Buried at the Bottom: Good News for Addressing Police Shootings

A recent article from the website RealClearInvestigations addresses the lack of decline in police shootings through a lens of facts inconsistent with much of what mainstream beliefs hold about the issue. For those who support reforms to reduce deadly encounters between the public and the police, especially those in the policing profession, the end of the piece by James Varney and Abigail Degnan represents a hope for a better future based on evidence rather than on political rhetoric.

In short, the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) has developed a use of force training guide called Integrating Communications, Assessment, and Tactics (ICAT) that is “designed to fill a critical gap in training police officers in how to respond to volatile situations in which subjects are behaving erratically and often dangerously but do not possess a firearm.” While Varney and Degnan include one anecdotal example of a single agency’s positive trajectory after implementing ICAT, recent research (by an early critic of the PERF use of force guidelines that served as the foundation for ICAT, no less) shows promising results.

Naturally, more research into ICAT is necessary before pronouncing it a definitive answer to the problem of police shootings, but it can be argued that one of ICAT’s founding principles is so self-evident that policing everywhere might be much improved by adherence to it: “the sanctity of human life should be at the heart of everything agency does.”