One of the most eye-opening talks at the IACP 2024 police leadership conference, delivered by retired Chief James Pierson, owner of JP Law Enforcement & Safety Training, focused on fear as a normal, and adaptive human response among police officers. The talk is summarized in an article by Rob Lawrence in this Police1 IACP 2024 Quick Take: How police officers can manage and master fear.
Chief Pierson and I connected at the conference, and this follow-up interview extends the insights shared at IACP. Italics are my part of the conversation.
Chief Pierson, you said you would rather work with an officer who acknowledges having fear than one who says they have no fear. Can you say more about this?
Fear is a warning sign your brain and body are picking up. It is designed to alert you to anomalies and to make you aware of potential negative consequences. A person who truly has no fear has a wiring issue. That person might put your team in greater danger because they don’t have a fully functional “alert” system.
Ok, so the point is that instead of fearing fear, it’s actually adaptive for performance to have a fear system that’s intact? You talked about “signal to noise” ratio during threat assessment during your talk at IACP, and fear seems to be the primary driver of this. In other words, the person who has no fear could actually put everyone else in much greater danger because they’re not alert to the same signal-to-noise ratio as someone who experiences fear. Is that right?
Yes, it’s also important to understand that fear happens before and after the danger, but not in the middle of a dangerous situation. If you ask someone, “Where you afraid during an event?” they might say, “No.” When adrenaline kicks in, your brain becomes hyper-focused on the threat. I think back to an incident where I was on patrol and there was a guy with a shotgun. There were facts in this scenario that I know now but didn’t know then. I had no awareness for example that there was a 250-pound police officer 6 inches away from me and he had the guy covered. I do remember seeing drops of rain falling off the shotgun.
Yes, police officers have said very similar things to me in their therapy sessions. They are trained to be observant of the smallest details of a situation, but when our lives are threatened, people get tunnel vision. This is a normal, biological response to threat. The fear of “forgetting” something or being cross-examined in court around a detail that they were unaware of at the time is a real fear for many, in the wake of a critical incident. It’s one thing to notice small details on a routine patrol and another to have your credibility and character weighed in a courtroom around some detail you might never have noticed while under life threat.
Let’s transition to the nature of what we fear. I’ve written about how the bravest warfighters will run into a firefight yet be overtaken by fear at the idea of telling their spouse that they love and need them. This suggests that life threat may not be the greatest threat for many people, and I think you made this point as well in your talk.
This is true. The thing about a life threat is that it is immediate, and it has an end. Let’s say you’re on patrol, and someone’s shooting at you. You’ll feel fear before the event, but not during the event. And when the event is over, your fear may rise again, but it will eventually fade away. So, in general, with a specific incident, there’s an end to the event and an end to the fear that’s attached to that event.
Part of the reason social fear can be worse is that people fear that it won’t end. Twenty years ago, before everything was on social media, people made an allowance for others to change over time. For example, twenty years ago, if you did something stupid ten years prior, others might think, ‘Well that was 10 years ago and you’re not the same person you were when you made that mistake.”
In the current world, nothing wears off. Now it seems that everything we do is recorded and potentially amplified by social media. So nowadays, people are asking themselves, ‘Did I ever do anything that’s going to come back to me?’
Every rule has an exception. What is one exception to the rule that social threat is worse than life threat?
Let’s say that you have a fear of going to your doctor because you have some symptoms and you’re afraid it might be cancer. Let’s say that you’re afraid of getting your PSA levels checked because prostate cancer runs in your family. This is an example of where a life threat could be ongoing. It’s something that could change your entire life and could create daily fear as you navigate the course of the progressive and/or potentially terminal illness.
Yes, exactly. This kind of fear is what stops people from catching diseases that would not be lethal if they could be caught and treated early. And when it comes to mental warfare, the same principle is true. When people struggle with mental warfare, to the degree that they avoid talking about it with people who can help them heal, their challenges may become progressively worse until the hole they’re in is very, very deep.
Let’s shift to a specific example you showed us during your talk. In the video, an officer had just been fired on. There were visible specks of blood on his right hand, and though he was physically safe, he was dealing with the after-wash of fear following this event. And his greatest fear was that he may have forgotten to have his body cam on. You emphasized that his fear of getting in trouble was worse than his fear about the life threat. And after your presentation, while you and I were talking, the officer’s chief came up and said, “I never would have wanted him to worry about his body cam. That’s not how I meant for that policy to be interpreted.”
Let’s talk about this for a moment.
That chief is a great example of a leader who really cares about his team. That officer was never going to get in trouble with a chief like that. Often though, in leadership, there is a temptation with 900 irons in the fire to reduce policies to a single sentence. This can shortcut the process of communicating the core intention of the policy. What chiefs can say instead is something like, “Look, in the normal course of patrol interactions, as a general policy, we want you to have your body cam on. However, if there’s an emergency, or someone is threatening your life, do what is necessary and don’t worry that you’ll get in trouble about whether your body cam is on or not.”
And how can leaders talk about fear to their teams?
Culture in an agency starts from the top. We set the culture by talking about our own fears. There’s a stigma among chiefs around communicating anything less than they are completely in control. But it’s essentially about being honest with your troops. You can lead with confidence while also expressing that you have fear.
I agree with this. I’m not the first person to point out that bravery is not the absence of fear. It’s grappling with fear and doing the thing you were trained for anyway. Any last words Chief Pierson?
Yes, I would say this. You can’t fix a personnel problem by writing policies. You can’t fix a policy problem with new personnel. And you can’t fix a leadership problem with either.
Chief James Pierson (ret) retired in Henderson, Texas in 2017, and currently carries his Texas Law Enforcement Commission with the Rusk County Attorney’s Office as an investigator. During his entire 34-year career, training has been the center of his focus. Chief Pierson presents training in multiple disciplines, and acts as an expert witness at the state and federal level. He has assisted on TCOLE boards to develop training courses and worked as a consultant in the areas of policy development and leadership development.
