Tom Aveni

Tom Aveni has been a career law enforcement officer, having served on the local and state levels in three states (NJ, UT, NH). His police career began in 1978, and he has served as a police trainer since 1983. From 1990 to 2001 Tom served as a police “Training Coordinator” with the once prestigious Smith & Wesson Academy. There he was instrumental in training over 12,000 police and military personnel from across the United States and 23 other countries. Since 1995, Mr. Aveni’s police training focus became oriented toward researching so-called “questionable” police shootings. These shootings routinely involve suspects who were unarmed and non-assaultive when shot by police. Previous studies had suggested that 25-43% of police shootings are of unarmed suspects. In this pursuit, Tom also examined the influence of police cognitive bias and contextual expectations on the inclination to use deadly force. E-mail: tom@theppsc.org