Episode 11: Contagious Fire

Whenever a police officer fires their weapon at another person it is important to understand why.  What were the conditions that lead to the shooting?  Explaining why a single officer shoots two or three times is important but explaining why three or four officers empty their clips seems to be a completely different question. 
To better understand the idea of something called “contagious fire” we are joined today by Eric Dlugolenski from Central Connecticut State University.
Main Topics
•We’ll discuss the importance of studying contagious fire even if it’s a rare event.
•Eric will explain the use of video simulators to study officer shooting behavior.
•I also ask Eric to clarify the difference between shooting “errors” and justifications.

Don't forget to like, FOLLOW, and share. Sharing this podcast or an episode is one of the best complements I can receive, which will help grow the show.

And don't forget to provide a review. Giving five stars is never a bad idea.

Feel free to email me your comments using the "send us a text" option, or at the following email address: policeinservicetrainingpodcast@gmail.com

Bluesky: @policeinservice.bsky.social

Transcript

Welcome to the police in service training podcast. This podcast is dedicated to providing
research evidence to street level police officers and command staff alike. The program is intended
to help the police and law enforcement community create better programs, understand challenging
policies and dispel myths of police officer behavior. I'm your host, Scott Phillips.
In 1999, four NYPD officers fired 41 shots at Amadou Diallo, striking him 19 times in
his doorway at the top of the stairs of a brownstone building. The story goes that the
officers approached Diallo as a possible suspect in a multiple rape case who was known to be
armed. One of the officers yelled, gun, when he mistakenly thought he saw Diallo pull a
gun. It was actually a wallet. A second officer stumbled backwards when he tried to retreat
to safety. The first officer fired two other officers still at street level. Heard the
first officer yell, gun, heard the shots from the first officer, saw a colleague fall backwards
and thought Diallo had fired shooting their partner. They open fired with their weapons.
The officers were found not guilty of murder when they were prosecuted. Now let's compare
the Diallo shooting with another incident. In the early 2000s, two police officers in
Cleveland responded to a disturbance call and were approached by a man who moved toward
them in a deliberate manner. The man had a metal garden rake raised in a threatening
manner as he approached the officers. Both officers drew their weapons and ordered him
several times to drop the rake. The man continued to move toward the officers as they continued
to back up. It finally got to a point where one officer fired a single shot killing the
For reasons passing understanding, the county DA prosecuted the officer who fired his weapon.
During the trial, the prosecutor made a few points. First, if the officer felt in fear
of his life, why did the officer only fire once? Second, if the man with the rake was
a danger, why didn't the other officer fire as well? The bottom line in this case was
the same as in New York, not guilty. Maybe I'm being too flippant in my thinking, but
I've often pondered the following question based on these two incidents. What is the
appropriate number of shots to be fired by an officer? But in all seriousness, whenever
a police officer fires their weapon at another person, it is important to understand why.
What are the conditions that led to the shooting? Explaining why a single officer shoots two
or three times is important, but explaining why three or four officers empty their clips
seems to be a completely different question. To better understand the idea of something
called contagious fire, we are joined today by Eric Duglinski. Eric is an assistant professor
at Central Connecticut State University and a retired police sergeant from the West Haven
Connecticut Police Department. He is an applied police researcher and has been recognized
as a National Institute of Justice Lead Scholar and a National Police Institute Fellow. Welcome
Eric.
Scott, thank you so much for having me on. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about
the study.
Excellent. Thank you very much. Okay, so as a retired police officer, it is completely
understandable that you would want to study the police. It's no surprise people like you
and I focus on the world in which we used to work and live. And there are all types
of studies into officer-involved shootings, but why contagious shootings? What drew your
interest to this topic?
