Fixing the Police - Part 3

How training is conducted

Traditional Training

I mentioned in the last post that high school sports training is probably superior to the training that is provided to many officers in their academies. I am going to use firearms training to elaborate upon this point. As mentioned in the last post, the State of Texas requires 48 hours of firearms training in BPOC. This training must cover a variety of firearms related issues such as proper nomenclature, how to hold weapons, safety rules, weapon maintenance, and marksmanship. To graduate, the students must pass a firearms qualification course with a score of at least 70% (I will not deal here with whether missing 30% of the time when using deadly force is an acceptable standard). The course of fire must include at least 50 rounds fired at ranges from point blank to at least 25 yards. Five rounds must be fired at both the 15 and 25 yard lines. It is also highly suggested (but not required) that officers complete a night or low light course of fire with a handheld flashlight.

For those not familiar with the typical firearms range course of fire, I will give some detail . These courses consist of firing a set number of shots at a set and known distance. For example, officers might be required fire five shots into the body of the target at 7 yards. Next, they might be told to fire two shots at the target on the right and two at the target on the left. Again, the target is at 7 yards. Typically, these courses start close to the target and then move back as the course progresses. To add stress, a timer is often used. This timer will beep to start a specific part of the course and the officer must shoot all the required shots before the timer beeps again. Some ranges have targets that turn to face the students and then turn away when the allotted time is over. Again, the passing standard for these tests is 70%. This is not a difficult standard. As a concealed handgun license instructor, I have seen people who have never fired a handgun before to pass this type of test after 4 to 6 hours of training.

Now, consider what police shootings look like. The officer must determine if the suspect is a threat or not. Encounters are often surprises. They often happen in low light conditions. The engagement distance is usually less than 3 yards and both the officer and suspect are moving.

How do officers do in these encounters? The hit rate is usually less than 50%. Often it much less than that. For example, Donner and Popovich examined 149 officer-involved shootings in the Dallas Police Department between 2003 and 2017 and found that, at the level of the individual bullets fired, only 35% of the rounds hit the suspect¹. They also note the some of the rounds which missed suspects hit bystanders or even other officers. Additionally, in about half of the shootings, none of the rounds fired by the police at the suspect actually hit the suspect.

Given that the firearms training that officers are required to complete in BPOC has little to do with that actual shootings look like, it is not surprising that officers do not perform well in actual shootings. The required academy training is really marksmanship training and the application in the field is a life-or-death gunfight. While some marksmanship training is needed to ensure that officers know the basics of how to safely operate a firearm, this training has little to do with developing the capabilities to successfully negotiate an actual gun fight.

To be fair, the use of firearms is also present in other areas of the BPOC curriculum. For example, officers are taught about the legal aspects of using deadly force, and the unit on arrest and control requires that officers do at least some comprehensive scenarios where the officer has to justify legal authority, demonstrate de-escalation if possible, approach a suspect in a safe manner, use the appropriate level of force, and determine what violations have occurred (if any).

The comprehensive scenarios required at the end of the arrest and control block of BPOC could help to overcome the limited required firearms training, but the number of scenarios and the particular situations that should be addressed are left to the instructors to determine. Because these scenarios are suggested at the end of a block of material that deals primarily with less than lethal uses of force, it is likely that less than lethal situations will be the focus of these comprehensive scenarios. In fact, the only example scenario given in this section involves a suspect attempting to punch the officer.

Not only is BPOC firearms training focused on skills that are not well matched to the task, but BPOC classes often provide those skills in a manner that almost ensures that the officers will have poor retention. Most academy training is provided in block fashion. That is all material on a topic is presented in a single unit (e.g. it is firearms week, so we are doing firearms all week and when we are done with that, we go to the next topic.). When students are trained this way, they will show a rapid increase in skill during the training period, but they will also show a rapid decrease in skill following the training. The students will do well during the training, but they will not retain most of the skill that they developed.

Deliberate Practice

In sports training, a variety of models have been developed to enhance the acquisition and retention of skill. Perhaps one of the most prominent of these is the deliberate practice model. I will not go into all the details of the deliberate practice model here, but the model has been shown to produce dramatic improvements in performance in a variety of domains. One of the key features of this model is that training is not delivered in block fashion. Different skills are instead interleaved with each other. In this model, if we are going to do a total of 48 hours of firearms training, we would attempt to spread the training out over an extended period of time. So, if BPOC was going to run for 6 months (24 weeks), the students would do approximately 2 hours of firearms training a week (and these two hours would also preferably not happen on the same day). When students are trained this way, you will not see as dramatic an increase in skill as when practice was blocked, but you will see much better retention of the skills that were acquired.

The interleaving of skills (and knowledge) also creates natural opportunities to link what is happening in one area of training with another. For example, if students are studying use of force law while they are doing firearms training, this creates opportunities to link the law to shooting practice or vice versa. This can lead to much better mental representations of the skill, which is a key part of improving preformance.²

The Ecological Model

Another model that has gained acceptance in sports training is the ecological model. This model has a broad set of theoretical foundations and implications for training, but one of the most important is the linkage between perception and action. The ecological model posits the perception is intimately linked to action and as a result, the two should be coupled and explicitly trained together.

