Is the focus of your skills and tactics training on Technique or Principles and Concepts? An understanding of technique is important. I believe an understanding of fundamental principles and concepts, such as balance, power and mobility, are more important to focus on.  Why do I think principles and concepts are more important to focus on? Technique often requires a specific set of conditions in order to be applied properly. Principles and concepts can be applied across a broad range of environmental factors, situations and conditions. Technique often breaks down under time … [Read more...]

The debate continues to rage on about whether law enforcement agencies should require a 3 or 4 year degree as a prerequisite to get hired. I am opposed to this and have voiced this concern in presentations and blog posts, the most recent being Some Thoughts on The Calls For Better Educated Cops back on July 27, 2020. I am an advocate for education, but opposed to having a degree being a requirement to get hired, or get promoted. One of the issues I see is that we focus on front loading education instead of focusing on career long learning for law enforcement professionals. What do … [Read more...]

In a recent 3-2-1 Thursday Newsletter, author James Clear shared two questions from Richard Hamming's talk, You and Your Research.  Those two questions are: What are the important problems in your field? And if you're not working on them, why not? Every trainer should be asking themselves these two questions on a regular basis. By important problems I am not talking about flavour of the day issues that the special interest groups and politicians say are important. Those may be important, but too often the claims that they are important have no foundation in fact, … [Read more...]

In the last month I have heard a few people talk about the nautical phrase “Hold Fast. Stay True.” in various interviews and presentations. My understanding is that it originated in days of wooden ships. In a storm sailors would tell each other to “Hold Fast”, meaning to grab on to rigging or something solid and secure to prevent being swept overboard. “Stay True” was the direction to the man at the helm to stay true to the compass heading to avoid being blown far off course.  Today law enforcement is in the midst of an intense storm. A storm of media coverage, condemnation, and … [Read more...]

“Will this be on the test?” is a common question asked by students both in the Academy and in in-service training. Why? Because of conditioning. Seth Godin wrote about this conditioning in a blog post back in September. Here is part of that post: The problem is that no one taught us to understand. Instead, we are pushed to simply to memorize. To be educated enough to do well on the test, and then to forget what we were taught, because we never actually learned it.Understanding opens the door to insight and to comfort with the data. Understanding is the platform we need to go to the … [Read more...]

Cal Newport wrote a great book called So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love. In the book he shares the following story of how he came up with the title:  “In a 2007 episode of the Charlie Rose show, Rose was interviewing the actor and comedian Steve Martin about his memoir Born Standing Up. They talked about the realities of Martin’s rise. In the last five minutes of the interview, Rose asks Martin his advice for aspiring performers. “Nobody ever takes note of [my advice], because it’s not the answer they wanted to hear,” Martin … [Read more...]

Growing up you likely got in trouble for dropping things. You dropped the glass and spilled the juice; you got in trouble. You dropped a picture and broke the frame; you got in trouble. If you dropped something expensive; you got in a lot of trouble. As you got older if you dropped things you either got in trouble or got ridiculed and called clumsy, or got laughed at for having a case of the dropsies.   As an adult you get pissed off at yourself when you drop your fresh, hot cup of coffee from Starbucks as you are getting into your car. You are mad at yourself not only for … [Read more...]

Skills like shooting and control tactics are often referred to as hard skills while skills like emotional intelligence, active listening, empathy, mindfulness, and compassion are referred to as soft skills.  I am not sure about the origin of the terms soft and hard skills, but I wish we would drop them from our vocabulary. The skills referred to as “soft” are actually really hard to master. It can be far easier to teach a new recruit how to shoot and do a straight armbar takedown, than to teach them to be mindful and actually listen while seeking to understand the messages being … [Read more...]

I continue to hear from law enforcement trainers across North America how difficult it is to recruit people in 2020 and how the applicant pool is continually shrinking.  I realize it is a tough time to recruit right now but, is the pool shrinking or are we simply using 20-year-old recruiting strategies, which are no longer effective in today’s world? 20 years ago people were knocking down our doors to get jobs. Agencies would have hundreds, if not thousands of people applying when it was announced that they were hiring. Now, that is not the case. That does not necessarily mean … [Read more...]

Whether your agency is voluntarily succumbing to the pressure to do de-escalation and implicit bias training or being forced into it by politicians who are in a rush to be seen to be doing something and are not willing to take a measured evidence based approach to change, you need to think beyond the initial training course, and think about how to weave the core elements of the training into your agency culture.  We have seen too many agencies do the one off training on these topics before. This is where you bring everyone in and force them to attend training on this topic. There is … [Read more...]