LEOK – What The Studies Don’t Tell Us

By Dr. Joel F. Shults
As the 1992 FBI publication Killed in the Line of Duty states: “The specific factors that contribute to a particular law enforcement officer being placed in a particular situation that leads to his or her slaying remain unclear”. How helpful then, are the FBI’s publications on law officer assaults and line of duty deaths? Law Enforcement Officers Killed (LEOK) seminars are being presented throughout the country and are in high demand. These programs are made available by the FBI and are a chilling reminder of the savagery of attacks on police officers.
Scientific research always includes the researchers’ assessment of the limitations of the project both in terms of methodology and interpretation of the results. This article addresses concerns about the limitations of the LEOK research and seminars. The observations stated here is not a critique, but rather an objective exploration of where the value of these studies lies.
Data sets are not predictive of outcomes
Analyzing the past is challenging enough, predicting a future encounter and its outcome is much like predicting the weather – the perfect storm may somehow be related to the unseen flap of butterfly wings that swirl a set of molecules into motion. LEOK studies examine historical occurrences and while valuable in examining trends they should be used with great caution for establishing paradigms for predicting future assaults. There is some danger that officers will trade old inaccurate preconceptions of how they will be attacked for new inaccurate preconceptions.
Statistics and charts show what percentage of officers were engaged in certain activities, where attacks occurred relative to offenders’ homes, and the most prevalent season, day, and hour of officer murders. But the preeminent risk is that there is no hour, no season, no day, and no assignment which is unrepresented in officer murders. Will I behave differently when working day shift knowing that my chances of being murdered between breakfast and lunch are half that of being murdered between lunch and supper? Am I then to be half as cautious? Does a finding that the .45 ACP caliber of bullet killed the same percentage of lawmen as the .22 magnum determine how cautiously I deal with an armed offender?
Interviews with offenders offer only subjective assessments
No claim is made by the FBI or LEOK trainers that there is a singular profile of a cop-killer. Profiles are composites; an average of characteristics that seem to appear with some frequency. The psychopathic ramblings and life observations of caged cop killers make for interesting case studies, but there are limitations to the generalization of their comments to all or most deadly encounters.
Limitations include possible distortions in the offender’s recall of the deadly interchange. Sensory distortion in a violent incident is not limited to the victim officer; an offender is undergoing a traumatic event as well. Interviews are necessarily conducted years after the event, during which offenders may have reconstructed the entire sequence of events as well as their rationale and feelings at the time. Only consenting inmates were interviewed, which may have created a self-selecting research sample that differs in some way from a more inclusive sample. In other words talkers may construct their view of the world and themselves differently than the non-talkers whose tales are not told.
Statistical averages have no mathematical predictive value
Remember the difference between mean and mode from you statistics class? A mean is an average. If you have a study sample of a killers that consists of a twenty year old male, a thirty year old woman, and an seventy year old female the average age of your group is forty even though no actual 40 year old exists. The mode is the most frequently occurring number or category. In our group, the gender mode is female. Neither of those statistics would explain nor predict an officer death at the hands of the 60 year old male. Averages and modalities make for interesting reading but do not provided an analytical tool for a given set of circumstances that may occur. Therefore average ages, average years of experience, average distances from the attacker are all of interest but do not provide answers for officers in their unique confrontations.
Officer profiles offer no predictive value
One of the most often cited results of the LEOK study is that the victim officers are characterized as friendly, well-liked, hard working, service oriented, less likely to use force, breaks some officer safety and policy rules, feels he can “read” people, looks for the good in others, and is easy going. This set of characteristics was found in the Violent Encounters study released in 2006 as well as the 1992 study. Trainers should be very cautious in the application of this finding. One problem is that if we assume that these traits are somehow causative or contributory factors to officer deaths then to be safe an officer should be unfriendly, disliked, avoid hard work and public service, use forces frequently, follow every procedure to the letter every time, make no assumptions about a person, assume the worst in everyone, and be constantly uptight.
We simply could not police this way. A second limitation is that these descriptive terms are too general to be useful and there is no study that indicates that these traits don’t describe most of the 700,000 police officers who survive every year. Police officers must be chameleon by habit and adapt to individual situations. We cannot know from these studies if the behavior characteristics of the victim officers were at play during the violent encounters studies, nor if those same behavior characteristics were actually very successful in previous encounters in preventing violence.
The 2007 FBI LEOK publication cites 57 officers feloniously killed in 51 separate incidents. Of these: 16 officers died in 2007 from felonious attacks during arrest situations, 16 officers died as results of ambush situations, 11 officers died during traffic pursuits/stops, 5 officers died while responding to disturbance calls, 4 officers died while investigating suspicious persons/circumstances, 3 officers died during tactical situations. We have no indication that the officers who died by ambush, and therefore had no way to prevent the attack, are profiled any differently than those who may have had a chance to avoid their own death with tactical or perceptual improvements. We can certainly believe that officers who die in tactical situations are among the highest trained, best equipped, and most aware of the circumstances into which they are called. Nearly half of the killers interviewed said that there was nothing the officer could have done after the initial contact to save their lives.
