How well-trained are our police?

Phaedrus · 2019-04-14T06:06:03.070Z

Police officer 'excused' after mistakenly using his gun instead of his Taser...

A small-town Pennsylvania police officer will not face charges after shooting an unarmed man during a struggle because the officer honesty believed he was using his Taser at the time, not his service weapon, the Bucks County district attorney’s...

This is not an anti-police or “some lives matter” thread. I saw a 60 Minutes story some years ago about an expensive ($100K+) but effective training course designed to help officers respond coolly and rationally even under extreme stress. It seems worth it, to me, to avoid this kind of ■■■■ up. I have trouble understanding how you can’t tell the difference between YOUR taser and YOUR gun, unless you have the yips. The training course puts officers into dozens of these scenarios, simulating reality as much as can be.

This is the kind of law enforcement spending I would gladly see MY tax dollars used for.

TriggerWarning · 2019-04-14T09:04:03.938Z

Every police officer in the country will tell you they need more training but there isn’t enough money or staffing for it. Every officer in training means an officer not working the streets which means either paying OT or running the shift short.

As to mixing up the taser with a gun, its really not hard to understand. If you have trouble understanding how they could mess it up then think about the last time you were getting ready to leave home but suddenly couldn’t find your keys, or cell phone, or sunglasses. You frantically look for a bit only to realize you had them in your hand the whole time. You got distracted and failed to notice this obvious thing under highly normal, non stressed, mundane circumstances. It happens to all of us.

Now imagine a super stressful fight where your adrenaline is maxed like happens with cops. You lose 80-90% or more of your perception as the fight / flight syndrome kicks in. You go to grab for your taser but because your more used to drawing your gun due to the exponentially more training you get with it you draw the gun.

Its horrible when it happens but its also unintentional every single time. There was an incident 10 years or so ago in San Francisco where Oscar Grant was shot and killed by an officer who thought he had his taser. There were nearly ten different videos of the incident from cell phones and the like and they’ve all been studied extensively. From them its 100% clear that the officer thought he had his taser because of the following:

He stepped back from Grant to create distance. Distance is your enemy with a gun as if you were going to shoot him then you would do it point blank. But its necessary with a taser as you need at least 12 inches of spread between probes for a taser to be effective. He was creating space for the probes to spread.
He can be seen flicking his right thumb along the slide area of his gun. He was carrying a Glock and there is nothing on a Glock in this area so there is no reason for him to do this except that this is where the on / off switch on a Taser is at. He was clearly trying to turn his Taser on.
He was utterly and absolutely befuddled after he shot and this is apparent on some of the videos as he tried to figure out what just happened.

TriggerWarning · 2019-04-14T09:13:51.191Z

And a 100K training? LMAO. Thats five times my departments (100 officers) total annual patrol training budget for all of us.

The money just isn’t there and it won’t ever be there.

Especially with nearly every dept nationwide running severe staffing shortages. This forces OT budgets to go through the roof and keeps training down to the bare minimum each year required because like I said an officer in training on an already short staffed dept means more OT being paid out to cover. Especially for officers who work night shift. All training is held in the daytime so even for a one day training a nightshift officer has to miss two nights at work (the night before so he can be rested and then the night of the day he had training).

First solution is fix the staffing shortages but in 2019 America with the War on Police there are few quality applicants out there. Portland PD recently only had 3 applicants meet the requirements, including a passed background check, for 90 open positions. I don’t expect the War on Police attitude to change so that means you have to increase wages and benefits to the point that people feel its worth applying. But this won’t likely happen without massive tax increases and that will never happen so here we are.

Phaedrus · 2019-04-14T17:37:52.108Z

Thanks for your thoughtful replies.

Yes, I understand how the average person could screw up in this situation. An Army Ranger, say, would not. For that matter, how many questionable shootings involve SWAT officers instead of beat cops? That is the level of intensive training this program apparently provides. As much as possible, it removes the adrenaline factor. Cops are trained to be cool even under maximum pressure. I realize, of course, that such training is not cheap, and that it’s probably a pipe dream to think it would ever be supported. We would need federal money to do it. But I think it’s at least as important as Trump’s wall. $10B would train 100,000 officers, and I have to think that such training applied to the majority of beat cops would allow them, over time, to implement their own training of new officers.

Think of the benefits (which have apparently been realized in the few departments fortunate to have afforded this training): a dramatic decrease in questionable shootings; increased community confidence in their police force; a virtual end to “Black/Blue Lives Matter”.

I think it’s worth it.

TriggerWarning · 2019-04-14T20:50:31.527Z

Phaedrus:

As much as possible, it removes the adrenaline factor. Cops are trained to be cool even under maximum pressure.

I hear non cops say this all the time but I ask what training is this you speak of?

I’ve been a cop for 22 years and have never been to such training or heard of it. Oh we talk about it all the time but to actually train for it . . . . it doesn’t exist. With experience in real life situations you get better at mitigating some of the pressure but thats about the best you can do.

I remember a training I went to years ago taught by an experienced cop at my dept that was supposed to mimic a real life shooting. He wanted to create an adrenaline spike so he had us sprint 100 yards, then punch and kick a training dummy for a minute, then get attacked by a guy in a redman suit with a knife at which point we were in a shoot / don’t shoot scenario. He asked the class how realistic we felt it was for a real shooting. The teacher by the way had never been in a shooting. All but two of us in the class, me being one of the two, rated it a 9 or 10 out of 10 in terms of what they thought a real shooting would be like in terms of stress / adrenaline / tunnel vision, etc. The other guy and I who were the only two who had been in an actual shooting rated it a 1 and a 2 out of 10 respectively because it lacked the most important thing: fear of death. You can make me out of breath all you want but until you make me think I might die it will never feel real and you can never simulate the panic impulse your brain will have as you try to overcome it.

And thats why you can’t train to be cool under pressure because training will never be able to create that fear of death or injury that exists in real life. Actual job experience does it all the time though which is why I say you do get better at it with experience. Of course you can also get worse because a bad incident can cause PTSD issues that you may not even realize you have until things go bad again.

Safiel · 2019-04-14T21:14:11.846Z

As an aside to this.

Things like this is why many small municipalities have abolished their police departments entirely. The last borough police department was shutdown over ten years ago in my county. And in Pennsylvania, county sheriff departments are restricted service only, meaning they do not engage in any law enforcement, but serve warrants and subpoenas, transport prisoners and perform bailiff duties. The Pennsylvania State Police are the only official law enforcement in this area.

We are pretty much on our own to protect our own lives and property, which is fine with me, maybe not so much for others.