Citation

Young AT, Pierpoint B, Perez C. J. Police Crim. Psychol. 2022; 37(4): 769-776.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2022, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1007/s11896-020-09384-0

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The current study presented police officers with an armed suicidal subject scenario during an in-service training, and their responses to this scenario were quantified. Officers then participated in a group debriefing and educational session after the scenario. One hundred and eight officers and deputies participated in the current study, and the researchers found that a majority of officers (72.2%) did not shoot the armed suicidal subject. Nine officers (8.3%) never gave a verbal command when faced with an armed suicidal subject, 22% never drew their weapon, and 86.2% walked closer to the subject and/or allowed the subject to walk closer to them. Many officers did nothing when the role player disobeyed their commands to stop moving towards them and 57.8% of officers walked backwards when faced with this threat. Officers removed the gun from the suicidal subject's hand 32.1% of the time.

Language: en

Keywords

De-escalation training; Lethal force incidents; Officer safety; Suicide intervention; Suicide-by-cop