ABSTRACT
This chapter presents results from a study that examined police officer sensemaking. Police officers viewed a videotape of an actual traffic stop. All the police officers in this study conduct traffic stops, thus they all had preexisting frames built from their traffic-stop experiences. The chapter focuses on the sensemaking aspects of police decision making, and pays particular attention to the behavioral cues they use to understand situations. It begins with a discussion of sensemaking and a description of the data/frame model of sensemaking. The chapter focuses on how domain experience contributes to effective sensemaking and discusses some general findings from the expertise literature. It also discusses the use of behavioral cues to detect deception and presents general findings from this research area. The ability to assess and predict human behavior is more complex than predicting the behavior of non-human entities.
