Police shootings have become one of the most “visible and controversial” aspects of the criminal justice system . Yet, very little empirical effort has been devoted to understanding the underlying systemic vulnerabilities that likely contribute to these tragic outcomes. Using a randomized controlled experiment that incorporated a police firearms simulator and 306 active law enforcement officers, this study examined the effects of dispatch priming on an officer’s decision to use deadly force. The findings suggest that officers rely heavily on dispatched information in making the decision to pull the trigger when confronted with an ambiguously armed subject in a simulated environment. When the dispatched information was erroneous, it contributed to a significant increase in shooting errors. The results contribute to a broader understanding of officer decision-making within the context of police shootings and introduce the theoretical concepts of cognitive heuristics and human error to the research on police use of deadly force.

In Los Angeles County we have 5 to 15 [police] shootings in a year due to what we call perception issues. These have become a bigger problem in the last five or six years. These are also called “cell phone shootings.” Typically what happens is that a deputy has contact with an individual, and a short foot pursuit occurs. During that foot pursuit, the individual either makes an affirmative movement, such as a tossing motion, or produces something from their clothing that the officer mistakes for a weapon. The officer responds to this perceived threat by firing his weapon. After the shooting occurs, we discover a cell phone lying nearby or on the person’s body. The circumstances in which the shooting occurs (such as a “shots fired” call, armed robbery call, or “man with a gun” call) may provide context for the officer’s state of mind. Unfortunately, these shootings have been common for us over the last few years. (Police Executive Research Forum, 2012, p. 8)

- Los Angeles County Assistant Sheriff Cecil Rhambo

Method and Sample To test these hypotheses, a randomized controlled experiment was devised using prerecorded dispatch audio and an interactive police firearms training simulator. These types of simulators have been used to test police decision-making, particularly the impact of implicit racial bias on the police decision to use deadly force, in a number of other studies (e.g., Chaires, 2015; James et al., 2016). While firearms training simulators cannot possibly reproduce the dynamic environments or elicit the same cognitive strain an officer is likely to contend with in the field, they do provide for standardized and realistic scenarios in which the situated decision-making of experienced officers with a full range of force options can be observed in a controlled and relatively safe environment. This makes simulators attractive for both law enforcement training and research purposes. In the present study, a Ti Training brand firearms simulator was used in conjunction with aShot Indicating Resetting Trigger (SIRT) brand laser training pistol. The trigger pull for the training pistol was adjusted to approximately 5.5 pounds, the factory setting for three of the most commonly issued police duty handguns, the Glock 19, 21, and 22. Sample The sample was composed of 306 active duty law enforcement officers recruited from 18 different agencies in two different states. The participating agencies were diverse and included a midsized western municipal police department (n = 86), a midsized western sheriff’s department (n = 55), a small western campus police department (n = 33), and an east coast cooperative training center composed of 15 different departments (n = 132). Based on the collected demographic characteristics (see Table 1), the resulting sample appears to be representative of the larger U.S. law enforcement population (Walker & Katz, 2013). Table 1. Sample Description (N = 306). View larger version Participation in the study was voluntary, and confidentiality was extended to both the officers and the agencies involved. The project received approval from both a university institutional review board and an executive officer from each of the participating agencies. Data for the study were collected between July 2016 and October 2016 by the author. Participant recruitment and the experiment itself were conducted during previously scheduled in-service training days at the participating agencies. A brief presentation was given at the start of each training session to solicit volunteers. Potential volunteers were told the study was focused on police decision-making using a firearms training simulator. Each volunteer officer was asked not to divulge the contents of the video scenario they saw or their experience with the study to other potential participants. Design Volunteer participants were taken one at a time to a secluded study area where they were given a training pistol and asked to stand in a designated location facing a projector screen. Once in position, the participants were read directions from a script. Officers were told they would hear a dispatched call, and, after the audio ended, a person would appear on the screen in front of them. Officers were asked to interact with the person on the screen as if it were the first person they were contacting on the dispatched call. After the directions were given and the officers were in position to participate, they were randomly assigned to one of three dispatch treatments and one of two video scenarios using a random number generator. Independent variables The following dispatch treatments1 were used: Stem (control) dispatch Unit one respond to 411 Main Street on a possible trespass in progress. Break. Unit one continuing, the RP is a next door neighbor who says her neighbors are away on vacation, and someone she doesn’t recognize is walking around the house and peering in the windows. Break. Unit one continuing, the subject is a White male wearing a black hoodie, khaki pants, black beanie, and sunglasses. Gun prime update Unit one additional, the RP says the subject appears to be holding a gun. Cell phone prime update Unit one additional, the RP says the subject appears to be talking on a cell phone. Officers assigned to the control dispatch treatment (n = 100) heard only the stem dispatch. Officers assigned to the gun prime dispatch treatment (n = 106) heard the stem dispatch and the gun prime update. Officers assigned to the cell phone prime treatment (n = 100) heard the stem dispatch and the cell phone prime update. After listening to the randomly assigned dispatch, officers were presented with one of two randomly assigned video scenarios. Officers assigned to the cell phone scenario (n = 146) were shown a video of a man, matching the description of the person in the stem dispatch, standing in front of a white wall with his hands in his jacket pockets. After approximately 6 seconds, the man rapidly pulled his right hand from his pocket and pointed a cell phone at the officers as if to film them. Officers assigned to the gun scenario (n = 160) were shown a video of the same person, dressed in the same clothing and standing in front of the same white wall with his hands in his pockets. After approximately 6 seconds, the man rapidly pulled his right hand from his pocket and pointed a handgun at the officers as if to shoot them. Dependent variable The dependent variable for the study was whether or not an officer fired the simulated handgun during the course of the scenario. Shooting at any time during the cell phone scenario was considered a false-positive error. Not shooting, within the four second decision window, during the gun scenario was considered a false-negative error (Scharf & Binder, 1983).

