Articles - Careers & Training

Local law enforcement officers should receive training on an ongoing, mandatory basis. We all know that. But how many of our agencies provide it?

Supervisors and officers tend to dislike dealing with performance evaluations (PEs) as much as they dislike internal affairs investigations and termination proceedings. Supervisors hate writing evaluations and officers hate reading them. But they persist anyway.

In most private sector businesses, employees and supervisors need not be concerned that the contents of their performance evaluations could be made public. Supervisors are free to speak openly about their employees' performance, issues, and career goals. However, for public employees the privacy of the written evaluation is not guaranteed.

How we train is how we fight—or more broadly, how we perform under pressure. This also applies to helicopter pilots; how they train versus how they are expected to fly.

We live in an age of political correctness where saying the right things seems to have more value than doing the right things. People use catch phrases to draw attention to themselves and make them seem wise and caring.

MMA practitioners commonly use choking techniques to defeat their opponents. The consequences of your being "choked out" or rendered unconscious are severe for officers. Learn how to defeat the rear naked choke and guillotine choke.

I was recently reading how more and more professions are turning to checklists to improve safety. I have been advocating just this kind of practice for law enforcement for decades.

There is a tendency to shy away from DUIs unless you are part of a specialty unit that deals with them all the time. But I think we can reverse this trend through understanding and training.

In many cases, the victims of stabbings never knew the knives were in play. Their first indication that something was wrong was when they saw blood. And that's often too late.

Let me give you a flashlight technique that will work under stress, in any conditions, on any terrain, and inside any building. It's as simple as this: Turn the damn light on and point it at what you're trying to shoot.