What happens when police kill?
“Everybody in our nation, including law enforcement, gets their training about police shootings from Hollywood,” says Dr Lewinski, professor of sociology at Minnesota State University.That ignorance extends to police, judges and juries. It wasn’t until Dr Lewinski started conducting experiments in the early 1990s that anyone had looked at how quickly suspects could move and how long it took police officers to react to that movement.
He discovered that in the two seconds it takes an officer to draw and pull the trigger, a suspect can fire nine rounds. A person can turn and move as much as 13ft (4m) in one second.
So an officer facing an attacker may decide to shoot — and later swear they were facing them — when in reality their victim has turned to run and been shot in the back.
In the US, an astonishing 70% of victims of police shootings are shot in the back or the side.
The stress of such an encounter affects recall:
In a pilot study in Minneapolis in August, the results were alarming. The officers did not know how many shots they fired and their description of the suspect was inaccurate.“One of the things lost in the stress response is the counting. Mathematical ability is certainly suppressed. We know that people can’t think and shoot simultaneously in this kind of high stress situation,” says Dr Lewinski.
If police officers cannot remember key details, it raises serious concerns about the reliability of their evidence. But it does not mean they are lying.