Editor’s Note: PoliceOne would like to thank our friends at the International Association of Law Enforcement Firearms Instructors (IALEFI) for an excellent conference in West Palm Beach, Florida last week. Watch for upcoming coverage of the event on P1TV, and in the meantime, we present this article by PoliceOne Firearms Contributor Jeff Hall, which originally appeared in The Firearms Instructor, the IALEFI magazine.
By Jeff Hall
By now, most firearms instructors in the country are aware of Dr. Enoka’s study. Enoka identified three specific mental/physical situations that would cause an involuntary press of a trigger, IF the finger were on the trigger: startle response, postural instability, and overflow effect. If you have not read Dr. Enoka’s research, you should do so, immediately.
Most of the police departments where I teach use the four basic firearms safety rules. Originally created by Col. Jeff Cooper at Gunsite, these four simple rules, if followed, preclude anyone from being injured by a firearm. They are:
1. All guns are always loaded.
2. Never let your muzzle cover anything you are not willing to destroy.
3. Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on the target and you are ready to fire.
4. Be sure of your target as well as the background.
Pretty simple, huh?
Largely as a result of Enoka’s study, police trainers across the country adopted “indexing”- keeping the trigger finger off of the trigger, straight along the frame, until the gun is up on the target and ready to fire. Indexing is a good thing; I recall my days as a young trooper, searching through buildings with my finger on the trigger of my Model 19. I recall “felony stops” with the hammer cocked, aimed at a suspect, finger on the trigger, ‘cuz we didn’t know any better.
Along the way, we also adopted the “ready” position, with the muzzle depressed to about 45 degrees, muzzle off the target, allowing us to actually see while we searched and while we challenged bad guys to stop. The rationale for a ready position was, and is, that should a negligent discharge occur, we shoot the ground instead of a person we shouldn’t.
In the last few years, a new tactic has taken root. No one seems to know where it started, who started it, or who requested it; a former FBI HRT friend of mine believes it came from a competition shooter who did some training for HRT years ago. As told to me, the rationale for this new technique was that it was much faster to get hits on target. We’ll come back to speed later.
The technique I refer to is having the muzzle up, on threat, finger “indexed”, while searching, shouting commands to suspects, etc. that all coppers do on a regular basis. I’ve heard it called “tactical ready,’ “contact ready,” “SWAT ready”… We see it on the nightly news, with patrol or SWAT officers posing for the cameras, hut-hut-hutting toward the building in question, guns up, REALLY, REALLY, TOTALLY, ABSOLUTELY ready to engage whatever threat appears. I call it stupid and dangerous.
Okay, we have Enoka’s work and we have rule #2 above. We also have research done by Dave Spaulding and by the U.S. military that shows that officers will “trigger search” when going into an unknown situation. “Trigger search” simply means that the officer, wanting reassurance that the trigger is REALLY there (did the Trigger Fairy move it in the last hour?) touches the trigger prior to entering the unknown. I don’t know how many times I’ve tugged on a static line, even though I knew that my buddy and I both checked it REPEATEDLY! Trigger search is well documented, although little has been done in scientific, empirical study. Your officers WILL place the trigger finger on the trigger in stressful situations, no matter how much emphasis is placed on “indexing.”
I recently did a Level Two (advanced) instructor course for a state training commission. One phase of the course is a search through a live-fire shoothouse; it’s done singly, in pairs, and in teams. I made a conscious effort to watch each of the thirty six shooters that went through the shoothouse. Every shooter, some repeatedly, touched the trigger during the search. I finally stopped one student who was preparing to enter the last room. I asked him what he had just done. He thought, then sheepishly answered that he’d touched the trigger. When asked why, he said he just wanted to make sure it was there.