Results A Pearson’s chi-square test of independence with Cramer’s V posttest was used to analyze whether or not the officers shot during the cell phone scenario. The results for the cell phone scenario are shown in Table 2 and indicate a significant and strong relationship between the information an officer receives from dispatch and the decision to use deadly force in a simulated environment. When dispatch informed officers the subject appeared to be holding a gun, they shot the person presenting a cell phone more than twice as often (RR = 2.19) as the control group. This provides strong support for the first hypothesis. When dispatch told officers the subject appeared to be talking on a cell phone, only three officers (RR = .212) shot the person presenting a cell phone. This provides strong support for the second hypothesis. Table 2. Results for Cell Phone Scenarios. View larger version The results for the gun scenario are shown in Table 3. Regardless of the dispatch treatment, 100% of the officers who were assigned to the gun scenario fired their simulated weapon. That is, there were no false-negative errors. Because there was no variation for this group, they were excluded from the analysis of the officers who were presented with the cell phone scenario. However, the fact that all of the officers shot at the subject who produced a gun allows the gun scenario to serve as an effective control for the cell phone scenario and strengthens the findings for that group. When a weapon was produced, officers who were participating in the study reacted appropriately and shot the subject. However, anecdotal evidence and subjective observation seemed to confirm that officers who received the cell phone dispatch treatment shot much later than officers who received either the gun prime or control dispatch treatments.2 Obviously, this would need to be empirically tested with reliable measures before any definitive statement could be made in support of either hypothesis. Table 3. Results for Gun Scenarios. View larger version Given the inherent problems with using “balance tests” in conjunction with experimental data (e.g., Mutz, Pemantle, & Pham, 2018), no additional statistical analysis of the data was done.

