Having just come from the ASLET convention, I can say that police training is moving forward at an ever-greater pace. For not only is the equipment continuing to improve, but so are the techniques with which they are employed.
When I was teaching full time, we thought that we were pretty high-speed guys. Gerry Smith (now heading-up Beretta’s USA’s Domestic Law Enforcement, Bill Burroughs (now one of the key people at Caliber Press, our boss Bob Hunt (supposedly retired but somehow still authoring books on battle-employed Randall Knives and I were not just “teaching” everyday but we were always out somewhere learning something “new” ourselves. But from what I saw last week about the way the things are advancing today, our past efforts pale in comparison.
Having just attended lectures by Tom Aveni (another former Smith instructor who is now with the Police Policy Studies Council, Fred Yates (a full time member of HK’s International Training Division, Phil Messina (the creator of the Modern Warrior School in New York, Dave Smith (who through the help of his wife, I believe a police officer herself, has morphed from Buck Savage to one of the most impressive stand up instructors in the country today, and Lou Ann Hamlin and Kathy Vonk (two of the best female issues and police bicycle instructors around - http://www.ipmba.org/index.htm), I must say that the trainers attending these programs and taking the material back home, will help people in ways we never dreamed of ten years ago!
But then it’s not the same world it was ten years ago. Not only do we face a true terrorist threat here in this country, but we also face domestic issues (worldwide) that would never have been considered in the past. I was in Germany sometime ago and, as fortune would have it, I was invited to a certain department’s rather “secluded” firing range. On one of the office walls, was a picture of Gary Klugiewicz in full RedMan training gear. Gary, a retired Captain from Milwaukee and a fixture within hands-on training circles, is now the head of that company’s training division.
I laughed and told the man escorting me that I couldn’t get away from such things and after laughing with me (he too, is a world traveler and knows what its like to constantly run into people when you’re away), he explained to me why Gary had been there.
My “guide” had been on the job for almost thirty years. And when he first came on, he said that the uniform itself was enough to command respect and obedience. Then, as times changed (remember that Europe was racked with civil disobedience, labor riots and terrorist activities in greater levels and for longer periods of time than we’ve ever seen here in the US), people began to seriously “act up” and act “against” the established authorities. At that point, the uniform alone was no longer enough. Vocal and minimal physical techniques became necessary to control those who broke the law.
Later, as the established governments throughout Europe began to moderate their “official” stance against such (occasionally violent) outpourings of political violence, the real criminals saw their chance. Now it wasn’t just the legitimately protesting members of the working class who were rewarded with minimal police opposition and jail time; oftentimes it was the “career” criminal as well.
This situation caused the police response to escalate further. More effective (aggressive) “hands on” techniques became necessary as did the use of impact weapons (something that the Asians had already learned) and chemical agents.
Next came the fall of Communism. And while the bulk of those freed to work and prosper within the capitalist world did so with an energy and a desire not seen since the huge waves of immigration to our own country in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, there were many others who saw this as a perfect way of getting ahead by criminal means.
A very good friend, who runs a training academy in a port city in another country, told me that their criminal demographics had shifted greatly when the wall came down. Suddenly they were dealing with people (bad people, very bad people), who had been “controlled” in ways by the Russians that they knew would never be replicated by the government in his land. Thus causing him, like my German compatriot, to use physical techniques and firearms, in ways that he never expected in years past!
Phil Messina’s class as ASLET dealt with things like this in detail. He talked about and offered techniques to deal with the criminal who acts outside of those guidelines that we have expected and accepted in the past. He made it very clear that we live in a different world today than we did a year and a half ago and that we must be prepared for it.
Dave Smith showed us examples of how many of us can sometimes unknowingly train others for failure! He inspired our group to look at what we’re doing and to recognize that our personal opinions and biases could be impairing our abilities to get necessary ideas and concepts across. “Teaching is not (necessarily) learning,” he said. We have to look seriously at accepted (not bastardized) learning theory and recognize what parts of it make sense in our (police training) applications of it. We have to take an objective view as to our collective success as police trainers!
I knew that sometimes, even kids wanted to kill me when I was on the job in Chicago but now its time to know the same thing if you’re in living somewhere in Germany (like my guide) or west of Dubuque, Iowa (like my rural relatives). Tom Aveni addressed some of this in his presentation where he emphasized our willingness to sweep “questionable police shootings” aside and not learn from them. We have to study everything, good and bad, in order to try and make people better, and safer, at what they do. We must learn in order to help others to learn.
And in doing so, we can’t overlook the sometime additional issues of those (women and smaller statured men) coming into our profession in ever greater numbers as profiled in their class by Fred Yates, Kathy Vonk and Lou Ann Hamblin last week in Ontario. This subject has been addressed for years by Cathy Graham (formerly of Glock and now a staff instructor at FLETC, and Joe Ferrera (of Southfield Michigan outside of Detroit - www.defensivetactics.com) but Fred, Kathy and Lou Ann are not only offering a full five day class on the subject back at HK but they are also studying related physical conditioning issues in depth as well.
And that’s what I hope to do here. Discuss things in enough depth so that it will cause you, the reader, to go out and investigate them further on your own. Not everybody gets sent to things like ASLET or LETC or IALEFI’s Annual or Regional Training Conferences. Not everyone can afford to go to the SHOT or IWA Shows. Trexpo has shows only on the east and west coasts. And ITOA can only accommodate so many people at their yearly Chicagoland area program. So I will do what I can to tell you about what I see or learn at these and other events so that you can decide if they are of interest and if you want follow up on them yourself.
Next month, I will talk a bit more about the organizations listed this month and how you might possibly join, learn from or make use of them.
Tom Marx’s technically-oriented column is designed to give readers and Police1 members insight from a training perspective. Tom works in marketing and product development for Uncle Mike’s Law Enforcement. He was an officer and trainer with the Chicago Police Department and later a trainer for the Smith & Wesson Academy. Please contact Tom with any comments or suggestions for articles at tomm@uncle-mikes.com.
Visit Tom’s Police1 Columnist page for more information on Tom and additional articles.