This is precisely the reason that many police departments in recent years have banned high-speed chases. It’s not just because of the dangers of hitting some innocent bystander during the chase, although that is clearly part of the worry, since about three hundred Americans are killed accidentally every year during chases. It’s also because of what happens after the chase, since pursuing a suspect at high speed is precisely the kind of activity that pushes police officers into this dangerous state of high arousal. “The L.A. riot was started by what cops did to Rodney King at the end of the high-speed chase,” says James Fyfe, head of training for the NYPD, who has testified in many police brutality cases. “The Liberty City riot in Miami in 1980 was started by what the cops did at the end of a chase. They beat a guy to death. In 1986, they had another riot in Miami based on what cops did at the end of the chase. Three of the major race riots in this country over the past quarter century have been caused by what cops did at the end of a chase.”

“When you get going at high speeds, especially through residential neighborhoods, that’s scary,” says Bob Martin, a former high-ranking LAPD officer. “Even if it is only fifty miles per hour. Your adrenaline and heart start pumping like crazy. It’s almost like a runner’s high. It’s a very euphoric kind of thing. You lose perspective. You get wrapped up in the chase. There’s that old saying—‘a dog in the hunt doesn’t stop to scratch its fleas.’ If you’ve ever listened to a tape of an officer broadcasting in the midst of pursuit, you can hear it in the voice. They almost yell. For new officers, there’s almost hysteria. I remember my first pursuit. I was only a couple of months out of the academy. It was through a residential neighborhood. A couple of times we even went airborne. Finally we captured him. I went back to the car to radio in and say we were okay, and I couldn’t even pick up the radio, I was shaking so badly.” Martin says that the King beating was precisely what one would expect when two parties—both with soaring heartbeats and predatory cardiovascular reactions—encounter each other after a chase. “At a key point, Stacey Koon”—one of the senior officers at the scene of the arrest—“told the officers to back off,” Martin says. “But they ignored him. Why? Because they didn’t hear him. They had shut down.”

Fyfe says that he recently gave a deposition in a case in Chicago in which police officers shot and killed a young man at the end of a chase, and unlike Rodney King, he wasn’t resisting arrest. He was just sitting in his car. “He was a football player from Northwestern. His name was Robert Russ. It happened the same night the cops there shot another kid, a girl, at the end of a vehicle pursuit, in a case that Johnnie Cochran took and got over a $20 million settlement. The cops said he was driving erratically. He led them on a chase, but it wasn’t even that high-speed. They never got above seventy miles per hour. After a while, they ran him off the road. They spun his car out on the Dan Ryan Expressway. The instructions on vehicle stops like that are very detailed. You are not supposed to approach the car. You are supposed to ask the driver to get out. Well, two of the cops ran up ahead and opened the passenger side door. The other asshole was on the other side, yelling at Russ to open the door. But Russ just sat there. I don’t know what was going through his head. But he didn’t respond. So this cop smashes the left rear window of the car and fires a single shot, and it hits Russ in the hand and chest. The cop says that he said, ‘Show me your hands, show me your hands,’ and he’s claiming now that Russ was trying to grab his gun. I don’t know if that was the case. I have to accept the cop’s claim. But it’s beside the point. It’s still an unjustified shooting because he shouldn’t have been anywhere near the car, and he shouldn’t have broken the window.”

Was this officer mind-reading? Not at all. Mind-reading allows us to adjust and update our perceptions of the intentions of others. In the scene in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? where Martha is flirting with Nick while George lurks jealously in the background, our eyes bounce from Martha’s eyes to George’s to Nick’s and around and around again because we don’t know what George is going to do. We keep gathering information on him because we want to find out. But Ami Klin’s autistic patient looked at Nick’s mouth and then at his drink and then at Martha’s brooch. In his mind he processed human beings and objects in the same way. He didn’t see individuals, with their own emotions and thoughts. He saw a collection of inanimate objects in the room and constructed a system to explain them—a system that he interpreted with such rigid and impoverished logic that when George fires his shotgun at Martha and an umbrella pops out, he laughed out loud. This, in a way, is what that officer on the Dan Ryan Expressway did as well. In the extreme excitement of the chase, he stopped reading Russ’s mind. His vision and his thinking narrowed. He constructed a rigid system that said that a young black man in a car running from the police had to be a dangerous criminal, and all evidence to the contrary that would ordinarily have been factored into his thinking—the fact that Russ was just sitting in his car and that he had never gone above seventy miles per hour—did not register at all. Arousal leaves us mind-blind.

Have you ever seen the videotape of the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan? It’s the afternoon of March 30, 1981. Reagan has just given a speech at the Washington Hilton Hotel and is walking out a side door toward his limousine. He waves to the crowd. Voices cry out: “President Reagan! President Reagan!” Then a young man named John Hinckley lunges forward with a .22-caliber pistol in his hand and fires six bullets at Reagan’s entourage at point-blank range before being wrestled to the ground. One of the bullets hits Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady, in the head. A second bullet hits a police officer, Thomas Delahanty, in the back. A third hits Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy in the chest, and a fourth ricochets off the limousine and pierces Reagan’s lung, missing his heart by inches. The puzzle of the Hinckley shooting, of course, is how he managed to get at Reagan so easily. Presidents are surrounded by bodyguards, and bodyguards are supposed to be on the lookout for people like John Hinckley. The kind of people who typically stand outside a hotel on a cold spring day waiting for a glimpse of their President are well-wishers, and the job of the bodyguard is to scan the crowd and look for the person who doesn’t fit, the one who doesn’t wish well at all. Part of what bodyguards have to do is read faces. They have to mind-read. So why didn’t they read Hinckley’s mind? The answer is obvious if you watch the video—and it’s the second critical cause of mind-blindness: there is no time.

Gavin de Becker, who runs a security firm in Los Angeles and is the author of the book The Gift of Fear, says that the central fact in protection is the amount of “white space,” which is what he calls the distance between the target and any potential assailant. The more white space there is, the more time the bodyguard has to react. And the more time the bodyguard has, the better his ability to read the mind of any potential assailant. But in the Hinckley shooting, there was no white space. Hinckley was in a knot of reporters who were standing within a few feet of the President. The Secret Service agents became aware of him only when he starting firing. From the first instance when Reagan’s bodyguards realized that an attack was under way—what is known in the security business as the moment of recognition—to the point when no further harm was done was 1.8 seconds. “The Reagan attack involves heroic reactions by several people,” de Becker says. “Nonetheless, every round was still discharged by Hinckley. In other words, those reactions didn’t make one single difference, because he was too close. In the videotape you see one bodyguard. He gets a machine gun out of his briefcase and stands there. Another has his gun out, too. What are they going to shoot at? It’s over.” In those 1.8 seconds, all the bodyguards could do was fall back on their most primitive, automatic (and, in this case, useless) impulse—to draw their weapons. They had no chance at all to understand or anticipate what was happening. “When you remove time,” de Becker says, “you are subject to the lowest-quality intuitive reaction.”