Discussion If the core technology of the police is situated decision-making where there is a potential for violence and this core technology can be altered through the introduction of new technology as Manning (1992, 2008) hypothesized, then it is critical to understand the impact of dispatched information on police decision-making and outcomes. While police dispatch technology is certainly not new, little to no research has looked at how this complex communication technology with multiple human interface points has modified the core proficiencies of the officers who must adapt it to their decision-making and tactics in the field. The present study provides empirical support for Manning’s hypothesis. All else being equal, dispatched information altered the decision to pull the trigger for a significant number of officers, at least within the context of a simulated environment. The results also demonstrate the brittle nature of relying on dispatched information, whether implicitly or explicitly, to make a split-second shooting decision in response to the rapid production of an object from a person’s pocket. When dispatch told officers the subject appeared to be talking on a cell phone and the subsequently encountered subject produced a cell phone, only 6% of the officers made an error, when compared with 28% of the control group. If we look solely at the outcome, the correct information allows the officers to perform at a much higher level. However, when officers were told the subject appeared to be holding a gun and the subsequently encountered subject produced a cell phone, 62% of the officers made a shooting error. It is interesting to note that outcomes for the cell phone scenario could be dramatically altered by slightly changing the information officers received. When the information was correct, officer performance significantly improved. When the information was incorrect, officer performance significantly degraded, and error became much more likely. Woods (2019) would call this a “brittle” relationship. That is, things that improve performance under some or even most circumstances can, under slightly different but similar circumstances, lead to catastrophic failure. Outcomes, as Woods et al. (2010) argue, are not good measures of sound decision-making or process. Instead, the discovery of human error should be seen as the starting point for deeper investigation rather than an end unto itself. From this perspective, human error becomes a symptom of underlying systemic vulnerability and brittleness rather than the primary cause of a tragedy. Accidents are not viewed as anomalies born out of individual human fallibility, but rather the normative and periodic result of entrenched aspects of the work environment (Perrow, 2011). This has significant implications for both the practitioners who investigate officer-involved shootings and the researchers who study them. Both narrow blame-oriented legal investigations and the indiscriminate aggregation of cases based solely on an outcome variable will, more often than not, miss or mask the systemic culprits behind these highly contextualized events. Understanding that similarly situated people will process information in similar ways and that circumstances that result in human error will often result in repeated errors over time and across people opens the door to empirical research and perhaps even efforts at prevention and reduction. Indeed, the goal of accident- or error-related research should be to learn from error, reduce complexity, and “engineer resilience” into the decision environment for front end operators (Woods et al., 2010, p. 83). According to Hale and Heijer (2006), Resilience first conjures up in the mind pictures of bouncing back from adversity . . . responding to disaster . . . [and] rapid recovery from [disasters]. This captures some of the essentials, with an emphasis on flexibility, coping with unexpected and unplanned situations and responding rapidly to events, with excellent communication and mobilization of resources to intervene at the critical points. However, we argue that we should extend the definition a little more broadly, in order to encompass also the ability to avert the disaster or major upset, using these same characteristics. (p. 35) They go on to write, “this aspect of resilience concentrates on the prevention of loss of control over risk, rather than recovery from that loss of control” (p. 36; see also Rasmussen & Svedung, 2000). From the latter perspective, the goal of resilience engineering is to increase the “elasticity”—the resilience—of otherwise brittle operating environments for frontline workers and thereby decrease the likelihood for catastrophic failure (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2015). “Resilience engineering” has become a mainstay of the safety science literature and both theoretically and practically applied to other high-risk occupations and endeavors as diverse as healthcare, aviation, and energy production (Dekker, 2019). The objective of resilience engineering is to reduce the complexity—the true enemy of consistently achieving desired outcomes (e.g., Dekker, 2014; Woods et al., 2010)—of the work place and thereby improve the likelihood for desired outcomes rather than errors and accidents. In the case of dispatch priming, even though there is evidence to suggest that priming becomes much less salient once individuals become aware of the prime and its effects (Molden, 2014), it is unlikely and perhaps unrealistic to assume dispatchers will not pass information about the presence of a weapon on to responding officers. It is just as unlikely, unrealistic, and perhaps even unreasonable to assume officers will not use the information dispatch provides them to inform their decision-making in the field. However, understanding that officers will rely on dispatched information to make decisions and that, in turn, will increase the risk of error may encourage officers and agencies to employ tactics that, where possible, allow officers more time in which to evaluate a situation before being forced to make such consequential decisions. For the purposes of this study, officers were placed in a tactically disadvantageous position—very close to a potentially armed person with no physical barrier (i.e., cover or concealment) or substantial space between them. This necessitated “split-second” decision-making and likely exacerbated the effects of the prime (Fyfe, 1989). It should be noted that, when these types of false-positive shooting errors occur in the real world, the involved officers often find themselves or place themselves in similar positions of disadvantage (e.g., Phippen, 2016; Selby et al., 2016). Scharf and Binder (1983) noted that experienced officers tend to slow down their responses when possible and effectively use their approach, positioning, and tactics to maximize their ability to collect and evaluate information from the event itself rather than relying on preevent information. This, according to Scharf and Binder, made experienced officers less susceptible to error, particularly when preevent information was incorrect, in comparison with less experienced officers, who tended to rush in and relied heavily on preevent information to dictate their responses. A number of scholars have hypothesized that time, distance, and tactics might be more effectively used by law enforcement officers to increase “resilience” during potentially armed encounters and to decrease the likelihood for bad shooting outcomes (e.g., Fyfe, 1989; Pickering & Klinger, 2016). For officers who suddenly find themselves in a tactically disadvantageous position while confronting an ambiguously armed subject, engineering resilience may mean keeping the muzzles of their weapons lowered until a legitimate threat has been positively identified. A slightly different experiment with British police officers used a simulator and written “briefing” information rather than dispatch audio, had officers start with their guns in their holsters, and found no significant difference between those who were primed with a “threat” briefing and those who were not (Mitchell & Flin, 2007). This suggests there may be a “sweet spot,” somewhere between the holster and pointing the weapon directly at an ambiguously armed subject, which would allow the officer to respond quickly to a confirmed threat and avoid shooting in the case of a false-positive presentation. This should be a direction for future research, the lifesaving implications of which could extend far beyond instances of dispatch priming. While 100% of the officers shot the subject who produced a gun, caution should be taken in the interpretation of these results. Given the speed with which a person can draw a gun and the number of rounds that could be fired at an officer in a matter of seconds (Blair et al., 2011; Lewinski, Dysterheft, Bushey, & Dicks, 2015; Lewinski, Hudson, & Dysterheft, 2014), a more precise measurement will be needed to determine whether or not dispatch priming affects false-negative error rates for officers who encounter a subject who produces a weapon. Future Research The current study could be expanded in a number of directions. As discussed, finding an appropriate measure for empirically establishing whether or not dispatch priming can delay an officers response when a weapon is produced (i.e., false-negative errors) is an important next step. In addition, the salience of dispatch priming might be explored in other police decision-making contexts (i.e., stop, search, and arrest decisions). Experimenting with the content, format, and delivery of the information dispatch provides officers in a variety of field situations may also be productive. While police technology has been the subject of a significant amount of research, very little empirical effort has gone it to understanding how technology changes police decision-making in the field. How do officers adapt technology to suit their needs and how does technology change the problem space for an officer? This study contributes to the literature by demonstrating the value of applying a theoretical lens that incorporates heuristics and biases to the examination of police deadly force encounters and police decision-making more generally. Indeed, the behavioral economics and psychological literature on heuristics and human error are a largely untapped theoretical treasure trove for scholars wishing to understand the decision-making of criminal justice actors and offenders more generally. While criminologists are only just starting to apply these concepts to the field, their initial findings are compelling and should be expanded.

