Situational Awareness for Survival

Situational Awareness for Survival

Helping first responders improve safety by ensuring members understand how to develop and maintain situational awareness while working in high-stress, high-consequence, time-compressed environments. This is the goal of this training.

This presentation helps departments identify opportunities for improving high-risk decision-making outcomes and show them how to implement strategies to help members enhance critical thinking and resilient problem-solving skills.

We explain the process of what the mind and body go through in an officer-involved shooting and how to cope with the aftermath.

We help members be better equipped to develop and maintain situational awareness and make better decisions on emergency scenes.

One of the topics we cover is "Do we train to fail?"

Do Officers Train to Fail?

Is it possible to erode a police officer's situational awareness and train a police officer to fail? Absolutely! I have seen it often. I still see it at police academies, on YouTube Videos, and during police officer training sessions.

There was a time when I didn't see it. I was one of those instructors who were training police officers to fail. I didn't realize I was doing it. No instructor would prepare a police officer to fail on purpose. But, accidentally, it's happening all the time, and the consequences can be catastrophic.

I remember when I was in the academy, we would do various training to prepare us for our careers as police officers. One of the drills we would train on was felony stops. Felony stops were intended for pulling someone over who had just committed a felony-level crime or had a felony warrant.

We would first learn to put space between our squad car and the suspect's car. This gave us more reaction time and created a safe distance from the suspect. We would then exit our squad, take cover behind our driver's side door and call the suspect back to us. We would then either have the suspect lay on the ground or kneel. Our partners would handcuff the suspect, search, and secure them in the back of the squad car. The drill would run smoothly, and officers would feel good afterward.

However, without even knowing it, we were training to fail.

How were we training to fail? In law enforcement, we learn the difference between cover and concealment. Cover is something we can hide behind that will stop bullets from hitting us (e.g., a brick wall or a vehicle's engine block).

Concealment is something we can hide behind that bullets can penetrate (e.g., a car door, bushes, sheetrock). In the felony stop drill, we were concealing ourselves behind the car door of our squad, which bullets can penetrate. Instead, we should be angling our squad cars and hiding behind the engine block of the squad, while giving the suspect orders. We were training to fail, we were placing ourselves behind concealment instead of cover. This could have catastrophic effects if a suspect were to exit their vehicle and begin shooting at us.

Key Takeaways

The lesson here is that, under stress, we become creatures of habit. Our brain will instruct our body to perform exactly how we were programmed to perform based mostly on memorization and repetition. This is true when recalling cognitive information (e.g., people's names and email addresses). It is also the case with muscle memory (i.e., the physical movements tied to performing a task).

Practice does not make perfect. Practice makes permanent! This can lead to eroding a police officer's situational awareness, and in stressful environments, police officers can revert right back to how they were trained. Let's train for success, not a failure!

Everyday life

?Think of when you trained a friend or your teen to change a flat tire on a vehicle. This training usually takes place in the nice, controlled, safe environment of a clean garage (unless it's our garages). In reality, they will probably be changing a flat tire on the side of a busy road with many traffic cars passing by, often at a high rate of speed.

Have they been trained when it is unsafe to change that tire and call a tow truck instead? If they have yet to be trained on this alternate decision, this could lead to poor situational awareness, and they get struck by a passing vehicle operated by an inattentive driver.

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