Study reveals important truths hidden in the details of officer
Tom Aveni
Ideas for research projects can germinate from the least likely moments  as when a student asked  Firearms Trainer Tom Aveni  if he'd ever visited the ACLU's website. He hadn't ("Why would I even want to go there?")  but out of curiosity he did.
Not only did the ACLU statistic turn out to be not as far off as he imagined but  Aveni  has made other unexpected discoveries - pertaining especially to hit ratios  low-light shootings  multiple-officer confrontations  mistaken judgment calls and less-lethal technology - that have convinced him police firearms training needs a significant overhaul.
Dr. Bill Lewinski  executive director of the Force Science Research Center at Minnesota State University-Mankato  says that by pursuing "important and different kinds of questions "  Aveni  has produced "valuable new insights into officer-involved shootings." His findings are expected to provide "a cutting-edge demographic foundation" for upcoming research projects at FSRC that hopefully will result in "profound changes in law enforcement training in the future."
An ex-cop with 23 years' training experience   Aveni  now heads the Police Policy Studies Council  a research  training and consulting corporation based in Spofford  NH  and is a member of FSRC's National Advisory Board  as well as a busy expert witness in police litigation. Like other trainers   he  says   he  "made a lot of assumptions that are not true" until  his  research provided "an epiphany for  me " about some of the nuances of police shootings.
 He  was struck first by how tough it is to find out anything meaningful on the subject from law enforcement agencies. Most don't compile detailed data on their shootings  fearing in some cases (perhaps rightly) that it would be misinterpreted and misused by the media and "agenda activists" if available. Of the few departments that do collect deadly force information  "even fewer freely share it " Aveni claims. If they don't outright suppress it  they tend to present it in bare-bones  "sterilized table formats" that have no standardized consistency and that "make detailed analysis difficult."  Aveni  observes: "The devil is in the details  and the details of police shootings have always been lost."
 Aveni  spent more than 6 months dissecting that material according to different variables. That information  combined with limited statistics  he  managed to obtain related to shootings on other major departments  including New York City  Baltimore County (MD)  Miami  Portland (OR) and Washington (DC)  has allowed  him  to spotlight a number of deadly force subtleties that have not been so thoroughly examined before.
For example  it has long been believed that officers overall have a dismal 15-25 percent hit probability in street encounters  suggesting truly poor performance under the stress of a real shooting situation. Actually  this figure  while essentially true in the aggregate  is markedly skewed by certain shooting variables   Aveni  found.
During a 13-year span  the Baltimore County PD  which  Aveni  regards as one of the best trained in the country  achieved an average hit ratio of 64 percent in daylight shootings - not ideal  but clearly much better than commonly believed. In shootings that occurred in low-light surroundings  however  average hits dropped to 45 percent  a 30 percent decline. The data from Los Angeles County (LAC) reveals a somewhat comparable 24 percent decline.
"Until this research "  Aveni  says  "performance has never been accurately matched to lighting conditions " even though as many as 77 percent of police shootings are believed to occur under some degree of diminished lighting. Some departments tally "outdoor" versus "indoor" shootings  but most appear not to precisely differentiate between low-light and ample-light events  despite the preponderance of shootings during nighttime duty tours.
A multiple-officer shooting  in which more than one officer fires during a deadly force engagement  has an even greater influence on hit probability   Aveni  discovered.
Multiple-officer shootings   Aveni  told Force Science News  are three times more likely to involve suspects with shoulder weapons than single-officer shootings. This tends to "increase the typical stand-off distance " he says. Many of these confrontations also embody fast-changing  chaotic and complex circumstances. These factors  Aveni believes  help explain the negative impact on accuracy.
 Aveni  also discovered a correlation between multiple-officer shootings and number of rounds fired.
With LAC shootings involving only one officer  an average of 3.59 police rounds were fired. When 2 officers got involved  the average jumped to 4.98 rounds and with 3 officers or more to 6.48. "The number of rounds fired per officer increases in multiple-officer shootings by as much as 45 percent over single-officer shootings  " Aveni  says.
The ACLU's statistic that got him started on this project turned out to be based on fatal shootings that occurred before the landmark Supreme Court decision Tennessee v. Garner  when nearly half the states still legally permitted the shooting of any fleeing felon  regardless of the threat he or she presented. After the restrictions imposed by Garner  "you'd expect fewer unarmed suspects to be shot "  Aveni  explains.
Not necessarily true  though   Aveni  found. In a recent 12-year period  Metro-Dade (Miami) PD reported 34 shootings in which suspects were "clearly unarmed" or in which officers thought they saw a gun but none was found. All told  about a third of all shootings in which suspects were shot and killed by that agency's officers were considered "questionable." In a recent Texas study  25 percent of suspects shot by officers in one metropolitan county were found to be unarmed  33 percent if shots fired at moving vehicles are included. LAC's data put the unarmed target figure at 18 percent  well below the ACLU's pre-Garner assertion.
Higher or lower  many of these shootings are "mistake-of-fact" (MOF) situations   Aveni  says. Usually a suspect is displaying an item that is falsely but reasonably perceived to be a deadly weapon (a cell phone  for example)  or the suspect is behaving in such a way that in context is believed to constitute an immediate lethal threat (making a fast  furtive movement toward the waistband  for instance).
