Coming February 6, 2024 . . .
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
When Paul Taylor, a former police officer, use-of-force training instructor, and now a criminologist at the University of Colorado Denver, found out that the 911 dispatch information about Rice had been wrong, he decided to run an experiment
Taylor put 300 police officers representing 18 agencies in two states through an interactive firearms training simulator. All the officers were told about a “possible trespass in progress.” Then some were told that the “subject appears to be holding a gun” and others that the “subject appears to be talking on a cellphone.”
When the officers arrived at the scene, they saw a man matching the description of the suspect with his hands in his jacket pockets. For half the volunteers, the man quickly pulled a cellphone out of his pocket to film the officers; for the other half, the man pulled out a handgun and pointed it at them. The officers had to make a split-second decision to shoot or not shoot, with their virtual lives at stake.
The results were dramatic. Six percent of officers who had been advised that the subject appeared to be talking on a cellphone ended up shooting the man who attempted to film them with his phone. But 62 percent of the officers who were told the suspect had a gun did the same. In other words, officers who were told the man had a cellphone were 10 times less likely to shoot an unarmed suspect than those with incorrect information. (In the scenario where the suspect drew a gun, 100 percent of the officers shot the suspect, regardless of what dispatch told them.)
“What blew me away is that these results held for all officers no matter what,” Taylor told me. “It didn’t matter how much experience you had. It didn’t matter if you were on a SWAT team. Getting the wrong information universally increased the risk of making an error.”
Comments
but this doesn't blame racism!
by artappraiser on Tue, 08/11/2020 - 2:19pm