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joe817 wrote:Excaliber, I think you've just accurately defined the term "burn out"(with reference to explaining complacency).

I've often wondered if and/or how law enforcement officers could maintain day after day, week after week, year after year, etc, etc. etc. The answer is most can't....unless they rededicate themselves to keeping their skills sharp.

The complacency I described could progress to burn out, which I see as the situation where one performs his job functions by just going through the motions and has to force himself to do even that. That's an extreme stage, and a very dangerous one that police supervisors need to spot early and act on quickly to prevent tragedy.

One of the most effective means of keeping officers sharp is to change their assignments and give them opportunities to develop and use new skills. Changing patrol areas from high activity to low activity areas (or the other way around), assignment to bike patrol, traffic enforcement (somebody's gotta do it), plainclothes and investigative units, etc. every couple of years goes a long way to keeping officers fresh, effective, and safe. It's much easier to do this in larger agencies than it is in small ones.

My personal observation is that leaving someone in essentially the same job (even with patrol area changes) for more than three years creates a high risk for negative changes in even the best officers. Even temporary reassignments (e.g., plainclothes to replace vacationing officers for 2 - 4 weeks) goes a long way toward keeping officers focused and fresh. The challenge is what to do with the minimally performing officer who doesn't want to do anything other than come to work, collect a paycheck, and go home. He or she doesn't perform any better with alternate assignments. But that's probably more of a selection / hiring issue and another discussion altogether.

Liberty wrote:Arms Proficiency is only one skill. Political savy, Knowledge of department policy and procedure, and understanding the law, is what gets an officer promoted. Being better than "good enough" with firearms isn't usually going to help one move up the fod chain.

While it's true that skill with firearms, if it's your only notable area of mastery, won't get you promoted, there's a good reason for that - it alone doesn't qualify you to competently lead others in high consequence situations. On the other hand, it's hardly a detriment either.

While some on the command staff may have sniffed on occasion at my interest in firearms and tactics, when the head of security for a major international organization called our agency head for a knowledgeable answer on a sticky firearms issue he was facing, guess who he called to deal with it? When the U.S. Dept of State called him to host visiting Russian police diginitaries, guess who he asked to show them around? They had a blast on our range, by the way - they'd never seen a computerized moving target system, and had never been able to fire more than a handful of practice rounds at a time back home. We gave them 9mm 5906's and boxes of ammo to play with until they got tired. When they saw our shooting techniques, they soberly observed they were glad to be our friends - and would hate to come up against us in combat. Their State Department hosts were pleased, to say the least.

Being able to confidently give knowledgeable help to high ranking folks like that in their time of need never hurt his career - or mine.

KFP wrote:

DoubleJ wrote:
worthwhile.

Something I should have pointed out during my earlier post is that the thought processes that lead some police officers to strive for excellence in firearms training as well as their other job skills, while others are happy to meet minimum requirements and leave it at that are not unique to police work. There are also factors in play in law enforcement that have very little parallel in the civilian sector.

This forum has seen multiple discussions about how much training one should continue to acquire after receiving a CHL, and how often one should carry. Some folks attend as many training courses as they can, practice religiously, read voraciously on the topic, and carry 24/7 because they truly understand that anything can happen to anyone anywhere and anytime. Then there are the folks who go to the range once every 5 years for mandatory qualifications and carry only "when they need to," however that might be determined. And then there's everyone else who falls somewhere in between.

These people and cops all come from the same basic population as police officers do, and their thought patterns are more consistent than not.

In the civilian world, it's generally assumed that police officers are much more conscious of their frequent exposure to potential danger and hone their skills accordingly. While this is certainly true of many officers, particularly early in their careers, many others who start out sharp and aware fall into the complacency trap and come to see their successful emergence from multiple dangerous situations as just the way things are and will always be - in other words, the norm.

While they understand intellectually that they can be hurt or killed, because no one has actually done that to them in the last few years, that possibility fades to the backs of their minds and they put less effort into constant preparedness and less "awareness effort" into their responses to danger. This slide into complacency is not due to ignorance or mental laziness in most cases. It's actually very difficult to maintain a consistent awareness of danger year after year and to maintain alertness to the "what ifs" on every call, even when you're sick, tired, had an argument with the spouse, or have to work a second job after your current shift. I think the phenomenon might be more accurately viewed as a form of mental exhaustion from constant exposure to violence, stress, death, and close calls over long periods of time. Give thought for a moment to what it would feel like to make good incident assessment decisions and use force aggressively and lawfully in 5 or 6 violent situations a week instead of once or twice in a lifetime. Then think what it would be like to repeat that experience every week for 25 years.

While in that weary mindset, it's easy to neglect skill maintenance and development because in your free time you just want to do something completely different and decompress. Over time it's really easy to lose critical skills and to set oneself up for walking into a situation you may not be able to get out of.

While it's easy to question what appears to be woefully inadequate use of firearms skills by officers in some well publicized incidents, the underlying reasons may be significantly more complex than laziness or a deficient training regimen.

joe817 wrote:Excellent post Excaliber. Thank you.

You're welcome. I'm glad you found it worthwhile.

seamusTX wrote:

LaserTex wrote:Please don't take offense...if I were a Police Officer, I would take a personal responsibility to be proficient with my weapon.

I'm not that easily offended.

Ideally, every police officer should be able to shoot, drive, run, wrestle, jump fences, etc., like a champion. Never having worked for a police agency, I don't know what the reality is except what I have heard and read over the years. Some forces send certain officers for advanced training. That kind of thing is expensive, and an officer who is at the low end of the pay scale may not be able to take a week off and pay for training that costs a good chunk of $10,000 when all the fees and travel are added up.

