Roots of the Reactive Posture: A Manifesto for Police Trainers
Daniel Modell, Lieutenant, New York City Police DepartmentRussell Jung, Sergeant, New York City Police Department
“Action is faster than reaction” is a fundamental axiom of tactics. Curiously, if you poll police officers about whether they conceive of themselves as actors or reactors, they answer “reactors”with little variation.If the axiom carries any value, the answer is alarming. Tactically, it means that police officers see themselves as (and therefore are) disadvantaged. The issue therefore merits substantive inquiry. Why dopolice officers tend toward a reactive posture when it is disadvantageous to doso? This piece will tackle the question. The inquiry is crucial, particularly at the extremes of the spectrum. Overreaction prompts officers to fire fifty rounds atunarmed suspects. Underreaction leavesofficers brutalized or dead. Both are responses to the same fundamental pathology: panic—and panic rests, finally, in not knowing what to do. To a significant degree, then, training is the culprit. To a significant degree, training is also the solution. Our purpose here is to offera comprehensive diagnosis of the problem.
I. Culture
In the movie “Tombstone,” the villain Johnny Ringo challenges protagonist Wyatt Earp to a gunfight. Earp is a fine marksman, but not so fast as Ringo. Knowing this, Doc Holliday, fastest gun in the west, unbeknownst to his friend Wyatt Earp, shows up in Earp’s stead to square off with the villain. As a shadowy figure approaches, assumed to be Wyatt Earp, Johnny Ringo says, “Well, I didn’t think you had it in you.” The shadowy figure reveals himself dramatically: it is Doc Holliday.“I’m your huckleberry,” Doc says in a famous line. Verbal jousting follows. They square off to fight. “Say when,” Doc says. By “say when” he means to challenge Johnny Ringo to draw first. The moment makes forriveting drama. After all, fattening drama is the point. Tactically, of course, it is madness. In a real world violent encounter, it is absurd to cede the first move to an adversary knowingly and as a matter of course. Nevertheless,countless movies and television shows, multiplied across decadesby an industry whose lifeblood isentertainment, ground the tacit assumptionthat the good guy never strikesfirst; indeed, the good guy often prompts the bad guy to strikefirst.The trope shapes a mindset—all the more dangerous because it flits about the subconscious, unexamined and unchallenged. Good guys don’t act first. This unexamined premise frames a reactive posture.
Pre-conscious assumptions about “fairness” in violent encounters,inherited largely from athletic competitionssuch as boxing and Mixed Martial Arts, reinforcea reactive posture in real world encounters. “Ultimate Fighting” is often advertised as the closest thing to the “street” possible. In Meditations on Violence, Rory Miller demolishesthe preconception that martial arts and real world violence share a mutual connection and applicability.
Competitions are steeped inritual and rule;the streetsin chaosand lawlessness. Competitors warm up before a match. The street affords no such luxury. Competitive fights transpire through fixed limits of time and space (ring, octagon; three minutes, five minutes). The street abhors limits. Competitors rest between rounds as corner menurge advice and work cuts to stop bleeding. Adversaries can only wish for these things in the street as they navigate a mix of adrenalin, chaos and terror. Referees recite and enforcerules—and stop fights when serious injury seems imminent. The street has no referee. Competitions are flanked by prohibitions: no rabbit punches, no kidney punches, no sucker punches, no groin strikes, no biting, no eye gouges—that is, all the preferred tactics employed by street predatorsagainst their “prey;”the street brooks no prohibitions. Despite the violence, asense of honor and fair play underwrites these competitions.Dishonor and desperation underwrite the street. Competitionsare steeped in ritual and rule;the streetsin chaos and lawlessness.
Competitions nevertheless shape a mindset about what the “fight” is supposed to look like: mano a mano; skill againstskill; size isproportional; force employed is of a type. These unexamined assumptions about “fairness”serve to framecriticismsfinding expression in questions such as “Why were there so many police officers there for just one person?” (The unstated presupposition is: “That’s not fair, many against one!”) “Why did the police officer use a baton? Even though he was struggling, the person didn’t have a weapon.”(The unstated presupposition is: “That’s not fair, one has a weapon, the other doesn’t!”) Fairness assumes a defined framework of rules jointly accepted. Real world violence carries no commonly accepted framework of rules;only the predatory drive to destroy. To talk of “fairness” in real world encounters by way ofunexamined assumptions inherited from a radically different contextis a category error—an error that, in practice, often swamps the capacity for meaningful tactical evaluation.