Sure. So as an officer, I was really always fascinated by the science and dynamics of
critical incidents and deadly force encounters. I think anyone who's ever worn the uniform
knows just how fast things can unfold in the street. And that curiosity really led me to
want to understand the dynamics ultimately to a PhD. But the contagious fire research
is pure serendipity. So my good friend and research partner, retired chief John DiCarlo,
has been interested in contagious fire phenomenon dating all the way back to probably around
the Amadou Diallo and Sean Bell cases, where the terminology was popularized by mainstream
media. The only issue we had was it's somewhat of a logistical nightmare to get a study together
to look at this phenomenon. And essentially, that's how we realized no one had really broken
this ground. Mike White and David Klinger had done the first study with secondary data
in Philadelphia, but it was far from kind of the last word on the phenomenon. And then
pure chance, we were reached out to by the chief of police, Stephen Hebbye from Farmington,
New Mexico, who had a multiple officer, multiple shot fired incident. And he started looking
for literature and looking for science. He wanted to better understand it and be able
to explain what was going on and offer training for his officers. And he realized the void.
So he reached out and that was the start of setting up what became ultimately a multi-state
trial for this.
Oh, excellent. Very good. It's really interesting to hear that a police chief would reach out
because the trying to bridge the gap between scholars and practitioners is something that's
been tried for a long time. It's getting much better these days. So, okay, we'll get into
your paper and your research in just a moment. But from a broader perspective, why is this
whole area of inquiry of value or relevance to the police? I mean, after all, this is
an infrequent event to have multiple officers firing multiple shots.
Absolutely. Rare is something that's undeniable. But if and when it does happen, these are
nationwide news events. And for that reason, we want to train and set our officers up and
put them in a position where at minimum, right, lowest bar, they understand some of
the known stimuli that can affect their behavior and they can train to mitigate those things.
Excellent. And we'll ask about that later on, the idea of training and policy.
OK, so in your article, and you just mentioned a moment ago, you briefly discussed the
Sean Bell case, the Amadou Diallo incident. I kept forgetting because I had to look at
those again. I kept forgetting that those were roughly 20, 25 years ago. So I should not
assume that many people know about them today. Can you give a bit more detail about these
incidents? Absolutely. So again, yeah, 20 to 25 years ago. So worth revisiting.
There are two of the best known examples of controversial police shootings, both involving a
large number of shots fired in chaotic situations. So we wouldn't necessarily diagnose them as
contagious fire, but they would be potential contagious fire events that we would look at.
So Amadou Diallo in 1999. Again, I have just kind of the overview, but Diallo was a 23 year
old Guinean immigrant who was unarmed when he was shot and killed by four NYPD plainclothes
officers in the Bronx. They were searching for a rape suspect and mistook Diallo for him.
When they approached him outside his apartment building, he reached into his pocket, likely for
his wallet. And one officer believed he had a gun, opened fire. The other officers reacting to
the first shots and believing they were under fire also fired their weapons. A total of 41 rounds
were discharged and Diallo was hit 19 times. The officers were later acquitted of all charges,
but the incident sparked national conversations about racial profiling, police training, and the
phenomenon of contagious fire. Right. And then in Sean Bell, which was in 2006, Sean Bell was 23
years old and was out celebrating the night before his wedding when he and two friends were
shot by undercover NYPD officers in Queens. The incident unfolded outside of a strip club that
was under police investigation. A confrontation occurred and an undercover officer believed Bell
and his friends were going to retrieve a gun. Bell's car struck an unmarked police van and
officers opened fire. 50 shots were discharged in total. Despite the scale of gunfire, no weapons
were found in Bell's vehicle. He was killed and his two friends were seriously injured. Three of
the five officers involved went to trial and manslaughter and assault charges, but were
acquitted, leading to protest and renewed scrutiny of police tactics. And the connection to the
subject matter today is a lot of the vernacular and verbiage, the idea of contagious fire. If you
look at some of the articles around that time, that's really where we first see contagious fire
applied to these types of events.
Yeah, it's one of those things, the confusion. And then I'm hopefully going to get into this in
another podcast in the future between recognizing a wallet versus a gun. Most people would say that
it should be easy to do. But something I've talked about in the past with another episode, we
talked about the training in the academy. And my comment was that they're scaring the hell out of
officers that everybody wants to kill you. So that might not be the best way to train some of the
officers during different approaches. Okay, now I want to challenge you just a little bit. But
first, in your article you wrote, and I'm going to try to quote this, it is important to note that
both intentional and unintentional reflexive fire are considered errors in the context of police use
of force as they lack the necessary precondition of an independent assessment of the threat level
and the objective reasonableness of the force application. Unquote. First, this is sounds like
a little bit of legalese, but can you clarify what you meant when you wrote that?
