Shooting and Holding Fire in Police Work: Insights From a Study Informed by the Binder and Scharf Model of Deadly Force Decision-Making

• Author: Jordan C. Pickering,David Klinger
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10887679221111723
• Published date: 01 February 2023
• Date: 01 February 2023
• Subject Matter: Special Issue Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/10887679221111723

Homicide Studies

2023, Vol. 27(1) 34 –54

© 2022 SAGE Publications

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DOI: 10.1177/10887679221111723

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Special Issue Article

Shooting and Holding Fire in

Police Work: Insights From a

Study Informed by the Binder

and Scharf Model of Deadly

Force Decision-Making

Jordan C. Pickering1 and David Klinger2

Abstract

How police officers exercise their unique power to use deadly force continues to

be a topic of interest among academics and has recently become arguably the most

visible public policy issue related to the criminal justice system in the United States.

Academic interest in officers’ use of deadly force includes attention to how officers

make the decision to discharge their firearms during encounters with citizens. Binder

and Scharf posited that actions and decisions made by officers early in a high-risk police-

citizen encounter can impact their decision to use deadly force at the conclusion of

the encounter. This decision-making model, however, has been subject to very little

empirical scrutiny in the decades since it was proposed (see Fridell & Binder; Scharf

& Binder for notable exceptions). To bring their comprehensive framework back

to the forefront and provide additional empirical assessment, the authors used the

Binder and Scharf model as a framework to examine 82 officers’ decisions to shoot

or hold fire in incidents that involved multiple officers who ultimately made different

decisions regarding lethal force. Results from the qualitative analysis suggest that the

presence and actions of other officers on scene can have a notable impact on officers’

decision-making during a high-risk police-citizen encounter. Furthermore, findings

from this study extend the Binder-Scharf model by highlighting the role of conscious

and unconscious decision-making and the impact of social roles on officers’ choices

during an officer-involved shooting.

1California State University, Fresno, USA

2University of Missouri—St. Louis, USA

Corresponding Author:

Jordan C. Pickering, California State University, Fresno, 2576 E. San Ramon Avenue, M/S ST104, Fresno,

CA 93704-0001, USA.

Email: jpickering@csufresno.edu

1111723HSXXXX10.1177/10887679221111723Homicide StudiesPickering and Klinger

research-article2022

Pickering and Klinger 35

Keywords

policing, deadly force, qualitative methods, decision-making, theory

Introduction

The use of deadly force by police officers has been both a contentious social issue and

a matter of academic interest for decades, but recent years have seen a notable upswing

in both public and academic interest in the topic (e.g., Klinger et al., 2016; Sherman,

2018). Empirical inquiry into the use of police deadly force has been dominated by

two sorts of studies: (1) research that uses information from police agencies about

incidents in which officers discharge their firearms to examine the social correlates of

deadly force (e.g., Fyfe, 1978; White & Klinger, 2012) and, more recently, (2) labora-

tory experiments in which researchers seeking to assess how specific features of

police-citizen encounters (primarily citizen status characteristics) might affect how

officers exercise this ultimate form of their coercive powers (e.g., Correll et al., 2002;

James et al., 2016). Research in these traditions has shed a decent bit of light on some

aspects of the use of deadly force by police, but the studies using aggregated counts of

shootings and the laboratory-based studies are, in different ways, far removed from the

actual social events in which police officers fire their weapons at citizens. Because this

is so, neither of the dominant lines of inquiry into the critical matter of police use of

deadly force can shed direct empirical light onto the core question of how it is that

some police officers in some encounters with citizens come to pull the triggers of their

service weapons.1

Fortunately, and running against the tide of aggregated and experimental research,

a small number of scholars have sought to inform our understanding of this important

matter by examining the micro-social processes that occur during police-citizen inter-

actions in which police gunfire might, and sometimes does, erupt. The most compre-

hensive product of these efforts is Binder and Scharf’s (1980; see also, Scharf &

Binder, 1983)2 sequential decision-making framework, which views police gunfire as

an aspect of social events (i.e., police-citizen encounters) that unfold over time and

offers a detailed explanation for why involved officers sometimes shoot and some-

times hold fire as police-citizen interactions play out. Unfortunately, as the archival

and laboratory-based lines of inquiry came to dominate the deadly force research land-

scape, Binder and Scharf’s scheme faded into the background.

The current paper pulls Binder and Scharf’s (1980) work forward and uses it as a

jumping-off point to explore how various features of police-citizen encounters influ-

ence how officers make sense of such interactions and, ultimately, come to either shoot

or hold fire. It does so by drawing information from a unique sample: interviews with

police officers who were involved in interactions with citizens that included: (1) mul-

tiple officers, (2) one or more of whom discharged a service weapon, and (3) one or

more who did not shoot. By examining the thoughts and actions of individual officers

who were involved in the same police-citizen interactions but made different choices

about firing their weapons, this paper provides fresh insights into deadly police