If you’ve read my articles, you know my issues with law enforcement training. The reality is that most cops—unless they take time to train on their own—are not well trained.
Taking training seriously means ending the “check the box” style that wastes time and money. Here are examples of training that wastes time.
Firearms Qualification
Most police agencies are required to conduct annual firearms qualifications. Depending on the department, it is typically 50 to 100 rounds and begins at the 15-yard line. Most of the firing is done from a static position with a paper target in front of the officer. Some agencies give time limits at each course of fire to add some stress.During firearms qualifications, depending on the agency, the officers fire one round at a time in response to an auditory signal such as “THREAT” or “UP.” In some cases, they could fire up to five rounds depending on the course of fire.
Let’s discuss the simple science of this whole firearms qualification.
In a high-stress situation, a suspect points a gun at the officer or charges them while holding a knife. Officers are encouraged to shoot until the threat is down. This is supported by medical research as it has been found that 64 percent of gunshot victims with wounds to the chest and 36 percent of those wounds to the head and neck can survive more than five minutes.
Here is the reality when an officer must discharge their firearm: The suspect is on the move and rarely stationary. The suspect is also shooting at the officer, running at the officer with a weapon, or trying to run the officer over with a car.
What Are the Benefits of Adding Stress to a Firearms Range?
Stress exposure training at a police firearms range has several benefits, including:1. Improved decision-making skills under stress: During high-pressure situations, officers must be able to make quick and effective decisions. Stress exposure training helps officers develop the ability to make accurate decisions and respond appropriately in high-stress situations.
2. Increased confidence and performance: With regular stress exposure training, officers become more confident in their abilities and are better equipped to handle the physical and mental demands of their job. This leads to improved performance and better outcomes in real-life scenarios.
3. Better physiological response to stress: Stress exposure training helps officers develop a physiological response to stress that is more conducive to effective performance. This includes improved breathing patterns, lower heart rate variability, and reduced muscle tension.
4. Enhanced situational awareness: Stress exposure training helps officers develop heightened situational awareness. This enables them to better assess their environment and make informed decisions based on the circumstances at hand.
5. Improved safety for officers and civilians: By training officers to handle high-stress situations, stress exposure training helps to reduce the risk of injury or death to both officers and civilians. It also helps to minimize the potential for property damage and other negative outcomes.
I can train anyone to qualify with a firearm. What takes time is becoming proficient. Now you ask what I mean by becoming proficient.
Proficiency in one’s equipment is essential for effective performance. I mean, think about it, in the military, once you’re issued a sensitive item such as a rifle or night vision goggles, you are required to learn every aspect of that piece of equipment. You are then tested under duress, you are tested when you’re fatigued, you are tested while you are eating, and so on. Part of police training should be testing an officer’s proficiency. We should move away from “qualifying.”
Scenario Based Training
“Once a threat is presented, a law enforcement officer needs time to perceive and react. Reaction time research has been of interest to scholars for over a century (Donders, 1868; Vickers, 2007). Vickers (2007) surveyed numerous studies and found mean reaction times of 0.14 to 0.16 s for an auditory stimulus and 0.18 to 0.20 s for a visual stimulus. A longer reaction time to a visual cue is attributed to the longer period of time required by the complex signal processing in the human visual system (Engelken, Stevens, & Enderle, 1991). The time for the human brain to consciously perceive, evaluate, and classify a visual cue, instead of simply reacting to its earliest detection, is 300 ms.” (Lamme, 2010; Rutiku, Martin, Bachmann & Aru, 2015)Something that is not done enough in policing is scenario-based training. Let me rephrase my previous sentence. SWAT teams and various other specialized units do scenario-based training, except for the patrol division. “Patrol division” refers to your everyday uniformed cop who works the beat. These officers don’t receive enough scenario-based training. Especially the type that forces officers to think critically on their feet, to put the officers under duress so that they can learn to tackle complex problems and/or incidents.
In my 15-plus years in law enforcement, I only do scenario-based training under duress with my SWAT team. As a brand-new officer, scenario-based training is only done at the police academy. Most patrol officers would go through their entire careers doing just a handful of scenario-based training sessions.
There needs to be an emphasis on scenario-based training for the entire profession, not just specialized units.
A review of studies on stress inoculation training (a type of stress exposure training that involves gradually increasing exposure to stressful situations over time) concluded that this type of training can be effective at reducing symptoms of PTSD and improving coping strategies among police officers.
Another study published in the Journal of Traumatic Stress found that police officers who underwent stress exposure training were less likely to be involved in use-of-force incidents compared to officers who did not receive this training.
