#125- “FORCE SCIENCE: The Truth Behind Split-Second Decisions”

In Episode #125, we welcome Brian Baxter and Von Kliem of Force Science—the organization reshaping how America understands human behavior in high-stress, split-second encounters. Their cutting-edge research reveals what really happens when perception narrows, reaction time collapses, and life-or-death decisions unfold faster than the brain can fully process.

They break down the myths, the science, and the truth behind use-of-force incidents—and explain why their findings have become essential for investigators, trainers, attorneys, and frontline officers nationwide.

If you’ve ever wondered what actually drives an officer’s decision in those critical moments…
 wait until you hear what Force Science has discovered.

Chapters

• 0:00 Cold Open: Honest Not Accurate
• 0:24 Hosts And Guests Introduced
• 2:35 Brian’s DPS Career And Training Path
• 5:20 Discovering Force Science And Human Factors
• 8:30 Human Performance In Split-Second Force
• 12:15 Memory, Confabulation, And Officer Recall
• 16:05 Tactics Shift: Who Really Has Advantage
• 20:40 Policy, Training, And Real-World Transfer
• 24:10 Video Limits: Frame Rates And Missing Data
• 28:05 Case Studies: Montana And Florida Videos
• 32:15 Perspective Traps And Naive Viewers

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:00

This girl heard gunshot. Saw her cousin with a gun in his hand. Saw the glass break. Saw her cousin with a bullet crush. And her brain said, how does this make sense? So she created a comprehensive, logical, order of events based on her life experiences. Um told that story and she told it honestly.

SPEAKER_01: 0:22

Stay honest, but not accurate. Welcome back. Viewers, watchers, listeners, I'm your host, Tyler Owen got the big boss in today. Your executive director of the NPA, the man myth, the legend, Kevin DeLoren. He always has to call me fat every time. Oh gosh, here we go. Bring that up. Yeah, what's going on, man? You've been busy. I've been busy. Yeah, you got a safari. A safari you're planning uh going to Harry Cup. No, no, no, no, no.

SPEAKER_03: 0:50

Oh, yeah. We bought a safari at the Relentless Defender game. Ah, okay. We're like the dog chasing the car. We caught it. We got to figure out what to do with it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:00

Anything going on within uh around the state that you want to cover real quick before we dive off into this episode?

SPEAKER_03: 1:05

Man, we got all kinds of stuff going on. But uh, you know, I you know what, let's get into the episode because a lot of it we will touch on right here.

SPEAKER_01: 1:12

Okay, cool. Yeah. If you guys don't know, we have uh some special guests in today, Brian Baxter with Forsites. You are uh what is your title with him? I'm uh Chief Executive Office. Chief Executive and Vaughn. Vaughn, yes sir. Say your last name. Vaughn Cleam. Cleam. Okay. Well have I'll I'll have that display drive. I was gonna screw that up. I'm I always know who my friends are when they speak to time. Yeah, yeah, we're not friends, man. We're not friends. Uh I'm notorious for misspelling mispronunciation names all the time. Uh at Escosa County, shout out to them and new Bronfels. I finally got those down after two years of working on that. Former state trooper. But yeah, I think it's important. Uh, for those that don't know force science, it's an incredible, incredible organization or um training aspect. And you guys also do some uh consulting work for use of force situations. So we're gonna dive off into that. Me and Brian were having a conversation off camera. I think it's important to kind of point out, as TNPA has also, leaders within law enforcement organizations, I think, are the most successful of those that have served themselves as cops. And so for science not being uh not being out of that also, they all with Brian having uh uh experience and as being a state trooper. So we're gonna dive off into that. And uh, I guess we'll kick it off by saying, who the hell is Brian? What's uh what's what's how how did you get where you are today and give us a background of force science?

