If you’ve taught defensive tactics for any length of time, you’ve seen a student meltdown when faced with a problem for which they have no solution: freezing, flailing, moving ineffectively, or reacting very slowly when looking for the solution to a problem.
The “choke” phenomenon can be blamed for some of this behavior, but not all of it. When training is insufficient to provide the student with applicable skill to solve a problem, the outcome can be a delayed reaction, a fatal freeze, or a fear-based overreaction. In the field, a freeze or a significant delay in reaction time can have much more unpleasant results.
Motor learning researchers have studied the effects of skill on reaction time for decades. One primary result is Hick’s Law, which states that when preparing to execute a simple movement, more choices — or stimulus-response alternatives — increase reaction time. For example, two choices instead of one yields a 58 percent increase in reaction time.
Applying Hick’s Law in Law Enforcement
On the surface, this research could lead us toward radical simplification of skill training for law enforcement. Having only one choice for a response for a given set of stimulus should make the practitioner faster.
However, Hick’s research had a more complex result that is often ignored in terms of law enforcement training. In fact, subsequent research found that the large increase in reaction time was true, but only for simple movements.
Complex psychomotor skills, when learned to a level of high proficiency, don’t cause a large increase in reaction time when the user has to choose between several alternatives. Further studies — including Mowbray and Rhoads (1959) — showed that when four choices were given and the movements were learned to a level of automaticity, response time was equal to response time with one choice.
How should law enforcement trainers use this data? The research points to developing a high level of skill through reference-point training in the proper context. For example, when attempting to take a suspect into custody, police officers have to control the suspect’s arms from a variety of positions or reference points. Police officers should be trained to recognize these reference points on the body and should have several techniques that they can execute from each position.
The officer will be much less likely to freeze or suffer from a large increase in reaction time; they will be working in familiar territory at all times.
Further, the training should take officers through a progression that starts at a very simple, sterile environment and ends with skill execution in an environment that closely replicates field conditions. At the conclusion of training, the practitioner should be able to execute the techniques automatically, with very little cognitive “bandwidth” in use.
Once a skill is mastered, the officer can execute the skill quickly with a high likelihood of success in field conditions. DT training should also include the concept of flow — transitioning from one technique to another. As officers develop a larger toolbox of skills to automaticity, their effectiveness will increase and their reaction time will decrease.
Moving Toward Schemas
Police trainers should attempt to move officers who have mastered individual skills toward developing schemas — blocking groups of well-learned skills together for different environmental problems. Experienced officers should be provided with skill refresher training and also with scenario training that allows the officer to develop and use schemas or blocks or skills to solve problems.
The counter argument states that we should prune training down to a very small number of skills in order to maximize speed, training time, and training dollars. I disagree with this viewpoint, as it does not acknowledge the true meaning of Hick’s research and it creates officers who have a very limited skill base to draw from in an increasingly complex work environment. This limited skill base produces officers who, when confronted with a situation for which their training has not prepared them, will freeze or fatally under-react. Overreaction can occur when an officer — equipped with a hammer — only sees nails to pound.
Law enforcement work requires us to train and develop officers that can adapt to a wide variety of situations and can employ a range of force options to solve complex problems. When in physical confrontations, officers must be able to react quickly and effectively to a variety of problems and environments. Consequently, this requires us to teach a wide variety of skills, and to spend enough time to allow mastery of the skills. The final result will be officers with a big enough tool box to handle the job.
