Could Brain Training Help Address Police Brutality?
Jason Sherwin founded deCervo to help baseball players make better decisions. He never expected the technology to be used in life or death situations. The startup, set up by Sherwin and his friend Jordan Muraskin in 2014, was initially one of a wave of companies trying to bring brain-based training to the world of sport. Its first commercial product was uHIT, a neuroscience-driven tool for training baseball hitters. WIRED UK This story originally appeared on WIRED UK. The idea was to help players train above the neck. By showing them video clips and animations of different pitches coming toward them on a screen, deCervo claimed uHIT could add to their well of expertise without them actually needing to be on the fieldthereby improving their ability to make the snap, high-speed decisions required when a fastball was beaming toward them at almost 100 mph. Sport, of course, isnt the only area where people need to make high-speed decisions under pressure. Police officers are thrown into service with barely a fraction of the thousands of hours of practice an elite athlete might have built up before they turn pro. In the United States, the average police academy training program last between 13 and 19 weeks. A high school football player in the US trains for more than 500 hours a season, Sherwin says, while a police officer may only go to the shooting range a couple of times a year. Its the most high-risk work possible, and we dont provide them with the training, he says. While working on video training software for the NHL, Sherwin and his colleagues began to wonder whether the framework they were developing for athletes could be used to help police officers make better decisions where the stakes are a lot higher. Recently, deCervo unveiled e-Train, a product that uses the same principles as uHIT, but applies them not to fastballs and sliders but traffic stops and use of force. It is, Sherwin says, a way of potentially solving these quick trigger decisions they can go either way, and which have much more drastic consequences than a swing and a miss at the plate.  There are dozens of examples of police officers making the wrong decision. In 2014, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot dead in Cleveland, Ohio, when an officer mistook a toy gun for a real one. In 2020, 47-year-old Andre Hill was killed leaving a friends house in Columbus, Ohio, after a neighbor reported an SUV in the area repeatedly turning its engine on and off. He was unarmed. In April, Daunte Wright was shot dead in Minnesota when an officer allegedly fired her gun instead of a Taser during a traffic stop. Mike Malpass, a serving police officer and former SWAT team officer based in Phoenix, Arizona, says the current approach to police training is as if a baseball player learned the rules of the sport in a classroom, hit a few slow balls in a batting cage and then was plunged straight into the major leagues. Malpass is the author of Taming the Serpent, a book about how neuroscience could improve police training, and for 15 years hes been evangelizing about the need for officers to be trained in how to make better decisions under pressure. Skills are great, but if you have the knowledge and you dont know how to use it, its a skill you can only use on the range or in a classroom. Training has barely changed in 30 years, he says. Most police training is either staticshooting at a paper targetor scenario based, says Rudy Hall, a 20-year NYPD veteran with a doctorate in education who is consulting for deCervo. The reality of that is limited because theres another officer playing the role of the suspect. Instead, e-Train uses body-cam footage from real incidents to give officers the feeling of being in a real-life encounterbut it can be slowed down and rewatched, and key facets can be highlighted so that officers know what clues to look for when put in a real situation.