Firing Together, Reporting Alone: Contagious Fire and the Grammar of Force

Contagious fire—officers discharging their firearms in response to peer gunfire rather than an independently assessed threat—is a deadly force phenomenon that compounds the risk of injury and death in multi-officer shootings. In a published randomized controlled experiment, peer gunfire increased the odds of firing 11.57-fold and rounds discharged by 72% (DeCarlo et al., 2024). Drawing on written accounts from the same sample (N = 169) representing 11 U.S. law enforcement agencies across four states, we examine the divergence between what officers do and what they say about what they do. Officers overwhelmingly provided individualized accounts foregrounding personal decision-making, in direct contrast to the behavioral interdependence documented experimentally. Among officers directly asked whether peer gunfire influenced their decision, 69.1% explicitly denied it (80.0% if all non-responders denied influence); unprompted, 94.4% made no mention of peer influence whatsoever. We demonstrate that this discrepancy is neither wholly unconscious nor fully available to the narrator and is subject to post hoc revision through the institutional grammar of force. We advance a tripartite framework identifying behavioral interdependence, subjective awareness, narrative accountability, and the enduring salience of their assemblage for police policy and practice. Keywords: contagious fire, sympathetic fire, use of force, police, officer accounts