Conclusion Police shootings have become one of the most “visible and controversial” features of the criminal justice system (Klinger et al., 2015, p. 194). Yet, very little empirical effort has been devoted to understanding the underlying systemic vulnerabilities that may contribute to these tragic outcomes. Using a randomized controlled experiment, the research described in this article examined "“cell phone shooting” errors and the effect of dispatch priming on an officer’s decision to use deadly force. The findings contribute to the broader understanding of officer decision-making within the context of police shootings and introduce the theoretical concepts of cognitive heuristics and human error to the police literature on deadly force. More research is needed on the systemic, technological, and situational factors that contribute to police decision-making within these highly contextualized events. Understanding these processes can give us insight into the underlying weaknesses found in everyday police practice and clues about how to make these processes more resilient against future errors.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD Paul L. Taylor https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9780-4184

Notes 1

Three full-time police dispatchers from three different agencies in two different states reviewed the dispatch scripts for each treatment group and found them to be realistic representations of the type of information they would give officers during an initial call for service. In addition, one of the full-time police dispatchers read the scripts that were recorded and used for the study. 2

With the objective of assessing whether or not dispatch priming had a significant effect on the likelihood of officers making false-negative errors, the author attempted to measure the differences in shooting response times for the gun scenario. However, unanticipated random processor speed variability in the simulator system made this measurement unreliable.