SPEAKER_00: 2:28

Uh kind of a you ever heard of a post turtle? Yeah, that's that's kind of my story. I got up there and sure how. I uh I started out with DPS in 1993 and I worked 30 years before I retired in the summer of 23. And I worked everything from patrol, I did a couple years on the SWAT team, which was awesome, went into narcotics and that really caught my interest. So I stayed in the criminal investigations bloodstream, I guess you could say, uh, until the last few years of my career when I promoted. Uh went back to headquarters here in Austin and and closed out as the assistant chief over the training division for DPS. Uh and a lot of good experiences, a lot of stuff. It's it's a pretty uh typical recipe. You hear that a lot in law enforcement, patrol, narcotics. Why, you know, that yep, there's a similar path that that a lot of people travel, and and I wouldn't I wouldn't change anything. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 3:20

Well, and I and I also think it's important because again, back to what we were talking about earlier. I think somebody that teaches that that you know represents people of that of that type of environment. Kevin's got a uh a pretty lengthy career. I've been blessed in my career path with uh the several agencies that I worked at. And so it makes sense that you've got the tactical experience, the narcotics experience, and then being a state trooper, quite honestly, you know, people say people see state troopers here in Austin, Dallas, Houston, but what they don't know is that these rural areas, a trooper can work anything from, you know, a minor family violence backing up to a county guy uh all the way up to assisting a Texas Ranger or the sheriff's office with a homicide. So it's kind of a unique aspect. And so uh a lot of states aren't like that, you know. A lot of states aren't like Texas.

SPEAKER_00: 4:02

Yeah, it's uh you know, a lot of states have a state police right. And that phrase gets used a lot, but uh DPS is literally a public safety agency, and so it's it's focused on a lot more than just patrolling the highways working crashes. It's it's focused on uh real police work, it's focused on the highway work, it's focused on uh, you know, rendering first aid, it got an EMT program within the department. You it's kind of an all-encompassing public safety.

SPEAKER_01: 4:26

Well, and used to, it was just it was just troopers, rangers, and then narcotics. Now I'm starting to see a lot of, you know, uh it's CID. And so that kind of encompasses a lot of that other aspects of things of of assisting other agencies, uh counter, you know, counterterrorism intelligence, and so DPS has kind of branched out, and not you're not just seeing those three different divisions within DPS.

SPEAKER_00: 4:47

Oh, the director that that we had for the for the past decade and a half uh made a huge difference, big old change agent, uh and and it was the the push behind a lot of that that you see now. Right, right.

SPEAKER_01: 5:00

Well, you being the uh over the training section probably gave you a lot of experience with uh training different cadets and troopers, and so probably made you a good fit for where you are today. And how did you get involved with force science and and where did it start when you started that that trajectory?

SPEAKER_00: 5:15

That's a great question. In 2015, I was uh I was a major at the training academy. Uh and and the training academy is not just the the recruit academy, it's the end service training, leadership training, personal development for the non-commissioned members. And so it's a big job. And I got offered an opportunity to go to the force science, force analyst certification course, which is kind of the flagship program that that we're known for. And I attended it and I fell in love with it. I started geeking out over the human factors and the biomechanics and the physiology and psychology involved and in decision making and human performance and and then how that applies to training people in a better way, adult learning uh based on science and empirical data rather than this is what my FTO told me to do. Uh so I fell in love with it, and then I went to the advanced specialist course in 2018, and that's a semester-long course that uh at the time took place in Chicago. Now it's 100% online. But I attended that course and started doing some analyses for district attorneys and people outside the department, really getting a dose of what it means to analyze the use of force case. So when I retired, I stayed in contact with the company and was contract teaching and uh was offered the opportunity to work with uh an amazing leadership team that Bond's here representing. And so I I jumped on it and I've just kind of been drinking from a fire hose for the last six months.

SPEAKER_01: 6:44

Yeah, so for the listener or viewer out there, that's a 22-year-old cop that's listening to this podcast in their patrol car right now at 2 a.m. in the morning that may not understand fully what you just mentioned about the human element, uh, the science behind use of force. Dumb down just a very brief scenario or analogy of kind of like what what you're speaking of and how that impacts uh not only in the court system, but legal representation, like what TMPA does. Kind of break it down, give, give us an example.

