Training: Are We Kidding Ourselves?

More training! We need more training! I’ve heard it, and I’ve said it, and I believe it. But we have a big unanswered question in law enforcement regarding officer survival: Has our training saved lives over the past fifty years? The answer may be no, it has not. Hear me out. From a perusal of reasonably easily accessible data (i.e. Google) of police officers murdered from 1970 through the time of this writing, factored to a ratio per 100,000 officers, shows that the rate of officers murdered has decreased. In 1970 the rate was 22/100,000, 1980 was 28 (the highest and I don’t know why), 1985 was 17, 13 for 1990, 11 for ’95, 8 each for 2000 and 2005, 10 for ’10, then 6 for 2015, 2020, and projected 2025. Good news, right? But why the lower rates?

First, let’s cover some data problems, the first of which is the relative rarity of police as LODD murder victims. Yes, the stack of bodies is terrible – thousands over the years. But, considering the number of police officers and the number of contacts, calls, and dangerous situations they encounter, the incidence of dying by means of felonious attack is mercifully rare. That doesn’t diminish the tragedy nor the urgency to prevent those deaths, but from a math perspective, there are few consistent factors in these events that create predictability.

We can train on only relatively few certainties, if any, when it comes to violent encounters because each one is unique. A plaintiff’s attorney might ask “Were you trained for this situation?” The truest answer one can give is “not specifically this encounter”, because every event is unique. Even if the same scenario happened again the next day with no memory of the previous one, there are micro differences – what you ate, how you feel, the weather, a bystander, and on and on into that quantum mechanics “Many Worlds” theory that parallel universes exist branching with every possible outcome.

Another huge problem is that databases are hard to mine, especially when it comes to making relational associations. Even knowing how many cops there are in a given year is uncertain. Anomalies like 911, COVID, and multiple victim clusters like Lakewood, WA, Oklahoma City, Dallas, and WACO make averages meaningless. That leaves the casual researcher like me having to round up and average and guesstimate some numbers.

But here’s the bottom line: it is questionable that our changes in training have reduced that 1970 ratio of 22 per 100K officers to 2020 at 6 per 100k. Here are some changes that happened during this time span: better trauma care, body armor, cell phones, 911, population and officer to population ratios.

For example, trauma injury survival rates improved nearly 25% during the time frame we’re looking at, so of the 100 officers murdered in 1970, we could speculate that 25-30 of them would have survived given modern emergency care, bringing the murder rate closer to 15 or 17 per 100,000 officers, a number closer to the 1990s era.

Speaking of 1990s, only 25% of police agencies mandated the wearing of body armor then (the first “save” by body armor was late 1975).  By 2010, 92% of agencies mandated body armor. We can’t be exact in determining how many murders were prevented by body armor, but one study suggested 8 officers per year could be saved. An officer not wearing body armor is 76% more likely to die from a torso shot than a protected officer.

We have better communication and technology, and more police officers (despite recruiting woes) than those higher fatality years, as well as roughly 150 million more humans in the U.S. now than in 1970. How that plays into the stats – who knows?

While we are pretty good at counting murdered officers, we are terrible about counting wounded officers, and completely absent in measuring deadly encounters where there are no reportable injuries. That means we only know about when officers fail to survive, not how frequently they survive – which would be a better guide to planning training. (See the story of research when, to find out where to improve armor on military aircraft, they examined where anti-aircraft fire hit the planes that managed to return from combat. What they didn’t see is where the rounds hit the planes that were completely shot down which would truly have shown their vulnerability.)

Yes, fewer officers are dying from felony assault now than 50 years ago, but with all the supposed increase in the frequency and quality of training, isn’t it likely that more officer survival is from better trauma care, body armor, and equipment? Let’s keep training more and better, but it will be done in partial darkness until we get the data that we truly need to measure success.

https://nationalpolice.org/main/why-are-you-still-calling-the-cops/

by JFShults

The National Police Association (NPA) is pitching in with expert analysis of an important upcoming SCOTUS case: Kyle Smith, et al. v. Rochelle Scott, et al. The primary issue is whether the use of body weight to control a combative person is an acceptable use of force.

For the sake of the language used in the case, and as used by the media and law enforcement alike, since a death occurred, the question is whether the officers in the case used deadly force in a way they shouldn’t have.

For the civilian reader’s sake, we need to be reminded that the words “excessive force” and “deadly force” are not in the Constitution. What the Constitution does address is “reasonableness” in the Fourth Amendment: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated. If a person claims that the seizure of their person, i.e. an arrest, is unreasonable, federal law (see 42 USC 1983) allows the person to sue the individual or entity responsible in federal court. We also might be reminded that applying these laws to non-federal government actors was made possible by the Fourteenth Amendment. However, it took about 100 years for that to apply to lawsuits against local law enforcement.

There may be lawsuits in state courts for damages that are claimed to have arisen because of an unreasonable seizure (arrest), such as a physical injury, but the loss claimed in federal court is the loss of their right to be free from unreasonable government actions, not any physical injury. Federal courts have the liberty to include such claims for efficiency’s sake, however.

So, what is “reasonable”? As courts must arbitrate claims of unreasonable force and have spent many years doing so with eager lawyers wanting to define their plaintiffs’ accusations to sustain monetary awards and government lawyers seeking to save tax-funded payouts and maintain the authority of the law to maintain order. Generally, SCOTUS has given the benefit of judgment to the police, with an understanding that rapidly unfolding and dangerous events require the freedom to use one’s best judgment in the moment, without relying on hindsight, and without blaming the cops for being there in the first place. (See Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386).

