Reasonable Officer at the 4S Meeting

Find members of our team presenting at the 4S Meeting in October. Read the abstracts or watch the talks below:

Several of our researchers can be found in the session Expertise, law, and “reasonable” professional practice on Thursday, October 7 – 11:30 to 1:00 pm

The expert reconstruction of “reasonable” and “unreasonable” use of force in police shootings of suspects

Michael Lynch, Cornell Univ.

Expert witnesses on police use of force deploy digital technology to re-visualize video materials to support the prosecution or defense of police officers accused of unjustified and excessive use of force in the apprehension of suspects. In the recent trial of Chicago Police officer Jason Van Dyke, who was charged with the 2014 murder of Laquan McDonald, an expert witness for the defense reconstructed a video of the shooting which had gone viral. The reconstruction animated the scene from Van Dyke’s point of view. As in other recent trials, the defense argued that a “reasonable police officer” would view the movements that McDonald was making (or about to make) at the time of the shooting threatened the safety of the officer or other nearby parties. This paper discusses how expert witnesses not only reinterpret video evidence taken at the scene of police uses of force, but also reconstruct the raw video footage into a visual demonstration of “reasonable” actions consistent with training. Such demonstrations do not necessarily convince a jury — indeed, the jury convicted Van Dyke of murder — but they provide clear exhibits of how “perspective,” “interpretation,” and “intention” are turned into visual exhibits designed to support adversary narratives. The paper delves into the practices through which video evidence is reconstructed into exhibits of “reasonable” or “unreasonable” police practice.

Posthumous Psychoanalysis: On Assigning ‘Motive’ to a Victim of Police Violence

Patrick Watson, Wilfrid Laurier University

The 2016 criminal trial of Toronto Police Service’s Constable James Forcillo in the shooting death of Sammy Yatim included a series of noteworthy and novel findings and arguments. Among these was an attempt by Forcillo’s counsel to introduce an expert witness, criminologist and ex-police officer Rick Parent, to argue Yatim engaged in victim-precipitated homicide or “suicide-bycop.” Parent proposed to conduct a “post-mortem psychoanalysis” on Yatim by examining a combination of: (1) SMS text messages between Yatim and a friend where Yatim expressed suicidal ideation; (2) a Google search history on Yatim’s phone that included terms “the easiest way to kill yourself,” and; (3) a series of actions and interactions captured on surveillance videos that, for Parent, indicated Yatim was contriving a scene that would necessitate lethal use-of-force by responding officers. This paper discusses Parent’s testimony in a voir dire admissibility hearing and the Judge’s decision to bar Parent’s testimony on the grounds that he neither had the relevant expertise nor was an expert opinion required to assess Yatim’s ‘state of mind’ due to the availability, and ‘common-sense’ interpretability, of Yatim’s conduct on video leading up to the shooting. This contributes to a broader discussion of how video evidence features in criminal trials for police officers accused in on-duty use-of-force incidents, where video evidence is largely circumstantial (as opposed to demonstrative) and arguments revolve around the ‘state-of-mind’ of either the victim or the accused.

Use Of Force Models: A Practice In Search of a Science

Albert Jay Meehan, Oakland University; AnnMarie Dennis, Oakland University; Carmen Nave, Wilfrid Laurier University

In his classic treatise on United States policing, Egon Bittner (1970:37-38) observed that the lawful use of force by the police was “essentially unrestricted” by law and that instructions officers received about use of force largely amounted to “sermonizing” and “sanctimonious homilies” to be “humane and circumspect” in its practice of force. In the ensuing years, the landscape of police training has dramatically changed through the lamination of “science” onto the force decision-making process to provide post-hoc rationalizations of the “reasonableness” of the force decision. In this paper we examine two such changes: a) the development and evolution of use of force models (i.e., the “force continuum”) within police training which we consider expert “mock-ups” (Garfinkel and Sacks 1970) of real-world situations that are understood by officers as merely having “resemblances” to actual situations but “inadequate” as a guide to practical action in any actual use of force and; b) the creation of “force science” as a new field which employs “unbiased scientific principles and processes to determine the true nature of human behavior in high stress and deadly force encounters” (https://www.forcescience.org/). The data are drawn from police training materials, trial testimony of officers and force experts in police deadly force cases, and videos of police-involved shootings.

In the session Technologies of Policing; Policing as Technology Saturday, October 9 – 3:00 to 4:40 pm, Andre Buscariolli presents:

“Barking up the Right Tree:” The Ethnomethods of Big Data Policing

Andre Buscariolli, UC-Santa Barbara

The advent of big data has expanded police officers’ capacity to identify reasonable causes for suspicion (Ferguson 2014). Instead of relying on situational factors, officers can now retrieve large amounts of information from law enforcement databases (e.g., criminal history, financial records, GPS locational data, etc.). However, reducing data into mathematical models erases the context in which it was generated, thus limiting its usefulness and applicability (boyd and Crawford 2012; Kitchin 2014). “Context – what was accomplished, by whom and where, how and why, all need to be recreated for ‘the data to carry meaning'” (Bornakke & Due 2018:1). Then, how do law enforcement personnel recreate context while using big data for investigation purposes? This presentation examines the video-recording of a CompStat meeting where officers provide a thorough explanation of how they used GPS locational data (obtained from a suspect’s cellphone signal) to arrest and convict a prolific house burglar. Drawing from Ethnomethodology and STS, I analyze the practices by which officers make sense of big data, many of which mobilize ethnographically grounded police knowledge – i.e., “area knowledge” (Bittner 1970). In brief, what is known about and through big data is tied to contexts this technology is employed. In what concerns its use for policing purposes, findings suggest that big data evidence does not conclusively and objectively “prove” that the suspect was the perpetrator. There has to be interpretive work done to bring potentially equivocal pieces of b