You will make mistakes, by their standards and by your own standards as well. As your instructors, we will do what we can to make sure that you make these mistakes safely, in training.
Training is the place for mistakes.
Years ago, we designed and ran a “Confrontational Simulations” course. In a ConSim course, the goal is to present realistic, high-stress situations and force the student to make hard decisions under extreme pressure. The goal of this particular class was to bring Corrections Officers, who were accustomed to being unarmed in a relatively controlled environment, up to speed on decisions and survival skills when they were working fully armed and outside the jail.
Many of the scenarios were intense: walking into armed robberies, former inmates wanting attention (good or bad), assassination attempts on high-profile offenders. Some were designed to draw a bad decision: in one case, exactly mimicking the assassination attempt, the ‘threat’ was a reporter with a microphone.
One scenario was just an elderly lady crying on a park bench. The officers were good and compassionate people. Most who went through the scenario spent endless energy trying to engage her in conversation, or provide some sort of help. The goal of the scenario was to remind the officers that not everything is their problem.
One of the officers, who shall remain nameless, asked and talked and even pled with the old woman. He finally ordered her to quit crying and tell him what was wrong. She continued to howl and sob. He repeated the order. She kept crying.
He pulled his pepper spray and hosed her down!
We ended the scenario. The officer then had to turn to a jury of his peers (the other officers taking the course) and justify his actions. He couldn’t, of course. No reasonable officer would have done anything similar.
Neither would this officer, in real life. The situation was designed to ramp up his adrenaline. Even more, in the class setting he thought, with impeccable logic, that given a problem, his job was to find a solution. When everything else failed (and only when everything else failed), he tried force. It never occurred to him, in a classroom setting, that he was allowed to walk away, that not every situation is a situation requiring action.
You are expected and required to use the minimum level of force that you reasonably believe will safely resolve the situation.
‘Safely’ is very specific, and something hard for people raised on western movies and concepts of fair-play to grasp. I’ll hit it again in section 1.2 on the “Three Golden Rules,” but you deserve a taste here.
Real violence, real fighting, and real applications of force are not games. There is no reset button. There are no do-overs. A professional in this situation cannot afford some misguided idea of chivalry or fair play. Were the officer to indulge in that illusion, the bad guy would win half the time and go on to victimize more of the innocents the officer is sworn to protect.
At the swearing-in ceremony, when the Chief handed me my badge he said, “Once you pin this on, you are never allowed to lose. Never.”
The more force you use, the safer it is for you. Do the math. The threat* comes at you with no weapon, and you may try to wrestle with him and you might win. Or you may hit him upside the head and you may win. Or you could hit him with a club and you will probably win. Or you could pull a knife or gun and almost certainly win. The higher the level of force you use, the safer for you.
The key is that you must judge the lowest level that will safely work. An experienced officer with decades in martial arts specialized in joint locks could handle many things, safely, at a lower level than other officers.
So, officer or civilian, you do not go into a situation at the level of force in which you believe you might prevail. You go into it as hard as you need to in order to go home safely.
‘Safely,’ as you see, modifies ‘minimum level.’ It is one short sentence, but it gets very complicated, especially in application.
Lastly, to ‘resolve the situation’ can mean something different in almost any encounter. The level of force needed to stop a man from kicking another man to death may be different from the level of force necessary to stop a sniper from pulling a trigger, and will definitely be different from the force needed to get handcuffs on a drunk and drive him to detox. The goals of a Use of Force (broadly to gain compliance or get control) are extremely variable, and that modifies everything.
You are expected and required to use the minimum level of force that you reasonably believe will safely resolve the situation.
1. You and your partners go home safely at the end of each and every shift
2. The criminal goes to jail
3. Liability free
The three golden rules, first written by Dep. Paul McRedmond of the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office, must be the basis of all officer training. The fact that they exist, that they are explicitly taught, and that they needed to be stated so clearly says something about the profession.
Rule #1: You and your partners go home safely at the end of each and every shift
In most professions, staying alive and uninjured during the workday is more or less expected. Statistically, this is true for officers also. Most days, most go home fine. But some days, they don’t. They are paid to sometimes deal with less-than-fully-socialized people in volatile situations. Officers are expected to walk (or run) into places where people with more common sense are running away.
Rule #1 is a pipe dream. The only safe way to do the job is to NOT do the job. Some officers do use this strategy and get away with it. We’ll talk about Lops in “Experience,” section three. The essence of Rule #1 is not to make the job any riskier than it is. Don’t take stupid chances.
You might die, but you should never die because of your own stupidity or bravado. You should never get your partner killed because you couldn’t keep your ego in check. And you should never, ever, die in such a way that other agencies use it for training films.
A short list of things to remember:
• You are not Superman and bullets do not bounce off you. This is one of the Hollywood Effects. By the time you join a police agency, you have watched thousands of hours of television. In the television world, being the good guy seems to magically protect you from serious injury. This isn’t true. We all know it isn’t true, but seeing it a thousand times can hit the brain at a very deep level and rookies often act like it is true.
• Keep your ego in check. This is a job, not an identity. Criminals will try to bait you, or try to make you angry. If you lose control, they can manipulate the situation. It is your job to manipulate the situation. You have to do everything in your power to stay above the game, so that you can see and think clearly.
• Never take it (almost anything) personally. You are going to be interacting with people on their worst days. They will be angry, frightened, and indignant. It’s not about you. If someone needs to get his sense of masculinity back by calling you names, stay cool. It’s better than if he gets it back by beating his wife or children, which might be his normal method.
• Don’t get too excited to watch your back. This is a hard one to teach and a hard one to do. When the adrenaline hits, you will get tunnel vision and physically be unable to see things in your peripheral vision. Another factor is that attention is naturally drawn to the point of action or the greatest perceived threat. You will want to look at what is going on. Sometimes it will be your job to make sure no one comes up from behind. Even if it isn’t, make a conscious decision to look around and see if the situation has changed.
• Do not compete