Talk with Brian Baxter, CEO of Force Science

Join us for a great discussion with Brian Baxter, the CEO of Force Science.

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Strategic Training Concepts

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:03

Okay. Hi, Jeff here for Overwatch 5.9. We have a outstanding special guest today from Force Science Institute. This is Bryant Baxter. He has a a great career to to share, but also, of course, uh some fantastic information. We were talking just before we we got on here about a piece that I just watched in the Force Encounters course from Force Science Institute. As like many that are listening, I'm a lifelong learner and I love finding good resources and I really enjoy the uh research, the time and effort that Force Science puts into uh what they put out. So um Brian, thank you so much for being here with us today. It is truly an honor to have you take the time out of your very busy day um to sit here and talk with us.

SPEAKER_00 1:05

I'm glad to be here. I really appreciate the invitation and uh looking forward to the looking forward to the visit.

SPEAKER_01 1:11

Excellent. So, Brian, if you could just kind of tell us a little bit about uh your your background. Most people, of course, are gonna say, well, okay, force science, we we heard of that, but you know, we we saw Brian, and you know why does Brian get to tell us what hit what he thinks?

SPEAKER_00 1:30

Well, I uh I am reminded every day that I don't get to tell my wife what I think, but uh in in this setting, I just kind of start from the beginning. Uh uh I went to the Texas DPS Academy in 1993. Uh I had done a short tour in the Army before that. Uh my career choice was always to be a Texas State Trooper. I'd I was never gonna be a uh lifer in the Army. And I started in uh 1993 and I was 20 years old. Graduated the academy, did a bunch of cool stuff, started out obviously in patrol, uh, spent some time at the state capitol, uh, inside the, like not in a patrol car, but inside the state capitol, uh, doing that security detail, which is a pretty cool job, and you learn a lot that you don't learn anywhere else. Uh progressed naturally, kind of experienced the the storyboard that so many of your listeners have experienced over the years going from patrol. Uh, I went into SWAT, I served on the state SWAT team for two years, and then got a promotion to sergeant investigator in the narcotics service. So I worked in narcotics, did undercover work, organized crime stuff, uh, big cases, small cases, you know, any for anywhere from the cartels to the Dairy Queen Mafia. And I kind of stayed in that bloodstream for the rest of my for most of the rest of my career. I promoted to group supervisor of a narcotics group in South Texas, came back to West Texas, had two groups there, uh, and then and then promoted to uh what I call the swivel chair position. Uh I made captain, district commander, and I realized I was spending a whole lot more time listening to other people's cool stories than I was building my own cool stories. Um, but I got to influence a lot of things that I wanted to influence as a captain. And and I thought I'm gonna retire right here in West Texas as a captain. I had 30 counties, everything from uh Reeves, Pecas, and Terrell counties to the west all the way to Kerrville in the east. I bordered up against Kerrville as a huge district, uh, a lot of people, a lot of cool work. And I thought I was gonna stay there forever uh until we did some redistricting and I was gonna have to move to a town I didn't want to live in, I didn't want to raise my kids in. So I started looking at choices, and I as a career field guy, I made the decision, my wife and I made the decision to leave criminal investigations, organized crime, the work that I'd done for years, and move into training. There was a training captain opening at our tactical training center in Florence, Texas, which is about 45 minutes north of our headquarters and our training academy in Austin. And I took that position and I thought, man, I I don't know if training is going to satisfy, you know, scratch that itch that I still have. And I learned a ton. I uh I ended up spending the rest of my career in the training division, uh, stayed there, helped to develop some things, helped to introduce some some cool courses like our tactical emergency casualty care course. I got to play a big role in that. Uh, got to rewrite some use of force policies, restructure the use of force review board. And in that, in that time is where I started bumping into force science. I went to their force analyst certification course when they they taught it at our academy, and I fell in love. I it was drinking from my fire hose for 40 hours, and and at the end of it, I thought, man, I just learned a whole bunch of cool stuff. I don't know what any of it meant. I can't remember most of it, but boy, was it cool. And so it, you know, as you and I talked earlier, it it really ignited a spark for me to do my own digging and do my own research and start figuring out how all of these human performance research data are applied to what we do every day and what we see other officers and deputies and troopers doing every day. So that kind of became my my goal in life uh as I wrapped up my career. I went to the advanced specialist course that Force Science offers. It's a semester-long course. It's a it's a wonderful immersion type course that that you really get to understand the ins and outs and the application of the research of human performance, biomechanics, physiology, psychology. Uh, and then I was promoted to the rank of assistant chief before I retired and uh retired in 2023. So I had a 30-year and six-month law enforcement career. And and like I told you earlier, it's five out of seven days of the week. I think about that job. I think about those people, those experiences, that the opportunities that I had to serve. Uh, and and I retired and I started contracting for force science, doing some teaching here and there, doing some writing. And ultimately I was uh brought on as the CEO in May of this year. So about nine months ago, I became a full-time employee and and I work with an amazing leadership team, amazing instructional team, amazing back-end team that does the customer service and customer experience work. And and I and like I told you, I if there was a job that God created for me in retirement, it would be this one. It's it's a great place to be.

