General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Police shoot man in the back with both hands held High [View all]struggle4progress
(118,280 posts)There are conflicting stories regarding the taser and whether it malfunctioned
It's clear from the video he was shot shortly after turning his back and raising his hands. I can't quite be sure how long after he raised his hands the fatal shots were fired; from the youtube, I would very crudely gauge it as about a second, but mine is an estimate with no real precision
There are some neural delays in conscious detection of an event and in the formation of conscious intent to act; and presumably there are similar delays when forming a conscious decision not to engage in an intentional act that one has already decided to undertake. Unfortunately, I can't speak with any precision on the science there; in one of the links I've provided in this thread, a police chief suggests that the total time required to change one's mind in such a situation might be 1.5 sec; I don't know if that estimate is supported by research
I would assume that conscious detection of an event and conscious intent to act do not involve precisely the same cerebral centers, so if (say) it takes 0.5 sec to perceive an event and another 0.35 sec to form intent to act, it is plausible that combination could require 0.85 sec. And I might expect decision not to act after all, based on changing perceptions, could take at least the same amount of time and perhaps more, since the changed decision presumably requires resolving signal conflicts. So if the deputy saw the man his back to the police but his hands down and out of sight, believed the man armed and erratic, he might have made a decision to shoot based on (say) some hand and body motion that he misunderstood as the man turning to open fire
On viewing the video alone, I wouldn't call it a justifiable shooting -- but under stressful conditions, when one's attention is concentrated on aiming at a suspect thought to be armed and erratic, I don't know how long it takes to form an accurate assessment of a changing situation and make a defensible decision about how to respond. If the shots range out about 3 sec after the man had raised his hands, I'd call it manslaughter; if the shots were fired about 0.5 sec after the man began to turn his back to the officers, I'd probably call it suicide-by-cop; if the shots were fired more than 0.85 sec after the man began to raise his hands, we're in a vast gray area where I lack the knowledge needed to make a call
Ciba Found Symp. 1993;174:123-37; discussion 137-46.
The neural time factor in conscious and unconscious events.
Libet B.
Abstract
Our earlier evidence had indicated that a substantial duration of appropriate cerebral activity (up to about 0.5 s) is required for the production of a conscious sensory experience; this means the sensory world is experienced delayed with respect to real time ... Our experimental finding that conscious intention to act appears only after a delay of about 350 ms from the onset of specific cerebral activity that precedes a voluntary act provided indirect evidence for the theory. In a direct experimental test a signal (stimulus to somatosensory thalamus) was correctly detected in a forced-choice test even when the stimulus duration was too short to produce any awareness of the signal; to go from correct detection with no awareness to detection with awareness required an additional 400 ms of the repetitive identical neural volleys ascending to sensory cortex ...