I think we're definitely guilty of a little bit of legalese on a reread of it. The way it was
phrased in the article does sound a little bit like legal jargon. So let me break it down some.
Basically, when we talk about police use of force, every action should be based on an officer's
independent assessment of a threat. That means the officer perceives a specific danger, evaluates it
and makes a conscious decision to use force based on that perceived threat. However, in the case of
phenomena like contagious shooting, or what we call intentional reflexive fire, basically officers
are not necessarily making fully independent decisions. Instead, their behaviors conditioned
by the actions of their peers. In other words, one officer fires, and the others reflexively
follow suit, potentially without conducting their own assessment of the threat.
Fair enough. Now here's where I want to push back just a little bit. The idea of with the idea of
using the word error, because some people might interpret the term error to mean unjustified.
So my thinking is, wouldn't this be like an officer who inadvertently shoots someone who
is holding a cell phone rather than a gun? The immediate perception or in this case,
misperception is that the phone was a gun. So the officer fires now that same perception,
or again, misperception argument could be made here. If you and I are partners, if you fire,
wouldn't that be my justification for interpreting the situation as immediately dangerous? You fired,
so I fired as well. That's a great point to clarify. And I could see officers listening to
this and hearing error and having that exact question. So just to clarify, when we say error,
we are not commenting on the justification of the force. It's actually, and we probably could
word this better. It's actually a reference to, if you're familiar with Paul Taylor, in 2019,
he wrote a paper on basically updating our typology of police shooting errors.
And in his matrix, he has something called misdiagnosis errors, which refer to a group
of shootings or different types of shootings that might be considered mistake of fact,
or you might call them cell phone shootings. But they get to the subject matter you're talking
about. And the basic equation is this. There's intention to discharge the firearm, and there's
intention to hit the target. So that matches kind of the definition you're giving of this isn't an
error. The problem is the outcome is unintended. And that might be after the fact when we have
all the totality of circumstances after the fact. And we do have 2020 hindsight, but it is an
unintended outcome at the end. So he, in his typology, calls that an error. So we look at this
as with contagious shooting, the difference is that an officer fires because another officer
fires rather than due to their own direct threat perception. You fired, so I fire, that may feel
instinctively justifiable. But legally, every officer must be able to articulate their own
independent reason for using deadly force. So that justification must basically be based on
multiple sensory inputs. So I think the important point here is we have to bring in all the senses.
We're just talking about the auditory stimulus right now. We talk about the sound of bang,
the sound of pure gunfire. It's not just hearing gunfire, but also seeing a weapon,
a threatening movement, or other indicators of an imminent threat. So if an officer hears shots,
but sees that the suspect's hands are up and they are unarmed, the justification for firing
is significantly weakened. This is why threat verification is critical in training, and officers
need to assess before reacting to gunfire. So kind of the bottom line is contagious fire,
like mistake-of-fact shootings, can sometimes be legally defensible, but it's more problematic,
and you have to bring in the rest of the senses for that to happen.
Right. This is where, when I was teaching, I used to discuss these kinds of topics. And this was an
example to demonstrate these kinds of shootings, to demonstrate how really complicated these
situations can be, how it's difficult to ascertain all the pieces of information that
you'd like to have, how you might focus on the threat perception areas, the person's hands,
rather than something else that's going on at the same time that may not seem
threat worthy, but might contribute to your understanding of it better.
Again, the complexity of these kinds of things. For most people, they don't understand it, which
is why I get really picky, anal retentive about the word error, and maybe that's my sensitivity
to that topic. And so I know Paul's work, I've read it, and I think I had the same response to
that. You know, error is like, you know, like you screwed up, where, and I know I'm just reaching
for somebody to give us a better word for the police to be able to demonstrate what this means
rather than they screwed up. But that's a personal observation. So, all right, let's
jump into your article. You're studying contagious shooting. How did you study this
when an officer might succumb to this contagious firing?