II. Procedural conditioning
Suppose you want to teach a child how to ride a bicycle. You tell the child “don’t put your left hand on the right handlebar; don’t put your right hand on the left handlebar; don’t put your left foot on the right pedal; don’t put your right foot on the left pedal; and do not, under any circumstances, pedal backward. Now,ride!” What you told the child was true, so far as it goes. It is also useless. You cheated the child, pretending to guide when you in fact merely confused. You provided the child no guidance on how to ride a bicycle by barking orders about how not to ride a bicycle. The injunctions are no help as the child gropes to sort out the subtleties of riding. Yet this is the form of “guidance”provided by all too many police agencies to officers as they navigate the complexities of the most extreme and perilous interpersonal encounters possible, whereloss of life and limb are real and daunting prospects. Enjoining police officers through a cognitively withering series of negatives “Police officers shall not use deadly physical force against another person unless...” “Police officers shall not discharge their weapons when...” “Police officers shall not fire...” “[Police officers] will not be subject to criticism or disciplinary action for choosing notto discharge their weapons...”(this lastis a tacit injunction not to shoot) without any clear and countervailing guidance on when they can and should use force, deadly or otherwise, subliminally shapes a reactive mindset. The dangerous and deadly consequencesof couching policy in negative terms havebeen known since at least 1997, when the FBI published the second of its three seminal reportson Law Enforcement Officers killed andassaulted in the line of duty. Here is how the authors of In the Line of Fireput it:“In general, the study results indicate that officers had clear memories of what ‘not to do’ and when ‘not to use force’ but that some had difficulty in recalling instances in which the use of force was an appropriate, timely, necessary, and positive decision...Some officers had to make a conscious effort to recall their departments’ use of deadly force policy prior to the initiation of necessary force. In some instances, that recall came too late (In the Line of Fire, p. 43).”Their recommendations followed:“Based on this information, it is recommended that each department review its use of deadly force policy to determine that all elements of the policy are clearly articulated and easily understood. Department members should be constantly tested for their recall of this policy, and positive aspects of the policy should be stressed, especially in reference to the proper time to use deadly force. Negative aspects, such as when not to shoot, should not be overemphasized. It is also recommended that training content and procedure be regularly reviewed and evaluated for the express purpose of keeping the officer alert to the constant potential for danger inherentin law enforcement service(In the Line of Fire, p. 43).”The recommendationsmet with stunning indifferenceas municipal police agencies clung, idiot-like, tocomfortable orthodoxies etched in stone ages past. As in so many contexts where it prevails, unquestioned orthodoxy, cultivating a dreamy stupor, conceals a brutal truth: procedure is drenched in blood.
III. Training
The following narratives representactual training scenarios (past or present).
Recruit officers are dispatched to a domestic dispute. They should (and usually do) separate the parties involved and glean statements in an effort to ascertain facts all while the partners maintain some visual contact. If the recruit officers do these things, that is to say, manage the scenario as they are trained, an instructor strides into the room and cuts the scenario, announcing dramatically “you’re all dead.” If a recruit asks (usually sheepishly) what happened or how they failed, the instructor says“ I tossed a grenade into the room. It killed everyone.” When asked privately by a more seasoned officer what the purpose of the scenario is supposed to be, to the extent that the instructor can articulate one at all, he says something like “Hey, we’ve gotto teach them that it’s a dangerous world out there. Anything can happen.” Instructors appeared satisfied. They made a dramatic point: they killed the cops. For the record, the instructors provided no information, no counsel and no strategy on how to handle invisible grenades during domestic disputes.
At a car stop workshop, recruit officers are conducting a felony stop, multiple passengers in the vehicle. As they pass the rear of the vehicle, a perpetrator emerges like a jack-in-the-box from the trunk and sprays the hapless recruits with simunitions fire. When asked privately about the purpose of the scenario, instructors, to the extent that they can articulate a purpose at all, say: “Hey, they should have checked the trunk. Anything can happen. They need to be taught that.” Instructors appeared satisfied. They madea dramatic point: they shot the cops. For the record, the sort of incident scripted in the scenario has never happened.
A seasoned patrol sergeant was compelled to take part in the “training” scenario that follows. The sergeant happens ona scene in which one person is holding another against a wall at gunpoint. The sergeant and his partner take cover, draw their weapons and issue firm commands to “drop the gun!” The role player with drawn gun shouts: “I’m on the job! I’m a cop! This guy is wanted for robbery!” The sergeant repeats his command to drop the gun. The role player complies. The sergeant and his partner systematically handcuff both, secure the gun and ask pointed questions. The role player tells the sergeant where to find his police shield and identification card as he offers a reasonably coherent narrative about witnessing a robbery. The sergeant scrutinizes his credentials and directs that the alleged robber be arrested. The role player then asks the sergeant to remove the handcuffs. Once uncuffed, he retrieves his gun from the sergeant and shoots him. The sergeant, having experienced many such remarkable plot twists in the course of his years of “training” said what many feel going into it: “I knew it. I knew something like that was going to happen. I was just waiting.” When asked privately what the purpose of the scenario was supposed to be, after stammering around a bit, the instructor answered, “Well, there are a lot of forged police ID’s out there. You just never know. You’ve got to know the good from the bad.” Instructors appeared satisfied. They made a dramatic point: they shot the cop. For the record, instructors never taught participants how to tell good from bad police credentials, neither before nor after the scenario. Evidently, the scenario was designed to test knowledge that was never taughtto trainees.