SPEAKER_01 7:01

That's outstanding. So when you started with the the training division, uh did you well you obviously knew what it was because you've gone through different in-service courses and other things, but did you have a real concept of how you might be able to influence or kind of put some other spin to what it is that uh your agency was doing?

SPEAKER_00 7:36

Yeah, I saw I saw some opportunities, but I didn't see certainly all of the opportunities that I was gonna have. I I'm a I'm a firearms guy and I'm a tactics guy uh coming through SWAT and coming through the infantry and the army. Uh, I've always enjoyed uh helping people shoot better, move better, load better, communicate better. And so that was gonna be my my kind of small-minded focus. Uh, I thought I'm going to the tactical training center. I'll I'll do some some influence on the tactical training that we do. And I got to do that. I got to to bring some modernization to some things that have become kind of uh dogmatic over the years. I I'm teaching this because I was taught this and my FTO told me this. I don't know the data behind it, I don't know the research behind it or the reasons behind it. I just know this is what we teach. Uh so by God, we're gonna keep teaching it. I got to, I got to massage a lot of things like that and get them modernized. Uh, again, just with anything, it's it was about the team. I had a great leadership team. I had a couple of dozen hard-charging troopers out there as instructors that that went to work every day with a smile and knew the importance of their job, that they were influencing not only every in-service student that came out to qualify, or that came out to do a low-light class, or that came out to uh you know do a breaching course, but also every single recruit that comes through the academy spends a significant amount of time at the tactical training center. And those troopers and that leadership team and and myself had the the honor and the privilege and the big responsibility of influencing every single trooper that came through that academy. So that there was a ton of opportunities, and I like to think that the team and I, you know, did did a lot with them.

SPEAKER_01 9:30

That's outstanding. So the progression, and we we do another uh piece as we talked about, where we talk about transitioning from either the military or the uh law enforcement world or both and into you know the private sector. Yeah. Uh you're you're an outstanding example of uh being able to find the right niche and what you want to do and continuing your purpose and mission, uh, to to continue that and move it forward and still influence and still uh make a positive impact on on those that uh choose that they're going to um attend or listen to or read an article from for science. So uh that's it's awesome that you get to do that. Uh that that's a great thing.

SPEAKER_00 10:22

Yeah, it's beyond all I'd never imagined. You know, uh my wife and I sit and reflect sometimes. Never thought we would have a house like this, never thought we'd get this old, you know, never thought we we wouldn't uh that we would have the blessings that we have. And and certainly one of the biggest blessings in my life after God and family and and the the things that provided these opportunities is this opportunity to work before science and have that you know elbow rubbing relationship with the career that I love so much. Um, I'm a a little older, a little balder, a little grayer than most of the people in those classrooms. Uh, and that's okay. You know, I I get to hear their stories, and and one of the most rewarding things is when you give a a block of instruction on attention or vision or uh memory and confabulation and how somebody could not remember something that happened right there in front of their body camera, and you explain the the physiological and environmental and human performance influences that make those things happen. They come to you on a break and they say, Hey, I had a shooting three years ago, and it went down like this, and then this happened. And they tell me, and the body camera shows this thing occurring, but I don't have any memory of it. And I was told I was a liar, and I felt like a liar. I felt like I was crazy, and this is really helping me through that. So that hearing the real life examples of real life human beings, uh, because that's what we all are before we're anything else, we're human beings with the abilities and the limitations of human performance. Hearing those people, usually young people, because I'm in full, full-on grandpa mode, uh, tell those stories and and tell you that you've helped them, that your company and and the work that you do has helped them, man. That's that's huge.