All right. So ultimately we used a simulation design. So this was very organic. I'd like to
say we had it all perfectly mapped out. We knew exactly what we were doing from day one,
but this was definitely a lot of pre-planning, a lot of kind of piloting and slowly learning.
So we worked remotely back and forth to Farmington, New Mexico. They had a project
coordinator there, and ultimately they brought us out. We had a national guard base that we
used as our facility for the entire simulation exercise there. And essentially what we used is
a giant projector screen, almost similar to like what you'd see in some of the modern trainings
with like the panel design, but just everyone. And we recorded with the help of officers from
Farmington, New Mexico, a very realistic simulated video encounter. The officers come around the side
of a building. They have a gentleman that is not responsive, not listening to commands,
reaches once, reaches twice, and then very quickly, and I hate the term, but furtively presents kind
of the cell phone for that classic mistake of fact shooting. We primed them very heavily with
a dispatch script. So the pre-read dispatch script told them that this man was despondent.
He had suicidal ideation. He was possibly armed and basically wanted to shoot out with police,
walked out the door, and that was his last known location. And the officers are told,
you've arrived on scene, the three of you are together, based on your training and the totality
of circumstances, act exactly as you would if this were a real-life encounter. There was deception,
so obviously we can't study contagious fire if we tell the officers exactly what we're doing.
So after we went through the institutional review board and worked everything out,
we had two officers that were role players, essentially officers that we call them confederates
in psychological research. They're in on it. They know what we're doing. They're basically acting
and playing the role, and they were great. So they would sit there and they would hold their
paperwork and be like, ah, can we go back on the road yet? Are we done? When can we go?
And we would bring an officer off the road. We'd do a whole intake demographic survey,
get all their details. We'd explain to them we were interested in studying the action-reaction gap,
and we wanted to look at time between their behaviors and different circumstances.
We made it seem like we had about five different scenarios they might go through,
just so they would think there was a lot of irrigation and wouldn't really be able to game
our bias, their activities. And then we'd bring them into the room. And we had three conversion
kits set up for their duty weapons. So I'm sure the listeners are familiar with the company
Simunition, but we would use Simunition, SecureBlank, Gen2 Loud Rounds, I believe they're
called. And basically they don't send a projectile. There's no bullet going down range. So they're
safe to use in the environment we created, but they sound and give exact recoil feedback as you
would from your duty weapon. So that was important because some of the other research out there on
startle response and sympathetic, but we had to recreate that. And it's hard to do that in
other environments without actually having that same feedback from the weapon system.
So two Confederate officers, random number generator. If the random number generator were,
I believe, even, they were instructed to fire all three of their rounds, the second the individual
reached. If it was an odd number, they were instructed not to fire. Other than that, they
acted exactly how they would. All participants were instructed to assume a tactical position
that they would based on the call for service, the nature, the details. And for most officers,
that ended up being like a low ready. They did on holster and started at a low ready.
We turned off the lights to make it immersive and we'd say live, play the video and let them go.
And then what we recorded was how many, we recorded whether or not the participant fired
and then how many rounds they fired for each one with the intervention or stimulus or test
case being whether or not the Confederates fired, because that's what's creating the
stimulus for a contagion. Right. Right. All right. So what did you find? Put it this way.
Is this a thing? Yes. And if our research does one thing in summary, it provides empirical evidence
that contagious fire is a phenomenon. It's a real thing. It's not just an officer anecdote or
something we talk about. We can watch it and observe it and pattern behavior.
So the officers, the two Confederates, they would fire and the subject that was part of being
studied, they would follow? Generally. But I'll give you the exact numbers just so we can get
into it specifically. So officers exposed to simulated gunfire from peer officers were over
11 times more likely to fire their weapons compared to those who were not, which is a pretty
profound effect size for our line of work. And then when officers did fire their weapons,
those exposed to peer gunfire discharged approximately 72% more rounds than those
not exposed. And the timing of these shots is also consistent. It's consistently occurred after peer
officers began firing, confirming that contagious nature of the effect. We did have 169 participants.
