Eye Witness Accounts of Michael Brown’s Shooting are Likely to Be Flawed

It is not surprising that accounts differ as to what happened to Michael Brown in the seconds after he met Darren Wilson on August 9.  This is true not only because witnesses to Mr. Brown’s death may have motivation to offer accounts that best suit their interests, but also because we have limited capacity to recall emotional events that happen in split seconds, even if they happen to us, by us, or right in front of us.   Studies on the subject of the limitations of eye-witness accounts, including studies of police officers’ own accounts of shootings, reveal those accounts to be flawed because our ability to recall events accurately in those sudden circumstances are flawed.   Since most of us do not have the ability to recall events perfectly, our brains make up what we did not or could not actually perceive. Dr. Alexis Artwohl studies how flawed memory influences the accuracy of eye-witness accounts of police shootings.   In her 2002 article “Perceptual and Memory Distortion During Officer-Involved Shootings”, she surveyed police officers involved in shootings and found that their accounts tended to include observations that did not happen.   As she states in the article, “[t]he author did this because she discovered, in the course of conducting numerous group debriefings, that many officers do not fully realize the extent of their own memory and perceptual gaps and distortions until confronted with evidence to the contrary.” Thus, she reports that of the officers polled in her survey, 62 percent viewed the incident in slow motion, 84 percent noted that sounds seemed diminished, 79 percent experienced “tunnel (lack of peripheral) vision”, and 74 percent stated that they responded in “automatic pilot” with little or no conscious thought.    Her research was consistent with other research on the subject and came to the similar conclusion that “memory and perceptual distortions, in fact, did occur to some degree in officer-involved shootings.” Those distortions would explain why in her research for example, 21 % of the officers “saw, heard, or experienced something during the event that they later found out had not really happened or happened very differently than they remembered it. It’s hard to imagine that any investigation into Mr. Brown’s death will not be influenced by the toxic racial and political atmosphere surrounding the events. But even with a rigorous and neutral investigation, it’s possible we may never know the precise sequence of events that led to Mr. Brown’s death.