Officers can’t withdraw and wait for SWAT if there isn’t any; they have to be able to respond themselves. They can’t wait for EMS to control a victim’s bleeding - or their own - if the ambulance is 45 minutes away on a good day. How do they gain advanced skills when a basic police academy crams dozens of subjects in as few as 10 weeks, and that’s all the training they get? Who trains leadership skills or new instructors when there’s no budget for travel or training, or filling the vacant shift?
These are questions faced every single day by the majority of departments in the US: the small ones, the remote ones, the ones policing rural areas. John Chapman believes he has the answer, in the form of low- and no-cost training developed specifically for rural officers.
Chapman is the executive director and lead trainer of Task Force 70 (TF70), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit named for the 70% of law enforcement agencies that are small, many with fewer than 10 officers. His partner, retired Secret Service Senior Special Agent Steve Burris, coordinates curriculum and directs TF70’s Patrol Institute, a think tank for developing long- and short-term study plans. Additionally, TF70 fields six part-time instructors, each with more than 20 years of law enforcement experience. They deliver training designed to improve safety, effectiveness and professionalism for officers who too often have minimal training after academy graduation.
As he trained officers in a variety of settings for decades, Chapman realized how many officers were from small agencies and how many of those were under-trained. “The average wage for these officers is $17 an hour, and the average population they serve is around 10,000,” he said. Many are from towns even smaller than that. “Their training keeps falling behind, with more mandates being passed but fewer resources.”
A model designed to remove the cost barrier
He also recognized that those same officers face complex and violent threats just like urban officers, just with fewer tools to respond. Chapman set about finding ways to correct the training shortfall, by traveling to the officers for hands-on classes, teaching remote classes for academic subjects, and leveraging corporate sponsors and grants to mitigate costs. In addition, Chapman intends to have a 17-acre physical training facility completed in Humphreys County, Tennessee by summer 2027. “We have had a ton of industry support from companies, with equipment and firearms,” Chapman said. “We run on a three-layer fundraising model. First, there are small monthly donors, then industry donations and then large foundational donors for a long-term foundation.”
Expanding the reach of rural training
While TF70 currently is training a few hundred officers a year, the completed facility is intended to be capable of hosting more than a thousand each year. Through private donations and corporate sponsorships, costs from tuition and travel to ammunition and shift backfill will be covered, making advanced training accessible for officers from small departments with strained budgets.
Live virtual classes will continue for topics like patrol leadership and instructor skills and methodology for patrol training. Those are small classes of up to five students that meet online and encourage interaction and discussion with instructors and other students. Study and projects are assigned for completion between meetings. Each class runs six to eight weeks.
Building skills around five critical areas
TF70 builds training on a framework that Chapman calls “The Big Five.” The first of these is Constitutional Judgment. It’s a module developed with and certified by Hillsdale College, intended to teach the original intent of the Constitution as it applies to real-world, real-time decision making in law enforcement. Next is rescue marksmanship, teaching precise, decision-based shooting for officers responding to hostage situations and other complex incidents. The third is breaching, a place where Chapman has observed that training deficits especially result in casualties. Next is emergency medical skills, with the understanding that immediate EMS response in rural areas is unlikely. Most rural officers acquire basic Stop the Bleed skills in the academy. TF70 takes that farther into the TCCC realm, emphasizing that Tactical Combat Casualty Care is a perishable skill requiring repetition and practice. Last is hands-on coursework in tactics. Chapman prioritizes a simple methodology that can be effective in any environment, and is easily retained despite practical limitations on training time. The new training facility will especially benefit the students in these hands-on classes.
“Law enforcement is receiving less funding and expected to be capable of more responsibilities today. This class helped prioritize and train the most beneficial topics efficiently. The virtual nature also allows more flexibility.” — Deputy Richard Lidell, Morgan County IN
Chapman has trained probably thousands of officers since he began his own career in the early 1990s. He’s thinking big with TF70’s new project, and if the Tennessee facilty succeeds, hopes eventually to expand farther west, bringing training closer to officers for whom travel time and expense can be significant barriers.
For Chapman, the need became particularly clear when he met a young rural officer who had sought out one of TF70’s free classes after hearing about the organization on YouTube.
“He’d never had any training since the academy so he sought us out,” Chapman said. “It was a free class, he took it on his own initiative, and he was just overwhelmed when I talked with him about it, discovering how untrained he was in everything from marksmanship to basic Constitutional understanding.”
It is the kind of gap Chapman hopes TF70 can help address: officers working in communities where resources may be limited, but the situations they are expected to handle are not.
