Part 1 of a 2-part series
By Chuck Remsberg
Senior Police1 Contributor
Sponsored by Blauer
A new FBI study of police and violence, due to be released this week, includes fresh insights into “one of the worst” confrontations an officer can get involved in—a suicide by cop.
Dangerous efforts by compassionate officers to help rescue troubled subjects in these situations, plus a lack of hard data about the nature and extent of the problem, are placing LE responders at unnecessary risk, according to the authors of the five-year research project discussed at the recent IACP Convention in Boston.
Among other things, in their formal report and informal observations, the researchers:
• provide a definition of suicide by cop and urge that the phenomenon be included in Uniform Crime Report statistics to better measure what proportion of police use of deadly force it represents;
• examine for the first time the perpetrators’ perspective, based on unique interviews they conducted with survivors who were unsuccessful in getting officers to kill them;
• caution officers to steadfastly keep their personal survival and the protection of other innocent parties as the top priorities in these confrontations, not the ad hoc “counseling” of suicidal suspects;
• stress that departments need to show greater concern in dealing with officers who get trapped in these no-win situations, given the exceptionally devastating emotional impact the outcome often has.
The new report, titled Violent Encounters: A Study of Felonious Assaults on Our Nation’s Law Enforcement Officers, is the third in a series of officer survival-related research projects first launched by the FBI in the late 1980s. Authors are Dr. Anthony Pinizzotto, clinical forensic psychologist, and Ed Davis, criminal investigative instructor, both with the Bureau’s Behavioral Science Unit, and Charles Miller III, coordinator of the Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted program.
Their latest work explores in depth 40 serious attacks on LEOs, involving 43 offenders and 50 officers. In nine chapters that cover nearly 200 pages, the authors analyze such factors as the verbal and nonverbal interactions between officers and offenders, common traits of armed offenders intent on murdering officers, the roles of officer and suspect perceptions in turning an encounter into an assault, what officers and attackers alike consider to be important training issues and other elements of the “deadly mix” that spawns violent confrontations.
A full chapter is devoted to suicide by cop, says the study’s Executive Summary, because of the “widespread misunderstanding about this topic” and the special “challenges and dangers of offenders who intentionally draw law enforcement officers into the dynamic of suicide.”
To the authors’ surprise, more than half (21) of the assaulters of police officers whom they interviewed in or out of prison had contemplated suicide at some point. Ten had actually attempted to take their lives, including six who said they “wanted the cops to kill them” at the time of their encounter.
At a general presentation and discussion on the study at the IACP conference, the authors explained their findings and conclusions about subjects who try to entice cops to kill them. (We intend to report on other content in Violent Encounters in future articles.)
Define it, count it, train for it.
The study proposes that suicide by cop be officially defined as: “An act motivated in whole or in part by the offender’s desire to commit suicide that results in a justifiable homicide by a law enforcement officer.”
Using this definition or some other that would be “clear and uniformly accepted,” the UCR could collect statistics from cooperating departments that for the first time would reveal the true extent of the problem nationally. The authors suggest that “attempt suicide by cop” statistics should also be collected within the UCR program.
Once sufficient samplings can be extracted and investigated in detail, including in-depth interviews with both police and offender survivors, “it would hopefully be possible to come up with training recommendations,” says Miller.
Right now, with very limited documentation, it’s believed that as many as 15% of fatal shootings by police may involve suicide by cop. “But no one has done sufficient research to come up with meaningful training proposals,” Miller says, in part because the problem has yet to be accurately quantified and its complexities fully understood.
Indeed, there are still some in law enforcement who are convinced there is no problem, that suicide by cop “is just something made up by the press,” Davis says. In reality, “it’s an on-going problem that can happen anywhere at any time. Just because it hasn’t happened yet [in your jurisdiction] doesn’t mean it won’t.”
Avoid the “do-gooder” mind-set.
Often these incidents escalate so quickly that officers don’t have time to realize what they’re really involved in. But on occasions when they are able to recognize that they are dealing with a subject who has suicidal inclinations they need to guard against “getting lured into the wrong mind-set” and needlessly exposing themselves to heightened jeopardy, Pinizzotto warns.
For example, some officers, especially those who’ve dealt with “normal” threats of suicide and have talked a subject out of taking his or her life, may see a suicide-by-cop scenario as another chance to “help” a misguided soul. But suicide by cop is unique, and “if you misread it, you’re going to be in trouble,” Davis says.
From their interviews with subjects who’ve survived suicide-by-cop attempts, the researchers learned that “these people are often not ambivalent,” Davis explains. “Some have definitely decided they want their life to end, and they want a cop to do what they can’t do.”
“When you think of suicide, you usually think of people overdosing or hanging themselves or even shooting themselves in a private setting where they don’t present a threat to anyone but themselves,” says Pinizzotto. An effort at suicide by cop “is considerably different because an offender with a weapon in hand can just as easily use it on an officer as on himself, or hurt bystanders.” And, if frustrated, he often will.
“It’s a misunderstanding to think these people cannot be dangerous and deadly,” Davis says. This is confirmed by the researchers’ interviews with would-be suicides by cop who survived. They spoke candidly about having an initial plan not to hurt the officer(s) confronting them. But “they wanted to be killed quickly,” Davis says, and if that didn’t happen they were fully prepared to “try their best to kill police,” figuring that would provoke a fatal response and thereby accomplish their “mission.”
In other words, “If you’re not going to kill me, I’ll kill you!”
Well-meaning officers need to overcome the temptation to “focus only on the safety of the perpetrator, and look after the safety of all the people around, including themselves,” Pinizzotto says.
“Your first job is to protect yourself,” Miller reminds. “Hesitating to use deadly force when it’s justified and needed can get you killed. You have a responsibility to protect your community, and you’re not helping anyone if you’re lying there with a bullet in your head.”