At a NRA Tactical Handgun Instructor class on the East Coast, we did the night fire class. We were using an indoor range during the “Forty Dollar FATS” slide show. The officer approached the screen, dropped to high kneeling behind cover, and promptly put his finger on the trigger. When asked about it, he said he “didn’t know what he was getting into”, so wanted his finger on the trigger. Does any officer ever know what he’s getting into?
Bob Maule is a rangemaster for the Tacoma, WA, police department. Bob is also a master instructor for the state training commission. Bob is well aware of the indexing/muzzle up issue, and decided to observe students specifically for trigger search.
T.P.D recently conducted active shooter training for all 360 officers in the department. Bob found that approximately 70 percent, or 252 officers, touched the trigger at some point in the training, usually just before entering the unknown. Most who touched the trigger did not realize it.
A recent scientific study was completed at the University of Frankfurt, Germany. The researchers wanted to test Enoka’s theory with actual, trained police officers. A pistol was equipped with sensors that recorded each time an officer touched the trigger, even though the officers had all been trained to remain “indexed” until the pistol was on target and a decision had been made to fire. In the Frankfurt study, a full 20% of the officers touched the trigger, some repeatedly, and all denied having done so. What makes it worse is that all the officers KNEW they were being tested for trigger search!
“Well, it’s faster,” your officer argues. Not so. I’ve tested instructors from Florida to Alaska and have found that it takes .48 to .52 seconds, either from the ready or on threat and “indexed”, to get a center mass hit on a known target, using an electronic timer. Ron Avery is the director of the Practical Shooting Academy (and Firearms Columnist for PoliceOne) and a world-class IPSC shooter and trainer. Ron’s research showed about .40 seconds. Ron does not feel that running around with guns in folk’s faces is a good tactic, either.
“I strongly discourage it; it’s deadly to other operators…and it is not any faster than the positions I teach,” Ron says.
One Seattle area instructor decided to test the theory, using colored lights as the stimulus to shoot. His observations showed that it was actually faster to get a hit from the ready, because the shooter’s hands were not blocking the view of the lights, which were at belt level of the target
“It’s more intimidating!” It may be, but show me the data. With literally hundreds of police officers in documented studies and observations placing fingers on triggers when inappropriate, I’d like to see data from hundreds of criminals who only stopped because they were looking down the muzzle of a gun. The data doesn’t exist, and juries look at data, not just what the officers “feels” is right.
No one says that a police officer can’t draw a firearm and threaten the use of deadly force! We do it every day, and must continue to do it. The .48 seconds cited above is WAY better than the 1.6 to 2.6 seconds it takes most coppers to draw the service pistol and shoot. However, if drawing to a ready position to challenge and search allows just as fast a response, isn’t it better to hit the ground, not a person, when we have that negligent discharge?
There was a shooting last year in Washington state. A trooper was pursuing a traffic violator and broke off the pursuit when the violator entered a residential neighborhood. A deputy saw the violator and made a stop, pistol drawn. The passenger was negligently shot when the “indexed” officer inadvertently pressed the trigger. Another officer shot out the back window of a car when he slipped on the ice- he swore he was “indexed.” Guns don’t go off of their own free will- it takes a press of the trigger to cause it.
I encourage trainers to adopt a ready or “guard” position for all challenges and searches. Depress the muzzle to about 45 degrees, off any part of the suspect. Keep the muzzle off the target until the decision has been made to fire (rule 3); only then, go on target, on trigger, and resolve the problem. It will allow better visibility during searches, allow a full view of suspects’ hands, discourage tunnel vision, and will keep everyone safer. It may take some re-training of officers, but that’s what we do, and we shouldn’t be afraid to tackle this training issue.
Jeff Hall is a retired Alaska State Trooper. He spent over twenty years on the department, serving in patrol, major crimes, a one-man “bush” post, narcotics, warrants, and traffic. He spent eleven years on the statewide SERT team and nineteen years on the pistol team. Jeff is currently an NRA adjunct staff instructor and private trainer. Jeff holds black belts in four martial arts, and has a BA in criminal justice.
