From John Veit
On Apr 11, 2016 the Force Science Institute published an “extra” news release that confronts the issue that “many agencies have training paradigms that are directly leading to deaths of officers in the line of duty.”
In a provocative, in-depth interview, Insp. Chris Butler, one of North America’s leading use-of-force experts, minces no words in assessing shortcomings of police training.
Butler,who is a 26-year veteran of the Calgary (Canada) Police Service, is an instructor in the Force Science Institute’s two-day Force Science Basics seminar on FS principles and is one of the few peace officers to earn special certification as an Advanced Force Science Analyst.
His assertion that “many agencies have training paradigms that are directly leading to deaths of officers in the line of duty…is hard for trainers to swallow, but not all training is good training. And bad training will get officers killed just as fast as no training at all.”
The hour-long interview was conducted by FS graduate Brian Willis, president of Winning Mind Training, and is posted in audio format on Willis’ website for police trainers.
In it, Butler offers insights into applying FS research to firearms and UOF programs to better prepare officers to overcome life-threatening challenges of the street.
Here’s a sampling of the topics touched on:
Having spoken to thousands of firearms and use-of-force trainers, Butler says that he can count on one hand the number who have said, ‘We base training on the threats and circumstances that officers are likely to encounter on the street.’
“Almost always the standards are designed to meet some sort of administrative risk-management requirement. Very little is finding its way from real-life combat situations into firearms training.”
Training in no-or low-light situations is commonly neglected, even though a significant percentage of OISs occur where visibility is impaired. And officers frequently are not taught the importance of moving immediately when faced with a threat–a proven means of disrupting offender hit rates–because trainers mistakenly accept that range design prohibits any movement that’s effective.
Butler recounts valuable lessons learned from Force Science’s groundbreaking Traffic Stop study, which involved a motorist suddenly producing a gun and firing on officers during discussion of a driving infraction.
The initial reaction of 91 out of 94 officers was to “stand flat-footed, draw, and try to return fire,” says Butler, who helped conduct the study. That “strong but wrong” automatic response was “embedded in their brain” because that’s how “we have conditioned officers to respond to lethal threats presented at close range.” Yet in the 1.5-1.9 seconds that reaction requires, an officer could receive “a minimum of six rounds coming at them.”
Force Science’s well-known Hit Probability study, which revealed the natural instinct of many offenders to shoot at an officer’s head from close range, also confirms the value of immediately moving as a threat response, Butler says.
“Officers see the threat coming and they tend to stand still while drawing their weapon to respond,” he says. “Drawing your weapon should be your second priority. Moving to get your body off-line is the single most important piece of mitigating action you can take.
Butler challenges trainers who claim they can’t teach movement on the range because of safety considerations or facility limitations. “We can’t allow ourselves to fall into that fallacy of thinking,” he declares. “Every time you let an officer stand still and draw, you reinforce a habit that can get the officer killed.
There are always solutions. Even taking a dramatic step to the right or left as you draw and fire can help. It may not be the optimal solution, but we can certainly start to implement small advances and do it now without waiting for the ‘big’ solution.”
Too few agencies “move beyond the classroom to teach [tactics] in a context of reality-based training,” Confining teaching only to the classroom typically “floods an officer’s forebrain with knowledge that never gets into the midbrain,” Butler says. “The only way to teach skills so an officer is competent to perform them is in the environment in which they are going to be needed.”
Trainers who don’t appreciate the “huge difference” have no understanding of “how the brain works under stress.
We can’t think we are training officers to respond predictably and reliably in the crucible of life-threatening events until we have first seen them [use their skills] reliably and predictably in the context of a realistic training environment.”
“There’s a huge responsibility on trainers to understand how to tie together cognition, perception, motor behavior, and tactical decision-making,” he says. “We have the most work to do in moving firearms training into a state that is supported by research.”
Trainers always say they need more time, Butler observes. “But the question is: How effectively and productively are you using the time you’ve got?”
Are you, for example, “spending far too much time taking officers to a high level of technical skill [with their firearm], rather than taking them to an acceptable, safe level of competence and as fast as possible moving them out of a static environment and start building complexity [into their training], so their basic skills are further enhanced within the context in which those skills are needed.”
John Tate
May 09, 2016 @ 10:48:20
Thanks for “Strong but Wrong” article by John Veit.
In the last 20 years, what aspects of LE training have I found to be continually the most deficient?
Law
Effective DefTacs
Tactical shooting
This one line in Veit’s article hit the 10X – “Drawing your weapon should be your second priority. Moving to get your body off-line is the single most important piece of mitigating action you can take.”
But, question: at least in New Mexico (NM DPS & FLETC), what do we train? Answer: What we learn at quals … stand flat-footed, draw, fire, reholster … because quals are the only agency sponsored shooting/training that most peace officers experience. “[O]fficers [ … ] are not taught the importance of moving immediately when faced with a threat.”
I’m now officially retired … I’ve let all but one of my DPS certs expire.* I’ll let Firearms die in September. Many reasons, not the least being tired of pissing into the wind. I’ve been a marksmanship instructor since 1977 (USN, NRA, USA, and LE since 2001). While individual students will listen, agencies will not. Their list of reasons vary from sad (no $$) to rude (‘Who the hell are you to tell us what to do?’).
What’s nice is seeing you, Veit, the Force Science folks still holding strong.
One closing comment, in 2005 at the direction of my then chief, Randy Erwin, I put together a LEOSA class. It was originally only classroom stuff about tort law and unarmed street survival (lessons from South America). But Randy told me to put in a reactionary, tactical shooting portion. I did; and what an eye-opener! Never have you seen such horrible, deadly, mindless, even stupid actions.
