As a training officer often when I speak with administrators on the phone I get asked similar questions. The main question I get asked in talking about our programs is how is my program different from others. It's definitely a legitimate question and needs to be addressed. Often in looking at what's available out there it all looks the same in one way or another so I can definitely understand why one of these officers would just say screw it they are all the same. I've already addressed problems with tactics in other articles I want to talk about a different issue today. I want to talk about learning and retention of knowledge. Though I'm still relatively young at age 38 I've actually been teaching for 17 years. I've ran public Dojos. I've taught at various conferences all over the United States and will soon be headed to Europe. This isn't about my bio my point is with teaching at all these conferences I've gotten to see alot of programs and with these administrators I've seen alot of the same problems.
People sometimes think our programs don't have a structure yet nothing could be further from the truth. It's just a different structure than what they are used to seeing. You see the way most programs are set up you may start it at 8 am in the morning and work a module til 10 am. Then your going to take a short break and come back and work on something else until lunch. By 5 pm you've pretty much forgotten half of what you learned at 8 am. Your on to the next thing. You get your certificate and the end of class and the instructor hops on the next bus out and your left with a piece of paper and nothing more. This is all too common. It's important that everything flow together. When we start a program in the morning even when we move onto another section we'll come back to what we learned that morning to show how it flows with the rest of the course. This is important not only for just muscle memory but people need to see how everything works together. They need to see how everything is relevant to everything. Otherwise all you have is a bunch of random tactics you'll never be able to remember under stress. There's police programs out there that teach 160 tactics in 5 days. Some of those tactics may be good but it doesn't matter because the program is useless. The officer is never going to remember all 160 and they certainly will not be able to recall each individual tactic to use under stress when the frontal lobe of the brain shuts down during an adrenaline dump. The more options you have to make a single choice the longer it will take you to make that choice. That's just common sense.
Another problem is going to be static training. Anything can work on a compliant subject walking through something. This is caused due to a lack of pressure testing. Pressure testing is basically when you test something to see how it works under pressure. It would be one thing for me to tell you how to get to the store and demonstrated it. It's a different thing when you walk to the store a bunch of times and see for yourself. My directions could be wrong. You might find a shorter way to get there. There might be construction I didn't know about. This is a research problem. Most DT courses are martial arts based. This means there was an agenda to promote a specific ideal when the program was put together. That means it was tested just enough for the developer to prove in his or her own mind that it worked without properly testing it under actual circumstances. What happens during static training your memorizing tactics you aren't learning them and that is a huge difference. This leads me to another problem related to lack of pressure testing and learning. You see the fact is everything works sometimes and nothing is going to work everytime.
When you do static training you miss alot of angles. What if something goes wrong or the guys just get the jump on you. No situation is perfect. A person would have to be pretty arrogant and dumb to think they have tactics in a program that will work 100% of the time. It ain't happening. The students need to know this and they need to hear it from the instructor. Follow ups and failsafes need to be taught. The officers need to see these things from every angle and practice them dynamically so they are actually learning and not memorizing. Get in those positions now so you know your next move so it doesn't happen on the street or if it does then you at least know what needs to be done.
Another thing that gets done at alot of these things is there's a test at the end. I went through this whole thing in martial arts as well. I understand the whole right of passage thing and that's fine but it most instances it's just another way of getting extra money out of the students. I mean if you see these people training everyday you know if they have it down or not. If you don't then you aren't paying enough attention. In a shorter version this is problematic for police courses as well for one of the same reasons I mentioned above. It basically forces the officer to memorize instead of learn. They get so wrapped up in not flunking that test and have to go back and tell the boss they flunked and cost the department money for nothing that they go into memorize mode and the learning stops.
As educators this is our responsibility. The way things have been in the past can't continue and departments need to wake of and be aware of this and stop supporting these programs. The officers need to come first and you need to be aware of the environment that supports learning. It doesn't matter if the tactics are good if the officer can't retain them when they leave the course. If your a civilian it's the same thing this structure applies to you as well. Just memorizing muscular techniques isn't going to help you and it isn't going to be engrained when you need them. This is something I felt needed to be brought to light. Time changes and we need to change with it and if we can offer something differently in a way to make the public safer we need to do everything in our power to make that happen. For the ones that don't make these changes they are destined to become a museum piece serving no purpose but their own
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