SPEAKER_00: 7:10

Well, I will definitely defer on uh a lot of this to Vaughn because he can give some insights on some some recent examples of this stuff in practice. But a great example is uh, you know, an officer might have a tendency to watch their performance on a body cam video and think, oh my gosh, why did I do that? Why, why did I press the trigger two times after something changed? And you can compare that to human performance to something as simple as a traffic light. When we're in traffic and we're approaching an intersection, the light's not going to turn from green to red. The light's gonna turn from green to amber to red because human beings don't have the capacity to immediately stop doing anything. You have to perceive the change in your environment, you have to become consciously aware of the change in your environment, and then you have to make a decision and then behave based on that decision. So all that takes time. And and so the same thing applies to a use of force incident. That that what you what you may blame yourself as an extra strike, that's just because you're a human being and you hadn't perceived the change in your threat environment and you delivered that extra strike or fired that extra shot. So it's what we serve a lot of purposes, and not the least of which is empowering officers and public safety professionals with the information they need to know what they should expect of themselves and and how to how to do better. Yeah. And you know, you know, I've been in this business a long time.

SPEAKER_03: 8:36

I and this is just an amateur taking a shot at this, but it seems to me that very often we remember doing what we meant to do and not necessarily what we actually did. Does that sound accurate?

SPEAKER_00: 8:49

Memory is a a fascinating thing, and it's one of my favorite lanes to to geek out in. Uh, and that what you just described is absolutely something that can happen. Uh, it's called confabulation, uh, which is a fancy mouthwork for remembering things uh that that may or may not have happened the way you remember them. The important piece of that is it happens when you have no intent to deceive anybody. Right. It's not that you're making up facts or you're filling in blanks with information that makes you look better. It's your memory has gaps, and we do a thing called sense making where we look back on an event and we have a gap in our memory, and the things that make sense to us based on our experience and our knowledge and the other things associated with that event fill in those blanks.

SPEAKER_03: 9:33

Yeah, the problem is we've got so many people that are just looking for any kind of evidence that we are in fact lying, fabricating, whatever, that any little thing like that they will seize upon. So, how do we lay the foundation to get the general public to understand? And I this is where you guys come in, right?

SPEAKER_02: 9:51

Yeah, well, and I tell you that that comes up in most of our cases. I was testifying in San Diego recently, and the question came up is how frequently is there an inconsistency between the officer's statement and the video? And it's every single time. So we have to lay that expectation. You are not going to get perfect synchronization between your memory of an experience because as you're pointed out, you're remembering things just the gist of it, right? You it's just the meaning and the feelings that it evoked in you, not the precise distances, number of shots fired, number of punches, but we investigated as though how many times did you hit him, how many shots did you fire, how far were you, uh, and not just that, but where was your partner when you were doing it? So now what was your partner doing while you were in this fight? And and so why didn't you hear all the other gunfire going on around? Yeah, it's it and so we we as an organization are committed to this concept of honest accountability. One of one of the criteria for honest accountability, whether it's in training, operations, investigations, or case evaluations, is you can't have expectations that are beyond human performance capabilities. And so if you're expecting my memory to line up perfectly with a video, that's an expectation beyond human performance. And and I want to go back, one of the things, when we teach cops, you're like, give me an example of a human performance uh concept that we would we would train police. What we try to do is we we can have a one-hour block of instruction or a 17-week advanced specialist course. When we first get with a patrolman, and I'm like, what can I teach you this morning that's gonna help you tonight? That's what we're looking for. Not the not the deep diving academic memory consolidations and all that. That stuff's important, but I need to teach you something right now. And the one of the examples is intuitively, whether we're cops or civilians, if I have my gun out and pointed at you and I can't see your hands, I'm assuming I have the advantage, right? Because I've got my gun out, I've cleared my holster, I've I've I've got the drop on you, right? And what we were able to do is say, no, look, let's look at how fast you can be assaulted by somebody with a gun in their hand. And we've seen cases in real world where it's a tenth of a second. Now we'll use an average of a quarter of a second, but we actually have evidence of a tenth of a second because we're not talking about drawing from a holster, we're talking about a gun in hand, how fast can I pull it and and fire a round? And typically it's an unamed round, but at close quarters, that doesn't matter. Right. If you have your gun out and pointed, we then said, well, how fast is your response time? Right. And what we found was it's almost an eighth of a second with your gun out already to come up and get an aim shot on. And that was from an audible signal in a lab in real life. Stimulus. Right. Yeah. So we have seen in complex operating environments, which is the reality of policing, over three seconds between an audible signal and a and an officer having to look and go, okay, what did I just hear? Was it from the officer? Was it from the suspect? Did the suspect fire a gun? Did they fire a gun? Did somebody get hit? Oh, there's my bad guy taking off running and being able to get that first round off. So we've seen in our own studies over two seconds responses, and we've seen in in other cases we've evaluated over three seconds. Now back to the lab. I'm telling, I have to let that patrolman know, based on human performance research, that just because your gun is out and you're hiding behind your front sight and you've got the drop on them, they still have the advantage. Once we do that, I could teach you that in the morning. Now, my next question is how does that have impact your tactics? How are you what are you going to do different with that new piece of information? And then we throw that as a company back out to the industry. Yep. We don't typically try to now we have our ideas about tactics, right? Brian and I uh because force science is committed to application, research, I would say it this way, research for the sake of research is like teaching math to math teachers. Like no one's ever using it, right? So so we we come in as an organization, we're like we have our researchers and we have our cops, and what we look for is a way to blend real world application with that research. And oftentimes it's just a question, like that we have to throw back out and say, with this piece of information, now what would you guys do different in training, operations, investigations?

