Law enforcement invests significant time and resources teaching officers how to perform. Academies teach tactics, communication, decision-making and legal principles. In-service instructors reinforce those skills, while scenario training gives officers opportunities to make decisions under pressure, receive feedback and try again.
We spend a great deal of time discussing how to make that training better, more realistic and more applicable to what officers actually encounter on the street. Eventually, however, the training ends and the officer returns to work. What happens next may ultimately matter as much as what happened during the training.
An officer can leave a well-designed training program understanding the value of communication, tactical patience and sound decision-making. He may have demonstrated those abilities repeatedly during scenario training and received excellent coaching from instructors.
But those lessons now have to survive contact with the working environment. The academy or training unit may establish the standard, but field training officers, supervisors, peers and organizational culture will have an enormous influence on whether that standard continues to develop.
This article is part of a five-part series on building officer judgment that holds up under pressure and under review. Read the full series:
What happens when nothing happens?
Consider a young officer responding to an agitated person during an otherwise ordinary call. The officer recognizes that immediate action is unnecessary, creates some distance and begins communicating. He listens, establishes rapport and allows enough time for the person to make a better decision.
At the appropriate moment, the officer acts decisively and resolves the situation safely. There is no use of force, no injury, no pursuit and no remarkable body-camera footage destined for social media. The officer simply handled the call well.
What happens when he returns to the station may be more important than we realize.
Perhaps his field training officer recognizes what occurred and tells him that he did a good job giving the person time without surrendering control of the situation. Maybe a supervisor later asks why he chose to wait rather than immediately intervene.
That short conversation gives the officer an opportunity to explain what he was seeing and why he believed time was helping him. In doing so, the supervisor is reinforcing not simply the outcome, but the judgment that produced it.
There is another possibility, of course. Nobody says anything because nothing happened.
That possibility deserves our attention because law enforcement has become very good at examining encounters when something goes wrong. Uses of force are reviewed, pursuits are reviewed, complaints are investigated and critical incidents may be examined frame by frame.
There are good reasons for all of that, and those reviews can provide tremendous opportunities for learning. But if we only study officer performance when something goes wrong, we may overlook thousands of opportunities to learn from what officers are doing right.
Successful de-escalation frequently produces an absence of drama. The difficult person voluntarily sits down. The angry driver lowers his voice. The domestic dispute never becomes a fight. The emotionally distressed person eventually agrees to walk to the ambulance.
Perhaps most importantly, an officer recognizes that another 30 seconds of communication is helping and continues talking, or recognizes that those 30 seconds have stopped helping and changes tactics.
None of these incidents are likely to become memorable stories told around the station, but they are examples of officers exercising the judgment we say we want them to develop.
What are officers continuously learning?
We would never expect firearms proficiency to survive simply because an officer demonstrated it in the academy. We provide recurrent training because we understand that physical and technical skills deteriorate without practice.
Communication, judgment and de-escalation deserve similar attention, but maintaining those abilities does not always require another formal training day. Some of the best opportunities for continuing that training may already be occurring every day on our streets.
When I attended the New York State Police Academy early in my career, the phrase “Continuous Improvement and Learning” was part of the academy’s philosophy. At the time, I largely understood that idea in the context of formal training and professional development. More than two decades of teaching and working with officers has given that phrase a broader meaning for me.
Continuous learning does not stop when officers leave an academy or training classroom. It happens every day, whether an organization deliberately manages it or not. Every agency, in that sense, has continuous learning. The more important question may be: What are its officers continuously learning?
Officers can learn that patience is weakness, that asking another officer for an opinion demonstrates uncertainty, or that communication is simply something we do until we are legally justified in taking action.
They can also learn that experienced officers think before they act, that changing tactics is not indecision, and that communication is a tactical competency.
Both environments continuously teach officers. One reinforces the standards established in training, while the other can gradually teach officers away from them.
Turn everyday performance into learning
Body-worn cameras have given modern law enforcement something previous generations of instructors could scarcely have imagined: an enormous library of actual officer performance. Every shift produces examples of communication, positioning, decision-making, emotional control, tactical patience and problem-solving.
Yet we understandably tend to view body-camera footage through an accountability lens and frequently look at it because something occurred that requires review. There may be tremendous training value in deliberately looking at some of the incidents where nothing went wrong.
Imagine an FTO watching five minutes of an ordinary call with a recruit and asking a few questions:
- What did you see when you arrived?
- Why did you move to that position?
- Why did you stop talking and let him vent?
- At what point did you realize he was beginning to cooperate?
- What would you have seen or heard that would have caused you to change tactics?
A conversation like that does not require a lesson plan, a training facility or an eight-hour block on the schedule. It simply requires someone willing to turn experience into learning.
The incident occurred in real time. The learning can occur in slow time.
This also reminds us that teaching officers is not something done exclusively by people assigned to a training unit.
A sergeant who recognizes good judgment and explains why it was good is teaching. An FTO who asks an officer to articulate the reasoning behind a decision is teaching. An experienced officer who explains to a younger officer why a particular approach worked is teaching.
Those small conversations accumulate over the course of a career and help determine whether formal training becomes lasting professional behavior.
From training to professional habit
None of this means encouraging officers to talk indefinitely when circumstances require action. Tactical patience remains tactical because it serves an objective.
Time is useful only while it improves the officer’s position, increases available options or reduces unnecessary risk. When circumstances change, good judgment may require immediate and decisive action.
We are not trying to create officers who always slow things down. We are trying to develop officers who recognize when slowing things down helps and when it does not.
That ability cannot be created by policy alone, nor can it be placed entirely on the shoulders of academy and in-service instructors.
It has to become part of how officers talk about police work and how supervisors coach performance. The classroom can introduce concepts and scenarios can provide opportunities to practice them, but eventually every instructor has to hand the officer back to the organization.
What happens after that handoff determines whether training becomes a temporary lesson or a professional habit.
Exceptional policing is rarely defined by a single dramatic moment. More often, it is built through hundreds of ordinary encounters in which officers repeatedly practice judgment, communication and tactical decision-making.
If agencies want those skills to survive, we have to notice them, discuss them and coach them. When officers perform them well, we should take the time to recognize not only that something worked, but why it worked.
Training can teach the standard. Culture determines whether it survives.
