Law Enforcement Across Cultures: How Culture Impacts the Use of Non-Lethal Weapons

While assumptions can be made about the behavior of Westerners in response to law enforcement actions, we cannot assuredly say the same for non-Western cultures. Tactics used for crowd control in the U.S. can be interpreted and responded to much differently in diverse cultures. This Phase I will focus on the differences in cognition across cultures and how these dissimilarities influence how individuals interpret the use of non-lethal weapons. To accomplish this, we will first investigate crowd control techniques currently used in the civil and military law enforcement domains. Using our existing Cultural Lens Model we will make predictions of how these tactics may be perceived in different cultures. The Cultural Lens Model is a framework for understanding, explaining, and potentially predicting reasoning and decision-making behaviors of members of different cultures. This model has been used in a range of domains to develop recommendations for training U.S. forces for missions in multinational environments. We will also leverage our work in sensemaking and decision making to strengthen our understanding of which crowd control techniques may be the most effective across different cultures. Finally, we will explore strategies for training and technologies for building just-in-time training tools for law enforcement personnel.