The goal is to ensure these orders result from deliberate tactical decisions and haven’t become the product of thoughtless habits. “Show me your hands” orders will always be an option for officers seeking to confirm or alleviate their safety concerns. In either case, the cross-examination seems obvious: “You told him to move. Unfortunately, after the officer’s order to “show me your hands,” it was no longer clear whether the suspect’s movement was evidence of an imminent threat or a desperate attempt to comply. When the suspect moved his hand (still holding the gun), the second officer shot at him.

With the gun still visible in the suspect’s hand, one officer ordered the suspect not to move, while a second officer ordered the suspect to “show me your hands!” After shooting an armed suspect who had recently shot at the police, officers held the severely injured suspect at gunpoint. The difficulty in assessing intent is not limited to cases of concealed weapons. It can risk accelerating an armed confrontation before you’ve established a tactical advantage and, if they intend to assault you, leaves you virtually no time to identify or respond to the threat. On the other hand, directing a person to show you their hands is inviting movement that strips you of a valuable threat cue. Simply put, it is more reasonable to infer a threat from a person’s movement if you’ve told them not to move. The challenge then is to give orders that create and maintain a tactical advantage while simultaneously creating opportunities to assess compliance. Unless a suspect expressly threatens an officer, officers are forced to look to the suspect’s behavior and their willingness to comply with lawful orders to find evidence of their intent. Simultaneously, they set conditions to help clarify a suspect’s intent, which will play a large part in judging the reasonableness of the officer’s response.įor those of you who analyze threats through the “intent, ability, means, and opportunity” framework, you’ll likely agree that intent can be the toughest to discern. They give orders and prioritize tactics that take advantage of time and space to reduce a suspect’s ability, opportunity, and willingness to assault them. To avoid these disastrous odds, officers learn to recognize and value threat cues and suspicious patterns of conduct. Edged-weapon attacks can be even faster, with research showing knife thrusts at speeds of. With these speed advantages, suspects could conceivably fire before the officer perceives any movement and could continue to fire ten or more rounds before the officer can return fire. To put these speeds into perspective, it takes about twice that long (.30 seconds) just for the brain to perceive and react to a visual stimulus. 1 Compare this to “suspects” from our previous research who were able to pull a concealed weapon and fire in an average of. 5 seconds but still took nearly two additional seconds to move, draw, and respond with aimed fire. We see this in our traffic stop study results, where officers were able to identify and react to an armed threat in less than. While an officer is going through this “mental chronometry,” the suspect continues to take advantage of the officer’s delayed or defeated response. This is because it takes time to perceive a suspect’s movement, identify an object, interpret an action, decide on a response, and execute the response. In deadly force encounters, we know that action beats reaction, and that police are at a disadvantage when trying to identify and respond to pre-attack cues. Meaning, compliance can look like pre-assault behavior-and pre-assault behavior can look like compliance.

The irony is that an order to “show me your hands” or “take your hands out of your pockets” may invite the same movement from a compliant suspect as it does from an assaultive one. Officers know that “hands kill” and that they should “watch the hands.” These well-founded concerns are what prompt demands for suspects to “show me your hands!”

Get yo a hands off me