SPEAKER_03: 14:12

And just to hone in on that, for the for the uninformed of us, they have the advantage, much like the offense has the advantage in a football game, because they know when the ball's gonna get hiked, right? And the defense doesn't. They they've already got their minds made up what they're gonna do. You have to wait for them to start doing whatever they're gonna do, and then you have to recognize it, analyze it, decide what you're gonna do, and then start doing what you're gonna do.

SPEAKER_02: 14:40

And that gives them a yeah, they have the advantage. And and when you say you have to wait for them, that goes to the next layer. So we're just talking human performance. We're talking development of tactics and and and what are you gonna do? Because obviously, if you're gonna develop tactics, I don't want to do that with my FTO, I want to do that in a training environment, right? We want to build those file forwards in the training environment. But then you add like you have to wait, sort of thing. And that brings in the legal question, do I? If the reality and the policy question, and the policy question, that's exactly right. So we have to battle, and I say battle, we are part of the discussions at every stage. What's your training look like? Because to your point on the policy, policy is irrelevant unless it's been operationalized. And how do you operational, how do you get policy from a piece of paper to the street? Well, that's the training, right? It could be a classroom setting, but ultimately, if we really deep dive our science of learning, our advanced instructional methods course, when we operationalize policy, there are ways to do that. So we got what we refer to as transference. What are you gonna do in that classroom that allows you to actually be able to do it on the street a month from now, two months from now? And so we're scientists deeply involved in that part of it. So we're trying to touch all of it to make sure that if you're gonna hold officers accountable to their training, it has to be good training. Right. And so we're gonna help you figure out what good training looks like.

SPEAKER_01: 16:03

Well, and you mentioned accountability, and what's it really interesting? I was thinking about this on the way in this morning. Me and you, me and Brian had a conversation a couple of weeks ago about kind of how we got here. Why, why, why wouldn't a police association be partnered with an organization like you guys on the science portion? And it goes back to when we started in law enforcement, we all had BHS tapes. Okay. That's how we and processed that because we're going to hit on this in a minute. Well, we didn't all have it, right? First ones we got. And so you you had mentioned something about frames per second and just how magnificent and how how how much that changes in that much of a time frame on the quality of video, uh, 4K, high definition. And it's it's scary to think about this when we first had body cams in East Texas. When I when we first got body cams issued, they weren't even on high def. They were on like 720 uh pixels. I'm not sure what the frame rate was, but my point is this, and you guys are the perfect ones to ask about this, is these departments, when we first started, think about the use of force situations weren't as questioned. And I'm not saying police weren't held accountable, I'm not saying that, but society as a whole, we've grown into this aspect of we're gonna hold these cops accountable and we're gonna, you know, watch these body cams. Well, then it twisted into forced science. Now we have to have science behind the accountability portion of these body cams because not all things look as they perceive in camera. And so you guys bring that other element into y'all science and research of okay, well, you didn't see in this frame per second on this body cam, that's where you guys can help us out on the legal representation side of our members.

