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Deadly Force: A Look At How Officers Think On The Job

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) – Videos of police shootings are dissected by both prosecutors and the public. Now, a role-playing exercise aims to help community members better understand the difficult decisions police officers can face on a call.

For three hours each week, members of Eagan Police Department's citizen's academy are in class. Matt Hall is a participant.

"There's more to the story then just a five-second video clip," he said.

This week, the class examined a potentially deadly traffic stop scenario. The lesson was planned long before recent high-profile police shootings.

"We train to shoot until the threat is stopped," said Officer Jeff Thul, who was leading the class. "We don't train to shoot to kill, we don't train to shoot to wound, we take all of that out of it."

He says officers don't know what they'll face when they stop someone on the road.

"We don't know if they came and just committed a crime, we don't know if they're just going to pick up their kids from soccer practice," Thul said.

In the class, citizens learn just how soon officers can be forced from offense to defense.

Dawn Seefeldt is a behavior scientist with the Force Science Institute, a law enforcement training center in Mankato, which has a holistic approach to police work.

"I think a lot of the civilians that go through this scenario tonight are going to realize just how quick these things unfold," she said.

With the help of doctors, psychologists and attorneys, Seefeldt helps people and police better understand how the mind works under stress and in fast-moving situations.

"It's not possible for anyone to remember anything clearly," Seefeldt said. "We have human limitations...We assume that we can [remember everything], but that's because no one is asking us to remember information perfectly."

Researchers with the Force Science Institute found that 81 percent of police officers experience some kind of perceptual alteration. Most often they forget what they hear rather than what they see.

As part of a recent class, citizens were put in a scenario where a suspect in a traffic stop becomes aggressive and brandishes a gun. The participants end up shooting the suspect and are then quizzed after on what happened – how many shots were fired? What did the suspect say? What color was the gun brandished?

"A split second decision to end someone's life that you're going to have to make," Thul said. "You know that the courts and everyone else is going to have the next six months to a year to dissect every little piece of it, and you had five seconds to make a decision, and now you have to live with that decision for the rest of your life."

To see what else the Force Science Institute found when studying officers' memories, click here.

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