Note: This article was originally published in 1999 at the release of the results of this groundbreaking study
How’s this for a potential nightmare?
With no cover, you’re facing a subject who’s holding a gun at his side. He starts to raise it toward you.
You instantly make the decision--as you should--to shoot him in self-defense. You fire--but when he goes down, you discover that you’ve shot him in...the back.
In fact, a civilian witness who was off to the side is now screaming: “You shot him in the back! You shot him in the back!”
What happened??????
You may not realize it, but what really happened is that after you decided to shoot, the suspect turned and started to run away from you.
You didn’t perceive this...and even if you had, you couldn’t have physically stopped yourself from shooting once your brain had committed to do so.
Now your problem is this: How can you convince your superiors, the media, the community--a jury--that he was FACING you and initiated a deadly threat when you decided to pull the trigger, but was facing AWAY from you when your round actually hit him?
How can you build credibility for your version of the events versus the easily drawn conclusion that you simply and coldly shot a non-threatening suspect in the back?
You may get some significant help from a brand new study on suspect movement by Dr. Bill Lewinski, a former Street Survival Seminar instructor and now an expert witness with Calibre Press’s Legal Consultation Service.
Lewinski’s study, released for the first time today (3/9/99) to the law enforcement community through the Street Survival Newsline and the Street Survival Seminar, was conducted at Minnesota State University--Mankato, where he has long been a prominent faculty member of the school’s outstanding law enforcement program.
“We’ve known for a long time that action can beat reaction,” Lewinski told the Newsline, “but just how fast IS action?” Lewinski, a police psychologist who has been studying police shooting decisions in the U.S. and Canada for over 25 years, set out to measure it.
Using time-coded videotape and 25 law enforcement student volunteers, Lewinski established a baseline for suspect action time by recording exactly how long it takes persons playing the role of threatening subjects to raise a weapon from beside their right thigh to shoulder height and pull the trigger.
To just “throw” a shot without aiming or establishing target acquisition took an average of .43 second. The fastest time was .28 second.
For the meat of his study, Lewinski then measured turning speed--how long it took for a threatening subject to start to raise a weapon and simultaneously to turn away from a stationary starting position, as if turning away from a police officer attempting to deal with him or her.
With multiple repetitions, role-players turned from 3 starting positions, always holding a .22-caliber revolver in their right hand. First they were positioned standing sideways, looking in the direction of their right shoulder at the camera, which was stationed where a contact officer might be on a field stop. Whenever they decided to do so, the suspects moved the gun up in a threatening manner and at the same time turned toward their left and ran away to the right at about a 70-degree angle from the officer’s perspective.
The average time for each subject to rotate and run at least one step was 32 second. The fastest was .18 second.
The next turn-and-run started from the same positioning, but this time the subjects ran directly away from the officer. Here the average turning time was .33 second, with the fastest again .18 second.
In the third sequence, the suspects faced the “officer” (camera) front-on, then spun 180 degrees and ran directly away. This took an average of .54 second, with the fastest recorded at .37 second.
Earlier studies have shown that once an officer perceives a threat--like the movement of the gun, in this case--it could take from .5 to 1.5 seconds for his brain to process that information and complete a reaction (firing his gun in self-defense).
Even starting with his or her gun in a ready position (at approximately waist level), the average officer needs .73 second to raise the weapon up to near eye level and squeeze off a round. Drawing a holstered sidearm, of course, takes longer (up to 1.9 seconds--or even longer depending upon the type of holster being used).
In experiments with the Minneapolis SWAT team, Lewinski discovered that the fastest an officer could bring a shotgun from a modified port position to a standing shoulder position and do “a point-and-shoot discharge in a subject’s general direction” was .58 second.
“Obviously, subjects are much faster at [shooting] at an officer than officers are at reacting,” Lewinski says.
What all this means, he concluded from his data, is that “if a subject on the street was raising a weapon to shoot an officer as the subject turned and ran and the officer reacted [by firing], the subject would be shot somewhere in the back” by the time the round hit him, if it hit him at all.
