things like, did the officer take advantage of available cover?” he said. “We train officers to make themselves the smallest possible target, so you leave it to the bad guy to decide whether they’ll be shooting or not. So we were looking at things like, did the officer take advantage of available cover or did he just walk in the front door? Did he keep his gun away from the individual at all times? Did he keep his flashlight in his weak hand? In a burglary call, did they call back for more information or did they just say ten-four? Did they ask for backup? Did they coordinate their approach?—you know, you be the shooter, I’ll cover you. Did they take a look around the neighborhood? Did they position another car at the back of the building? When they were inside the place, did they hold their flashlights off to the side?—because if the guy happens to be armed, he’s going to shoot at the flashlight. On a traffic stop, did they look at the back of the car before approaching the driver? These kind of things.”
What Fyfe found was that the officers were really good when they were face-to-face with a suspect and when they had the suspect in custody. In those situations, they did the “right” thing 92 percent of the time. But in their approach to the scene they were terrible, scoring just 15 percent. That was the problem. They didn’t take the necessary steps to steer clear of temporary autism. And when Dade County zeroed in on improving what officers did
What is valuable about Fyfe’s diagnosis is how it turns the usual discussion of police shootings on its head. The critics of police conduct invariably focus on the intentions of individual officers. They talk about racism and conscious bias. The defenders of the police, on the other hand, invariably take refuge in what Fyfe calls the split- second syndrome: An officer goes to the scene as quickly as possible. He sees the bad guy. There is no time for thought. He acts. That scenario requires that mistakes be accepted as unavoidable. In the end, both of these perspectives are defeatist. They accept as a given the fact that once any critical incident is in motion, there is nothing that can be done to stop or control it. And when our instinctive reactions are involved, that view is all too common. But that assumption is wrong. Our unconscious thinking is, in one critical respect, no different from our conscious thinking: in both, we are able to develop our rapid decision making with training and experience.
Are extreme arousal and mind-blindness inevitable under conditions of stress? Of course not. De Becker, whose firm provides security for public figures, puts his bodyguards through a program of what he calls stress inoculation. “In our test, the principal [the person being guarded] says, ‘Come here, I hear a noise,’ and as you come around the corner—boom!—you get shot. It’s not with a real gun. The round is a plastic marking capsule, but you
Mind reading, as well, is an ability that improves with practice. Silvan Tomkins, maybe the greatest mind reader of them all, was compulsive about practicing. He took a sabbatical from Princeton when his son Mark was born and stayed in his house at the Jersey Shore, staring into his son’s face long and hard, picking up the patterns of emotion—the cycles of interest, joy, sadness, and anger—that flash across an infant’s face in the first few months of life. He put together a library of thousands of photographs of human faces in every conceivable expression and taught himself the logic of the furrows and the wrinkles and the creases, the subtle differences between the pre-smile and the pre-cry face.
Paul Ekman has developed a number of simple tests of people’s mind-reading abilities; in one, he plays a short clip of a dozen or so people claiming to have done something that they either have or haven’t actually done, and the test taker’s task is to figure out who is lying. The tests are surprisingly difficult. Most people come out right at the level of chance. But who does well? People who have practiced. Stroke victims who have lost the ability to speak, for example, are virtuosos, because their infirmity has forced them to become far more sensitive to the information written on people’s faces. People who have had highly abusive childhoods also do well; like stroke victims, they’ve had to practice the difficult art of reading minds, in their case the minds of alcoholic or violent parents. Ekman actually runs seminars for law-enforcement agencies in which he teaches people how to improve their mind-reading skills. With even half an hour of practice, he says, people can become adept at picking up micro-expressions. “I have a training tape, and people love it,” Ekman says. “They start it, and they can’t see any of these expressions. Thirty-five minutes later, they can see them all. What that says is that this is an accessible skill.”
In one of David Klinger’s interviews, he talks to a veteran police officer who had been in violent situations many times in his career and who had on many occasions been forced to read the minds of others in moments of stress. The officer’s account is a beautiful example of how a high-stress moment—in the right hands—can be utterly transformed: It was dusk. He was chasing a group of three teenaged gang members. One jumped the fence, the second ran in front of the car, and the third stood stock-still before him, frozen in the light, no more than ten feet away. “As I was getting out of the passenger side,” the officer remembers, the kid: started digging in his waistband with his right hand. Then I could see that he was reaching into his crotch area, then that he was trying to reach toward his left thigh area, as if he was trying to grab something that was falling down his pants leg.
He was starting to turn around toward me as he was fishing around in his pants. He was looking right at me and I was telling him not to move: “Stop! Don’t move! Don’t move! Don’t move!” My partner was yelling at him too: “Stop! Stop! Stop!” As I was giving him commands, I drew my revolver. When I got about five feet from the guy, he came up with a chrome .25 auto. Then, as soon as his hand reached his center stomach area, he dropped the gun right on the sidewalk. We took him into custody, and that was that.
I think the only reason I didn’t shoot him was his age. He was fourteen, looked like he was nine. If he was an adult I think I probably would have shot him. I sure perceived the threat of that gun. I could see it clearly, that it was chrome and that it had pearl grips on it. But I knew that I had the drop on him, and I wanted to give him just a little more benefit of a doubt because he was so young looking. I think the fact that I was an experienced officer had a lot to do with my decision. I could see a lot of fear in his face, which I also perceived in other situations, and that led me to believe that if I would just give him just a little bit more time that he might give me an option to not shoot him. The bottom line was that I was looking at him, looking at what was coming out of his pants leg, identifying it as a gun, seeing where that muzzle was gonna go when it came up. If his hand would’ve come out a little higher from his waistband, if the gun had just cleared his stomach area a little bit more, to where I would have seen that muzzle walk my way, it would’ve been over with. But the barrel never came up, and something in my mind just told me I didn’t have to shoot yet.
How long was this encounter? Two seconds? One and a half seconds? But look at how the officer’s experience and skill allowed him to stretch out that fraction of time, to slow the situation down, to keep gathering information until the last possible moment. He watches the gun come out. He sees the pearly grip. He tracks the direction of the muzzle. He waits for the kid to decide whether to pull the gun up or simply to drop it—and all the while, even as he tracks the progress of the gun, he is also watching the kid’s face, to see whether he is dangerous or simply frightened. Is there a more beautiful example of a snap judgment? This is the gift of training and expertise—the ability to extract an enormous amount of meaningful information from the very thinnest slice of experience. To a novice, that incident would have gone by in a blur. But it wasn’t a blur at all. Every moment—every blink—is composed of a series of discrete moving parts, and every one of those parts offers an opportunity for intervention, for reform, and for correction.
So there they were: Sean Carroll, Ed McMellon, Richard Murphy, and Ken Boss. It was late. They were in the South Bronx. They saw a young black man, and he seemed to be behaving oddly. They were driving past, so they couldn’t see him well, but right away they began to construct a system to explain his behavior. He’s not a big man, for instance. He’s quite small. “What does small mean? It means he’s got a gun,” says de Becker, imagining what flashed through their minds. “He’s out there alone. At twelve-thirty in the morning. In this lousy neighborhood.
