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.