Where is Excaliber when you need him?

- Jim

Since Jim won't let me off without saying something here, I'll try to provide a bit of perspective on how something like the performance described in this post could happen and how much effort it takes to do better.

Length warning: This post is 'way long, but I hope those who take the time to wade through it will judge it to be worthwhile.

Back when I started police work (1974), "qualifications" consisted of an annual run through of the PPC (police pistol course). After several warmup rounds, a scoring round was held and everyone who passed was done. Those who didn't pass fired another round.... and another....etc. until they passed. Very few officers out of the 200 man agency did any shooting outside the required 1 day per year. Proficiency levels could charitably be described as dismal, but because shootouts were relatively few and far between in those days, the administration was OK with this because costs were kept low and the state requirements for qualifications were being met.

You can get away with lots of things on good days....until you have a bad day. On one such day in the mid '70's, members of a sizable terrorist group committed a kidnapping in our city. One subject engaged several teams of both uniformed and plainclothes officers in a running gun battle. He was wounded in the arm and captured. A few days later he overpowered his corrections guard in the county hospital and was about to execute him when he was engaged and killed in a close range gun battle by one of our off duty officers who happened to be nearby visiting an ill family member, but that's another story.

The shooting incident investigation on the first situation revealed that officers had fired somewhere north of 80 rounds of .38SPC RNL to achieve that single hit on the intended target. Needless to say, each of those other rounds also scored a hit - on an unintended target. The department bought a lot of windows, car body work, and even some refrigerators to make the local property owners whole. While the local news outlets were relatively charitable (because only the bad guy got hurt), it was not a glorious moment for the agency and firearms training was identified as an area that could use some improvement. Courses of fire and tactical exercises were upgraded somewhat, but they were still a long ways from street realistic and everyone still passed.

I was assigned to manage the firearms training program in the early 90's, one year after the city's transition to 9mm semiutos. We were seeing an increasingly aggressive use of firearms in crimes, and officers were engaging suspects more frequently. Inadequate training and increasing need for the skill is a recipe for a real bad day. I proposed a radical rewrite of our firearms training program to include the psychophysiological effects of life threatening stress, tactical movement, control of light, cover and concealment, a qualification target change from the B26 to one very similar to the current FBI Q target, and a complete redesign of the qualification course that emphasized accurate close quarters shooting from the holster in short time frames (3 shots / 2 seconds at the first stage). I also instituted a program of secondary annual training during which officers were pulled from the street and put through the qualification course in full street gear for that day, whatever that was - winter coats, rain gear, whatever - with no warmups. The first round counted for score - just like on the street.

I reported qualification failures as failures - and the few officers who thought it too much trouble to maintain basic proficiency were temporarily removed from street duty,learned that they could lose their jobs if they couldn't meet basic standards, and received individualized instruction to give them the opportunity to enhance their skills. Everyone got the message.

Many cops don't mind not being proficient with firearms, but they hate being shown to be less than proficient in front of others. The initial reaction from the troops was weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth and everything short of death threats. What I asked them to do wasn't fair. They protested that they couldn't be expected to draw their guns and fire in such short time frames - and I showed them the time analysis of incidents of firefights where the time frames were what I allowed and less. They argued it was too hard to get the gun out of the holster and shoot accurately. I asked them where they kept their guns most of the time on the street. I then asked them whether they would like to find the kinks in their weapon systems and techniques on the range where we could analyze and fix them, or during their final exam on the street - the one with no do-overs.

When they thought that one over and realized everybody was getting embarrassed by guns that didn't come out of holsters, or holsters and belts that came with the gun when it was drawn, fumbled reloads, missed shots at close range, etc., they settled down and focused on analyzing how performance failures happened and overcoming them.

Firearms training became a time to focus on improving skills, and it became highly competitive with the addition of exercises that included man on man drills that incorporated critical skills but were performed in front of the rest of the class. The peer pressure of hooting and hollering when someone messed up was enough to inspire him to go back and relearn the skill to the point where he wouldn't embarrass himself. Proficiency and safety both increased exponentially, and officer confidence jumped to match the new competence. During my remaining time with the agency we had no negligent discharges, no bad guys who should have been shot who weren't, and nobody who shouldn't have been shot who was.

This was an expensive and resource intensive effort that required major support from the department's administration. Small agencies seldom have the internal resources to design and administer a program of this type without joining forces with other agencies to pool training resources and facilities. This is a reality, but not an excuse. It takes a great deal of creativity and dedication to reach and maintain a consistent agency proficiency level that lets an aware agency head sleep at night.

Thoughtful and dedicated officers will supplement their agency supplied training with whatever they believe they need to perform successfully on the street. Many spend a great deal of time, money, and effort doing so. Just like in other professions, there are others who look upon police work as just another job and see it as the agency's problem to give them what they need. They invest as little effort as possible, and see even an annual trip to the range as a chore they'd rather skip. In an impressive demonstration of how resistant ignorance can be to education, no amount of reasoning can move them to the point where they can think through the potential personal consequences of this position, because they think all those bad things we tell them about will never happen to them.

There is no question that it is the clear responsibility of the agency to provide firearms training and qualification programs that will enable their officers to successfully manage the situations they can reasonably expect to encounter on the street. That being said, if the agency fails to do so and that failure cascades to an incident failure in the street, the officer is often the one who pays the immediate and heaviest price, wth the agency and its administration not far behind when clear neglect of a duty to train can be shown.