Endloop of repeated verbal commands, possibly a mental Freeze?

[Erick Gelhaus]

I was writing up something regarding verbal commands and what happened in an event where when they weren't complied with quickly. As part of that, I brought in the Dinkheller and Conroe, TX shootings where it seemed the officers, one deceased and the other now missing an eye, got locked into an endless loop of the same commands. Even though compliance wasn't happening, the coppers kept giving the same commands. In Conroe, TX, it was 16 "drop the gun" and 4 or 5 "come on man".

Considering this, what popped into my mostly vacant mind was that this was a verbal freeze - out of John Hearne's and others work on Fight, Flight, or Freeze. Rather than the feet getting concreted in place, the mind is. Instead of working through the problem, the computer's blue wheel of death pops up and that repeated command is spinning but frozen wheel. Or, is it indicative of something else?

So, I called John and interupted him being a dad ... sorry Mrs. Hearne. John had some thoughts. He thought Glenn Meyer and Claude Werner would too.

One thing John and I discussed was his parking place analogy, I'll let him explain it. What came up as I was typing was the line, paraphrased at best, about the body not being able to go somplace the mind hasn't been.

Anyway, open for discussion - what do endless loop commands in an event indicate? And what are ways to fix it?

[blues]

Anyway, open for discussion - what do endless loop commands in an event indicate? And what are ways to fix it?

I'm out of the game a few years but these are the first thoughts that jumped into my mind, assuming that this is the kind of feedback you're looking for.

Fear of being second guessed.
Fear of being wrong.
Fear that the agency will not stand by them.
Fear that the local DA / US Atty will not stand by them.
Fear of becoming a fixture on youtube.
Fear of loss of liberty or livelihood.

The fear of being wrong/humiliation/repercussions can be greater than the fear of injury or death and can immobilize the brain and the ability to act.

I think a lot of classroom / legal instruction would help to cement the concepts of what is and what is not appropriate in a continuum of force especially as it relates to a particular criminal act.

And just as important as the conceptual is the practical. Realistic scenario based training with hands on. Videoed so that they can watch how they and their partners handled a scenario and judge their own performance...as well as get feedback from experienced trainers.

Hope these comments are on target. If not I'll be happy to edit / delete while the window is open.

[Eyesquared]

I am not an expert but repeating the same line over and over again, sometimes with increasing intensity, is a pretty commonly observed behavior when people are feeling combative, or expecting violence. You can see it a lot with Worldstar or Liveleak fight videos.

I don't think it indicates a complete "freeze", since you can see people maneuvering, posturing up, or watching (generally unconsciously) for pre-assault indicators during this process. I think it's more that your mental attention is focused tightly on the person you're about to do violence against or be attacked by, and there's not much space left in your brain to figure out something new to say.

[Tamara]

So, I called John and interupted him being a dad ... sorry Mrs. Hearne. John had some thoughts. He thought Glenn Meyer and Claude Werner would too.

Tagged for interest. (Also tagging @HeadHunter and @Glenn E. Meyer because I want to try the new "mention" tag.)

[JohnO]

It was Albert Einstein who defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different results.

Anyway, open for discussion - what do endless loop commands in an event indicate? And what are ways to fix it?

My first thoughts are of a person who has no plan. They do not know what to do next. They can't get past the D in the OODA Loop.
.
They never contemplated the possible outcomes and decided previously what they would do for scenario W, X, Y & Z.

[voodoo_man]

..didn't we already have this discussion?

Gata search to find it...

[Hambo]

I'm not a neuroscientist, but I'm reading a book on how we perceive time and it says that our refresh rate is about 3 seconds. If you don't move whatever is in short term storage to long term memory, it's gone. That's heavily paraphrased, but if that's the case, and officer could say "Drop the weapon" butthat doesn't get stuck in long term, then repeat, repeat, repeat, not even realizing it's not working.

[HeadHunter]

'Line in the sand' is a chronological concept just as much as a geographic one. A lot of people don't get that.

One of the best examples of such a failure is the shootout between Gordon Kahl and US Marshals that took place in Medina ND in 1983. The back and forth went on for almost 20 minutes. Eventually, two lawmen ended up dead and several more wounded.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon...C_North_Dakota

[Chance]

Completely outside the context of self-defense: an algorithm is a sequence of steps, and a sequence of steps can be looped to achieve an iterative effect (like counting from 1 to a certain number, or repeatedly checking to see if a value has been set to 'false' when it was initially 'true').

