Shoot First, and He Will Answer the Questions Later

Washington: The shooting looked bad. But that is when the professor is at his best. A black motorist, pulled to the side of the road for a turn-signal violation, had stuffed his hand into his pocket. The white officer yelled for him to take it out. When the driver started to comply, the officer shot him dead.

The driver was unarmed.

Taking the stand at a public inquest, William J. Lewinski, the psychology professor, explained that the officer had no choice but to act.

"In simple terms," the district attorney in Portland, Oregon, asked, "if I see the gun, I'm dead?"

"In simple terms, that's it," Lewinski replied.

When police officers shoot people under questionable circumstances, Lewinski is often there to defend their actions. Among the most influential voices on the subject, he has testified in or consulted in nearly 200 cases over the last decade or so and has helped justify countless shootings around the country.

His conclusions are consistent: The officer acted appropriately, even when shooting an unarmed person. Even when shooting someone in the back. Even when witness testimony, forensic evidence or video footage contradicts the officer's story.

He has appeared as an expert witness in criminal trials, civil cases and disciplinary hearings, and before grand juries. In addition, his company, the Force Science Institute, has trained tens of thousands of police officers on how to think differently about police shootings that might appear excessive.

A string of deadly police encounters in Ferguson, Missouri; North Charleston, South Carolina; and most recently in Cincinnati, have prompted a national reconsideration of how officers use force and provoked calls for them to slow down and defuse conflicts. But the debate has also left many police officers feeling unfairly maligned and suspicious of new policies that they say could put them at risk. Lewinski says his research clearly shows that officers often cannot wait to act.

"We're telling officers, 'Look for cover and then read the threat,'" he told a class of Los Angeles County deputy sheriffs recently. "Sorry, too damn late."

A former Minnesota State professor, he says his testimony and training are based on hard science, but his research has been roundly criticized by experts. An editor for The American Journal of Psychology called his work "pseudoscience." The Justice Department denounced his findings as "lacking in both foundation and reliability." Civil rights lawyers say he is selling dangerous ideas.

"People die because of this stuff," said John Burton, a California lawyer who specializes in police misconduct cases. "When they give these cops a pass, it just ripples through the system."

An Expert on the Stand

While his testimony at times has proved insufficient to persuade a jury, Lewinski's record includes many high-profile wins.

Many policing experts are for hire, but Lewinski is unique in that he conducts his own research, trains officers and internal investigators, and testifies at trial. Lewinski, 70, is affable and confident in his research, but not so polished as to sound like a salesman. In testimony on the stand, for which he charges nearly $1,000 an hour, he offers winding answers to questions and seldom appears flustered.

Much of the criticism of his work, Lewinski said, amounts to politics. In 2012, for example, just seven months after the Justice Department excoriated him and his methods, department officials paid him $55,000 to help defend a federal drug agent who shot and killed an unarmed 18-year-old in California. Then last year, as part of a settlement over excessive force in the Seattle Police Department, the Justice Department endorsed sending officers to Lewinski for training. And in January, he was paid $15,000 to train federal marshals.

Lewinski said he was not trying to explain away every shooting. But when he testifies, it is almost always in defense of police shootings. Officers are his target audience - he publishes a newsletter on police use of force that he says has nearly 1 million subscribers - and his research was devised for them. "The science is based on trying to keep officers safe," he said.

'Invalid and Unreliable'

In 1990, a police shooting in Minneapolis changed the course of Lewinski's career. Dan May, a white police officer, shot and killed Tycel Nelson, a black 17-year-old. May said he fired after the teenager turned toward him and raised a handgun. But an autopsy showed he was shot in the back.

Lewinski was intrigued by the apparent contradiction. He began by videotaping students as they raised handguns and then quickly turned their backs. On average, that move took about half a second. By the time an officer returned fire, Lewinski concluded, a suspect could have turned his back.

He summarized his findings in 1999 in The Police Marksman, a popular magazine for officers. The next year, it published an expanded study, in which Lewinski timed students as they fired while turning, running or sitting with a gun at their side, as if stashed in a car's console.

Suspects, he concluded, could reach, fire and move remarkably fast. In 2002, a third study concluded that it takes the average officer about a second and a half to draw from a holster, aim and fire.

Together, the studies appeared to support the idea that officers were at a serious disadvantage.

Because he published in a police magazine and not a scientific journal, Lewinski was not subjected to the peer-review process. But in separate cases in 2011 and 2012, the Justice Department and a private lawyer asked Lisa Fournier, a Washington State University professor and an American Journal of Psychology editor, to review Lewinski's studies. She said they lacked basic elements of legitimate research, such as control groups, and drew conclusions that were unsupported by the data.

"In summary, this study is invalid and unreliable," she wrote in court documents in 2012. "In my opinion, this study questions the ability of Mr. Lewinski to apply relevant and reliable data to answer a question or support an argument."

Inattentional Blindness

While opposing lawyers and experts found his research controversial, they were particularly frustrated by Lewinski's tendency to get inside people's heads. Time and again, his reports to defense lawyers seem to make conclusive statements about what officers saw, what they did not, and what they cannot remember.

Often, these details are hotly disputed. For example, in a 2009 case that revolved around whether a Texas sheriff's deputy felt threatened by a car coming at him, Lewinski said that the officer was so focused on firing to stop the threat, he did not immediately recognize that the car had passed him.

Such gaps in observation and memory, he says, can be explained by a phenomenon called inattentional blindness, in which the brain is so focused on one task that it blocks out everything else. When an officer's version of events is disproved by video or forensic evidence, Lewinski says, inattentional blindness may be to blame. It is human nature, he says, to try to fill in the blanks.

"Whenever the cop says something that's helpful, it's as good as gold," said Burton, the California lawyer. "But when a cop says something that's inconvenient, it's a result of this memory loss."

Positions of Authority

Regardless of what, if any, policy changes emerge from the current national debate, civil right lawyers say one thing will not change: Jurors want to believe police officers, and Lewinski's research tells them that they can.

On a cold night in early 2003, for instance, Robert Murtha, an officer in Hartford, Connecticut, shot three times at the driver of a car. He said the vehicle had sped directly at him, knocking him to the ground as he fired. Video from a nearby police cruiser told another story. The officer had not been struck. He had fired through the driver's-side window as the car passed him.

Murtha's story was so obviously incorrect that he was arrested on charges of assault and fabricating evidence. If officers can get away with shooting people and lying about it, the prosecutor declared, "the system is doomed."

"There was no way around it - Murtha was dead wrong," his lawyer, Hugh F. Keefe, recalled recently. But the officer was "bright, articulate and truthful," Keefe said. Jurors needed an explanation for how the officer could be so wrong and still be innocent.

Lewinski testified at trial. The jury deliberated less than one full day. The officer was acquitted of all charges.