Beyond false positives

• Author: Paul L. Taylor
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12460
• Published date: 01 November 2019
• Date: 01 November 2019

DOI: 10.1111/1745-9133.12460

RESEARCH ARTICLE

BEYOND FALSE POSITIVES

Beyond false positives

A typology of police shooting errors

Paul L. Taylor

University at Albany,State University of New

York

Correspondence

PaulL. Taylor, School of Criminal Justice,

Universityat Albany, State Universityof New

York,Draper Hall Room 213, 135 Western

Avenue,Albany,NY 1222.

Email:plt aylor@albany.edu

Research Summary: Daniel Kahneman (2011) wrote,

“There are distinctive patterns in the errors people make.

Systemic errors are known as biases, and they recur pre-

dictability in particular circumstances. …The availability

of diagnostic labels for [these] biases make [them] easier to

anticipate, recognize, and understand.” In this article, we

examine the systemic nature of human error in the context

of officer-involved shootings—one of the most visible and

controversial aspects of the U.S. criminal justice system—

and we seek to provide a common language for discussing,

recognizing, and understanding these tragic outcomes.

Policy Implications: The resulting typology offers a

framework for a systems-based approach to researching

and investigating police shooting errors that, in turn, could

provide a powerful vehicle for reform, improved officer

decision-making, and ultimately better outcomes.

KEYWORDS

deadly force, decision-making, human error, police

“To study error is to study the function of the system in which practitioners are

embedded.”

—Woods, Dekker, Cook, Johannesen, & Sarter,2010, p. 25

Daniel Kahneman (2011) wrote, “There are distinctive patterns in the errors people make. Systemic

errors are known as biases, and they recur predictably in particular circumstances. …The availability

of diagnostic labels for [these] biases make [them] easier to anticipate, recognize, and understand”

Criminology & Public Policy. 2019;18:807–822. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/capp © 2019 American Society of Criminology 807

808 TAYLOR

(pp. 3–4). The social and behavioral sciences are underpinned by the assumption that people with sim-

ilar experiences and training respond to similar situations in similar ways. Weunderstand that behavior

tends to be systematically connected to the featuresof peoples’ tools, tasks, previous experiences, train-

ing, and environments (Dekker, 2014; Klein, 2011; Lipsky, 2010). In a similar fashion, the research

findings on human error have consistently demonstrated that situations, behaviors, and decision pro-

cesses that result in error tend to result in repeated errors across time and people (Kahneman, 2011;

Reason, 1990; Woods et al., 2010). This has allowed for the systematic study of error to be used as a

vehicle for understanding workplace decision-making, professionalreform, and improved outcomes in

a number of high-risk occupational fields including medicine (Institute of Medicine, 2000), aviation

(Dekker, 2016; Reason, 2008), transportation (Green, 2017), and the military (Snook, 2002). James

Doyle (2010) and a growing group of others (e.g., Hollway, 2014; Shane, 2013) have called for a sim-

ilar lens to be applied to various aspects of the U.S. criminal justice system including police use of

deadly force (e.g., Pickering & Klinger, 2016; Sherman, 2018).

The purpose of this article is to present a typology of police shooting errors. The goal is to provide

both researchers and practitioners with a new framework—similar to Kahneman’s (2011) “diagnostic

labels”—to help facilitate more meaningfully research, understanding, better prediction, and perhaps

even the reduction of some of the most controversial police shootings.

1HUMAN ERROR

James Reason (1990) defined human error as “a generic term to encompass all those occasions in which

a planned sequence of mental or physical activities fails to achieve their intended outcome, and when

these failures cannot be attributed to the intervention of some chance agency” (p. 9). The key words in

this definition are “intended” and “outcome,” and they are important to keep in mind if we are to apply

this definition of human error to officer-involved shootings. It would not be appropriate, for example,

to apply the term “error” to all police shootings involving unarmed people. If, for instance, an officer

was struggling with a person the officer knew or believed to be unarmed and the officer intentionally

shot the person anyway, this would not meet the definition of an error. In this case, the officer intended

to shoot an unarmed person and the outcome matched the intention. If, on the other hand, the officer

believed the person was armed and the officer intentionally shot the person when he reached into his

pocket and it subsequently turned out he was unarmed, this would meet James Reason’s definition of

human error. The officer in this case intended to shoot an armed person but, instead, shot an unarmed

person. The result is an unintended outcome. In a similar fashion, if an officer intentionally shot an

unarmed person in an act of criminal malice, it would not meet the definition of human error. The

officer intended to shoot an unarmed person illegally, and the action wouldbe considered a “violation”

rather than an “error” by the standards outlined in the literature on human error (Reason, 2008).

The scholars who study human error generally agree that systematic errors should be viewed as the

undesirable by-product of otherwise useful psychological processes rather than irrational or maladap-

tive tendencies (e.g., Dekker, 2014; Kahneman, 2011; Reason, 1990; Woods et al., 2010). In fact, Ernst

Mach (1975/1905) wrote, “Knowledge and error flow from the same mental source, only success [or

failure] can tell one from the other” (p. 80). James Reason (1990) referred to this as a type of “cognitive

balance sheet” in which correct action and systematic error can be viewed as “two sides of the same

coin” (p. 2).

We know that cognitive and attentional resources are finite. Humans are not able to attend to a

fraction of the stimuli in their environment at any giventime, and t he more of their attentional resources

they devote to an object or a task, the less they haveto give to other objects or tasks (Chabris & Simons,