A man was attempting to murder a toddler in San Diego, and Norm Stamper shot and killed him. The year was 1972 and Stamper, a police lieutenant in San Diego at the time, recalls that his heart pounded, his breath quickened and his vision narrowed into a tunnel. “I couldn’t have told you what was going on four-feet away, to the left or to the right,” he says. He pulled the trigger, the man fell and an official inquiry found that Stamper’s actions were justified.
Stamper went on to become chief of the Seattle Police Department in the 1990s and get a doctorate in human behavior research. He says stress helped him focus on the would-be murderer. But stress also leads to deadly mistakes, he explains in his new book, To Protect and Serve: How to Fix America’s Police. Mistakes have dominated the news with police shootings of Terence Crutcher in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., Walter Scott in North Charleston, S.C., Akai Gurley in Brooklyn, N.Y., and others. Brain scientists agree, and all say the tense situation is made even worse by the recent assassinations of police.
[For more of this story, written by Rachel Nuwer, go to http://www.scientificamerican....e-suspect-shootings/]
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