Website and automated forms processes, Copyright
2007, Matthew August LeFande.
All
rights reserved. No claim to original government forms
Website and automated forms processes, Copyright
2007, Matthew August LeFande.
All
rights reserved. No claim to original government forms
Armed Citizen of the Week
A retired United States Marine in Plantation, Florida, disrupted a robbery in progress when he shot two men who attempted to rob a Subway sandwich shop, fatally wounding one of them, police said.
According to Plantation police, two armed men barged into the Subway at 1949 Pine Island Rd. shortly after 11 p.m. Wednesday, demanding money from the employee behind the counter. When they tried to force John Lovell into the bathroom, he pulled out a gun and shot both men, police said.
Donicio Arrindell, 22, was shot in the head and later died at the hospital. Fredrick Gadson, 21, was shot in the chest and ran from the Subway, but police found him in hiding in some bushes on the property of a nearby BankAtlantic.
Lovell, 71, was the lone customer at the time. Police said he had a concealed weapons permit.
A witness who was about to enter the Subway at the time said he thought the shootings were justified.
"I think justice, you know, was served and a civilian was a hero for today," Sebastian Shakespeare said.
Police said Lovell, a retired Marine, wouldn't be charged.
http://www.local10.com/news/13585335/detail.html
posted by Matthew LeFande 1:24 PM
matt@lefande.com
Not so fast: Police use more gun restraint than civilians
In making snap decisions about whether to shoot a potentially armed suspect, police officers are far less influenced by racial bias than students or community members forced to make the same decision, a large study has found.
The study, which was based on video simulations of armed and unarmed confrontations, found that racial stereotypes influenced the reaction times of both officers and civilians, but swayed the ultimate decision to fire only in civilian participants.
The new study, reported Friday in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, is the first to rigorously compare the influence of race on such life-and-death decisions in officers and in non-officers.
"We don't mean to suggest that this is conclusive evidence that there is no racial bias in police officers' decisions to shoot," said Dr. Joshua Correll, a University of Chicago psychologist and lead author. "But we've run these tests with thousands of people now, and we've never seen this ability to restrain behavior in any group other than police officers."
Correll said that the findings were unexpected, given that the police were exposed to the usual racial stereotypes in popular culture and confrontations on the beat. Co-authors were Bernd Wittenbrink of the University of Chicago; Bernadette Park, Charles Judd and Melody Sadler of the University of Colorado in Boulder; and Tracie Keesee of the Denver Police Department.
The research was conducted in 2004, and included 157 officers from the Denver Police Department, 113 officers from departments around the country and a diverse group of 245 adults from the Denver area. The police officers and the civilians were drawn to represent blacks, whites and Latinos, but the sample was not nationally representative.
In one experiment, participants watched a video screen as a series of 50 threatening images flashed by, one after another: men, half of them black and half white, each shown once while armed and once while holding something innocuous. The participants hit a button to shoot or to hold fire for each image they saw.
The researchers measured reaction times to the millisecond, and found a clear stereotyping effect. Officers and civilians took 10 to 20 milliseconds longer to make a decision when they saw either an unarmed black man, or an armed white man, compared to the other images.
But when it mattered the police officers tuned out race. They shot at about 13 percent of the unarmed black men and roughly the same number of the unarmed white men. The civilians shot at about 35 percent of the unarmed black men and 29 percent of unarmed white men.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/4855977.html
posted by Matthew LeFande 5:36 PM
matt@lefande.com
