Even when money is shoveled at making their methods more scientifically serious and rigorous, police “rarely cooperate with outside researchers” whose work might expose their failures. Meanwhile, a cottage industry of pseudoscientists crafts “studies” to meet police preferences.
But what kind of training really works—and whether it can be designed to reduce the influence of racial biases—is yet another open question. The Force Institute is one of the leading organizations that provides use of force training. Its founder, Bill Lewinski, a former Minnesota State professor, was recently the subject of a profile in the New York Times, which criticized him as a psychologist for hire who got cops off in deadly shootings. (The institute declined a request for an interview with WIRED.)
Little research into this area exists, and what does exist is carried out by people with a vested interest. Lewinski, for example, has argued that suspects can draw a gun more quickly than an officer can draw from a holster and aim, so police are justified in reacting before they see a gun. An American Journal of Psychology editor who reviewed one of the studies for the Justice Department called the research “invalid and unreliable.”