Ideas for research projects can germinate from the least likely moments  as when a student asked   [TGT] if  [TGT] 'd ever visited the ACLU's website.  [TGT]  hadn't ("Why would I even want to go there?")  but out of curiosity  [TGT]  did.
Not only did the ACLU statistic turn out to be not as far off as  [TGT]  imagined but  Aveni  has made other unexpected discoveries - pertaining especially to hit ratios  low-light shootings  multiple-officer confrontations  mistaken judgment calls and less-lethal technology - that have convinced  [TGT]  police firearms training needs a significant overhaul.
Dr. Bill Lewinski  executive director of the Force Science Research Center at Minnesota State University-Mankato  says that by pursuing "important and different kinds of questions "  Aveni  has produced "valuable new insights into officer-involved shootings." His findings are expected to provide "a cutting-edge demographic foundation" for upcoming research projects at FSRC that hopefully will result in "profound changes in law enforcement training in the future."
An ex-cop with 23 years' training experience   Aveni  now heads the Police Policy Studies Council  a research  training and consulting corporation based in Spofford  NH  and is a member of FSRC's National Advisory Board  as well as a busy expert witness in police litigation. Like other trainers   he  says   he  "made a lot of assumptions that are not true" until  his  research provided "an epiphany for  me " about some of the nuances of police shootings.
 He  was struck first by how tough it is to find out anything meaningful on the subject from law enforcement agencies. Most don't compile detailed data on their shootings  fearing in some cases (perhaps rightly) that it would be misinterpreted and misused by the media and "agenda activists" if available. Of the few departments that do collect deadly force information  "even fewer freely share it " Aveni claims. If they don't outright suppress it  they tend to present it in bare-bones  "sterilized table formats" that have no standardized consistency and that "make detailed analysis difficult."  Aveni  observes: "The devil is in the details  and the details of police shootings have always been lost."
 Aveni  spent more than 6 months dissecting that material according to different variables. That information  combined with limited statistics  he  managed to obtain related to shootings on other major departments  including New York City  Baltimore County (MD)  Miami  Portland (OR) and Washington (DC)  has allowed  him  to spotlight a number of deadly force subtleties that have not been so thoroughly examined before.
For example  it has long been believed that officers overall have a dismal 15-25 percent hit probability in street encounters  suggesting truly poor performance under the stress of a real shooting situation. Actually  this figure  while essentially true in the aggregate  is markedly skewed by certain shooting variables   Aveni  found.
During a 13-year span  the Baltimore County PD  which  Aveni  regards as one of the best trained in the country  achieved an average hit ratio of 64 percent in daylight shootings - not ideal  but clearly much better than commonly believed. In shootings that occurred in low-light surroundings  however  average hits dropped to 45 percent  a 30 percent decline. The data from Los Angeles County (LAC) reveals a somewhat comparable 24 percent decline.
"Until this research "  Aveni  says  "performance has never been accurately matched to lighting conditions " even though as many as 77 percent of police shootings are believed to occur under some degree of diminished lighting. Some departments tally "outdoor" versus "indoor" shootings  but most appear not to precisely differentiate between low-light and ample-light events  despite the preponderance of shootings during nighttime duty tours.
A multiple-officer shooting  in which more than one officer fires during a deadly force engagement  has an even greater influence on hit probability   Aveni  discovered.
Multiple-officer shootings   Aveni  told Force Science News  are three times more likely to involve suspects with shoulder weapons than single-officer shootings. This tends to "increase the typical stand-off distance " he says. Many of these confrontations also embody fast-changing  chaotic and complex circumstances. These factors  Aveni believes  help explain the negative impact on accuracy.
 Aveni  also discovered a correlation between multiple-officer shootings and number of rounds fired.
With LAC shootings involving only one officer  an average of 3.59 police rounds were fired. When 2 officers got involved  the average jumped to 4.98 rounds and with 3 officers or more to 6.48. "The number of rounds fired per officer increases in multiple-officer shootings by as much as 45 percent over single-officer shootings  " Aveni  says.
The ACLU's statistic that got him started on this project turned out to be based on fatal shootings that occurred before the landmark Supreme Court decision Tennessee v. Garner  when nearly half the states still legally permitted the shooting of any fleeing felon  regardless of the threat he or she presented. After the restrictions imposed by Garner  "you'd expect fewer unarmed suspects to be shot "  Aveni  explains.
Not necessarily true  though   Aveni  found. In a recent 12-year period  Metro-Dade (Miami) PD reported 34 shootings in which suspects were "clearly unarmed" or in which officers thought they saw a gun but none was found. All told  about a third of all shootings in which suspects were shot and killed by that agency's officers were considered "questionable." In a recent Texas study  25 percent of suspects shot by officers in one metropolitan county were found to be unarmed  33 percent if shots fired at moving vehicles are included. LAC's data put the unarmed target figure at 18 percent  well below the ACLU's pre-Garner assertion.
Higher or lower  many of these shootings are "mistake-of-fact" (MOF) situations   Aveni  says. Usually a suspect is displaying an item that is falsely but reasonably perceived to be a deadly weapon (a cell phone  for example)  or the suspect is behaving in such a way that in context is believed to constitute an immediate lethal threat (making a fast  furtive movement toward the waistband  for instance).