Dispatch Priming and Police Officer Error

• In Event: Police Use of Force: Tactics, Training and Liability

Abstract

Police officers are often asked to respond to emergencies with less than perfect information about the circumstances and/or individuals involved. In response to this, as some of the classic observational studies of the police have noted, many officers develop what Jerome Skolnick (1967) called "a perceptual shorthand" (p. 45) and William Muir (1977) termed "pidgeonholes" (p. 156) or cognitive shortcuts to efficiently predicting and responding to human behavior and potential threats of violence.

Using a firearms training simulator in a randomized controlled experimental design, this study examined the relationship between dispatch priming and the propensity of experienced police officers to make mistakes during shoot/no-shoot scenarios. The aim of the study was to understand how dispatched information affects officer decision making during rapidly evolving, time compressed emergencies.

This research starts to explore the ways in which police officers use heuristics and other implicit processes to make decisions in the field. The research could be expanded into other police decision making domains like arrest decisions, suspect identification, and the decisions to search particular vehicles and/or citizens.

Author

• Paul Taylor, University at Albany, SUNY