Recent decisions of lower courts have eroded this principle with the idea that if the officer could have, speculatively, avoided a situation that turned ugly, or if the officer(s) made a tactical mistake or misjudgment, then the officer should be deemed at fault.

Let me be a bit philosophical and hypothetical here. What if the defund, defang, and abolish the police ideologues were successful and *poof* no more police? Would law enforcement, as we know it, evolve again? There would still be laws, and there would still be lawbreakers, despite the notion that we can all self-regulate and create so much peace and equality that there would no longer be a human motive for anti-social behavior? We can dream, but we also know and have experienced rebellion and, yes, evil. With no collectively chosen agents of government, enforcing laws for the good of all would rely on private persons or groups to challenge lawbreakers. This system would elevate only physically or economically powerful people to the role now filled by police officers. We would appoint and pay government actors to keep peace, and we would find that arming them serves the pubic safety best.

With all due respect to other peacekeepers in the land, such as religious leaders, benevolent and charitable groups, social workers, etc., we would find that offenders who are willing to use violence will not respond to all the counseling, grace, and support in the world. So, yes, police agencies would evolve very quickly, and the public would demand it.

If, as I postulate here, we find that we must have armed government agents, we do so for one purpose: so that they may coerce behavior when individuals fail to conform to reasonable laws that protect the public at large. That coercion may be showing up, it may be a pointed finger, it may be a strong statement, and it may be physical force. None of those tools, used reasonably, should be taken away.

No one has the right to harm an innocent person. No one has the right to resist a lawful arrest. The use of coercion by police officers is highly regulated, even though no tool, no policy, no court decision, no tactic can be used with certainty of the outcome because every situation is unique in hundreds of ways. If a technique is used and a death occurs, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it was unlawful deadly force. The coercive technique may be one factor in a death or injury, but, absent the use of a firearm, there are multiple factors, including drugs and disease, that are part of the puzzle.

Especially in mental crisis cases, there is an inevitable behavioral component. To say a mental crisis that results in a call to police is just in the person’s mind is simply not biologically accurate. Many times, physical restraint is a medical rescue. If sitting on someone is an act intended to bring a person into compliance and safety, is it not reasonable? Are officers to be required to work the physics equation of weight vs. resistance over time, divided by pre-existing physical conditions? Not a physics professor, physician, or psychic could predict such an outcome, but a reasonable officer can surmise that failing to restrain a person can, indeed, be deadly.

If you don’t want the police to do the things that only the police can do, don’t call them. Let’s hope SCOTUS listens to the NPA and others and makes a reasonable decision.

Jane, you ignorant slut

 I just wrote my congressman and senators, so I’m not just blogging and Facebooking, thinking that by venting I am accomplishing anything. Whether my email (actually it’s not that easy, it’s a tedious and shameful navigational process to contact them) will nudge anything, we do recognize that votes count, dollars count, and raindrops make rivers. I also have donated to the ACLJ, our local pro-life pregnancy center, a homeless shelter, the American Legion, the NRA, to name a few. That, thus far, is the extent of my activism. What I have not done is call other voters uneducated or stupid and I hope I can convince others to have similar restraint. 

I did vote Republican but did not do so because I was brainwashed, think it is Jesus’ party, was afraid of a woman President, or am hateful of anyone. If there had been (in my opinion, to which I am entitled) a palatable Democratic candidate for President I may have voted for them (unlikely, but maybe). While I understand the fear of our current Executive bending the nation toward right wing extremism, history tells us that left-wing extremism is the other path to totalitarianism, and that’s what I voted against.

If commentators want to blame a certain set of 2024 voters for whatever they fear is happening, that’s convenient enough, but Presidential excess and governance by bureaucrats has a history of mission creep that brought us to where we are today. When I was a kid, we would gradually expand our yard by burning off brush. Unauthorized and unsupervised one summer day a friend and I decided to light a thinning fire, but looked away for just a bit and turned to see it already nearly out of control. Hopefully that parable is apt, but what took a few minutes at the edge our yard has taken a few decades, or perhaps centuries to create in government. We can’t curse the curb if we’ve run into it knowing our brakes had worn out.

In Federalist No. 10, James Madison argues that a large republic with diverse interests would prevent any single faction from dominating power. I have that hope today that the President’s excesses will be tempered by the influences of Congress, the courts, and public opinion. Public opinion may, sadly, be the weakest link as opposition is largely inarticulate, ad hominem, unfocused, and bitter. Further complicating matters is that our (I include myself in this human brain problem) sources of information and how we’ve been conditioned to consume them does little to educate us sensibly.

It rook Republicans far too long to learn the deceptive tricks of linguistic contortion and media manipulation, but the twisted rhetorical skills are now more fine-tuned across the political spectrum. Truth with a capital “T” is so camouflaged that few there are who can discern it. Intelligent debate in point-counterpoint fashion has digressed to the old Saturday Night Live routine where Dan Akroyd’s opening salvo in a debate with Jane Curtain begins “Jane, you ignorant slut”. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c91XUyg9iWM) (As an historical note, SNL used to be a comedy show).

You and I are ultimately the guardrails of democracy (I know – democratic Constitutional Republic – spare me the lecture). We will fail in that role if we vote only with our rage, focus on personality or party before principle, and label others as haters to justify hating in return. We Americans may have lost our collective fear of power that marked the Revolution in favor of comfort. Protest wisely.