Regarding the trait of reluctance to use force we must question the scale used to measure such a trait. Rapid decisions about application of policy and procedure result in officers’ technically straying from guidelines on a daily basis. The contrast between the dead officers’ actions and the second guessing of officers reviewing the event is predictable and not instructive of any actual contrast between victim officers and the general police population in terms of use of force decisions. In addition, although failing to wait for back up is cited as a fault, almost half of the assaults on officers studied in the 2006 report occurred where more than one officer was present and it is not known to what degree back up was available in the remaining cases.
An aspect of survival that is noted in the analysis of selected assaults on officers in the 1997 FBI publication In The Line of Fire is the officers’ will to live. This condition, frequently alluded to in officer survival literature, is difficult to define and is often reverently regarded as essential to surviving. Without critiquing the fact that this characteristic is not quantifiable, an objective examination of this aspect – whether it is by nature biological, metaphysical, or psychological – suggests that it has a mythical quality about it. Anecdotal evidence of the value of the survival mindset is very strong, and has been acculturated in a generation of police officers. To imply that some officers die because they lacked a will to live is not a conclusion based on defensible logic.
These factors create a great deal of doubt as to the usefulness of officer victim profiles. It is probable that knowing the victim profile is of no particular value since it may simply be saying that police officers who are killed are like every other police officer in general. We have no balancing data relative to officers not included in the studies to assume otherwise.
Offender profiles offer no predictive value
The analysis of offenders provides no predictive tools to assess an officer’s risk in a particular set of circumstances, as attested in the 1992 report. We also have little data to show whether, among the relatively small sample of police killers among the vast number of criminals imprisoned (and the even larger sample of unidentified violent criminals), the characteristics of police killers are significantly different than other criminals or even the population at large. Even if we could predict with some accuracy the likelihood of a person killing a police officer the victim officer would not normally know this at the time of the encounter. We also know that offenders typically have had numerous non-lethal encounters with law enforcement prior the fatal one, making a contact as unpredictable with the profile knowledge as without.
Offenders interviewed apparently often mention that they sized the officer up and decided to resist or not based on those calculations. Commentators may be overemphasizing the role of the offender’s view of the officer as professional or unprofessional as a principle contributing factor to the felons’ decisions to attack. The fact that this element is mentioned by several offenders does not imbue their comments with credibility given these killers’ skewed sense of their world. Nor does it really instruct an officer how to give off that aura of confidence and competence to a person whose values are contrary to those of law enforcement. It is ironic that we give credence to an offender who “reads” an officer’s ability to handle a situation yet we contend that that same characteristic in officers is faulty and may contribute to their death.
Some of the most important data exists in that which is not studied
A major gap in research on use of force is an analysis of successful encounters to compare and contrast with the kinds of violent resistance that generates reports and documentation. In other words we study the failures and not the successes. Compliant police encounters offer up no data. A recent survey indicates that 60-80% of officers will make a deadly force decision in their career and yet we know that a small number of officers actually discharge their weapon during a career at a suspect. We do not systematically study the successful outcomes - the unpulled trigger, the holstered nightstick, the uninjured officer. While the Violent Encounters study interviewed surviving officers of serious attacks, we don’t fully know why similar situations vary in their outcomes, as is acknowledged in the preface to In The Line of Fire. We don’t know how many offenders wanted to or had the opportunity to kill an officer and decided against murder for whatever reason.
Despite good faith efforts to dissect the anatomy of a police officer’s line of duty death, these tragic events represent a sample size within the universe of all suspect resistance and police contacts. Police officers engage in hundreds of thousands of contacts every day. A tiny number of those contacts results in an officer death or in any use of lethal force. We don’t really know what is different about all those compliant outcomes compared to the deadly ones, other than the latter are highly investigated and the former are not. We can’t simply say that a peaceful arrest was when the officer did everything right and a fatal encounter is where the officer erred in some deadly way.
Another limitation of the flagship 1992 report is that it is based on incidents chosen for study that occurred between 1975 and 1985. As we approach the end of the first decade of the 21st century we realize that much about technology, society at large and the police profession in particular has changed since those events took place. The conclusions from those events may be different than the aggregate of police killings in recent years.
Conclusion
The FBI and other scholarly studies on officer deaths and assaults must continue. The value of these studies may be seen in an increased awareness by officers of the dangers they face. The limitations of these studies in their methodology and in the assumptions and applications that are drawn from them must be carefully measured by users of the information. None of these studies makes a claim that any resulting information will be a predictor of a specific future event or prescribe specific responses to an extremely dynamic violent event. This important research must certainly continue but at present the predictive value of these studies provides only a dramatic reminder that murderous assaults can occur anytime, anywhere.