Page 6 - Top Cover Issue 6

6 TOP COVER ISSUE 6

THE

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t is widely recognised that human memory is fallible.
Generally people cannot reproduce very accurate accounts
for events they experience, despite the confidence they may
feel when describing what took place. Memory is viewed as
an imperfect process frequently prone to errors and distortions.
Loftus describes memory in this way: ‘In essence, all memory is
false to some degree. Memory is a reconstructive process,
whereby we piece together the past to form a coherent
narrative that becomes our autobiography’
As firearms officers we know that our attention and memory
is vulnerable to gaps and lapses of information, we also know
that our cognitive system is limited as a processor. This is
because our brain needs time to function effectively
analysing and making some sense of what is happening
around us. The need to narrowly focus and switch our
attention to a firearms threat may leave us all with
mistaken beliefs, and time pressure may force us to act. Our
own memory formed within a threatening situation, may
therefore seem entirely different from the perspective of
another witness.
For the vast majority of police shooting incidents in the
UK, video footage of the actual moments shots are fired has
not always been readily available. Where footage has