To Shoot or Not to Shoot: An Analysis of Officers’ Deadly Force Decision-Making Processes

• In Event: Police Use of Force

Abstract

How police officers exercise their unique power to use deadly force continues to be a topic of interest among academics. According to Reiss (1980), in order to fully understand when and how police officers use deadly force, researchers need to understand when and why it is not used. Scholars have yet, however, to study decision-making processes during incidents in which multiple officers were involved, but only some chose to discharge their weapon. This study seeks to address this issue by drawing from interviews conducted with police officers across the United States that have been involved in deadly force incidents. The interviews included in this analysis have been selected because the participating officers were involved in incidents during which some officers made the decision to shoot, while other officers made the decision not to shoot. The goals of this paper are twofold: to understand how the decision-making process during a deadly force encounter differs for officers that choose to shoot compared to officers that choose not to shoot and to analyze how decisions made by officers throughout the incident impact an officer’s final decision to shoot or not to shoot.

Authors

• Jordan C. Pickering, University of Missouri - St. Louis

• David A. Klinger, University of Missouri - St. Louis