SPEAKER_01 12:19

It is. It's just it's very self-affirming and self-satisfying, uh, which is brings me to a point of the people that I I like to interview and like to spend time talking to are those that do it for the right reasons. Uh many people get into training, security, law enforcement, military for different reasons. Um, somebody that does it for the right reasons and then continues on with that mission is very, very, very, very rare, but very, very, very valuable.

SPEAKER_00 12:57

So it's pretty awesome. Yeah, I I I tried the corporate world. Uh I gave it a shot. I gave it my best effort. Uh well, I gave it an effort, let's say that. And uh I I found out a couple of things about myself that uh I'm not good at selling people things that they didn't come to me to buy. Right. And I found out that uh that there's a value and and a reward in the camaraderie of a of a dynamic profession like public safety, military, uh, that that you just can't get anywhere else.

SPEAKER_01 13:35

Yeah, a very, very valid point. So uh a lot of the people who listen in are either military, law enforcement, medical field who kind of understand you know what you just said, but the implications of what you just said are very far-reaching, and that is the fraternity sorority that exists uh within our brothers and sisters, whether it be in the military or law enforcement, uh bar none, uh, that is something that is very different and unique. Because one moment we could be doing, we're sitting there having pull up the good old squad cars next to one another, right? And we're we're talking, and the next second we're going to a a shooting, or potentially uh somebody who is calling for uh not only the worst day of their life, but uh maybe it's putting us in in jeopardy. So now we have to be confident that that person that we're with um not only has the right training but the right mindset, and that's something that's very impactful. And being in the training uh world, uh being able to impart that is, I think, paramount. And then we take it from that and we go to the other things that we've discussed, and that is understanding uh human performance, understanding what it is that we might do, having training that can be replicated, uh, that is real world based, uh, that is scientifically based. Um that that's kind of where we're hopefully heading, uh, but where we'd love to see more. And I think Force Science has done a a great job in putting some of that research out there.

SPEAKER_00 15:36

No doubt. Uh going back to the early 2000s, uh Dr. Bill Lewinsky was the guy that that started that wave, and he was asking questions that that a lot of people weren't asking. Uh people would point out, hey, this person was shot in the back, and yet the officer says that when he when he shot, the suspect was facing him with a knife or a gun. There was assumptions one way or the other, uh, but Dr. Lewinsky was asking the the right questions at the right time. Well, why'd that happen? How does that happen? Let's be curious, not critical. Let's ask the questions that we need to ask to get to the bottom of this, not just to check a box and move this case off the docket. And so the research that that resulted from those questions being asked is is very law enforcement focused. Uh it hinges and connects with a lot of human performance research, uh, exercise science research, uh, physiology research across the gamut and across a number of really highly rated peer-reviewed journals. Uh, but it all began with the the asking of questions, which is what science is all about. People like to say that, oh, this science is settled or this question has been answered. Okay, great. The the best thing about research isn't just answering the question that you were asking when you went into it, it's determining what the next question is and what we need to start digging into next. And that's that's the beauty of of having this pool of beautiful minds that asks the right questions and knows how to do the research. There's there's always going to be critics, uh, skeptics, and that's actually, you know, part of the scientific process is skepticism. You you you can't overlook skepticism, curiosity, being objective, uh, being skeptical, and then being having the humility to say, hey, I I could have done that better, or maybe we should look into this next time, or hey, that person's more right than I am. We we got to have all those aspects. But at the end of the day, when you're researching human performance, it's observational research. And you're you're not treating one group and not treating another group. You're simply observing a group perform some kind of biomechanical function, and you're either timing it or you're getting the the increase in heart rate that results from it, and that becomes a range that you can then use when you apply it to training, when you apply it to investigations, uh, case analysis. And so you're right, the the research is is the the key, the core of what we do, and not just our research, but research from all over these other disciplines.

