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Old April 9, 2021, 11:23 PM   #27
TunnelRat
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Join Date: May 22, 2011
Posts: 12,181
I had one more thought about clothing and being memorable. In one course I took we did a scenario in a shoot house where there was a home invasion. Each student went through it separately, but we were all recorded and watched the results together at the end (honestly I found this a great idea that isn’t always done with scenario based training, but I learned just as much if not more watching others as I did going through it myself).

At the end of the scenario was an interview similar to that of a responding officer. Part of the point was to see the impact adrenaline might have had on our memories and why when giving a summary you want to be careful of making very definitive statements. We were asked to describe our attacker. All 12 or so of us could remember the color of the attacker’s shirt. No one could remember his pants and at best we had a rough idea of his height (the attacker’s face was under a helmet due to UTM pistols). Now this is different than just observing a person because when we saw the actor he was already a threat, but I was still a bit surprised at how tunnel vision we had all become.

The instructor who had been a police officer for decades and a training officer for much of that said remembering just the shirt color was very common. He stated some criminals were actually smart enough to take advantage of this and would wear a different colored shirt under their main shirt. If/when the criminal fled they would shed the outer shirt and at least avoid the main part of the description.


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