Although details differ, virtually every police officer will read these narratives with a weary sense of familiarity, for they have slogged through programs teeming in the fantastic, the theatrical, the wild and the pointless: the dispute that explodes into 47 ronin emerging from concealed lairs with arsenals of extravagant weaponryand attacking without intelligible purpose. In truth, the “bang, you suck, you’re dead” approach offends the reason and purpose of training. At its core, trainingshould aim to provide principled, practical strategies for navigating thebroad ranging and fluiddynamics inherent to streetencounters. Scenarios designed to kill thecop; scenarios designed to embarrass andhighlight deficiencies; scenarios designed to be unmanageable and unwinnable “teach” a dangerous lesson: how to die; how to focus on shortcomings; how to lose. The Kobayashi Maru does not test character. It shapes a reactive posture. Moreconcretely, it encourages police officers to distrust their training. Considerthe movement: instructors convey to traineestactical principles purporting to assist them in managing encounters. The instructors then design scenarios or exercisesto “defeat” the tactical principles.Why would trainees feel any confidence in employing strategies that bred defeat—personally experienced?There is NO training value in it. None.The unwinnable scenario isa theoretical abstractionemerging from the peaceofthe classroom, not from the realities of the street.Effective trainingshould cultivate a winning mindset, expellingthe concept of the “unwinnable” from the mentalvocabularyof trainees. There are, as a matter of fact,noinherently“unwinnable” scenarios in the street. But for the sake of polemics, assume that there are. What is to be done about them? They are, by hypothesis, unwinnable. It is therefore in a strict sense vain to introduce the concept into training. How do youwin against the “unwinnable?”
Most trainers are, of course, well intentioned. So what excites the will to designscenariosof the sort described? In many agencies, training is conceived as a luxury even if, in moments of political expediency, press releases profess devotion to it. In practice, time dedicated to training islimited, truncated, minimized. The contentcovered is commonly driven bycynicism and surveys fed through political algorithms. Frustrated trainers are madeto navigateedicts imposed from the rarefied heights of executive management. This does not make for a healthy training program. Given the painfully limited time allotted and the dubious content graftedonto otherwise sensible topics, trainers desperatelypack in everything that they canwith little regard to sequence because,after all, it is time-consuming to sequenceexercises in a meaningful way. Addthis maddening, striking fact:most Instructor Development Programs are themselves impoverished and time constrained. Few agencies trulytrain trainersin any way that can be characterized as systematic and substantive.Given thatframework, perhaps scenarios involving 47 ronin are predictable and unavoidable.
Many scenarios embedded in training programs are, moreover,steeped in a distorted understanding of “stress inoculation.” It wants reminding thatlaw enforcement did not forge the concept of stress inoculation. It inherited the concept from Psychology.Wedo well to recall its roots. The concept was developed to remediate themental seizureof those sufferinga range of psychologicaltraumas, especiallyphobias. Distilled to essentials, theideawas to introduce the person to the thing, condition or environment excitingthe phobic reaction in controlled, measured, rationally sequenced doses in a systematic effort to build tolerance so as to manage the stress associated with the phobia or traumawith at least functionalefficacy. Psychologists focused on the “inoculation” part of stress inoculation. Law Enforcement focused on the“stress” part of stress inoculation. In practice, for law enforcement, the concept devolved intoheaping undifferentiated gobsof stress onto trainees with littleregard to how itwas sequenced and without substantive understanding about the limits of cognitionand performance under stress. Stress became an end in itself—and the more elaborate and wild the stress, the “cooler” the training.This approach badly misconstrues how human beingslearn. Heapingstress on an unprepared minddoes not magically, “somehow,”prepare it. On the contrary, it deepens thetendency to inaction andpathology.If your goal is to teachsomeone how to drive a car, you do not explore some of the biomechanics and a scanning technique or two and then dump your student onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, yelling “drive, drive, come on, come on!”Theoutcome of such “instruction” is that your student will never wantto drive. Sensible training begins withtalk about the mechanics of drivingand the laws underwriting the practice;then appliesthe mechanicsslowly in an abandoned lot; then, perhaps, a side street on which traffic moves only one way; then a major avenue on which significant traffic movesin both directions; and, at length, ends onthe Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Good teaching will get you to your desired goal, in this case, driving onthe Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. But how you get there makes all the difference. Proper training can and should condition a sense of efficacy.To achieve this end, stress should be introduced in a series of manageable, tightly sequenced exercises, each building on the last and pushing toward the ultimate goal.Beginning where you want to end is poor pedagogy.Trainers should remind themselves regularly that stress is not an end in itself but rather a means to achieve efficacy in real world encounters.
