"Officers spend a lot of their time in (and around) vehicles, so getting into gunfights near cars is pretty common.” ~Doug Wyllie

With that in mind, I want to call your attention to an excellent new study from Force Science Institute entitled “The Influence of Officer Positioning on Movement During a Threatening Traffic Stop Scenario.”

Three officers respond at 3AM to the call of a disturbance. When they arrive, there are three people present, two males and a female. One male is intoxicated; I will only focus on him for the purpose of this example. Intoxicated male is spoken to by responding officers. They tell him to call it a night and to go to bed and sleep it off. He says he will and turns to go into the house. The officers continue gathering information for the incident report.

I had a discussion on facebook that centered on the question; how can a law enforcement organization gain “world class” tactical proficiency? This posed an insightful question from my good friend Marshall Wallace, What is "world class"? Is there a definition or metric that would allow an officer to know that he/she was approaching that level? I thought to myself that, my friend is the question? What is “world class” and how do we measure it?

“Confronted with a task, and having less information available than is needed to perform that task, an organization may react in either of two ways. One is to increase its information-processing capacity, the other to design the organization, and indeed the task itself, in such a way as to enable it to operate on the basis of less information. These approaches are exhaustive; no others are conceivable. A failure to adopt one or the other will automatically result in a drop in the level of performance.” —Martin van Creveld, Command in War

Some have described and compared police encounters as either static or, dynamic. It’s my view that there is no such thing as a static police encounter. All encounters whether they progressively evolve over a longer period of time or erupt rapidly in a short period of time, without warning, circumstances surrounding law enforcement encounters are all dynamic. Time is moving forward, circumstances changing and the ability of responders to adapt to the ongoing circumstances is always critical.

“In complex settings in which we have to take the context into account, we can’t codify all the work in a set of procedures. No matter how comprehensive the procedures, people probably will run into something unexpected and will have to use their judgment.” ~Gary Klein

Sid Heal the author of Field Command offers some great insight into the Boyd Cycle and how it helps us in Law Enforcement seize the initiative. Sid has spent a life time over 40 years in the Marine Corps and over 30 in law enforcement and had applied these ideas in combat and in crisis. Its valuable information for those cops looking to improve their tactics.

IMPLEMENTATION (OODA LOOP OR BOYD’S CYCLE)