Question, what if we treated police shootings like aircraft accidents?

[Savannahmann]

If anyone has ever watched television documentaries, or docudrama's about aircraft accidents you know how extensive the investigation to find out what happened, and why is. No stone is left unturned. The investigators seek to understand the effects of everything. Design of the aircraft, weather, procedures, crew behavior, training. The questions they ask about every piece of information is what, and why.

The author of this article points out how the aircraft crash investigations are run, and how we could apply that model to our police force.

I'll summarize it, probably too much. Partly because aircraft accident investigation is one of the documentaries that I like to watch, and I love learning about how things work, and how a little mistake can lead to a catastrophic result. Perhaps it's taught me to think ahead somewhat.

The accident happens, and the "go team" from the NTSB is sent. These are experts in specific subfields of aircraft investigations. Pilot training experts, materials experts, weather experts. All of them start out trying to figure out what happened. One tool that has made it much easier to determine the cause of the accident is the recording devices. The Flight Data recorder shows what the plane was doing. The inputs to the controls, the behavior of the engines, as much data as they can get. The other half of that data is the cockpit voice recorder. This records all the sounds in the cockpit giving the investigators a history of every alarm, every spoken word, the wind rushing, the bangs and groans the plane may make.

This information is vital in finding out as exactly as possible, what happened. But they don't stop there. If there are recordings at Air Traffic Control, they want them. If there are tapes of Radar, they want them. If a guy took a picture with his camera, they want it. They want every piece of information they can get, and they want pilot information especially. Was the pilot drinking or taking drugs before the accident? A drug and alcohol check will tell us that. What was the health of the pilot? When did he sleep last? What did he eat and when?

By the way, I work in an industrial setting. Heavy equipment, and lots of weight being moved about. If there is an accident at work, we have to provide a sample to rule out drug and alcohol playing a part. If you go to the Hospital, you will provide a sample there. It's part of the insurance regulations, and it's part of the workmen's' comp regulations. I've done that, had an accident and been cleared of the presence of drugs or alcohol that may have impaired my ability to perform my job.

Now, for aircraft, the airline gets to offer whatever information they have to the investigators, they don't get to hide anything, or claim that a single document is classified or restricted. They provide everything to the investigators. The same with the manufacturer.

Imagine if American Airlines plane crashed outside your town. American shows up with representatives from Boeing (not suggesting either Boeing or American are doing this, just picked their names out of the air as an example) and say they will be investigating it and you all can go away. They'll tell you what happened later. They announce that the plane is the safest thing in the air, and the pilot was great. It must have been an act of God. Then a second plane crashes, and a third, and so on and all that. Then video surfaces of pilots finishing their drinks and popping a bunch of pills before they board the plane to fly. The airline says that is an isolated incident, and one bad apple shouldn't prejudge the rest of the fine pilots. Video surfaces of people putting wings on the plane with duct tape. The manufacturer says it was a one off mistake, no reason to suggest all the other planes are less than safe.

You would picket and demand that no airplanes fly over your neighborhood. You wouldn't accept the word of either group ever again. No amount of internal reforms would be enough.

Yet, for Police, we do just that. No drug or alcohol checks. No suggestion that the officer did anything wrong. No one outside of the police agency can investigate the incidents.

The end result of the aircraft investigation is a narrative of what happened, and the mistakes that were made. The suggestions to prevent another accident are also included. A change in the design of the plane. Different training. A policy change, or procedure change. New regulations about what can or can't be done.

As an example, did you know it was a violation of regulations to have the pilots discussing anything but the plane during take off or landing? Checklist errors have led to crashes, and the pilots were usually, but not always, discussing something else besides the plane. Just normal people having a normal conversation. But it was dangerous enough that the pilots are now prohibited from doing that during preparations for take off or landing.

That regulation was made to make sure that future accidents were prevented. Because we don't want a world in which our weather report includes sheet metal showers and intermittent bodies.

We should have an incident investigation team that examines the use of deadly force every time. Not from inside the department, or even the city. But hand picked people who have one goal, to make sure that each incident was absolutely necessary. Does this incident provide a glimpse into poor training or a bad policy?

But we need information to conduct those investigations. We need recordings, video and audio to show what the officer saw, and heard. We need to look at those to see if there is a training change that can be made to reduce mistakes. Perhaps the officer could stand a little further away, further from the danger. Perhaps he can be taught that the weapon is his last resort, not a routine response. Perhaps it's anger management training and the effort to make the police set aside emotional response instead of ramping up the me cop you obey mentality.