Recommendations
Challenge the postulates that underwrite your training programwithzeal.Attack them, siege them, scold and abuse them. Bring every technique, every strategy andassumption, every word and every illustrationbefore the tribunal of reason and demand thatit justify itself. If it cannot answer the demand,consign it to the dust heap of good (or bad) ideas that paved the way for better,however long its tenuremay have been. Be wary equally of the “cool” and the “latest” on one hand and the old and enshrined on the other.Opt for the sensible, the operational, the usable.
Be mindful of thesacred bondbetween trainer and trainee, ofthe solemn obligation, pregnant with consequence, that a trainer seeks to open minds to possibilities not yet conceived; to help craft capacity and character;to invest chargeswith abiding skills that will sustain them safely through a career of taxing harshness thatwouldotherwise consume them. As trainers, we do not owe trainees—ourfellow officers—good. We owe them great. We owe themthe best within us. This powerful mandate is neverachieved by inertia. For a trainer, the one unforgivable sin is to say,“Wedo it this way because we always have.”
Avoid chirpingnegative procedural edictsto trainees. Repetition of this sort leaves abitter taste, asthe forced rations ofpropagandaalways do. Itmay please executive management for reasons peculiar to that stratum but ithurtscops and iscorrosive to trainers.Training is itself de facto policy. Make it positive. Tell traineeswhat to do—notwhat not to do.Having offered practical guidance about what to do, it is critical that trainerssupporttraineesas they applythat guidance in realworld encounters—and to signal the supportloudly and explicitly. As a corollarypoint, when atraineefails in some way once assigned tothe field, a decent and honorable trainer assesses the incident under the provisional assumption that he in some way failedhis trainee, knowing that thetrainee wanted to perform better. Diagnose the issues and the extent to which training underwrites them and modify the program accordingly. Waving about a lesson plan and fussingdefensively that you showed the traineehow “to get out of that,” thereby marginalizing the cop, avails you nothing, for you learn nothing by it. In practice, it canonizes a passive approach under which you endlessly await the next incident rather than actively minimizing occasions for a next incident.
Finally, wegrant as an abstract possibility that there may be some tactically savvy executives sensitive to the nuances of building a potent curriculum tailored to the distinctly impolitic realities to whichpolicingis liable, although we have not ourselves met any. By and large executiveschatter about tactics without intelligible meaning, insisting on content that dilutes, truncates and eviscerates the sound and the solid in favor of the political and the banal. Here, most of all, you must rememberthe courage that drove you into the profession and the pride you take in your role as trainer; at times, you must tell the ivory tower executive that hissuggestions are wrongheaded and dangerous. Though theymay prevail by fiat, their rank has noprerogative over your expertise.For a trainer, the only reward that matters finally is the gratitude of a cop who remembered histrainer’svoice urging counsel in a moment where it was most needed. By comparison, the transient approval of executives is a flimsy thing.
Acknowledgment
The authors express their deep gratitude to Detective Anthony Amoroso who through many years of guidance,discussion,fiery debate and, most of all, abiding friendship, set the authors on the right path in their tactical thinking.
About the Authors
Lieutenant Daniel Modell is a twenty-year veteran of the New York City Police Department. He has served as Coordinator of the Tactical Training Unit and Training Coordinator for the Firearms and Tactics Section. Lieutenant Modell is also Adjunct Professor at the State University of New York-FIT where he teaches self-defense. Lieutenant Modell secured a Bachelor of Arts Degree, Philosophy, New York University, 1989 and a Master of Arts Degree, Philosophy, University of Texas-Austin, 1994. He studied under Fellowship, Fordham University, 1994-1995.
Sergeant Russell Jung is a twenty-two year veteran of the New York City Police Departmentand served proudly in the United States Army. He served as Supervising Instructor of the Tactical Training Unit and in the Firearms and Tactics Section. Healso fought for many years as a member of the NYPD Boxing Team.Sergeant Jung was the recipient of a Police Foundation grant and a Mayor’s Scholarship to pursuean advanced degree in Homeland Security Studies.