SPEAKER_01 18:23

Absolutely. So that the whole scientific process is starting with uh some sort of hypothesis, asking that right question, and then the the defense of it, per se, which is your skeptics or your criticisms, so balances that out at some point.

SPEAKER_02 18:42

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 18:42

Um, yeah, for sure. Um offering courses that uh and I I personally have taken quite a few from Force Science and continue to do so. And as we kind of just talked, I I saw um a piece that you presented in uh Force Encounters that uh was just very well delivered, by the way, but also uh had some of that research that we had a little discussion just so everyone understands. Uh the evolution of um force science has been uh great. And looking back at some of the groundbreaking research that was done prior, and now we're looking at newer because there's other tools available now, uh, to to now research and to to look at things like, for example, the vehicle stops that you you took a look at and the the uh the the zones um uh of where someone might go and how they may react and you know there is no right answer. It's just now we're armed with some better information that could possibly save save someone.

SPEAKER_00 20:00

Sure. Yeah, and when you take a hundred people, almost a hundred people, and you run them through those scenarios, those those uh research constructed scenarios, and a lot of my uh my peers and my my cohorts out there in the world that do scenario-based training for a living, might look at these research scenarios and say, oh my gosh, that's that's not the ideal way to do training. Well, it's not, it's not training. It's we're we're testing we're testing the the environmental and physiological and uh uh other influences on human behavior under stress. And so when you take almost a hundred cops and you put them through those traffic scenarios and you see very similar things repeating over almost a hundred cops, you can you can observe that and document that as a range of expected uh responses. And then you got places you can go from there. You can take that and apply it to your firearms training, maybe change up the way you do your firearms qualifications and your firearms training, or you can look at it from an investigative standpoint and say, you know, maybe we're expecting too much of a human being who is facing their own death, who is inches away from somebody who has the means and the intent and the ability to kill me and is acting on that right now. Maybe we're expecting a little bit too much from that person when we look at the the decision-making process that they use and the the response that they select from the myriad responses that are available to them when you're reviewing it in a in a nice air controlled, uh air conditioned office with good lighting and you know hot coffee.

SPEAKER_01 21:44

So it's uh that that brings yeah, brings us to the the um standard of uh the gram factors that you know gram versus connerts stood for since uh 1986. Um the idea of understanding well. Those factors are, what what it means, and the fact that the uh United States Supreme Court had used the the the very terminology of uh making split second decisions rapidly evolving you know um dangerous situations. And taking that and understanding it and then looping that in with what is actual human capability and human performance. Um we can't go by what we see on a body worn camera or a dash cam. We can't go by what all the cell phones everybody holding up, and you you know, we see these snippets of of video or other things and formulate, and then we're using our own, and we'll use the term schema now, uh, to to fill in those gaps, um, ourselves and what are the legislation legislators doing and what are the the what's the court system doing in in the jurisprudence world? Um, how are they making it? Uh, because when you have a a standard like Graham, and then you get a ruling from a circuit court, like the 10th circuit did with talking about officer creating jeopardy, uh how how do we go through that? We need to have people like yourself, we need to have companies like Force Science that can help others understand a little bit better uh what is human performance-based, uh, what can we expect.

