Police Shootings Aren't Scripted-So Why Is Our Training?

As demonstrated in the video, many police shootings occur suddenly, with suspects initiating attacks on officers. The suspect has the freedom to act unpredictably, while the officer must rapidly assess the situation and react. These encounters unfold in seconds, demanding quick, decisive responses in the face of resistance.

Yet, most police firearms training occurs in controlled environments with scripted drills that lack the complexity of actual incidents. While force-on-instructor scenarios are often used to introduce some realism, they remain limited in scope and fail to truly reflect the fluidity and resistance officers face on the street. Compounding this issue, these scenarios usually receive significantly less training time than static range sessions.

In my eyes, this is equivalent to sending someone into a professional boxing match when the only training they have done involves hitting bags and hand pads. No one does this! Every boxer does a lot of sparring before engaging in professional fights! Yet, we put police officers on the street and expect them to be able to successfully navigate a deadly force encounter when they have only done the equivalent of hitting bags and sparring with their coach in very scripted scenarios.

What Do We Need for Training to Transfer?

What should we be doing? I am going to invoke EcoD and the Constraints-Led Approach here (you knew it was coming). One of the key elements of the CLA is representative design. The basic principle here is that if you want your training to transfer to the real world, training must be like the real world in specific ways. I’ll detail these below.

First, effective training must include the cues (information) that will drive the trainee’s actions in real life. Police shootings occur because of the actions of the suspect. Specifically, officers should use deadly force only when they believe that the suspect’s actions place the officer or another in danger of serious bodily injury or death. Obvious cases include suspects shooting at officers or charging with a knife at close range. However, case law provides numerous other examples of how complex these encounters can be. I have never seen the cues that officers will use on the street well represented on a firearms range. Most of the targets that officers shoot are only vaguely shaped like people, much less being armed. At best, the target’s threatening behavior is to turn from facing 90 degrees away from the officer to facing the officer. In many cases, the threatening behavior is the beeping of a timer or a trainer yelling “Threat!” While these create a stimulus to start the trainee’s action, they are not the cues that the officer must use on the street to guide their decisions (although I feel really bad for the suspect who is being held at gunpoint by the police and suddenly yells “threat!").

Second, on the street, officers are going to make choices before a shooting occurs, during the shooting, and after that all have an impact on how the event will unfold. Before a shooting, these will include how the officer approaches the scene, where they choose to stand, and how they interact with the suspect. When the officer decides to use force, these will include what force to use, whether and where to move, and when to stop using force. After, the officer might move to a better tactical position, call on the radio, and/or render aid to the suspect. In an actual shooting, officers will have lots of choices to make and many ways they can successfully achieve their goal(s). Some choices will be more effective than others, but success depends on having the flexibility and adaptability needed to match the officer’s capabilities with the situation rather than executing a single optimal solution. Typical firearms practice does not allow either flexibility or adaptability. You are told to stand in a particular place and fire a fixed number of rounds at a specific place(s) on the target(s).

Building on the importance of decision-making in use-of-force situations, the third item needed for transfer is that trainees must be able to connect their perceptions to their actions. I see the suspect doing X, so I do action A, this causes the suspect to do Y, so I do B, and on and on. In the literature, these are called perception-action loops or linkages. On the street, the suspect pulls a gun and starts to point it at the officer, the officer moves laterally, draws, and starts firing, the suspect goes down, the officer stops firing and quickly looks around to make sure that there are not any more threats. The officer’s actions are driven by their perceptions of what is happening and the officer’s actions affect what is occurring. The officer sees those effects and responds accordingly. Again, this is largely absent on the range. There is a stimulus to start shooting, but this has nothing to do with what would make you shoot in the field. Your actions do not cause the target to do anything. You stop shooting because you were told to shoot a certain number of shots. Why that many shots? The instructor may have a reason, but you probably don’t know it.

How Do We Work These Into Training?

While there are a few things that can be done to improve the representativeness of range training (like having trainees make shoot/don’t shoot decisions using realistic targets), ultimately, range training simply cannot capture the intricacies of police officers interacting with suspects. Also, from a safety point of view, you cannot train suspect/officer interactions with real firearms.

Scenario-Based Training (SBT) has long served as a bridge between static firearms training and real-world encounters. In SBT, simulated firearms (and other weapons) are substituted for actual weapons and instructors are generally used to act out the roles of suspects/bad guys. This allows SBT to reflect something that is much closer to what officers will face on the street. I believe strongly in this type of training and it is at the core of what we do at ALERRT, but what I want to argue for here is to take the next step in the evolution of SBT. That step is to draw from Ecological Dynamics (EcoD) and the Constraints-Led Approach (CLA) to enhance the impact of SBT.

If you want to improve the likelihood that firearms training will transfer to actual shootings, it must be lively. The concept of liveliness began in the combat sports world. The basic idea is that if you are trying to train someone to fight another person, that training must capture the uncooperative and unscripted nature of actual fighting. Hitting bags or drilling techniques against cooperative partners will not teach the trainee the key things they need to succeed. Resistance and variability are needed.

Trainees must engage with live resistance to learn how to act effectively. This doesn’t mean they are thrown into a ring for an uncontrolled brawl. The training is instead constrained so that they are working on something that still has the key elements of the combat sport, but is small enough that the trainee is not overwhelmed. Activities are also designed to minimize injury potential. I’ve linked to some examples of this here and here - and again, people are having success with this in the combat sports world.