Out of those 169 participants, 125 did fire regardless of the scenario, whether it was
test or control. And then we conducted this, as you can imagine, I'm sure all your listeners,
do police officers talk to one another? So we were hyper vigilant and very paranoid of biasing
the study by staying in any site for too long. So for that reason, we went to not only New Mexico,
but we ended up going to Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada, and had over 10 different agencies
involved in this, which is great for external validity and generalizability because we have
more than just one agency involved. But the biggest concern was ensuring that we weren't
biasing by people starting to figure out what we were doing at a certain location.
Okay, who funded this? Was it the Farmington police?
So we actually self-funded some of it. Farmington, and this is what I mean about this,
it was a very serendipitous thing, right? So Farmington was willing to fund some of it.
Myself and my research partners funded some of it on our own. And then I would definitely give
credit to the National Institute of Justice Lead Scholar Program because our final site was Las
Vegas, and Chief Jason Potts and I are both lead scholars. And so that's how we kind of talked
about, hey, can we trial this at your agency also? And that was funded by LEAD. So if you
look at our disclosure, that will come up. Okay, so I wanted to dig into just a little
bit more about the different kinds of characteristics of the people that were in the study.
Did you find any difference in the responses to the idea of contagious fire when it came to
whether age or experience of the officers? Yes, so there was actually a significant
negative correlation between age and the number of rounds fired, which basically
indicates that older participants fired fewer rounds. So we can discuss what that means,
but that's the correlation we did see in the study. Now you also measured the education
level of the people that were involved, the subjects, and was there any indication that
education made a difference? Sure, so education had a significant positive correlation with
whether or not the participant fired, meaning that participants who had associates or bachelor's degree
were more likely to fire. But there's, and this is where we get into that kind of like the fine
print, I guess, of the study. When we do random assignment, right, so you go to test group,
you go to control group, we did have a slight imbalance in the groups given the fact that we
only had 169 participants. So we do believe that the variation in education was likely
due to the imbalance. So I think that's to some degree, you know, explained away based on that.
But the age is interesting. So the fact that there is a negative correlation between age
and rounds fired is something that's worthy of, you know, future research and more conversation.
And just anecdotally, so we can't support this with our research, but just from watching these
trials go on and going through them, I did notice when sergeants came in, right, because you see
the chevrons there, the test subject, we did have sergeants go through, we didn't have anybody of
rank higher than sergeant. Sergeants tended to kind of act like sergeants during this scenario.
So they communicated more, they addressed things, they explained who's doing what. And for that
reason, I would just offer that as a possible theory for rounds fired because we tend to see
that more with the different ages and maturities taking more of a command presence in the role.
And we'll kind of rehash that when we talk about what this means for policy and training.
All right, this is great stuff. Now, this is probably going to be able to show my sarcasm
when it comes to some of the things I talk about. But what you're saying here is that
you're suggesting that an officer's decision to use deadly force may not be the result of
a smooth linear process. Yeah, so our research confirms, I think what all officers know,
critical incidents are multifaceted, complex and dynamic. Our findings indicate that under the
right circumstances, intentional reflexive fire is an observable and very human phenomenon.
Officers are highly trained individuals, they watch hands, they're hyper vigilant for threats.
But that final decision to pull the trigger is almost always made with the complete absence of
time. Officers operate in that time and in a time and information poor environment.
And while our study is the first to empirically demonstrate that contagious fire is a real
phenomenon, we need much more research to completely understand the mechanics of that phenomenon.
Yeah, this is good stuff that you've got going on here with the simulator. We did some work
up here in Buffalo a couple of years ago. We used a simulator, same kind of thing,
the flat screen rather than the, you know, the rounded room kind of a situation.
