ORLANDO — A police team executes a search warrant. Officers make entry, secure the location and complete the search without using force or creating problems with the neighbors. Everything goes according to plan. Except they’re at the wrong house.
“Tactical excellence? Sure. Strategic success? Not so much.”
That hypothetical, offered by Arif Alikhan during IACP 2026, captures a problem he and Thomas Datro, the Los Angeles Police Department’s director of police training and education, believe deserves greater attention: Officers can master tactical skills and memorize legal rules yet still make decisions that fail to achieve their intended purpose.
Legal mistakes can jeopardize criminal cases, expose agencies to litigation and undermine public trust. But if departments already devote considerable time to legal instruction, tactical training and policy compliance, why do these problems persist? For Alikhan and Datro, part of the answer lies in the distinction between training officers to perform tasks and educating them to reason through problems.
Alikhan, a former federal prosecutor, law professor and LAPD director of constitutional policing and policy, attended the LAPD Reserve Academy to better understand how officers are taught. He was struck by the emphasis on rules rather than the reasoning behind them. “Here’s the rule that you are expected to apply, with little explanation of why that rule even exists or what’s behind it,” he said.
Datro brings 22 years of experience as a sworn LAPD officer and sergeant. His concern is how officers learn and apply information under pressure, particularly when unfamiliar circumstances disrupt practiced responses. “We’re almost training them for a reality that they’re not going to operate in,” he said.
During their IACP session, “From Rules to Reasoning: Training Strategic and Critical Thinking for Better Outcomes in Police Stops,” the two offered a different way to think about what officers need to learn — and how agencies can help them apply that knowledge. Their presentation raised seven questions worth considering.
1. Are we training officers to remember the rules instead of applying them?
Datro described three stages of learning: encoding information, retrieving it and applying it. Police training often emphasizes the first two, he argued. Recruits memorize rules, pass examinations and demonstrate skills in controlled environments. Then they encounter something unexpected. “And then they hit the field and they have novelty that is introduced into these situations,” Datro said.
“I believe the application portion is where we’re falling short,” he added. When circumstances differ from those officers have practiced, they may default to familiar responses rather than reconsider the problem. Stress, fatigue and cognitive shortcuts can compound that tendency.
Datro illustrated the problem with one of policing’s most familiar commands: “Show me your hands.” He questioned whether officers always consider what they’re asking someone to do, particularly when they suspect that person may have a firearm. If dispatchers and witnesses have reported a gun, officers may already be primed to interpret an ambiguous movement as a weapon-related threat.
Alikhan reinforced the point with an example of officers repeatedly shouting the same command at someone who isn’t complying. “At what point do both of these officers realize that’s not working?” he asked.
For instructors, the challenge is to develop officers who can recognize when a familiar response isn’t appropriate or effective and adapt their approach.
2. Why do officers know Graham v. Connor but not the case behind it?
“How many shots were fired in Graham versus Connor?”
Alikhan posed that question to attendees about one of policing’s most familiar Supreme Court decisions. Audience members offered different numbers. The answer was none.
The 1989 decision established the Fourth Amendment’s objective reasonableness framework for evaluating excessive-force claims arising from seizures. Yet Alikhan suggested that many officers know the standard without understanding the facts and reasoning behind it. He asked how many had actually read the entire decision. “Those are vital things to understand if you’re going to apply them to different facts,” he said.
His point wasn’t that officers need to become lawyers. Understanding why courts establish particular rules helps officers recognize which facts matter when applying those rules to unfamiliar circumstances. For Alikhan, the Fourth Amendment’s emphasis on reasonableness and the totality of the circumstances makes that understanding especially important. Officers cannot anticipate every situation they’ll encounter, but they can learn how to reason through circumstances that differ from those covered in training.
3. When a driver runs, why do officers automatically chase?
Datro described a familiar scenario from recruit training: An officer conducts a traffic stop, the driver gets out and runs, and the officer immediately gives chase.
“I love doing this with some of the recruits. They’ll do a traffic stop, and the person gets out of the car and just starts running. And officers start giving chase.”
Datro pauses the exercise and asks recruits to reconsider their response. What if someone else is still inside the vehicle? What happens when officers abandon the original stop? What other risks might they be overlooking?
In some training scenarios, instructors conceal another person inside the vehicle. When officers pursue the fleeing driver, that person emerges and shoots them with a training weapon. “I see it all the time in the field, someone runs, and you just get up and start running right after them,” Datro said.
He wasn’t suggesting officers should never pursue someone who flees. His concern was that officers can become so focused on the obvious development that they overlook competing risks. Alikhan extended the example by asking a more fundamental question: Why are officers chasing the person in the first place?
The answer might involve suspected impaired driving, threatening behavior or other circumstances that make pursuit necessary. But asking why forces officers to consider their objective rather than simply react to someone running.
Datro argued that this kind of reasoning can become faster with practice. Officers don’t need to stop and conduct an elaborate analysis every time circumstances change. They need to develop the ability to identify the real issue and respond accordingly.