SPEAKER_00: 17:36

That's right. And and Von mentioned it a while ago that 100% of the time the officer's memory is not gonna perfectly match correct on the body cam. The reason for that is that officer's memory is gonna be based on what they paid attention to. Yep. Not even what they looked at. They could look at something, and if they're not paying attention to it, if they are simultaneously thinking, did I leave the garage door open when I left the house? They're not paying attention to what they're looking at and they're not gonna remember it. So the the officer's memory is gonna be based solely on what they paid attention to, and that's what they're gonna remember. Beyond that, when you do talk about things like frame rate, you talk about a patrol car dash camera that's maybe running eight frames per second, a uh body camera that might be running 30 frames per second, a security closed circuit TV camera that may be running four frames per second. So that's one flash of the view of that camera. Uh, you know, you're you're getting four of those every second. So uh you could bounce a basketball and miss the bounce of the basketball. You could just see a a frame of a person holding the basketball and the video would be of a person holding the basketball. But if we look at the 30 frame per second camera, we'll see that in between those frames, they bounce the basketball. That's a that's a great point. So one of the things we do is we we remind people that hey, hey, camera footage is good, whether it's eight frames, four frames, thirty frames, it's camera footage. It does a great job of capturing everything within the frame of that camera as long as at that moment. At that moment that the camera is capturing. So we we don't want to compare video footage to an officer's memory or a witness's memory, uh, whether they're in law enforcement or not, they're a human being. Because they're never going to be the same. And we had some recent evidence of that in a case.

SPEAKER_02: 19:21

At least almost every single case involving video, we have to analyze a bit. We won't even look at the case till we tell the client your video needs to be interrogated. We need to know frame rates. Um, variable frame rates. So it could be 12 frames, 24 frames, and the same film is changing because the processor is trying to save data. Has enough information changed in the environment that it's worth putting that much towards?

SPEAKER_03: 19:42

That's that's key. Variable frame rate. And this comes in with the technical, the sorry, the digital videos nowadays, because what you're talking about, again, for those of us that don't really understand the technology, the actual period of time between the individual frames that that video is recording varies. So things may appear to speed up or slow down because of the equipment, not because of what happens. For lack thereof.

