BORELLI CONSULTING: Recommended Reading

Too Much Light?
By: Ken J. Good
President of Strategos International
http://www.strategosinternational.com

Words have meaning. Concepts, both good and bad, can take on a life of their own. Therefore it is incumbent upon responsible individuals and groups to push back when ill-conceived or erroneous information is tabled as viable doctrine or policy.

Frameworks of thought built on fallacies or half-truths need to be destroyed as fast as they are erected.

I feel it is imperative to address just such a framework that was recently circulated through the November 2005 FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin. The article was entitled, "Perspective - Use of Force and High-Intensity Tactical Police Flashlights Policy Concerns" ~ By R. Paul McCauley, Ph.D.

Please read: http://www.fbi.gov/publications/leb/2005/nov2005/nov2005leb.htm#page10.

The best thing I can say about the article is that it has generated some healthy discussions on the topic of illumination tools within the Law Enforcement community.

Healthy discussion is good, but I personally find the article troublesome on multiple fronts. I will address only a few of them here.

Let me start at the beginning on the article. The author immediately sets up a classic straw dog for a good beating. The readers are drawn into a typical reduced-light scenario. That is, an officer situated behind the concealment provided by a wall of light emitting from the various lights on his vehicle. It appears from the extremely limited information provided that the officer made an incorrect decision. From there the reader is clearly encouraged to make the direct correlation between that bad decision and the fact that lights on the vehicle were somehow used inappropriately. Furthermore, a secondary but equally prominent line is draw to what is termed as "high-intensity tactical police flashlights" (HITPFs).

Therefore the reader is lead to the conclusion that we have a problem with how these lights are being used.

To me, this is overly simplistic and does not jive with reality. Confrontations are fluid, dynamic and unpredictable. A myriad of factors are always associated with any confrontation. The individual officer's decision-making processes within that confrontation needs to be carefully scrutinized if any reliable and meaningful conclusions can be drawn. This was not the case in the example provided.

What jumped out at me was the lack of any alternative solutions provided to the reading audience.

When I contacted the author directly, I simply asked him, "What are you recommending police officers to do differently in the scenario you brought forth specific to the lights or lighting situation?"

One the most crucial things an officer must do is identify and assess the threat to gain situational awareness. I genuinely wanted to know how he was proposing to do this.

I invited the author to show us in a reality-based, force-on-force environment, where officers are challenged to prevail in the scenarios while adhering to their use of force policies. This type of training has a very powerful benefit. It strips away many of the weaker facades of doctrine and allows those who are impartially evaluating to gain powerful insights into the actual priorities of training, and required skill-sets. There is no hiding behind dogma, academia, or personalities. If you want to shape policy, make sure you can show it stands up in this type of realistic simulation.

As stated on Mr. McCauley's website, he is subject-matter expert on flashlights. When I asked specific questions on the use of flashlights relative to his article, I received no specific answers. I did not receive any suggestions for alternative courses of action whatsoever. Nor did I receive an acceptance or a rejection to the invitation to practically show us how it is done. Does anybody else besides me see this as problematic?

His response indicated that we just approach things differently. Now that is a true statement!

Is the author actually proposing that when an officer is addressing any particular subject and/or threat that somehow the playing field should initially be leveled to allow the subject to have equal or greater situational awareness in order to avoid civil litigation?

What part of the Red and Blue lights, the siren, the spotlights, and the verbal commands did you not understand as a member of this society?

Some immediate alternatives (all with consequences) might have been:

a. Don't turn your light(s) on at all

b. Don't put the hot-spot of your light(s) in anybody's face or mirrors

c. Turn the suspect around with verbal commands before you energize any light(s) making the assumption you found him and still see him

d. Shine the light(s) elsewhere

e. Shine the light(s) on yourself

f. Give the subject a light to help him or her ID their overall situation

g. Give somebody you believe is friendly a light and have them shine it on you and or the subject

h. You fill in the blank

Moving on, I am going to quote from the article here:

" In this regard, the author recently conducted an experiment in which he asked 17 college students to move toward him in a darkened hallway. Each time, the author shined an HITPF into the participant's eyes. Fourteen of the students extended to some degree one or both arms in response to the light beam. In a real-world situation, officers could mistake this response as threatening, justifying an escalation of the level of force- perhaps, even to deadly force, depending on the circumstances. Further, some could argue that the officer's actions created the dangerous situation."

Again, this is just another straw dog to kick and then send into the woods. I believe I could argue almost anything could be construed as threatening if the reasonable man's perspective were not considered, after all breathing or blinking is moving!

Any officer with reasonable training and a reasonable decision-making capability, situated at a distance down the hallway would not construe the raising of hands after a bright light is shined in a subject's face, in and of itself as a "threatening action". The premise is simply absurd. In fact, my 10-year old son, when I asked him what somebody would do if I shined a light in their face, answered the question correctly. "Dad, they would probably close their eyes or put their hands up to block the light…." Give that boy a badge!

Are officers not correctly taught at the earliest stages of their training to try and get a visual on the subject's hands? In fact, the phrase "Show me your hands!" is probably the most common phrase I hear coming out of police officer's mouths during the training we conduct. Now the author seems to be proposing that a dangerous trend is forming.

