Improvement is a process
We need to improve our method of teaching people how to administer deadly force when it is called for. A good place to start is with the training of police officers.
In America, as in many nations, the single most likely group to be called upon to lawfully administer deadly force is law enforcement. We have armed our police forces here since the people of Boston founded the first professional police force in America in 1838. We have done so with the tacit understanding that the weapons are there for a reason. If a society arms its police, it does so with the understanding that the officers may well be called upon to use those weapons, lawfully, to visit potentially lethal force upon other people.
In the modern era, we understand (or did until recently) that the police are, generally speaking, the good guys. In turn, their use of deadly force on occasion, while regrettable, was seen as inevitable. Such use could be lawful, unlawful, mistaken, maybe even malicious. As a society, we accepted this as the price of doing business and built organizational structures to investigate and deal with any such usage. We knew that it is an imperfect world, that deadly force was being implemented by actual people in the real world, and being done so in what the US Supreme Court recognized as exceedingly difficult circumstances.
Most famously, in Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386 (1989), the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, in saying that any use of force by law enforcement must be reasonable, wrote in the majority opinion:
“The calculus of reasonableness must embody allowance for the fact that police officers are often forced to make split-second judgements – in circumstances that are tense, uncertain and rapidly evolving – about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation.”
While the courts have long recognized the difficulties and imperfections inherent to the implementation of deadly force by police officers, society today is increasingly less likely to accept anything less than perfection in these situations. To make matters worse, the definition of “perfection” is a moving target, currently all too often dependent on wide-ranging social pressures and political aspirations.
As a society, we have a general duty to make certain our officers are as well-trained as we can make them before we ask them to go into harm’s way. We must constantly strive to improve the way officers are taught to administer deadly force. They are doing so in our collective name, after all. I would argue that deadly force application is the single greatest responsibility we burden our police officers with. To do less than our very best when it comes to training our officers in this area is nothing more than an abdication of a supreme moral duty. If we are going to ask an officer to deliver a level of force, on behalf of society at large, that can reasonably be expected to cause death or serious bodily harm, we owe it to them and everyone in the community to train them to the best of our ability.
We have come a very long way in this realm over the last century, to be sure. Deadly force training today, versus where it was in the early 20th century, is excellent. That is not to say it is perfect or that it cannot be improved. And since we CAN do better, we MUST do better.
Naturally, that is not as easy as one might think. Cops, in my experience at least, tend to be fairly hidebound, set in their ways kind of people. This is true from the administrators and law enforcement leaders who approve training, to the law enforcement instructors who provide that training, to the individuals who receive the training. By and large, as a profession, we do not happily or readily adopt change.
However, if we are going to bring about real improvements in this area, one key group of stakeholders is the police themselves. They are the pointy end of this metaphorical stick, after all. It is they who have to take the training, they who have to internalize the training, and they who are the ultimate policy actors who must implement the training. If they do not buy off on changes and improvements, the status quo will continue to blunder forward.
Should the officers support the training improvements, making those changes and seeing them put into practice outside the training environment will be a much smoother process. Change implementation is difficult in the best of circumstances, which is arguably not what we have on our hands today. The difficulty of the endeavor, however, should not bar the attempt. We have to try, and we should start by discussing just what it is we want to do.
Since we accept the idea that police will occasionally be forced to implement deadly force in the course of their duties and that they must therefore be instructed on all the complexities thereof, we need a starting point. When it comes to deadly force instruction in the United States, this usually means firearms training. If deadly force is called for, the law does not presume to instruct or dictate how it should be administered, but firearms are the most often accepted methodology and current training supports this position.
As a general statement, firearms instruction in law enforcement academies teaches officers to handle their firearms safely and to pass the departmental qualification courses. Due to very real-time and budget constraints, few departments can teach beyond this basic level of instruction at the academy level. The law and policy surrounding deadly force usage is often covered in a legal training block. This is, by and large, about it when it comes to deadly force training for the vast majority of law enforcement officers during the academy. Some organizations do a bit better, some do a bit worse. Naturally, within even this basic level of instruction at a given academy, quality can vary from class to class, depending on numerous factors.
When it comes to fighting with a firearm, however, there is so much more involved. This is the firearms equivalent of teaching someone to get a small plane off the ground, circling the airfield a few times, and then landing it safely again. An impressive feat, to be certain, but then saying this person is now a combat pilot and ready to get into a dogfight on their own is ludicrous. We need to teach our officers to fight, and win, with their firearms because that is precisely what we expect them to do when we arm them and send them into the streets.
The foundation of law enforcement gunfighting training should be taught in a unified block of deadly force instruction starting at the academy. Anyone who has attended a police academy in the last 50 years is familiar with the instructional block concept. We teach blocks of instruction on just about everything we instruct police officers on. Car stops? Domestic violence intervention? Report writing? There’s likely a block of instruction on these in just about every police academy in the country. A deadly force instruction block? Not so much. This is even though the use of deadly force, in the moment and without prior judicial review or sanction, is arguably the single greatest responsibility we place on our officers.
What would such a deadly force training block look like? I suggest that it would encompass the mechanics, law, ethics, and psychology of deadly force employment, taught as a holistic, interwoven block of instruction. Each could then be taught as part of the whole, complementing one another, working to support the high-stress, high-stakes, high-speed critical incident judgment and decision-making that goes into any use of deadly force, as well as mere firearms accuracy.
That decision-making element of gunfighting is absolutely critical, by the way, though it is very rarely given nearly enough time in training. Officer Tony Peterson is quoted in Deadly Force Encounters, a book by Dr. Alexis Artwohl and Loren W. Christensen, as saying, “Pulling the trigger is the easy part. It’s making the decision to shoot that’s hard.” Our training on deadly force should recognize this fact and address it.
Along the way, improvements to each block could be made and implemented, both when originally established and as relevant improvements are made as time goes on. Let’s take the easy road and look at firearms instruction as an example.
As a profession, we do a pretty great job of teaching pure marksmanship. At the same time, we do a less stellar job of teaching gunfighting to new officers. This is a subtle but critical distinction. Like I mentioned above, it is the difference between teaching someone to fly a plane and teaching someone to fight with a plane. There is a huge gap between the two.
Typical law enforcement firearms qualification courses are performed in relatively benign weather, on safely run, dedicated ranges with specific firing points, and known target locations. The course of fire and the actions of everyone involved, including the targets, are well-known and rehearsed extensively beforehand. Officers are usually well-rested, uninjured, and thoroughly briefed before taking to the field. There are no uninvolved people on the range and certainly no live humans between the shooters and their targets. All actions on the range are tightly controlled and dictated by dedicated safety officers who are present to ensure the range is operating as smooth and safe as possible. Everyone knows when the shooting is to begin and when it is to end. If someone has a weapon malfunction or fails the course of fire, they are generally allowed to try again in order to pass with the required score, possibly after some remedial training and practice. Targets may remain stationary or move slightly, albeit in a very specific, largely predictable place, speed, and time. The entire activity is closely akin to a line dance in which everyone present knows the steps and how to perform their specific tasks.
This has very, very little to do with how we know gunfights actually happen.
Given the vast disparity between how law enforcement firearms qualifications are typically currently conducted and the known realities of a gunfight, the question that begs to be answered is why do we do it this way? If we know that we test firearms skills in a way that bears little resemblance to how those firearms will be used to defend an officer’s life, then why are we doing it this way? My theory is that we conduct qualifications the way we do largely to insulate the parent agency from costly lawsuits more than to ensure the survival of our individual officers. That is not good enough.
While every aspect of the “average” gunfight cannot be mimicked in the training environment, we can certainly get closer than we are now. And we should.