We saw some of the test subjects really dynamic in the room as if it was a true event. This was a
basement. So either side of the room had that the you could see where the pillars of the building
were the I beams that they were framed into the wall, but they they created a small natural
cove as it were not, you know, maybe six inches worth of one officer literally went over and hid
behind that, that, that, that I beam area. And I thought if we ever did this in the future,
we would need to get like, if possible, like a mailbox or a park bench or something like that
to see how, you know, how the officers utilize those, because it was really interesting just
to see that kind of behavior from some of the officers. All right. So as we said,
talked about earlier, this is a topic that's not extensively, this is a rare event in policing and
no question about it. So can you give us a couple, keeping that in mind, can you give us a couple of
ideas behind policies or implications for policies and training that police agencies should consider?
Absolutely. So the first one is let's rethink static range qualifications.
We're not the first to write this. We've seen this written in practitioner mediums,
but we do have this reality that how does every officer qualify? We all go to the range. We say
you're ready on the left, ready on the right, and we all fire in unison. Yeah. So I'm a criminologist
and a practical applied policing scholar. But if you start bringing in other fields, which is
probably the future of this research too, and we look at things like mirror neurons and social
proofing and influence, I would imagine that we're eventually going to start seeing that
there's things like cognitive heuristics and shortcuts that are ingrained because that's how
we train. So we're in those situations, those things tend to manifest. Contagious fire tends to
happen when you're only and in that final frame of use of force. So if we want to prevent contagious
fire, the first step is let's not get you into the position where that's the option. We're talking
about ICAT, we're talking about time, distance, cover, all of those things matter to prevent a
contagious fire incident. The most important from just my background in this and everything I've
seen so far and just anecdotally is communication. So if you watch, you said these events are rare,
but as we watch enough of a sample of them happening throughout the country, you tend to
notice signatures. And one of the big signatures is a breakdown of communication. So there's a lot
of case examples where one of the officers fails to announce that they are about to deploy. Sometimes
it's a less lethal, right? And that could have similar kind of manifestations, but they don't
communicate. After the Boston bombing, the shooting in the boat was probably one of the largest
mass multiple officer, multiple shots fired, contagious fire incidents that we're aware of.
And in the big report that came out after that, there was a big push for the idea of micro command
and micro command gets back to what I was talking about earlier. It's, we can't just be dependent
on the sergeant, the brass, or the leader being on scene. In any one of these situations, the training
needs to basically identify a leader for that moment. So micro command, it doesn't matter
what your rank is, you're the one that's giving commands here. Because again, you watch these
different situations play out and there's a lot of competing traffic, right? I'm yelling this,
you're yelling this, the confusion. So announcements I think are huge. Short of that, it's trying to
prevent getting to that situation in the first place. And I think those are the most fruitful
areas for dealing with this training in terms of getting rid of, again, the static range.
So we could put officers through simulations like this. We can make them aware. I think at the
minimum awareness is the first start of like the mass push to make change here is get this research
out. And it's got to appreciate you doing this because it's one of our efforts to do that and
get the word out. Well, I'm really happy you could join me on the podcast. So thanks again, Eric.
This was very informative information on contagious shooting and
you have anything else coming up with this kind of topic? Yes. So we're now looking at the post
officer interviews. So an important part of this is what was the officer's perception? What did
they say afterwards? What sort of language do they use in a report to justify what just happened
in the environment of this? So that'll be hopefully a forthcoming paper to look at that piece of it.
And then we're looking kind of bigger partnering with people outside our discipline to start
looking at more of the physiological components that are related to this. A big challenge. Eric,
thank you very much again. I do appreciate your time and best of luck with your research.
Scott, thank you so much. It was a pleasure. Have a great day.
That's it for this episode of the police in service training podcast. I want to thank you,
the listener, for spending your valuable time here. If you like what you have heard,
please tell a friend to subscribe on Apple podcast or wherever they get their podcasts.
And please take a moment to review this podcast. If you have any questions or comments, positive
or negative, or if you think I should be covering a specific topic, feel free to send me an email
at police in service training podcast at gmail.com police in service training is all one word,
or you can find me on blue sky using the handle at police in service.bsky.social. Have a great day.