“The angle of bullet entry would vary depending upon the speed of the officer and the rotation of the subject, but all [rounds] would strike from a slight side/rear angle to a direct 90-degree rear entry.”
Even if the officer had his gun up on target--aimed at the suspect’s chest--when the suspect started to turn, enough of the rotation would be completed that the round would strike toward the suspect’s back, Lewinski told Newsline.
You might wonder exactly what a civilian juror hearing all this might wonder: If a suspect can turn faster than an officer can shoot, why couldn’t the officer see that this was happening and stop himself from pulling the trigger?
The answer is rooted in survival psychology--and is critical to understanding the full significance of Lewinski’s ground-breaking study.
“When you get a signal that your life is in danger, your concentration is focused exclusively on the threat--on the movement of the gun in your direction, in this case,” Lewinski told Newsline. He refers to this as “weapon focus.” “You are not aware of shoulder or hip movement that would be signaling that the suspect is turning.
“Once your brain decides to shoot, it is virtually impossible to physically interrupt the completion of that action. You are concentrating on making your defensive action happen, on initiating fire as quickly as possible to save your life. You are not looking at whether some cue in the environment has changed.”
Lewinski examined over 600 cases of shooting decisions by officers. He could find only one in which an officer was able to keep himself from firing at a suspect once he had decided to do so.
In that case, the officer jerked his wrist so his gun was twisted away from the suspect--but the shot still went off in an uncontrolled fashion in a different direction. In this case, into city traffic!
A second phase of Lewinski’s study involved the phenomenon of fleeing suspects turning their torso to either side, pointing a gun back in the officer’s direction, and shooting--in effect, “throwing” a shot back in the officer’s direction. This is a common occurrence in foot pursuits, he says.
Again, because of the lightning speed with which a suspect can rotate his upper torso back to the front again and continue running, Lewinski found that “if an officer was in a weapon-drawn, ready position, could clearly distinguish the subject’s weapon and fired as soon as [it] was visible, the officer’s shot would hit the subject in the back while he would be rotated exactly opposite from where the officer said [the suspect was] when he decided to fire.” The suspect would also be from 5.5 feet to 11 feet or more farther from the point he or she was when the officer decided to shoot.
In other words, the way the officer described the shooting would likely be very different from the way it turned out.
Already Lewinski has brought his study to bear in 2 lawsuits involving officers, in which he served as a legal consultant on the officers’ behalf.
One concerned a MN officer who claimed he was aiming at an armed gangbanger’s side when he decided to shoot but ended up shooting the subject in the back. The other involved a CA officer who fired back at a fleeing suspect who pointed a gun back at the officer under his left arm and looked back over his left shoulder as he ran. That officer said he shot at the suspect’s left side, but the bullet actually entered the suspect from the right side of his back, casting doubt on the officer’s story.
Both cases were settled out of court, but for amounts significantly below what could have been expected without the influential insights of the new study, which Lewinski says demonstrated that the officers’ stories “were entirely credible.”
Lewinski has also presented the findings of his study in 3 grand jury hearings. In each case, his testimony proved to be the key factor in clearing each of the officers involved.
The purpose of his study, Lewinski stresses, is not to “provide a convenient excuse for a bad shooting.” But when a “point of impact turns out to be radically--and controversially--different than what you expected, this data may help you defend the fact that the suspect was in a threatening position when you initiated your reaction and through no misjudgment on your part ended up being shot in a totally non-threatening posture.
“All this can go to establish your credibility for the story you tell of how the shooting occurred.”
This spring, Lewinski intends to continue studying suspect moving-and-shooting behavior in collaboration with Dr. Roger Enoka, who runs the Neural Control of Movement Laboratory at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Enoka has previously conducted detailed studies of involuntary firearms discharges in law enforcement. His findings of the physiology of such mishaps is reported in Calibre Press’ Street Survival Seminar.
Dr. Bill Lewinski can be reached at:
The Force Science Research Center
124 East Walnut Street, Suite 120
Mankato, MN 56001
507.387.1290
F: 507.387.1291
pt@forcescience.org
Stay safe!
(C) Calibre Press Street Survival Newsline. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