SPEAKER_02: 20:12

And let me give you a really great example. Uh oh, it'll play back at a different rate. Well, because on the codec. Yeah, if we want to play stuff back roughly at 30 frames per second. So if your video recorded it at 24, you have to add six frames. Where do they add them? They just duplicate other frames so that it looks like it's 30. That duplication can happen in the camera, it can happen in the play in the codec or the the software playing it back. Yeah. Here's why this is critical. We just had three cases. I'm going to talk about two of them very quickly because your your audience has to know videos are liars in the sense that they cannot be used, to your point, for time, distance, speed, angles, elevation, all of that is intentionally distorted as a feature of cameras. It's not a bug. It's done so that we can save data and it's done so we can capture more information to review later. The problem is when we release it to the public, we're telling the public you can use the camera as a what I say a proxy for the officer's experience. You can use it as a accurate representation of the officer's experience, which is absolutely not true. Judges get bored listening to a lot of these cases until we start talking about video, and all of a sudden they're turning in their chairs and they're taking notes. Here's why this is important case out of um Montana recently. Um the sus the suspect in a homicide case said that the guy swung at him. The detectors watch the video, the guy never swings at him, right? On the video, they send it to me, like, we got a bad fact here, the guy never swings at him. And I said, Well, send me the video. And what I know is when you record a video, your camera is deciding if it's 10 frames per second, we call that a group of pictures, 10 frames per second in that 10. The first one's gonna be an index. It's gonna be an actual picture of the environment, right? Before it fills in the other nine frames, the camera processor is deciding has enough information changed in the environment that it's worth taking another picture, or should I just copy one? What I said is you can have, I looked at, I said you can have over half a second of missing data, and how many how fast does it take to throw a punch, right? If this guy's saying he swung at him and you could throw a punch in a quarter of a second, it didn't even be a couple of things. Yeah, Kevin is just in your hand. It's like Bruce Lee over here. Yeah, yeah. Uh, but if if it's a tenth of a second or or 0.14 uh of a second of a punch, so how many punches can I throw in 0.5 seconds that will not be captured on that video? But what will be captured are all those copies of those frames. So what we had to do is just saving memory space. Saving memory. But what here's what happens we looked at those 10 frames. That was just me giving sort of a background on what was possible. We sent that video to uh video analyst. He comes back and he says, at the moment, just before the shooting, you are missing 0.56 seconds of putting that. You can it looks like you can see it because the camera will fill it in with fake information, just so that it looks like it's playing back at a speed that is most comfortable to the human eye. Once we took those out for the jury, we said you cannot rely on these. These are literally copies, they do not reflect what actually happened. So you had 0.56 seconds of fake information being displayed. Once you take that out, we showed them with an with a uh a simul a simulation. If you had all 10 frames, actual pictures, you know, like you take a like the the day of the cards, yeah. Now I want you to imagine that uh all that all that camera did, not imagine this is what happened. It took the first index frame, that's an actual picture, it copied it eight times, and then took another one. This when we showed him what that looks like, it's a guy standing there and he doesn't move at all. When we showed him what it looks like if you had all 10 frames be actual photos or actual index frames, you see the punch very clearly. So what we were left with is the prosecution then looks at it, goes, Well, and we knew we had him when they asked this question. So you don't know what happened in that five, six seconds, do you? He may or may not have punched. And I go, correct, and neither do you. You processed. Well, we got a witness who was there. Yeah. Yeah. Who called the police within seconds of the shooting and said, This guy just attacked me. He and I, you know, so he was he had all these in in indicia reliability, right? In the timing and the story and the sincerity with which he told it, calling the police to the scene. It was all on video. Um, that was one example. The other one to your point of spade, uh case out of Florida recently where my client, this is all public at this point. He I'm testifying, he goes, Well, you can see the the big 300-pound man moving faster towards towards our client at this point, can't you? And I'm like, Well, so we talked about this last night. I see that the video portrays that. But this was a variable frame rate surveillance camera. The camera and the the playback software added frames. And I don't know if he's actually moving faster, or that's just a sort of an illusion that it is that results from the fact that the camera itself is adding frames. So I cannot credit, literally, I can't say whether he's moving faster, slower uh at that speed. But yes, if you're asking me, does it appear on this video that he's looking faster? It does appear as as though it is, but in my expert opinion, I did not credit.

SPEAKER_03: 25:33

So there are cases where items will just it'll seem like it'll just like they just appeared out of nowhere all of a sudden. Well, here's how I make it.

SPEAKER_02: 25:42

This is critical. I'll turn it over to the boss here, but uh, I just had a case to make this point. I said, I want if you don't believe me, let's go frame by frame. Here's the suspect with a gun running, running, running, and he disappears. He's no longer on the video at all. I go, frame, he's gone, frame, he's gone, frame, oh, he's back. It was because because of the lighting and the contrast of the device, the camera did no no longer recognize his movements as something worth taking a picture of. And so it just copies other pictures where he wasn't involved in it. And so I was like, did your guy just magically disappear? And the only reason I brought that up was to say you cannot rely on these videos, they are not fit for the purpose with which you're trying to use them. That's that's uh, I mean, that's the phrase. Videos are not fit for the purpose of forensic analysis relative to time, distance, speed, angles, elevation, or apparently, even if the suspect himself is in the scene.

SPEAKER_03: 26:38

And we haven't even gotten to the fact that they're a two-dimensional portrayal of a three-dimensional, even four-dimensional situation. And you don't have all those other one of our lawyers that that does a lot of work for us, he's an also a former cop. He loves when he gets in front of a jury, he'll show a picture of a football game. It's a picture of you got a receiver coming down in the end zone with a football, and you got two referees standing on either side, one of them signaling incomplete favorites hits us and ears that touchdown because they're looking at it from two different angles. Yeah, you don't get that. Right.

