Editor’s note: This is the first in a two-part series. Access part two here.
By Chief James J. Gerace and John F. Schmitt
“BEEEEEP!”
The felony alert tones echo through the cruiser. Your officer’s attention shifts to an awaiting emergency as their hands squeeze the steering wheel with a grip so forceful it could crack walnuts.
“Units 101 and 102, respond to the area of Central and Main. A caller is reporting that she is onboard the #13 bus, where a group of juvenile males just boarded. She overheard one of them mention a gun and can see the imprint of what looks like a firearm in his waistband. The bus is en route to Crossgates Mall. Caller reports the bus is packed with passengers.”
As chance would have it, a patrol unit is in the area and picks up the bus heading eastbound on Central Avenue. Backup is five minutes away.
What does your officer do next?
What do you want them to do?
Have you ever talked about it?
If you are a chief, commander or trainer, do you know which “play” your officers would run?
Perhaps a more important question is: What have you done to guide them in their decision-making process?
- Do they initiate an immediate felony stop on a crowded bus, pointing rifles toward innocent citizens?
- Do they order the driver to pull over, step on board solo and confront a group of potentially armed teenage males in a tight aisle?
- Do they shadow the bus and coordinate with dispatch to execute a discreet evacuation strategy under the pretense of a “mechanical issue,” systematically clearing innocent riders and setting up a containment perimeter, even if it risks a foot pursuit?
- Do they tail the bus and wait for the suspects to disembark before apprehending them?
It is unrealistic to expect officers to make perfect judgments when they are facing time- and space-compressed circumstances. Stressful conditions like our bus scenario tend to preclude orderly efforts to generate and assess different options. Officers will therefore search their mental library for a satisfactory “play” to run.
The question for leadership is whether your officers have a well-developed playbook to draw from.
The illusion of rational choice vs. street reality
We all know how officers are supposed to make decisions, right? They gather all relevant information, generate three courses of action, evaluate them against “trained police academy” criteria and then execute the optimal choice.
This is Rational Choice Theory (RCT). For decades, rational decision-making models have influenced administrative and academic approaches to police decision-making. RCT has clear appeal for police brass: If information is complete and officers follow the steps, they will theoretically reach an optimal outcome.
More importantly for risk-averse managers, it can offer an administrative defense: “Those officers should have followed their training. It’s not our fault things turned out badly.”
There’s just one problem: This approach has significant limitations in the field.
Traditional rational choice models assume decision-makers can gather and evaluate relevant information before selecting an optimal course of action. On patrol, under time pressure and with all its messy ambiguity, officers often do not have the time or information required to run a multistep analytical model.
How officers actually decide: Recognition-primed decisions
Starting in the 1980s, landmark research by Dr. Gary Klein revealed that experienced practitioners, including firefighters and military leaders, often make decisions differently. Rather than systematically comparing multiple options, they rely on the Recognition-Primed Decision (RPD) model.
Rather than comparing multiple options against each other, a seasoned officer rapidly scans the environment for recognizable cues and matches the situation to past experiences. This mental pattern recognition allows them to quickly identify:
- What cues actually matter amid the noise
- What outcomes are realistic to achieve
- How the situation is likely to evolve
- What course of action is most likely to work
The officer leverages their mental library, selects a promising play and runs a lightning-fast mental simulation. If they visualize it working, they execute it. If not, they consider another option.
Experienced officers don’t spend precious seconds comparing every possible option in search of a theoretical “perfect” choice. Instead, they satisfice — selecting the first course of action that appears likely to meet the situation’s demands.
Interestingly, practitioners are rarely aware they are following this process because it happens intuitively.
Because operational decisions are often driven by pattern recognition, a primary goal of an effective decision-making training program should be expanding an officer’s mental library.
Building the playbook: Attributes of effective decision training
How, then, do you train officers to make better decisions? You give them experiences.
The more situational exposures an officer accumulates, the more patterns — and subtle variations on those patterns — they can recognize. A deeper experience base expands the number of tactical plays at their disposal.
