Why does a police officer use a gun when they mean to use a Taser?
On April 11 2021, Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old African-American man, was killed after Kim Potter, a veteran police officer, pulled him over for a routine traffic stop of driving with expired plates in Minnesota, USA. Surprisingly, most routine traffic stops are not routine. Frequently, during traffic stops, police are killed and an experienced officer like Potter would be keenly aware of that. Once Wright was stopped, Potter discovered there was a warrant for Wright’s arrest and tried to detain him. When Wright tried to flee, Potter fatally shot him with her Glock pistol in the chest while yelling, “Taser! Taser! Taser!”
Tragic cases like these reveal the powerful psychological forces lurking beneath an officer’s conscious awareness. These forces remain hidden even to an unbiased witness, but in seconds they can shift a situation from routine to fatal. How could a veteran police officer have mistaken her pistol for a Taser? Like most police departments she carried the gun on her dominant side and the Taser on the opposite side, lowing the chance of confusing the two weapons. The gun Potter held is black metal and a pound heavier than the neon-colored plastic Taser she believed she was handling. When officers receive training, they spend significantly more time firing their gun than firing their Taser (which is more expensive).
Slips, mistakes, and capture errors
In the book The Design of Everyday Things (2013), Don Norman contrasts three kinds of errors; slips, mistakes, and capture errors. A slip happens at an unconscious level and occurs when an action is done incorrectly; you intend to do one thing and end up doing something else. Mistakes on the other hand, are conscious decisions. While a capture error is a kind of slip where instead of performing a desired activity, you perform a more frequently practiced one. Capture errors often happen when two activities are identical. For example, have you ever entered your social media password when logging on to your work computer (something you do several times during a workday)? The more frequent behavior captures your action through behavioral conditioning. The fatal shooting of Wright is an example of a slip and capture error. Police officer Potter’s plan to use her Taser was captured by the stronger conditioned response of using her gun.
How our brain learns skills
Why do we perform behaviors that are the opposite of what we intend to do? The origins of slip and capture errors lie in how we learn new skills. When you first learn a new skill like riding a bike, firing a gun, or any complex behavior the task is a conscious one handled mostly by our brain’s prefrontal lobes. The prefrontal area is important for controlling voluntary movement and for managing higher level executive functions like planning and organizing behaviors and controlling our responses to achieve a goal. With practice, the prefrontal lobes gradually transfer the control of skills to the cerebellum, a structure specialized in the coordination, precision, and timing of movements. With practice releasing-aiming- and firing a gun becomes a single motor code which is more easily triggered when under stress without oversight by the prefrontal lobes. In the cases of slip and capture errors, when under stress the prefrontal area quickly becomes overwhelmed. Even moderate acute and uncontrollable stress (typical stress for policework) causes a rapid and dramatic loss of prefrontal cognitive abilities. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take much stress for our attention to be captured by the wrong stimulus which triggers an automatic response by our cerebellum. As a result, when an officer is in a potentially precarious situation, their instinct is to reach for their gun rather than their Taser and we see tragic cases like that of Daunte Wright.
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