Law Enforcement and Education in Psychology
By Jordan Le Roy
Did you know that psychology plays a big role in the work of law enforcement? Psychology helps law enforcement deal with the daily tasks in their work, whether they realize it or not. For instance, during investigations, officers will, whether intentionally or not, use psychology tactics within interrogations. Unfortunately, these tactics are not always good; some make people afraid of law enforcement and others manipulate suspects to create a faulty memory. In fact, 75% of people that are wrongly convicted and are exonerated from their sentencing were originally sentenced due to faulty memory (Shaw, 2017). The following statistics are due to both the criminal justice system and law enforcement officers not having enough education or training on human memory.
Human memory is “remarkably good” but is also "fallible," meaning memory, while extraordinary, is also susceptible to outside factors in the environment that can manipulate the information we receive (Baddeley et al., 2009). The human memory is able to complete different complex tasks, such as listening to a lecture and taking notes at the same time; this is able to happen because of working memory. Working memory is the storage of information that allows for manipulation to occur in the human brain in order for people to complete complex activities (Baddeley et al., 2009). Manipulations can occur especially within the working memories of law enforcement officers due to interferences and emotions changing how people will perceive specific events.
Peace officers' memories are just as susceptible as the public is to manipulations of memory. Shaw (2017), through a study done with colleagues, confirms how little law enforcement officers know about their human memory, showing “overconfidence” in their abilities to store and recall information from memory, with “14%” of officers stating memory is like a “film” and "18%,” stating an event can not be remembered if it had never happened. Law enforcement officers are even more susceptible to manipulations in memories due to the “high amounts of stress” they deal with on a regular basis, interfering and manipulating the way they remember information later on (Lee, 2018).
Examples of interferences that can occur within law enforcement's working memory are inattentional blindness and the weapon focus effect. Inattentional blindness is the failure to perceive a visual change in the environment (Baddeley et al., 2009). For example, the “selective attention test” tasks the viewers to count and watch how many passes people in white shirts made. During the film, a gorilla enters the room in the midst of the passing (Simons & Chabris, 2010). Most people first watching this video focus on their task rather than the surrounding environment, creating inattentional blindness.
The weapon focus effect is how the presence of a weapon will impact a person’s memory by having people focus solely on the weapon and nothing else (Baddeley et al., 2009). A study conducted by Simons and Schlosser (2017) illustrates a scenario where both police academy trainees and experienced officers participated in a simulated traffic stop. The following scenario had a cooperative or non-cooperative driver with a handgun located on the passenger side of the vehicle. The results of the study concluded that regardless of how the driver acted during the interactions between the officers, “33%” of experienced officers and “58%” of trainees did not notice the gun (Simons & Schlosser, 2017).
The previous study supports the idea that there are a lot of different ways a police officer can be susceptible to various interferences, where more experienced officers are able to notice the gun whereas trainees experience inattentional blindness, not noticing the gun all together (Simons & Schlosser, 2017). This implicates how information is stored in working memory and then recalled later on. The study of Simons and Schlosser also hints towards another form of interference being emotion. In a real-life situation, an officer or anyone in that situation would be overrun with high amounts of stress with the imminent threat of the gun present.
Dr. Shauna's article goes into detail on the different statistics of what officers have witnessed and dealt with in the past. Fifty-eight percent of law enforcement officers have been threatened with a gun throughout their careers, and nearly 87.2% have seen someone who was dying (Springer, 2022). Law enforcement officers are constantly in "stressful decision-making situations” a lot within their careers and this stress will influence their working memory to recall later on those events in greater detail (Javanbakht, 2020). Officers most of the time will put a heavy reliance on the falsehoods of their memories, which can then lead to the false sentencing and imprisonment (Shaw, 2017).
Psychology is a part of everyone’s daily lives, whether they realize it or not. It is important for both the community and law enforcement officers to understand the importance of being able to not only understand others but also your own capabilities in your memory. The biggest limitation of human memory is its ability to obtain details in stressful environments. Training yourself to learn how to get through those types of stressful situations can help in handling them in the future and recalling information more accurately later on. Overall, this is one way that could help to improve working memory in high environments of high stress that can cause faulty memory.
References
Baddeley, A. D., Anderson, M. C., & Eysenck, M. W. (2009). Memory (3rd ed.). Psychology Press.
Javanbakht, A. (2020, October 2). The Aching Blue: Invisible Wounds of the Police. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-many-faces-anxiety-and-trauma/202010/the-aching-blue-invisible-wounds-the-police
Lee, G. (2018). An Examination of Inattentional Blindness in Law Enforcement. An Examination of Inattentional Blindness in Law Enforcement, 44. https://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1824&context=etds
N. , S. M. S. (2013, September 9). How Do Police Deal With Stress? Psychology Dictionary. https://psychologydictionary.org/how-do-police-deal-with-stress/
Shaw, J. (2017). The memory illusion : remembering, forgetting, and the science of false memory. Random House.
Simons, D. J., & Schlosser, M. D. (2017). Inattentional blindness for a gun during a simulated police vehicle stop. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-017-0074-3
Springer, S. H. (2022, May 4). The Human Toll of Trauma for Law Enforcement Officers | Psychology Today. Www.psychologytoday.com. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/free-range-psychology/202205/the-human-toll-trauma-law-enforcement-officers
15 Psychological Experiments That Revealed Interesting Facts About Ourselves. (2024, November 12). Amorq.com. http://amorq.com/article/4902/15-psychological-experiments-that-revealed-interesting-facts-about-ourselves