SPEAKER_00 23:43

And uh as you ask those questions and bring up those topics, uh the the first thing that comes to mind is a concept that we're championing right now for science called honest accountability. There's there's always a you know, the pumping of fists and the chanting to hold people accountable. And I think we'll all agree that's the right thing to do. We need to hold ourselves and each other accountable for the choices we make, for the behaviors we exhibit, for the for the damage we cause. Uh, but it can't just be accountability based on emotion or appearance because the use of force looked bad, or because it isn't necessarily what I would have done, or what the the observer would have done. We need to create a standard that encompasses human performance, biomechanics, physio, all of the things that you and I have been talking about, and and we call that honest accountability. And there's two primary prongs to honest accountability. One is that the standard or the expectation to which a person is being held accountable is clear and unambiguous enough that the officer can predict the the lawfulness of their behavior. In other words, this standard is so clear and established uh a red octagon on the top of a post at an intersection. It says stop. That's a very clear and unambiguous expectation. Every driver that approaches that intersection not only is expected to stop, but they know they're expected to stop. It's nothing that's uh in the wind or in development or in the mind of some reformist. So the same standard has to be available to law enforcement. The the the expectation, whether it's a law or a policy or uh a rule, has to be clear and understood by the person that's being held accountable to it. That's one prong. The other prong is that the expectation, whether it's a rule, a law, or a uh a policy, it can't be beyond the limits of human performance. It has to be something that this officer who is first a human being can physically do. In other words, uh part of my jobs at DPS was reviewing legislation that was going before uh uh the the state legislature to become law or not. And one of the in 20 uh 20, after the uh George Floyd riots and and situations that that resulted from that, there were a lot of people with knee-jerk reactions trying to reform police policies and state laws. And I believe that they did it with the best of intentions. I believe that they had in mind a clear vision of fewer people being hurt, and that is a honorable and a great goal to have, and I share it. Uh, but you can't you can't get there through unrealistic or dishonest standards. And one of the one of the bills that I read said that an officer must immediately cease using force when the threat is diminished or the threat horizon changes. To a to a non-human factors literate reader, that is intuitive and it makes sense. Hey, immediately when it stops, you gotta stop. But I had a case out of East Texas that I worked where deputies were responding to a scene where a woman was trapped in her car, being held hostage by her boyfriend. Boyfriend had pulled his pickup truck, blocked her car between the garage door and his pickup truck, and was aiming his AR-15 rifle at her periodically. And she called 911 from inside the car. The deputies start to respond. And this is right after a well-known case in Florida where an officer was almost convicted criminally for not acting fast enough. Uh and so these officers have that on their mind. They have the fact that this woman's being held hostage on their mind. They had the fact that this guy's got an AR-15 on their mind, and they respond with intention. As they approach, the bad guy has dropped his rifle, but he grabs the rifle of one of the deputies. They start struggling for the rifle, they go to the ground, and as the lead deputy and the crook are fighting over this rifle, another officer on the scene, watching this unfold, says, if he gets that rifle, he's gonna shoot one of us. And so he resorts to deadly force in the form of a butt stroke to the head of the suspect. Hits him once, they're fighting over the rifle, hits him twice, they continue to fight over the rifle. Three times, four times as he's coming up after that fourth strike, the suspect lets go of the rifle and the deputy is able to back away. And the deputy comes down with that fifth strike that he had already committed to and he had already started the motor program that the the kinesthetic chain that's going to lead to that strike, that fifth strike, he had already decided to do it, he had already put it in motion. And what we know about human performance is sometimes it takes longer to stop doing something than it does to finish doing something. And the question that was put to the court was was that fifth strike unlawful force? And and the answer is no. To stop immediately is beyond the limits of human performance. Now, if you would have hit him five more times, maybe then we can look into some uh ill intent, some some bad behavior. But that's well within the limitations of human performance. It's just one example of an expectation having to live within that that range of of possibility in human performance. So that's the two they got to be clear and unambiguous, and they got to be within the limits of human performance.

SPEAKER_01 29:54

Yeah, and one might argue that some of that is built in within already the law. Some's gonna already say that, well, with qualified immunity, and right there we have to deal with terminology because it's qualified, right? So, what do we need to do to take out the qualified immunity? We have to show the breach of duty, and you know, did they uh intentionally potentially uh violate somebody's constitutional right? Um clearly established you had mentioned before, and you you hit that right on the head because it's clearly established law that has to get looked at and clearly established in plain language uh that is within the the form of um actionable and it can be uh looked at through the limits of human performance, that's where I think things are lacking, and that force science is recognized as lacking, and others have spoken to that. Um when I go as an expert and use of force and and talk about that, uh I draw on a myriad of of research. And part of what I I use is some of what you just said, and that is have trying to explain to a group of lay people that in the moment um you've already made that decision, that that deputy who is doing that strike um already had had thought done and was committed to doing it. How can you flip a switch and stop it? So that is beyond the limits of human capability. So now we we must explain that to people who uh have this deputy's life in their hands at this point, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:05