Police shootings are another type of fight between two (or more) people. As I discussed above, police shootings are not simply about the physical action of firing a weapon. Instead, they involve whole sequences of actions before, during, and after the shooting that matter. The only way for trainees to learn to navigate these situations is for them to experience the situations in training. The only way to ensure that the information and feedback that they are getting represents the real world is for the training to be unscripted and uncooperative.

To better illustrate these concepts in action, let’s examine a practical training scenario. Any good scenario must start with a goal. For this scenario, lets say we want to teach officers how to handle a “report of a suspicious person” type call. Two trainees will participate in the scenario. One is the officer and the other the suspect. Next, we set intentions for the trainees. The officer’s intention is set by the call - check out the suspicious person and see if he is engaged in criminal behavior. We can choose from a wide variety of intentions for the suspect but lets make it direct and say that the suspect is a bad guy that wants kill the officer. The officer is equipped with training versions of his normal gear and the suspect is given some sort of simulated firearm (like a Glock 17T) that he can conceal anywhere on his body or not. Let’s also constrain the suspect to go down after being hit twice in a critical area (head or torso). Officers are constrained to never die, but to always fight through whatever happens. Then we have to pick a way to start the scenario. Lets say we put the suspect in a dead end alley and the officer around the corner from the alley. Then we say go. The trainees can do what they want within the safety constraints we set (like no shooting at closer than X feet away). We can declare a suspect win if he gets first shots on the officer, and an officer win if he gets two critical shots on the suspect before being shot.

Now consider the many ways this scenario could unfold. Some suspects will position themselves near the corner, while others may take a position farther back. Some will keep their weapon concealed, while others may have it ready. The officer will quickly learn how their actions influence outcomes—taking a tight corner might mean getting ambushed, while slicing the pie could offer better control. Both trainees refine their skills: the officer reads cues and adapts, while the suspect learns what makes an ambush more or less effective and this can inform how they approach the situation as an officer. Each repetition brings new insights and adjustments, reinforcing long-term skill development and improving decision-making under stress.

Scripted force-on-instructor scenarios offer some benefits, but their predictability limits the range of experiences trainees encounter, reducing their effectiveness in preparing officers for dynamic real-world encounters. Also because the instructor is not trying to win, they might give off false actions or reactions that can teach the trainee to look for the wrong things.

This type of training naturally creates real selection pressure, reinforcing the necessity of adaptable decision-making under realistic conditions. You are fighting someone, and they are fighting back. They don’t want to let you win. If what you are doing works in this type of training, it is more likely to work on the street. Also, your opponents are getting better over time which means that what works will also be narrowed over time.

Instructors can adjust any of the constraints to focus on specific goals while maintaining the unscripted and uncooperativeness of the scenario. Want to work on identifying concealed weapons or handling ambush situations, adjust the suspect’s starting conditions. The possibilities are limited only by the instructor’s creativity.

But Is This Firearms Training?

That depends on how you define it. If firearms training is only about operating the firearm and punching holes in targets, then probably not. But if firearms training is about learning to use deadly force in the real world, then I would say, “Yes!” We are teaching the trainee the whole process. Also notice, that we can make tweaks to the scenario to make it an empty hand control or an unfounded call situation. This means that the trainee does not enter the scenario knowing that it will be a shoot the bad guy scenario (just like real life).

While this approach significantly enhances realism and decision-making skills by immersing trainees in dynamic, high-pressure scenarios, it does come with tradeoffs. We still want the trainee to be able to detect when they have achieved proper barrel alignment. Some simulated firearms are probably better for this than others. The Glock 17T for example fires actual pellets that behave similarly to real bullets (at least at short ranges and when the barrel is clean). Meaning that when you hit the suspect, the gun was properly aligned. Many of the laser based systems use cone lasers and a limited number of sensors that may not give you as accurate feedback about barrel alignment. But using projectiles requires more protective gear than the laser systems, and this protective gear makes communicating and reading a person’s expressions more difficult. So you lose something there.

Being hit with projectiles enhances training realism through pain-based feedback, but excessive padding or repeated exposure can dull this effect, reducing its impact on physiological responses. Many of the laser systems include devices that deliver shocks when the trainee is hit. I have never seen anyone acclimate to these.

While many simulated firearms feature moving slides, none of them replicate the forceful recoil of a real firearm, making it difficult to get accurate feedback on recoil control and follow-up shot speed.

My point here is that all the current simulated weapon systems have limitations and therefore, there is always a trade off. Someday someone might create a system that gives accurate barrel alignment information and accurately simulates recoil, but until then, we will always be giving something up to get more liveliness.

As I have mentioned before, I am not saying that there is no place for range training. What I am saying is that we need to give lively SBT much more prominence. At this point it is speculation, but I can picture effective firearms training where the students spend their first few hours on the range (preferably over multiple days) learning whatever is required for their state qualification and then pass it (I have seen brand new shooters pass qualifications tests with only 4 hours of training many times), and most of the rest of their firearms training is done using the type of lively SBT activities that I discussed above. Students would still touch the range occasionally, and I would have them doing some shoot house work, but the rest of the time would be spent on police shooting scenarios. These create real selection pressure that ensures officers develop the adaptability and decision-making skills that are crucial for success in real-world encounters.

So there it is—I’ve stepped onto the third rail and made my case: more range training isn’t the answer. We’ve tried that for decades. If we truly want officers prepared for real-world encounters, we must prioritize dynamic, unscripted, and adaptive training. The streets don’t follow a script—neither should our training. The more unpredictable and resistant the training, the more prepared officers will be when lives are on the line.

In the next post, I will address the most common objection that I hear about using lively SBT for firearms training.