This is a major change from older models of training where students would be taught to perform a perfect physical action in isolation from situations where the action would be used. For example, it used to be common to teach a student how to swing a baseball bat without having them hit actual pitches. This would often be accomplished by having the batter swing at a ball on a tee and then giving the batter coaching tips to develop the perfect swing. After the batter had the perfect swing, variability would be introduced (say by having the batter hit balls from a pitching machine) and the student was expected to then adapt the prefect swing to the specific pitch. The pitching machine would only do one type of pitch and the batter would learn to hit that pitch and move to the next. The students would often do very well in batting practice with the machine, but then fail in actual games. This is because a large part of the skill of batting is reading the pitcher’s release and connecting that read with how to swing the bat to make contact with the ball.

Under the ecological approach, this failure of practice skills to transfer to actual games is believed to happen because action and perception must be trained together. To perform well in a game, the player must be able to read the pitch and adjust their swing accordingly (there is not an optimal swing, because no two batting situations are identical). Isolated practice does not develop this linkage between perception and action.

In the ecological approach, if the environment where the skill will be performed is highly variable, then variability should be introduced quickly. The student might be shown how to hold a bat and some basics about hitting, but he is then quickly introduced to hitting variable pitches. The only outcome that matters is successfully hitting the ball. There is far more to this approach than I am going to cover here, but to reiterate if the situation that we are training for is variable, the student must learn to perceive what is happening and adjust their behavior accordingly. This means that perception and action should be trained together as soon as possible.³

Now, compare this approach to firearms training. We are trying to produce officers who can respond to a variety of life-threating situations appropriately and use deadly force effectively when needed. These situations are complex and dynamic. The encounters are at different distances. The officers are moving. The suspect is moving. There are other people. The suspect can attack the officer, and so on. Yet, we think that we can teach officers to accomplish this by having their firearms requirement be to stand in a fixed position at a known distance and punch a specific number of holes in a stationary target? And we are surprised that the officers often do not perform well? I am shocked that we don’t have far more bad incidents than we do. We are teaching perfect firearms technique, but we are not connecting it to the perceptual skills needed to use that technique in the field. Many departments are using extensive role-playing and force on force scenarios to form this connection, but again, this is not the requirement (also consider the 35% accuracy of the officers in Dallas).

The takeaway:

1. Required firearms training does not match the actual task or environment

2. Most training is delivered in block fashion resulting in poor retention

3. This results in poor accuracy in actual firearms usage in the field

To improve:

1. Adopt the tenants of deliberate practice

   1. Interleaved practice

   2. Over an extended time

   3. With feedback on performance

2. Adopt the ecological approach

   1. Intentionally link perception to action

   2. Introduce variability early and often

Embodied Perception

The ecological approach also adds an additional wrinkle to the importance of training that is valuable to this discussion. The approach views perception not as providing a perfect representation of the world, but as providing an accurate perception of your ability to act on the world. Perception is affected by your capabilities! This concept is referred to as embodied perception and has been demonstrated in several studies.

In one study, people were asked to evaluate how steep a stairway was by tilting an arrow to indicate the steepness of the stairway. People who were less fit, indicated that the stairway was steeper than those who were more fit. In other studies, people would indicate that the stairs were steeper if you made them tired first. People also indicated that the stairs were steeper if you made them wear a heavy backpack when making the assessment. People’s assessment of the stairway was altered by their ability to climb it! Your perception is affected by your capability.

Think about the implications this has for policing. If perception is embodied, then an officer’s perception of a situation is affected by their capability. Officers who are more skilled at use of force will perceive situations (and people) as less threatening than those who are less skilled (the fitness level of officers also matters here). This is not just a judgment call. The situation will actually look and feel different to the different officers. Suspects may appear bigger, closer, stronger, more aggressive, etc. to less skilled officers. This difference in perception may cause the less skilled officers to not only be quicker to use force, but also to escalate the level of force more rapidly.

Better trained officers will also be more confident. While overconfidence can be a problem or even dangerous, suspects are able to detect when officers are confident⁴, and this affects suspects’ interactions with officers. In short, suspects are more likely to comply with confident officers, therefore more confident officers are less likely to have to use force.

In the next post, I’ll discuss some addition implications of this review.

1. Donner, C.M. & Popovich, N. (2019). Hitting (or missing) the mark: An examination of officer-involved shooting incidents. Policing: An International Journal, 42(3), p. 474-489. Doi: 10.1108/pijpsm-05-2018-0060.

2. This book discusses a lot of the work on deliberate practice - https://www.amazon.com/Peak-Secrets-New-Science-Expertise-ebook/dp/B011H56MKS/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=deliberate+practice+by+ericsson&qid=1674239686&sprefix=deliberate+practice+er%2Caps%2C101&sr=8-1

3. This book is an excellent overview of the ecological approach - https://www.amazon.com/s?k=how+we+learn+to+move+rob+gray&sprefix=how+we+lear%2Caps%2C109&ref=nb_sb_ss_ts-doa-p_3_11

4. Pinizzotto, A.J., Davis, E.F., Miller, C.E. (2006). Violent encounters: A study of felonious assaults on our nation’s law enforcement officers. Washington, DC: FBI.