Subjects are raising their hands in front of police officers when they shine a light at them… and this is a bad thing?

The article does highlight the fact that verbal commands should be used in conjunction with lights. My question is why wouldn't they be? Are officers not aware of their own force continuums and Use of Force policies? Is this the actual concern here?

Personally I have spent almost 20-years running around in the dark working with police officers in the training environment. As a training organization we have seen plenty of trends in this context. I cannot recall any high-stress force-on-force, reality-based training scenario where an officer was not talking to the subject in an effort to get them to comply when the situation did not require an immediate use of lethal force.

Officers simply do not shine lights in the subjects' faces and remain silent and then shoot them because they naturally raise their hands.

Can officers misconstrue sudden movement from previously unseen individuals at close range as threatening and respond by shooting? Yes, absolutely.

Using your light properly, moving and searching intelligently, as well as participating in well-conceived training within reduced-light environments, will help prevent this situation from developing the first place.

One cannot draw a straight line between mistake of fact shootings and purposefully directing a bright light into a subject's eyes in an attempt to degrade their vision. I would submit that one is a sub-conscious process happening in a compressed time frame at short distances and the latter is decided action with fairly predictable results. Getting them to raise their hands is helpful by product of course. They make excellent contact points for a subsequent takedown if required.

I can also recall many officers not being perfectly efficient or concise in their communication, but this is to be expected in stressful situations. Training helps officers improve in this important area of a confrontation.

At this point in time, I firmly and adamantly believe that if an officer can degrade the subject's vision (at the appropriate time) and at the same time get them to react in a manner that they will show their hands, this is fantastic trend. Nobody that I am aware of is advocating officers to randomly shine their spotlights at vehicles or into motorist eyes in traffic. Nobody that I am aware of in the training community is advocating starting every encounter with citizens by shining a bright light in their face.

It should be done in context of a calm officer with proper decision-making skills attempting to improve his or her situational awareness when the circumstances warrant it. I can cite many practical, on-the-street encounters where the incident was resolved quickly and without any injury to all within the encounter as a direct result of employing this approach. Without the light, in can easily be argued, the situation might have resolved itself quite differently.

Empty hands means, for the moment, that individual cannot immediately kill me if the relative distance supports that. This should generate better decisions not worse ones.

In fact, I am going to table the premise the use of HITPF's will actually bring down the required level of force and reduce civil litigation overall. I can cite a police officer who put this to the test. He was one of the leading officers in his department in terms of writing use of force reports. He was always in the soup. He obtained a very bright light and in the subsequent months, he did not write one, not one, use of force report. Anytime he encountered a situation he believed was going to escalate, he put 500 lumens of light into that person's pupils. Take a seat... Done.

I personally believe at this point that police flashlights are not a force-option unless they are used as a striking instrument; they are more correctly characterized as a force-multiplier. They can enhance every aspect of the force continuum when properly applied.

I think anyone arguing against this clearly does not understand the actual trends or physical realities of the situation. Like any other tool at the officer's disposal, you cannot guarantee a specific result. There are trends, but folks simply act differently from encounter to encounter. Again, any reasonable person with practical experience should understand this.

In addition to everything else I wrote, I would also like to address another needless obstacle put forth by the Professor.

The Professor states in his article:
"....no, scientific evidence exists that supports the theory taught by some trainers--that for every 10 years individual age, they need 4 times the light to see easily"....

According to:

SAE Technical Paper Series 870600
Visibility Problems in Nighttime Driving
Paul L. Olson
University of Michigan
Transportation Research Institute

“On average, acuity peaks at about age 15, and declines steadily thereafter, reaching about 1/3 peak value at age 80.

The most critical condition is at night. In general, acuity and other visual functions decline as the level of illumination decreases. However, the effects are more marked in the elderly...It has been known for some time that the minimum level of illumination to which the eye can adapt, as well as the time to adapt from one level to another, increases with age...older subjects were able to read highway signs at only about two-thirds the distance of the younger subjects at night.”

If one uses just a bit of due diligence, you can easily find an abundance of information of the effects of aging on vision put forth by ophthalmologists and industry lighting professionals that plan lighting in spaces for human beings.

For Example:

http://www.visualexpert.com/Resources/olderdrivers.html

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2459/is_n2_v26/ai_19468260

I found references to light planning schemata’s that as people get older, plan on having up to 10 times the amount of light for them to comfortably see.

The bottom line, although there may not be the perfect mathematical matrix available, it is well-known, well-documented, and well-studied that on average, age is detrimental to most ¬¬people’s vision...When it exactly starts and at what levels is as diverse as the human population.

To discount this factor when considering a larger population of LE officers that are in their 30-50’s is reckless at best.

So the professor's point was????

In conclusion, in agreement with the author, I believe we should have the factual discussion now as to how you can best leverage the powerful tool of high intensity light to save officers lives, minimize the use of force, and please those law abiding citizens you serve, while simultaneously keeping "subject matter experts" from using its proper deployment against you. At least with a good HITPF you'll be able to see them coming!

I have a comment on this article.

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