A recent study demonstrates that police officers are prone to firing their weapons when their colleagues do, emphasizing the need for contextualized firearms training.
This article was reprinted on Police1.com with permission from Tactical Science
Publication: DeCarlo J, Dlugolenski E, Myers D. (2024.) An experimental test of the contagious fire thesis in policing. Journal of Criminal Justice, 93, 102215.
What was the issue?
For some time now, people have suggested that police gunfire is contagious. When one police officer fires, it is likely to cause other officers to begin firing. People have also hypothesized that other officers firing may cause individual officers to fire more rounds than if they were alone. This experiment examines both if an officer firing makes other officers more likely to fire and if the officers fire more.
How did they look at it?
This was a true experiment where 169 police officers from 11 different departments were randomly assigned to either the experimental or control condition.
Officers in both conditions viewed a life-sized video featuring the same encounter. The scenario began with officers being told that they were responding to an agitated person call where the agitated person had been overheard saying that he was going to kill himself and that if the police came, he was going to shoot it out with them.
The video was 11 seconds long and started with the suspect walking away from the officers. The suspect then quickly turned and reached into his right side with both hands. Next, he quickly pulled a cellphone from his waistband area and raised it to chest level. In all the scenarios, the participant officer was placed between two confederates. These confederates were police officers who were told how to react to the scenario by the experimenter. Each confederate had a Simunition pistol loaded with 3 SecuriBlank rounds. In the experimental condition, the confederates were instructed to fire all 3 of their rounds as soon as the suspect pulled the cell phone out. In the control conditions, the confederates were told to hold their fire. The participant officer was given a Simunition pistol loaded with 10 SecuriBlank rounds and was free to respond to the scenario as he/she saw fit.
What did they find?
The participant officers fired 49% of the time when the confederate officers withheld their fire and 92% of the time when the confederate officers fired! When participant officers fired in the control condition, they fired an average of 1.13 rounds. When they fired in the experimental condition, they fired an average of 3.21 rounds! Using some sophisticated statistical modeling, the experimenters were able to estimate that the participants were about 11.5 times more likely to fire and fired about 72% more rounds when the confederates fired.
Listen to the researchers discuss their findings on the Policing Matters podcast
So what?
This study provided experimental evidence that supports the contagious fire hypothesis. It appears that officers are more likely to fire when their peers do and that they will also fire more rounds. The authors note that these findings are important because they challenge the idea that officers’ use of force is always the result of a conscious decision. Previous research has suggested that over 1/3 of officers involved in deadly force situations acted as they did without conscious thought (see Pickering and Klinger, 2023).
My $.02 I think that this study provides some solid support for the idea of contagious gunfire. Experiments are the best research tool for identifying causation, but the tradeoff is that the control required for an experiment may make the experimental test unrealistic. The scenario used here was definitely designed to prime officers to shoot the suspect, but it is still a fairly realistic scenario. The effects that it produced were also very large. Additionally, the large, multidepartment sample is a strength of this study.
This study is also one of many that suggest that contextual factors play a major role in shootings. The authors highlighted the unconscious nature of many use of force decisions. I am going to further amplify the importance of unconscious factors. Many deadly force situations happen faster than a person’s conscious control system can function. The time that it takes to receive sensory input, send it to the central executive of the brain to interpret and turn the input into information, decide what should be done, and then act is simply longer than officers have in many deadly force situations. This means that if officers are to survive many of these situations, they simply cannot rely on a conscious control system. They must act subconsciously.
I know that this may sound terrifying when we are talking about officers using deadly force, but humans are well-designed to control their actions subconsciously. We constantly react subconsciously and successfully in our everyday activities. We don’t have to think about how to walk. Rather we take in lots of information subconsciously, make dozens of adjustments subconsciously, and walk. We can do this because we have practiced walking our whole lives.
This is also what happens when people become proficient in sports. You don’t have to consciously think about how to catch a baseball if you are a baseball player. You just catch it. You are able to do this because you have practiced it a lot under a variety of conditions. You have learned to pick out the information needed to catch a ball and you react without thinking. In EcoD language, you have learned to pick out specifying information from your environment to identify your affordances for catching, and this information allows you to act without consulting the central executive functions of your brain. For you to develop this skill, your perception must be linked directly to action and your action to perception. This highlights the importance of contextualizing training.
Now let’s turn specifically to firearms training. Most firearms training is decontextualized. Officers spend a lot of time on ranges, shooting specific courses of fire, at known distances, at static targets (that often only vaguely look like people) in response to timer beeps or shouts of “Threat!” This teaches the physical skill of shooting in isolation from the perceptual cues that will (or should) control the officer’s actions on the street. This breaks the perception action linkage that is needed to develop effective subconscious control.
For those familiar with boxing or other striking martial arts, typical firearms training is like having a boxer hit the heavy punching bag. The boxer might learn some basics about controlling their body and hitting something hard, but they are not learning the timing and distance information that is needed to execute these actions against an opponent who is trying to hit back. These actions might have some value (although Scott Seivewright has been having a lot of success with fighters who never hit bags or pads), but no boxing coach would put a fighter in the ring without having the fighter do a substantial amount of sparring with a live opponent.
In firearms training, sparring type practice generally takes the form of scenario based training. This training connects perception to action, but is generally done much less often than range training because it is logistically more difficult to implement. Yet this type of training is exactly what theory and research tell us we should be spending most of our training time on. Learning a skill without the perceptual information that is used to control it in the “real world” has very limited value. (Also, I want to give a shoutout here to SetCan who are developing a gun sparring course).
A final point or two
Some of the contagious fire responses that we see in the study reported here might be a training scar (of course there are lots of other possible reasons too). Most range training that I have seen involves multiple trainees firing at the same time. When this is the case, other people shooting is a reliable cue that the trainee should be shooting too. This might create a perception-action linkage that creates the contagious fire response — whenever I hear other people shooting, I am shooting too.
Whether this is the case or not, if trainers are concerned about trying to stop contagious fire, it would make sense to expose trainees to situations where other people are firing, but they are not. One way to do this is to have one of the people in the training session be a confederate who shoots when he should not. If this is done enough, it should help the trainee to disconnect their firing decision from the firing decision of others (although I suspect that this will be difficult to do).