The setting was a shopping center parking lot. On hearing a shot fired, the first required act was to move to cover; but officers would not necessarily go to effective cover (e.g., behind an engine block, tires, axle, etc.). One fellow even dived under a truck where an inbound high miss would drench him in gasoline, and any low misses would both ricochet into him and generate secondary projectiles (rocks, gravel, sand).
A rare shooter would neutralize the two threats (pepper poppers placed under “bad guy” targets, mixed in with a bunch of innocent pedestrians), in two shots. Many took lots of shots; a few would empty multiple 15-rd magazines. Shooters were told to reload from cover; few did this effectively (body parts were left exposed); but some shooters even left cover with near or completely empty handguns. And the number of innocents who were hit exceeded NYPD on their worst day.
I ran that class about a dozen times. The results never changed: maybe 1-in-10 was competent, and an equal number downright unsafe. But the vast majority, 8-in-10, were just overwhelmed with the combination of new activities: go to cover; if necessary, find an effective position from which to fire (clear shot to threat without endangering innocents); engage from cover; keep shooting until the threat was down; reload from cover; clear/disarm the threat; …. now the same for successive threats. That’s a lot for someone who is only trained to stand “flat footed.” And we wonder why cops can shoot 84 shots and hit the suspect just once.† ‡
Stay safe,
John
* General Police, Criminal and Civil (Tort) Law, RADAR, Crime Prevention & Crime Scene Photography.
† http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/nypd-84-shots-brooklyn_us_55ec4b31e4b093be51bbb978
‡ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/12/06/police-shoot-137-times-into-car-after-chase-killing-unarmed-couple.html
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John M. Buol Jr.
May 09, 2016 @ 10:59:52
>> Never have you seen such horrible, deadly, mindless, even stupid actions.
Accepting low performance is understandable, even necessary, with brand new personnel at the Academy. The failure is never asking anyone to go beyond that throughout their career, and then wondering why personnel continue to perform at novice levels.
>> But the vast majority, 8-in-10, were just overwhelmed with the combination of new activities: go to cover; if necessary, find an effective position from which to fire (clear shot to threat without endangering innocents); engage from cover; keep shooting until the threat was down; reload from cover; clear/disarm the threat; …. now the same for successive threats. That’s a lot for someone who is only trained to stand “flat footed.”
Especially when that “flat footed” standard remains at the ridiculously easy levels found at Academy/basic. It would have been interesting to have a few higher level competitive shooters try this. Even if their events were primarily “flat footed” and they were improvising solutions on the fly, I suspect they’d perform notably better simply by being used to performing at a higher level while under a bit of competitive stress.
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John Tate
May 13, 2016 @ 16:01:07
Any basic level competitive shooters would have smoked this.
Here are some details; photos from one of our classes. I’m the guy with “Trooper” on shirt.
Think about it:
You’re walking parallel to the “range” with two cars positioned along the 25 yard line. You’re carrying a bag simulating groceries. Your walking continues back and forth until …
A gun is fired – simulating some sort of altercation between you and a shopping center. AT THIS TIME YOU ARE TO DROP THE BAG AND GO TO THE CLOSEST COVER AND OBSERVE.
You see one “bad guy.” But he’s mixed in a random group of “innocents.” He’s carrying a gun and threatening some of the “innocents.” YOU ARE TO MOVE TO A POSITION BEHIND THE CAR THAT GIVES A CLEAR SHOT OF THE “BAD GUY” BUT WITH NO INNOCENTS BEHIND. YOUR DISTANCE IS ~10 YARDS. YOU ARE TO YELL, DROP THE GUN; DROP THE GUN. THEN ENGAGE.
The “bad guy” target, a std black-and-white photo of one of our qual targets, is mounted on cardboard and placed on the front of a pepper popper with a ~2″ upright post and a 6″x6″ sweet spot (center of center mass). YOU SHOOT UNTIL THE “BAD GUY” FALLS.
Then you go forward to disarm, secure weapon (we put a blue gun on tgt stand), render 1st aid … etc.
BUT, THEN YOU SEE A 2ND “BAD GUY.” SCENARIO IS LIKE BEFORE. YOU ARE TO GO TO ONE OF SEVERAL 2ND LOCATIONS OF COVER (usually 55 gal drums), AND REPEAT AS BEFORE. †
When 2nd “Bad Guy” falls, is disarmed, etc. the exercise is over.
Usual time to complete each cycle is well under two minutes.
After each cycle, we hold an event debrief – so each shooter can learn from the experiences of others. (see Hdebrief2) What takes time is the debrief and target inspection and repair. There are usually a lot of hits on the bad guy that don’t result in knock-downs. And, sadly, there are often a few holes in the innocents. :-)
Comments.
These photos were from a very small class. Some had 30 ~ 40. Randy helped me on this class; he’s the one with the bullpup “distraction device.”
Notes.
* Here you cannot see the “bad guy.” The smoke/dust at the right of the image is the point of impact of random .308 rounds my partner is firing from over the head of the student … just to put a little pucker factor in the drill.
† In this frame you can see the “bad guy,” but the narrow “engagement alley” isn’t evident. You can see more dust from my partner’s rounds.
See photos:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151743618140946.1073741825.158979725945&type=1&l=b5d5af58c7
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John M. Buol Jr.
May 13, 2016 @ 16:10:59
Thanks for the description and photos. I put them on the Facebook page for others to see.
>> Any basic level competitive shooters would have smoked this.
That’s the takeaway point. More so than training to earn high scores in a match, it’s a developed capability built from a mindset of wanting to do well.
Have military personnel run their standard PT test/physical assessment for record, then invite people that train for and routinely win 5K races to take the same test and see which group runs better.
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