Effective decision-skills training must therefore focus on building an officer’s internal database, not simply teaching rigid administrative steps.
While direct operational experience is a powerful teacher, it can also be painful and costly.
Fortunately, research suggests that simulated repetitions — learning from training simulations — and vicarious exposure — learning from the experiences of others — can expand an officer’s playbook with much lower consequences of failure.
Moreover, simulations do not need to be high-tech to be effective.
Effective decision-skills training doesn’t require expensive technology. In fact, high-tech equipment can sometimes interfere with learning when excessive physical details consume mental processing power that should be focused on tactical judgment.
Low-tech simulations, such as simple Tactical Decision Games (TDGs) involving nothing more than a sketch map and a paragraph of text posing a dilemma, can also be effective, as long as the decisions they require are challenging and realistic.
Five fundamentals of effective decision training
Agencies seeking to build an effective decision-skills program can develop that high-level playbook through five fundamental principles.
1. Experiential learning
The entire objective of a decision-skills program is to expand an officer’s experience base.
To achieve this, an agency provides rich, challenging scenarios in a low-stakes environment where failure carries learning value rather than disciplinary consequences.
The larger an officer’s experience base, the more patterns they intuitively recognize and the more tactical options they have at their disposal.
Officers require both breadth — identifying broad situational patterns — and depth — distinguishing subtle, nuanced variations within those patterns.
2. High cognitive fidelity over high physical fidelity
Effective decision training does not require high-definition simulators or costly equipment.
What it does require is high cognitive fidelity, replicating the mental demands, friction and uncertainty officers face on patrol. This includes incomplete information, shifting priorities, time compression and ambiguous threats.
A simple TDG needs nothing more than a sketch map, a short narrative and a tough tactical dilemma that forces an officer’s mind through the same types of cognitive repetitions required in the field.
3. Micro-dosing and varied repetitions
Tactical decision-making requires ongoing practice. A single annual eight-hour training block is unlikely to build and maintain the necessary skills.
By micro-dosing short, 15-minute TDGs into roll calls, shift briefings or downtime during in-service training days, agencies deliver steady, high-volume exposure to tactical dilemmas.
Because no two calls on patrol are identical, these repetitions must vary continuously to sharpen and accelerate pattern recognition.
4. Coaching and guided debriefs
Unguided experience can lead to negative learning, where officers internalize the wrong lessons or overlook critical tactical nuances.
Skilled instructors make learning efficient by conducting guided debriefs, highlighting missed environmental cues, identifying hidden risks and anchoring decision-making back to agency policy and core tactical doctrine.
5. Active reflection and self-explanation
Cognitive learning is reinforced when officers actively articulate why they chose a specific play.
Requiring officers to explain their rationale out loud encourages them to process the scenario deeply, translate tactical intuition into conscious reasoning and internalize the lesson.
Looking ahead to Part 2
Becoming acquainted with the fundamentals of decision training is one thing, but operationalizing a program across an entire agency is quite another. Any leader of a change effort knows that implementation is where great ideas go to die.
In Part 2, we examine how the Colonie Police Department put these principles into practice and measured their impact through an independent research evaluation.
About the authors
Chief James “Jay” Gerace is a seasoned law enforcement leader with 27 years of police service and the Chief of Police for the Colonie Police Department in New York. He has extensive experience in developing and implementing evidence-based training programs for officers, including a special focus on scenario-based training to mitigate high-risk situations. His work has been published in respected law enforcement trade publications, including the IACP’s Police Chief Magazine and the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin. He has presented in front of leading organizations such as the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.
John F. Schmitt is the CEO of ShadowBox, LLC, a company that helps practitioners in a variety of domains develop expertise through innovative cognitive skills training. During 22 years as a Marine Corps infantry officer, he pioneered the use of tactical decision games (TDGs), which have since been expanded to other domains, including law enforcement. He is the author of Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1, Warfighting, which describes the Marine Corps’ operational doctrine called maneuver warfare. He resides in Auburn, Alabama.
