When Seconds Count: What Police Chiefs and Trainers Need to Know About E-Learning

Consider following an officer-involved shooting or vehicular pursuit that resulted in significant bodily injury or death to another; it was determined that over the course of the last two years, the officer involved had less than 20 seconds of combined documented use of force and vehicular pursuit training.

Within your agency, are officers using e-learning platforms as a means to complete mandatory training and engaging in nothing more than ‘click through’ or ‘mindless clicking’ to get to the end of the training modules?

If so, your agency and police officials may be subject to a successful federal civil claim for failure to properly train.

Impact of City of Canton v. Harris

The Supreme Court of the United States in City of Canton v. Harris (1989) ruled that a municipality can be sued under federal civil rights laws if its failure to properly train its police officers amounts to ‘deliberate indifference’ to the constitutional rights of the public.

The single and most important question addressed in Canton v. Harris was: At what point does inadequate police training reach the level of a constitutional violation for which a municipality will be held liable?

Impact of Monell v. New York City Department of Social Services

The rule established in Monell v. New York City Department of Social Services may assist in determining what deliberate indifference is, wherein the Court indicated that a city is not liable under §1983 unless a municipal ‘policy’ or ‘custom’ is the moving force behind the constitutional violation. Thus, appropriate questions within a failure to train civil rights litigation may be:

Agency’s Duty to Train Officers

Did the agency have a duty to train?

• Is there a custom of allowing officers to complete mandatory training in less than 10 seconds?
• Does the agency have a history and/or practice which is equivalent to a policy to provide perfunctory e-learning that does not meet the standards to be considered training?

Every state has an attorney general’s office, district attorney’s office, police training commission, peace officer standards and training council or equivalent which sets mandatory in-service training courses and/or a specific number of training hour requirements.

In addition, within most federal, state, local and tribal law enforcement agencies within the United States, there is general agreement that use of force and vehicular pursuits are:

• High liability activities
• Areas where officers must receive specific training

Consider for the purpose of discussion that a use of force and/or vehicular pursuit e-learning course consisted of 10 slides/screens with about 40 words on each slide/screen, it would take a police officer one to two minutes to read each of the slides, insomuch as an average adult reads 238 words per minute, the average college educated adult reads 300 words per minute and the baseline standard for adult e-learners is 150 words per minute.

Thus, reasonable questions are:

• How is it that an officer completed an entire e-learning program in 10 seconds?
• Did any actual learning take place?
• Did the police officer simply engage in click-and-forget or clicking for completion?

Both click-and-forget and clicking-for-completion are learned behaviors, since experienced police e-learners often know they don’t have to pay attention to pass the use-of-force or vehicular-pursuit training program.

Effective Training & Time Involved

An effective method for establishing the amount of time it should take a police officer e-learner to complete a use-of-force and/or vehicular pursuit training program is to utilize the 2:1 ratio wherein the e-learning course should take about 50% less time to complete than the equivalent instructor-led and/or synchronous course.

Following every use of force and police pursuit incident, a police department should be conducting a meaningful command review (MCR) and including the incidents into the agency's early warning systems (EWS) wherein recommendations regarding policy changes, remedial training, disciplinary action, administrative action, or a criminal referral are made to the chief of police.

Police departments which conduct MCRs and properly utilize the EWS are better positioned to defend against failure to properly train civil claims, in part because the officers’ click-through or mindless clicking could have been identified prior to subsequent training years.

While proper training can increase a police officer’s probability of compliance with rules, regulations, policies and directives, inadequate, incompetent, or no training at all may increase the probability of inappropriate or improper police action, which may give rise to civil litigation.

An agency which simply provides proof that an officer completed use of force training or vehicular pursuit training within an e-learning environment may not be able to demonstrate that ‘cognitive learning’ had actually taken place when subpoenaed training records and metadata reflect that the training was completed in less than 10 seconds, suggesting that the offending officer clicked through their mandatory training requirements.

Guidance Offered by the Court

The court has provided a test to determine deliberate indifference without articulating a specific meaning. However, some guidance was provided by the court when it stated:

In resolving the issue of a city’s liability, the focus must be on adequacy of the training program in relation to the task the particular officer must perform. That a particular officer my be unsatisfactorily trained will not alone suffice to fasten liability on the city, for the officer’s shortcomings may have resulted from factors other than a faulty training program.

The court has defined deliberate indifference by balancing policy, actual performance demands, and training. However, the formula to compute the balance is not specified, insomuch as typically a plaintiff must prove that the officer acted wrongfully and that there exists a casual relationship between the harm done and the unconstitutional custom, practice, or policy of the police department and therefore the question regarding the adequacy of the use of force and/or vehicular pursuit training will likely be reduced to the testimony and opinions of expert witnesses.

Effective E-Learning for Officers

For decades, e-learning has enabled police chiefs to deliver effective training to police officers despite manpower constraints and individual officers’ schedules, all while remaining fiscally responsible.

However, police chiefs and those responsible for ensuring police officers receive use of force and vehicular pursuit training through an e-learning system should give less emphasis to the ‘E’ and more to the learning by attempting to prevent their officers from engaging in click-through training or mindless clicking during e-learning courses because there’s a difference clicking something and thinking through something and the difference may be the difference between a successful or unsuccessful defense against a civil failure to train claim.

Christopher Chapman, Pd.D., is an associate professor of Criminal Justice and Constitutional Law within the City University of New York who specializes in police practices, supervision, training and procedures, and is a retired police officer.