Officer-Involved Shooting: Reaction Patterns, Response Protocols,
and Psychological Intervention Strategies
Laurence Miller
Independent Practice, Boca Raton, Florida
Most common are distortions in time perception. In the majority of these cases, officers recall the shooting event as occurring in slow motion, although a smaller percentage report experiencing the event as speeded up.
Sensory distortions are common and most commonly involve tunnel vision, in which the officer is sharply focused on one particular aspect of the visual field, typically, the suspects gun or weapon, while blocking out everything in the periphery. Similarly, tunnel hearing may occur, in which the officers auditory attention is focused exclusively on a particular set of sounds, most commonly the suspects voice, while background sounds are excluded. Sounds may also seem muffled or, in a smaller number of cases, louder than normal. Officers have reported not hearing their own or other officers gunshots.
Some form of perceptual and/or behavioral dissociation may occur during the critical event. In extreme cases, officers describe feeling as though they were standing outside or hovering above the scene, observing it like it was
happening to someone else. In milder cases, the officer may report that he or she just went on automatic, performing whatever actions were necessary with a sense of robotic detachment.
Disturbances in memory are commonly reported in shooting cases. About half of these involve impaired recall for at least some of the events during the shooting scene; the other half involve impaired recall for at least part of the officers
own actions. This, in turn, may be associated with the going-on-automatic response. More rarely, some aspects of the scene may be recalled with unusually clarity a flash-bulb memory.
More than a third of cases involve not so much a loss of recall as a distortion of memory, to the extent that the officers account of what happened differs markedly from the report of other observers at the scene. In general, it
is common for officers not to remember the number of rounds they fired, especially from a semiautomatic handgun.
A general neuropsychological explanation for these constrictions of sensation, perception, and memory is that the brain naturally tries to tone down the hyperarousal that occurs during a critical shooting incident, so that the individual
can function through the experience using his or her mental autopilot responses. In a smaller number of cases, the officer experiences heightened perceptual awareness of those features of the scene that are essential for his survival. Similarly, in emergencies the processing of accurate memories for
later use seems to take a neuropsychological back seat to the mechanisms necessary for getting the subject through the situation alive, right here and now (Miller, 1990).
The implications for training are that a greater depth, range, and flexibility of attention and arousal control will allow officers to use such automatic responding adaptively in a wider range of extreme situations (Miller, 2006)
https://www.psychceu.com/miller/Miller_OIS.pdf
https://www.psychceu.com/miller/police_course.asp
