Introduction
In the media and public discourse there is a common notion of ‘contagious fire’, which describes the situation when some officer’s shots provoke the sudden reaction of shooting from the colleagues. As a result, the press is full of stories describing the huge number of shots fired by the police.
Consequence of such public attitudes is that ‘contagious fire’ seems to be a well-established practice among law enforcement. However, this phenomenon is highly under researched, so the author found it relevant to understand the true nature of ‘contagious fire’.
Review of Literature
Although there is no academic evidence on the narrow topic of ‘contagious fire’, the authors of the articles perfectly reviewed all the existing evidence concerning police shooting and its administrative regulation. More specifically, scholars analyzed the determinants which caused more or less “officer-involved shootings” (White & Klinger, 2012, p. 200). The most crucial peculiarity of the mainstream scholarship through the years is the police-sided conclusions. For example, White and Klinger (2012) referred to the studies showing that the overwhelming majority of police officers fire in situations of imminent danger. Besides, the overall statistics demonstrates that police started shooting only in rare instances.
Objectives
The major goals of the study are to: a) identify predictors for the multi-shot accidents; b) fill in the blank spot in the research of the police shooting by analysis of ‘contagious fire’; c) if the problem really exists, the goal was to introduce some practical implication to change the status quo.
Hypothesis
This research tested hypotheses about whether the so-called ‘contagious fire’ is prevalent in the US law enforcement or it is just the media noise that does not have any justification in reality.
Methodology
The author conducted the statistical analysis (OLS-regressions) of the data on the ‘contagious shooting’. Then, the authors tried to sort the statistics in such a way to eliminate the unfitting observations. The cleaned dataset was used to identify the most prevalent predictors of the ‘contiguous fire’. All the operations with the observations and variables seem to happen in computer software like R or Python.
Findings
Hypothesis: ‘Contagious fire’ is not prevalent. The multi-officer shooting happened in cases when it was predicted and supposed to be: the suspect fired first, there were high-risk circumstances, one or more officers were injured and so forth.
Firstly, authors do not find any association between the race of the suspect and the increase of ‘contagious fire’ probability. In fact, the authors did not find any significant patterns that will allow to reduce the number of milti-shoot shooting.
Summary
The study examines the statistics of “contagious fires,” that is, situations where officers reacted to the shot of the first officer and also began to shoot impulsively. The reason for the study was the little knowledge accumulated in the area and the distorted view on multi-shot shooting in the media. The result was the conclusion that the issue of prevalence of ‘contagious fire’ is overrated. The statistical analysis showed that multi-shot shooting happened only in circumstances of necessity.
Conclusions
The content of the article relates to the law enforcement because it directly discusses the issue regarded as acute for many police departments. Although multi-officer shooting happens quite rarely, the public opinion considers it as an important issue. The authors’ opinion that the practice should not be changed because such multi-shot shootings happen rarely. The reason is that it happens because of the high danger officers experience in some moments. So, there are no administrative measures to adequately fix it.
Recommendations
“Taken together, all of these findings suggest that there may not be much that police policy makers and trainers can do to reduce multi-officer, multi-shot shootings, as these events appear to involve situations where those types of outcomes might be expected”
Comments: Although the authors did not come up with policy solutions, it is useful that they destroyed stereotypes and helped policy analysts to understand the nature of ‘contagious fire’.