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ogists, former and current law enforcement officers led by a very intuitive man, Dr. William Lewinski. Dr. Lewinski is a psychology professor who has spent the last 45 or so years studying and researching the behavioral sciences as they relates to use-of-force situations. The Forced Science Insti- tute has focused on the biomechanics and speed of officer and subject behavior as a way to understand the behavioral science elements that are present in use-of-force scenarios. They focus on training, research and consulting. I recently had the opportunity take their 40-hour certification course, and I must say it was beyond enlightening.
While time and space do not allow me to expand on all of the concepts that Dr. Lewinski and his highly knowledgeable staff covered, I will attempt to point out some of the inter- esting highlights and takeaways. First, the actions of drawing your weapon and firing can’t be 20 percent of what is involved when this decision is made. You must look to how the brain works, how it perceives threats, how your vision and hearing and work, how training and repetition make us better, and most importantly, how and why the body itself communicates internally to make a specific action happen. One interesting concept is the idea that we are shooting people in the back. They have established through intense study that a human body can turn its head in approximately .25 seconds. It takes an officer who is in the act of shooting at a threat .35 seconds to recognize that the threat has decreased and to stop firing. Unfortunately, the officer will on average shoot two more times before he can stop the process of shooting his weapon. The video will be unfairly frozen by COPA and the head of the offender will be turned away from the officer, but the officer, who recognized he has turned and the threat has gone away,
cannot stop quickly enough, and two more shots are fired. This is not implicit bias or depraved indifference by the offi- cer. It is science and medical evidence. Try to stop swinging a baseball bat as I step in front of you. Can’t do it.
Of course, the civil rights attorneys and the movement try to dismiss these types of opinions and views at trial. They call these experts “apologists” for the police. They do this, not be- cause it is false or bad science, but because it is correct and brings additional explanation into the science of officer-in- volved use of force. The people at Forced Science are medical doctors, doctoral-level psychologists and understand mem- ory, the principals of biomechanics, and all the sorts of an- alytical data that affect police officers in stressful situations. Their work is peer-reviewed, and the wealth of articles and publications they’ve published, combined with the number of times their opinions have been accepted in courts around the country, makes this the exact type of evidence that our civilian oversight and Police Board should accept and consid- er. But of course they refuse to even look at these opinions. They have consistently been stricken from police board trials. However, we will not stop putting this caliber of evidence to the forefront, and we have had recently had success in allow- ing the presentation of these principles. While we will never expect COPA to treat us fairly or the Police Board to expect anything less than robotic perfection, we can and will use this cutting-edge approach. Maybe, just maybe, we can save more jobs. As far as Coach Nagy is concerned? Can’t help him.
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