SPEAKER_00: 27:10

But you do get that when you compare a two-dimensional camera with a with a perspective on a scene, and then as a viewer, as a naive viewer of that video footage, we assume that the officer would have had the same, and especially with body cam, we assume that the officer had the same perspective of the same scene. It would have captured all of the things that happened within the frame. And one of the cases that we use in in our uh training is a case that involved uh a guy who gets out of a car and on the faster frame camera that's been stabilized, that you really watch the movements, uh, takes an object that is roughly the size and shape of a gun. It's a very, very large crucifix, and he gets in a very distinctive shooting stance, aims a gun to the right of the camera. You're you're the camera looking at me. He aims this direction and he's shot from this from the his front in the direction that he would have been aiming that notional handgun. But when you watch the video, uh there's distance involved. So by the time the sound travels, it appears that he was shot after doing nothing, turning around and putting his hands in the air, and he's shot in the back. When he he wasn't shot in the back, but the perspective of the camera that captured this event captured the image of his back. So there's there's a lot of assumptions, and that again, that naive viewer that's using emotion uh rather than empirical data to to guide their consumption of that video, it makes it even worse. Yeah, there's there's two things.

SPEAKER_02: 28:38

One, the challenge for watching these videos and releasing them to the public and the notion of accountability or transparency is one, they're not they're not video literate. They don't know the capabilities and limitations of videos that they're watching. Fair enough. You can sometimes front load that when the when the agency introduces the video, they can do a preamble and talk about the capabilities and limitations of what we can't and can't assume from it. Um, but the thing that makes it challenging is we have all since birth been hypnotized to suspend reality when we're watching TV. Right? We watch all these entertaining shows where men can fly and climb up walls, and in order to be entertained, we have to not question what we're seeing on TV. Right. Because we want to get immersed in it. That's what's happening now when we release these videos. Our audiences want to be immersed in it and imagine they're seeing everything there is to see. And now I can evaluate and form a judgment about the reason officer's decision, knowing nothing about what the officer saw. Um, and you know, to take a half a step back, you ask the question, what how do we respond to confabulation? If I can go back half a step, that's great. If we if we explain confabulation after the event, it looks like excuse making. But if you do it ahead of time, it's education. That's the first step that we do. We try to educate on the front end. This is a thing. It affects all of us. Transitioning from it affects all of us. When I evaluate a case, I know there's going to be confabulation. I look for evidence of confabulation in the other witnesses, in the civilians, in the suspect, in the victims, as they're giving their interviews. And if I can find evidence of confabulation, then I can say, well, we have evidence of confabulation on the officer's side, but we also saw that in the victim or in a witness. And the great example out of uh Prince, I think Prince William County, Virginia, was a woman who watched her cousin get shot at the front door of her house. And she says, I saw the whole thing. She's she's participating in the investigation with the police. And she says, They were my cousin was running behind my other cousin. My cousin was shooting at him. I watched him shoot him. Glass was breaking through the front glass door. My cousin comes in, falls down, and dies at the at the foot of the stairs. The the problem with that, she was a hundred percent believable, she was a hundred percent honest, and she was a hundred percent wrong because forensically the shooting actually occurred out in a parking lot. There were no shots fired at the door. What happened was that her cousin, who had already been shot, um was running and tried to open the glass door, uh glass screen door, and was running faster than the door was opening. So his shoulder hits it, shatters the glass. So this girl heard gunshots, saw her cousin with a gun in his hand, saw the glass break, saw her cousin with bullet holes, and her brain said, How does this make sense? And so she she created a comprehensive logical order of events based on her life experiences, um, and told that story. And she told it honestly, we say honest but not accurate. So if I can find evidence of that in a case where people don't have an incentive to lie, yeah, um, then it's then I then it goes back to more education, less, less excuse.

SPEAKER_01: 31:59

On the next episode of Blue Grid Podcast.

SPEAKER_00: 32:04

Either write their own tactics or contribute to their agency's tactics using the data that we provide about biomechanics, how long it takes to draw and fire a gun from the waistband, how long it takes to punch, kick, slash, stab, and and really inform the tactics that agencies develop.

SPEAKER_02: 32:22

Decision could be improved with the benefit of 2020 hindsight. So we have to explain this to juries like, well, would you have done something different? Would you have done something different? Look, in hindsight, every tactical operation, every decision made at the tactical level during a response could be improved in hindsight. That's why we do after action reviews, and we're gonna be able to do that.