We need a police incident investigation board. We need to know exactly what happened, but more, we need to know what went wrong and what we can do to prevent it from happening again if at all possible. We aren't going to get that with the current system. But we need to get there as soon as possible.

[el_bryanto]

1. There's a logic to that

There's a reason why a key but mostly forgotten plank of the early civil rights movement was to get lynchings treated as federal crimes rather than local ones. When you have an internal investigation run by other cops in the department or a grand jury headed by the DA who has, by necessity, a close relationship with the police, you open yourself up to corruption. An outside board, without such connections, might well do a a lot better.

Bryant

[Savannahmann]

3. There is a problem with that as we've seen.

The Federal investigation often lacks teeth for enforcement. Oh they may get an agreement to increase training, or have the department stress less than lethal responses. But those are all paper, and they end up going nowhere. In short, nothing changes.

But by contrast, the NTSB can order an entire airline grounded. Nobody flies for Value-Jet as an example. They can order the grounding of an entire make of aircraft. No DC-10's can fly until inspections and repairs of defects are conducted.

But the Federal Government does not have the authority to order a police department to change their training. Nor do they have the authority to require the Police to change policy, or eliminate a type of weapon. It's laughable really. The Feds say the police in this department are violating civil rights, they have systemically violated those rights for years. Under this agreement, they promise to cut it out.

Now, if those agreements had teeth, we could talk about them more seriously. "This officer fired his weapon in violation of policy and procedure. Therefore since the department did not update training and standards after the last shooting as we had instructed them to do, we are cutting all federal funding to the department for the next decade. Further, the police in that department are eligible to participate in Federal operations or raids. They will also be eligible to use Federal Law to seize property or monies."

Then the Department would be more amiable to actually implement the changes of the agreements. When millions of dollars go away they would have to either cut the forces, reduce pension payments, or get by with older equipment for much longer.

We have to do something however, and the incident investigation board seems like the most common sense approach.

[Sienna86]

2. Good idea. Add to that an independent prosecutor.

Should apply to any police shooting, from local to Feds.

[Savannahmann]

4. Perhaps, but often it is the training that is deficient.

As an example, do you remember the plane that crashed over Queens on November 12th, 2001? There is a very good show about it. It's on Youtube here.

If you don't have time to watch the entire thing, I'll try to give you the overview. In short, the trainers gave the prospective pilot an impossible situation. It could never happen. The lesson the pilot learned was that in that situation, little movements didn't work, only huge and extreme changes to the control surfaces worked. The pilot learned this erroneous lesson and applied it on the fateful day, and overstressed the aircraft to the point where the tail broke clean off.

The trainers were hoping to get the idea into the pilots mind that no matter what happens, you keep trying to fly the plane, you never give up, if the usual doesn't work, keep doing something constructive. The student learned that only the most extreme adjustments would work, nothing less would. So who was at fault? The Pilot, yes. His error led to the crash and the deaths of all those people. But he believed he was doing the right thing. He believed that this was the only thing he could do that might save the plane. Instead of saving the plane, he made the minor situation a major one, and then a catastrophic one.

So what is the corrective action? First, get rid of that scenario in training. Then make sure that the rest of the pilots are re-trained to know not to do that, ever. Finally, they put a warning light and alarm in the cockpit that told the pilot that he was making it worse, and to knock it off.

We can learn a lot from each incident. But only if we take a long, honest, look at everything and base our recommended changes on the facts of the case. Only this way can we prevent the next accident. We may never eliminate the risk of an aircraft crash, but we can reduce them a little more with each lesson.

We can apply that, but it means an independent review of the policies, training, and events of each use of force, or each loss of life by a cop. What did he do, and why did he do it? What should he have done, and how can we make sure the next guy doesn't do it wrong?

Pilot's like cops usually have seconds to deal with a life and death decision. Yet we are always evaluating pilots, and never evaluating police. We make sure the pilot gets retrained every year, or twice a year, or whatever. We give them check flights where other pilots watch them and offer any suggestions on how to improve. We keep trying to make the pilots better. We give them information, training, and test them to make sure they understood the training.

For police, we're supposed to judge intent. He is a great guy who has a tough job and you don't get to question him. Why not examine the situation, and determine the causes? Why not find out if a common training scenario is setting them up for failure down the road? There is an old joke in Engineering terms. I can't fix it if I don't know what's broken. We know only that the police system in the US is broken. We don't know what exactly, but we know the machine is broken. We can learn, and we can fix it, but only if we get serious about it.