4. Why does policing emphasize tactics more than strategy?
Alikhan argued that policing places enormous emphasis on tactical proficiency without always connecting those skills to larger objectives. “You could be doing things, but is it for the right reason and the right purpose?” he asked.
He illustrated the profession’s enthusiasm for tactical terminology with a story from his academy experience. “When I went to the academy and I was doing EVOC, they taught me how to do a tactical seatbelt release.” He joked that he’d apparently been releasing his seatbelt strategically his entire life without realizing it.
The humor underscored a serious concern. Officers are trained to act, often quickly and decisively, but they also need to understand whether those actions advance the mission. Alikhan contrasted policing’s tactical emphasis with military education, where he said strategic thinking is introduced early to help personnel understand how individual actions contribute to broader objectives.
He argued that the distinction becomes particularly important for supervisors and executives, whose responsibilities require them to think beyond immediate activities and consider longer-term consequences. The question isn’t whether tactics matter. It’s whether officers understand the purpose those tactics are intended to serve.
5. Are we teaching the Fourth Amendment — or just its exceptions?
Alikhan and Datro applied their approach while helping the Chicago Police Department develop constitutional policing instruction focused on vehicle and pedestrian stops. They spent several weeks preparing instructors, many of whom initially questioned why they needed another constitutional policing class.
Datro recalled how Alikhan’s explanation of the Fourth Amendment’s history and purpose changed the discussion. “Why is this the rule? Why is this the law? Why is the Fourth Amendment, the Fourth Amendment? And we don’t get into that very much.”
The instructors had extensive knowledge of the law, but Datro suggested their instruction often concentrated on the boundaries of constitutional protections rather than their underlying purpose. “They were being taught, and they were teaching officers almost how to get around the limits. How do you sidestep the limits? What are the exceptions to the limits?”
Understanding why constitutional protections exist, Datro explained, helped instructors approach the material differently. Alikhan emphasized that constitutional policing shouldn’t be taught simply as a list of prohibited actions. Officers also need to understand what they can do, what they should do and why.
“They knew the material, they didn’t know how to apply it,” Datro said.
The Chicago instructors subsequently trained approximately 11,000 officers. The presenters described the experience as valuable but acknowledged that the department had not rigorously evaluated its impact on policing outcomes. Nevertheless, the experience reinforced their belief that teaching the purpose behind the law can help officers reason through situations that don’t fit neatly into memorized rules.
6. What happens when enforcement metrics become the mission?
Datro challenged the tendency to measure police performance primarily through enforcement activity, including arrests and gun recoveries. Those measures may provide useful information, but problems arise when producing the numbers becomes the objective rather than a means of achieving a larger goal.
He described how officers can become focused on recovering a gun or making an arrest without adequately considering the purpose behind their actions. Rather than simply determining whether they have legal authority to make a stop, Datro argued that officers should understand why the stop serves a legitimate policing purpose. “Not because you can, but because I should for these reasons,” he said.
That distinction becomes particularly important when enforcement activity is evaluated against broader goals such as public safety and community trust. “If we trample across public trust, if we trample across legitimacy for the metric, well, we’re losing the purpose as to why we’re doing it,” Datro warned.
Alikhan connected that reasoning to the public’s expectations of police. “Public trust is not about popularity. Public trust is about people who believe that you and your officers are doing the right thing, the right way, and for the right reason.”
For police leaders, the challenge is to ensure that performance measures reinforce the judgment and behaviors they actually want officers to demonstrate.
7. Are we teaching officers to justify decisions instead of making better ones?
Alikhan argued that police instruction and supervision often emphasize an officer’s ability to articulate and justify an action after it occurs. But explaining a decision afterward is different from developing the reasoning needed to make a sound decision in the first place.
“When you’re debriefing somebody, ask about the reasoning and their decision making, not about their justification, because that’s after the fact,” he said.
He recommended borrowing a framework commonly taught in law school: IRAC, which stands for issue, rule, analysis and conclusion. The process begins by identifying the actual problem, determining the applicable legal rule, analyzing the circumstances and reaching a conclusion.
Alikhan illustrated the distinction with a hypothetical involving a person carrying a gun. The presence of a gun is a fact. The more important question is whether the person poses an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury. Framing the issue correctly helps officers identify which facts and legal principles matter.
The same approach can be incorporated into scenario training, supervisory reviews and debriefings. Rather than asking officers only to explain why their actions were justified, instructors can explore how they identified the problem and arrived at their decisions.
Alikhan encouraged attendees to begin with something manageable: a single lesson, a training scenario or a supervisory debriefing. Examine whether it teaches officers to identify the issue, understand the applicable rules and reason through their decisions.
The shift doesn’t require abandoning legal instruction or tactical proficiency. It requires connecting those skills to the purpose they are intended to serve. And Alikhan offered one practical place to start: When reviewing an officer’s actions, ask about the reasoning that preceded the decision — not simply the justification that followed it.