An algorithm gets stuck in a loop if it doesn't have an explicit step to exit the loop, which is called the "exit condition." You may think you've defined an exit condition, only to discover your loop never actually gets to the exit condition due to a logic programming error. Thus: an infinite loop.

So you get stuck in a loop because you never had, or didn't correctly define, the "switch" to get out of it. If you don't realize you don't have an exit condition, you'll loop forever.

</cs_prof>

ETA: Changed to "programming" error, as "logic" is a bit misleading.

[Beat Trash]

I'm out of the game a few years but these are the first thoughts that jumped into my mind, assuming that this is the kind of feedback you're looking for.

Fear of being second guessed.
Fear of being wrong.
Fear that the agency will not stand by them.
Fear that the local DA / US Atty will not stand by them.
Fear of becoming a fixture on youtube.
Fear of loss of liberty or livelihood.

The fear of being wrong/humiliation/repercussions can be greater than the fear of injury or death and can immobilize the brain and the ability to act.

I think a lot of classroom / legal instruction would help to cement the concepts of what is and what is not appropriate in a continuum of force especially as it relates to a particular criminal act.

And just as important as the conceptual is the practical. Realistic scenario based training with hands on. Videoed so that they can watch how they and their partners handled a scenario and judge their own performance...as well as get feedback from experienced trainers.

Hope these comments are on target. If not I'll be happy to edit / delete while the window is open.

This is a huge issue with younger officers at my agency. And a large part why it's difficult to recruit new officers currently.

There was a time that if an officer's actions were legal, moral and ethical than the officer would know that they had some sense of sense of protection under implied immunity. If the actions were questionable, then the courts acknowledged that the decision was made in a short period of time and applied the, "Reasonable Officer" test to the incident. As in, what would a reasonable and prudent officer have done in a similar incident.

Now...? Depending on the location and political climate, the officer can face an indictment for murder. Family threatened, as home addresses leaked and protesters marching in front of place of work and residence. Officers need to know that the Agency, Community and Courts will back them if they are forced to address problems involving bad people doing bad things. Right now, I don't that officers feel they have this support. At least not in my region. Hopefully a change in the White House will lead to a new outlook within the DOJ.

But if the issue of mental freeze is a result of an issue with the officer themselves vs. the officer having concerns about the results of the pending use of force then there is a problem that need to be addressed. The issue may be that the individual never thought the concept through, as in what to do if "Plan A doesn't work" They never worked it out to have a, "Plan B, C, D" ect. Or they may be the type of person that can not deploy lethal force. Some people can't. For several years, the trend with recruiting units seemed to be to hire people who were more of the mindset of a Social Worker than a Meat Eating, Knuckle Dragging Police Officer. We've seen a couple individuals who had to go out on a medical retirement (mental) because they were at the scene of an OIS incident and had to watch another officer deal with a situation that they could only stand there and watch.

If I were aware of an issue, I think that training would be the first place to start. Force on force training with the use of SIMS rounds or a FATS type simulator would be a great tool to use. Have someone else video the training, so as to show the officer afterward. We have the luxury of being a large enough agency that our academy is more of a regional training facility and we have these assets. I've started to incorporate SIMS training within my canine unit. (Not shooting at dogs...) It's an excellent training tool.

For smaller agencies without these resources, I'd suggest trying to make contacts with the nearest larger agency or state patrol academy and see fi you can develop a point of contact to use for training.

The problem I see, and I see it also in the civilian CCW community, is the false assumption that if involved in a critical incident, you know in advance how it will end. You put someone at gunpoint and give a verbal command, they will react in such and such of a manner. If rounds are fired, it will be X number of rounds fired at X distance. At least that's how it was practiced at the last training. When, during a very stressful incident, the incident does not follow the pre scripted plan, then it can cause some confusion. As in, "Your'e not supposed to do that!"

One must always remember that during a critical incident, the suspect (s) also have a say in how things progress. And things never go as planned.

Edited to add: Sorry for the rant, this has been a rather hot topic for a few of my co-workers and myself lately...