There is no question that law enforcement personnel are under attack from all sides. Too many officers have been injured or killed in the line of duty; some died in car accidents, some were ambushed, some were killed with their own firearm and tragically, some were killed during training activities.
In 2019, 38 officers were shot and killed in the line of duty. In December 2019, a volunteer with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department Search and Rescue team fell to his death. Government officials and activists are examining every use of force incident under a microscope. As this Police1 article discusses, extensive training and impeccable records to back it up are a must to defend your department from censure or lawsuit. To dig deeper, the foundation case on failure to train is City of Canton v Harris.
Now more than ever, you need to train like your life depends on it. Cheating might help you pass qualifications but could get you killed on or off duty. This article is based on information from two SHOT Show LEEP sessions – Deliberate Practice: If It Doesn’t Challenge You, It Doesn’t Change You and Weapon Retention and Presentation from Close Quarter Combat – which focused on key areas police officers should address during training.
Natural talent or training?
When you look at leaders in any vocation, do you think to yourself that they have gifts that you don’t, and you could never reach their level? Presenter Lon Bartel told us that K. Anders Ericsson, a Swedish psychologist, doesn’t believe that. Rather, Anders sees extended deliberate practice (e.g., high concentration practice beyond one’s comfort zone) as a means of how expert performers acquire their superior performance. While physical attributes such as longer limbs might give some people a head start, he has proven that it is encouragement and positive reinforcement that creates the champion.
A child with “natural talent” might only have a very small advantage to start, but people notice that advantage and encourage the child to practice improving that skill – thus leading to him or her becoming a champion. Positive reinforcement is the key to learning and improving any new skill. Encourage participants; don’t rip them a new one when they do badly – because negative reinforcement is proven to decrease performance.
Be positive
Lon told us that researchers Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobsen showed that people who receive positive feedback perform well and people who receive negative feedback perform poorly. Think of it as a self-fulfilling prophecy – something that causes itself to come true due to positive feedback. The opposite is the Golem effect, where people perform poorly because they are expected to do so.
What is your strategy as a firearms instructor, FTO, or force-on-force trainer? Do you encourage your students to improve themselves, or do you convince them they are failures? Yeah, I know about Gunny in “Full Metal Jacket” – and you don’t want to be him to your students.
What do you say to “that guy” or “that girl” who walks into your training session and apologizes to you because he or she knows that working with them is a waste of time for both of you? I am a firearms instructor and deal with dozens of students who have never held a gun in their lives. I don’t start with a target at 25 yards and tell them, “Watch what I can do,” but rather I start with a close target and ask to see what they can do.
After they gain accuracy and speed at close range, the target is moved further away and the process repeated. I have a photo gallery of students smiling ear to ear holding their firearm and standing next to a tightly grouped target. The key point is to improve with every practice. Start with what you achieved last time and do it faster, longer and more accurately.
Focus then recover
For maximum training retention, Lon recommends maximum focus for no more than an hour at a time followed by a rest period. Short blocks of training conducted more frequently are better than long blocks conducted less often. Elite performers practice consistently and don’t skip training sessions just because they don’t feel like it. You need sleep to let your muscles recover after a workout at the gym and mental training needs the same restoration. Read this article for details of what one elite performer goes through in an average week.
Retain your weapon
According to the FBI, in 2018 four officers were fatally shot by their own weapons after being disarmed. The LEEP session on weapon retention was presented by Progressive F.O.R.C.E. Concepts trainers Jay Wadsworth of the New York Tactical Officers Association, “Street Fighting Secrets” author Chad Lyman and Las Vegas Tourist Safety Division officer Lazar Siroyan.
The class can be summarized in three key points:
- If someone is trying to take control of your holstered weapon, keep it holstered until the threat is gone;
- Train and qualify with all of your holster’s retention features engaged;
- Training needs to be like real life.
Keep it holstered
The first lesson is that a holstered weapon cannot be used to kill you. Train to protect your holster and keep your attacker’s hands off of it.
Jay told the class attendees that in many cases, officers anchor the attacker’s hand onto their holster, which just gives the attacker more time to defeat the retention features to draw it. You want your weapon to remain in the holster and your attacker’s hands as far away from it as possible. Know how your holster releases and try to get the attacker’s hands off in the opposite direction so that you don’t help him release it. The objective is to retain and remove the attacker’s hands.
Use the RAT approach to get an attacker’s hand off your weapon: Retain, Angle, Attack, Transition. You need to get behind your attacker, which makes you positionally dominant. Only then can you attack and transition to your weapon. If you make space in front of yourself, you just allow the attacker to rush you again. If you cannot get behind the attacker, transition to street fighting skills – use your elbows, knees, or a head butt. The top of your head is a lot harder than an attacker’s face.
After you are in a dominant position and have space you should transition to ACT – win the Angle, Control the near sidearm, then it’s Time to take out/present your weapon. If there is any chance that the attacker can again gain control of your weapon, the time may not be right to draw it. But when the time is right, you need to make it happen – and fast. Don’t worry about getting a second hand on the gun – it’s a handgun, not a “handsgun.”
Practice firing as soon as your weapon clears your holster, using your hip to gain stability if needed. It is much easier to keep a handgun on a target with one hand while turning or moving backward. If you turn you might need to move your weapon from one hand to another. Is that a skill you have practiced?
And whatever you do, don’t “give the guy the gun” by pushing out or putting it against his body before you fire. Keep it as far away as possible. It is much easier to use the barrel to grab a gun away from someone than it is to hold onto it using the grip. Try it.
Take control
If an attacker grabs a weapon that already is out of your holster, use CUTT. Get the butt of the gun to the Centerline of your chest, Uppercut the trigger guard, Twist, Twist. First, pull it close to and parallel to your chest or try to nestle it in the crook of your elbow to protect it then twist in both directions to break the attacker’s grip. In either case, you want to turn in the direction of your support side first. Jay’s YouTube channel is here.
Attendees also learned that many officers will release one or more retention features beforehand to make it easier to qualify on the range. Don’t think of qualification as a necessary evil but think of it as a way to test your training and street skills. If you cannot qualify with all retention features engaged, then you need to practice your draw until you can. You can practice on the range or use dry fire at home. Defeating retention features to qualify is a move that could keep you from coming home after your shift.
Make it real
Street fights rarely happen on level ground in perfect weather, yet hand to hand combat training often takes place indoors on flat mats and often in a facility separate from the range.
The LEEP instructors recommended that combat training take place on unlevel ground and, if possible, at the range. Safety comes first, so simulator-based firearms or simunitions with proper face and hand protection should be used when training. Irregular foam blocks can be placed under mats to create a more real-world experience. Falling down or being shot with a sim should convince an officer that they need more training to prevent it from happening again.
Training Tools
There were so many new options for officer training that it would be impossible to write up all of them. In a follow-up article, we’ll cover just a few of the new products and services for both agency and personal training that we saw at SHOT Show. Many of the latest products work with an officer’s own weapon to help them understand and train where they need improvement – such as weapon draw, on-target time, trigger pull and reset, failure recovery, magazine changes and re-holster. Until then, stay safe and train like your life depends on it.
