There isn’t a cop out there who doesn’t want to go home safely at the end of each shift—it doesn’t matter if you’re in patrol, corrections, investigations, or administration, we all want to “win” every confrontation. But have you given much thought as to why you want to stay safe? It is human nature to run from danger, and yet we’ve all chosen a profession where we run toward the shots, jump into other people’s fights, willingly make traffic stops not knowing what we may encounter, or work in prisons knowing that each day we’ll be dealing with nothing but convicted felons. We know that 59,000 of us will be assaulted, 16,000 will be injured, and at least 130 of us will be killed each year, and not a single one of us is going to get rich doing it, but we keep right on going back to work, hoping to come out “the winner” in each and every encounter.
In the Street Survival Seminar we talk a lot about winning. Winning confrontations and winning deadly force encounters. We don’t want you to just “survive,” we want you to WIN! physically, emotionally, and legally. In fact, the instructors work pretty hard to get you and keep you in that winning mindset throughout the seminar. In the very first hour we show you a dramatic and gut wrenching video of a young deputy who doesn’t win, who is shot to death in a cruel and senseless encounter with a madman, and then we follow it with a slide that says: “I will win because...”
We ask the students to think hard about their own “because.”
What motivates you when things go really bad?
For Corporal Lance Shipman, staring into the barrel of his own duty gun, it was thoughts of his kids combined with anger, anger that he channeled into motivation to keep on fighting.
For Deputy Jennifer Fulford, already shot ten times in an encounter with two armed felons, it was pure indignation.
“These people didn’t know me, didn’t know who I was,” she told Dave Smith in a P1TV exclusive interview (see all three parts of that interview by following the links in the sidebar to the right).
“They only see my uniform,” she said, “they don’t know if I have someone at home waiting for me or not.”
Jennifer swore she wasn’t going to die in that depressing little garage, missing the wedding she had been planning for months, and she didn’t.
U.S. Deputy Marshal Mike Thompson utilized the confidence in his own newly acquired firearms and tactical competence to defeat two armed felons intent on killing Mike and his partner during the escape attempt of the prisoner they were transporting. Mike won because he consciously and deliberately trained to win.
Even while she lay unconscious in the hospital, given almost no chance to survive the point blank bullet wound to her chest and abdomen, Officer Stacy Lim drew strength from family and friends shouting at her to survive. She also used her own belief that “it wasn’t my time” to walk out of the hospital fifteen days later with no restrictions.
Officer Tony Luketic had already overcome countless obstacles after the off duty shooting that injured his mother and nearly cost him his left arm, but his ultimate decision to truly win came one day when he couldn’t tie his daughter Bethany’s hair ribbon. Tony used his anger, his frustration, his rage, to keep moving forward, to push his body and his mind to win, and he did.
For Officer Mike Kralicek, it was his wife Carrie who provided the will to win for him following the armed encounter that nearly killed him. Carrie believed in Mike when no one else did, believed in his ability to survive, to recover, to live, and she relentlessly pushed her beliefs into the forefront until Mike could join her in their mutual fight to not only survive, but to thrive. They now travel the country teaching others to do the same.
Have you thought about what has or what will motivate you to survive? What forces you to keep going, to better yourself, to win? It’s something you need to think about, to contemplate, to rehearse, and it’s something that will change throughout your career and your life. The first time I was sure I was going to die in the line of duty, I was motivated purely by pride. I was young, single, and stupid enough to think that my parents would get over my death pretty quickly... after all, they still had my brother, didn’t they? I wanted to win because I didn’t want people standing over my flag-draped casket saying “see, I told you they shouldn’t let girls become cops,” or, “we knew she’d get herself killed.”
It was the early 80’s and I thought I had something to prove. Years later, when I gave birth to my daughter, it was she who motivated me to win. She was not only my reason to live; she was my reason to improve my skills, my awareness, my confidence, and my outlook. I needed to be not only healthy, but happy, so that I could be a good parent, a much more important job than just being a good cop.
Now, toward the end of my career, I’m back to being somewhat motivated by pride, not for me, but for my husband. After all, how would it look if the wife of legendary survival trainer Dave “J.D. Buck Savage” Smith gets killed in the line of duty? I’m not afraid to die, and I’m confident about where I’m going when I do, but I don’t want Dave to have to live with my failure to win. Besides, I’m pretty close to retirement, and I really do want that pension, but that’s not something that ever motivated me until very recently.
Things really do change as you get older, and supposedly wiser.
Whatever motivates you, write it down, talk about it, and think about it. Visualize and rehearse how it will push you to get better, to fight harder, to keep going no matter what. “Winning” doesn’t just mean not getting hurt or killed, it also means winning in the aftermath of any critical incident, both physically and emotionally. It means knowing what’s important, and who is important, in your life. It means understanding what you control and what you don’t. If you’ve already had one of those “I will win because...” moments in your career, tell me, and your fellow crimefighters, what your “because” was, tell us why you won. After all, in this brotherhood that is law enforcement, we learn best from each other.
Stay safe!
