Air Crash Investigations as a model for Police Use of Force investigations.

SavannahMann

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Nov 16, 2016
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One of my suggestions for police reform is to change how we investigate police use of force incidents. The model I always suggest is Air Crash Investigations. I would like to take a few minutes of your time and explain why.

Flying is one of those endeavors that has a lot of rules. Those rules are written in the blood of the people who went before, and didn't know. Those rules are lessons we learned from those who went before, and didn't know.

The windows in an aircraft, the size and the shape, the rounded corners. Those are based upon a lesson we learned with the first Jet Passenger plane, the Comet. The Comet was a beautiful plane. But it had a fatal flaw, one we didn't even know existed. They used square windows in the plane for people to look out of. Those windows created stress points, the square corners were death. Cracks formed at the corners of the window frames, and then the plane broke up in mid air and everyone died. This happened three times.

de Havilland Comet - Wikipedia

The investigation really got started after the third mid air breakup. The engineers and investigators needed to know why. They finally figured it out. We learned a new lesson, one we had no idea mattered. We learned. Airplane design today has everything to do with that first commercial jet. The rounded Windows in the newest Boeing and Airbus jets have rounded corners because we learned that you just don't put square corners on planes. We learned on the lives of those who died to teach us the lesson.

Police use of force investigations begin with one simple goal. To prove the cop was absolutely justified in shooting. The cop uses the right words, I was a feared for my life and I had to shoot. It nearly always works, even in obviously bad situations.

The point of an aircraft crash investigation is to find out what happened, and why. Is there something we can learn from this? How do we prevent it from ever happening again?

After 9-11 and planes began flying again, an Airbus 300 plane crashed in Queens New York. American Airlines Flight 587 - Wikipedia

When they figured out that the co-pilot was directly responsible, he was kicking the rudder back and forth until it over stressed and broke off. The Investigators could have stopped there. They knew what happened. But they didn't know why.

They examined the history of the pilot, and they examined the training of the pilot. American Airlines in a simulator tried to teach the pilot a lesson. The lesson was to never stop trying to fly the plane. The scenario was taking off behind a large 747 plane, and entering wake turbulence. This is the roiled up air behind a large plane. The Simulation was programmed to ignore inputs and roll the plane until it was more than 90 degrees off.

The idea was to teach the pilot that you keep fighting to fly the plane, you don't try something once and give up. You keep trying to fly the plane in a situation until you meet the ground. What the pilot really learned was that only the most extreme control actions would have any effect.

The plane crashed because the co-pilot really thought he was doing the right thing, he learned the wrong lesson. Because of that, training for every pilot in the world was changed. Because of that crash, pilots had new training in simulators to give them a better understanding of the plane, and the actions required to fly it.

If either the Comet or the Queens investigations had been run like Police Investigations, what would we have learned? Everyone would have blamed de Haviland, and then another plane would have been designed with square Windows, and more planes would have crashed. God alone knows how many people would have died before we finally learned the lesson.

In the American Airlines crash, we would have called it Pilot Error, and since he was dead, blamed him and left it at that. Then another pilot would have done it and another, and another.

Determining the entirety of the event, all the little things that go into the event is vital. We can determine if there is training that can be changed, or added, or modified, or even eliminated. We can learn from the events, and increase our pool of knowledge. Even when everything is done right, we can still learn how the training and policies work in the real world. We can reinforce the good training, and work to eliminate the bad.

But this all requires a change in our outlook. It needs to be a change in our thinking. We have to start to ask ourselves what happened, and why. Why did the officer do this instead of that? Right now, the officers are out there, some policies and training is good, some is bad. But without those systemic looks at the incidents, we can't begin to improve anything. All we can do is sacrifice a few cops every year to the gods of public retribution. One cop shoots a guy with his hands up and it is ruled a justified shooting. Another shoots a guy with his hands up and he is convicted of manslaughter. The one who is convicted feels furious because he did what he was supposed to. The community is furious at the first because he was't convicted, or even charged.

We don't have a systemic approach to these incidents, and without that we will always have a system rife with inequities, and with resentment.
 

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