And it helps, and and this is one of the things that we try to do, it helps to explain it before it happens. In other words, make this knowledge of human performance common before we need to know it. Now, we also know that if I'm not asking the question, then the answer is not going to have much meaning to me. I've got to be asking the question for the answer to have meaning. And usually that question is asked uh after a critical event. But when we can explain it up front, it's education. When I tell you the reason that every time you approach an intersection that's controlled by a traffic light, and I ask you, is the light's green as you approach, but you know that the light's been green for a minute and it's fixed to change, what color is it going to change to? It's gonna change to amber before it changes to red. Because as long as we've had traffic lights, Dr. Lewinsky calls them semaphores. I love that word, semaphore. As long as we've had traffic lights, we have known that it's impossible for a human being to stop instantly. You can't go from green to red. You have to go from green to amber to red to allow someone to perceive the change in their environment, to become consciously aware of that change in their environment, and then make a decision, very simple decision, to stop, and then begin the process of stopping. The same is true in baseball. If you look at the major league baseball players that are that are at home plate and they're facing a pitcher that's throwing on the low end 95 miles an hour, you got about four tenths of a second to hit that ball, to identify it, make sense of it, orient to it, decide what you're gonna do, and then start doing what you're gonna do. So, how likely are we to be able to check a swing once we've done that process based on our stimulus? And then we realize, oh, that's a curveball, or oh, that's go that's low and inside, I need to stop this swing. Checking a swing is not successful very often because it's beyond the limits of human performance in that time-compressed situation. So if we explain things ahead of time using real-world examples of traffic and sports, it's education. If we wait until after something happens and we explain it from a human performance perspective specific to law enforcement, it appears as though it's excuse making, even though it's not. It's still education, but it has the flavor of excuse making if we do it after the fact, where it has the flavor of education if we do it up front.

SPEAKER_01 34:47

Yeah. Brings us to uh the whole tenets of community policing, having that relationship with the community prior to an incident, as opposed to trying to build that bridge afterwards. Uh, we we all have seen and know the aftermath that can happen if that relationship isn't there. Kind of the same idea. The other thing that I I really like uh that uh Dr. Lewinsky had brought up, he uses the analogy of how many cameras it takes a referee, right? Or you know, to be able to see, you know, the angle or whatever, and how a person really needs multiple views to make that that decision. That's why they have those reviews, right, on the field. So same idea. You don't just have one camera with one view, you have multiple, and and I love how he he used that as an analogy to try to just like you did with the um traffic light, which is great. Um same idea. Uh Neil, put that out there.

SPEAKER_00 36:03

Educate with real world examples, and that that sports analogy is so good because there's a picture that I've got it pictured in my mind, and you're you're about to, and your viewers are about to have this picture in their mind because we've all seen it. Uh the end zone call, where one official uh is waving the the pass is incomplete in the end zone, and the other official is holding up the touchdown sign. They're both within feet of the problem, but their perspectives are different. Neither perspective is wrong based on what they saw or what they paid attention to. But in the historical context, one outcome is correct and the other is incorrect. And that's why one of the one of the favorite quotes I like to use from an officer that was involved in a case that we worked years ago, he said, I was wrong, but I was telling the truth. What that official saw when he called that pass incomplete was a knee on the ground or a bobble in the possession. Something he perceived visually caused him to call that pass incomplete. The other official did not see that and called it as a touchdown. Neither one of them is lying, but they saw it differently because of the difference in their perspective, and then what that perspective made available for them to perceive.

SPEAKER_01 37:16

Yeah, so that well that can bring us to uh a hundred different things, but uh one thing that I I guess we can kind of get into just slightly from that idea of yes, people number one can make mistakes because police officers, just like anybody else are human. Number two, they do understand the law and there's rules and there's a reason for them. Um intentions can possibly be important, but more importantly, was the officer aware of what was the clearly established law at the time? Yeah, were there rules in place that were understandable, clearly defined, and how is it being interpreted? Uh that that is so important. Um because we see the interpretations can can vary. So not that an internal affairs investigation is wrong, not that a grand jury could be wrong, not that uh a jury of uh whoever looking at this, whether it be civil or criminal, uh, not that they're wrong. It's how are they perceiving it? And and we we have so much to talk about where it comes to perception and human performance. Um I I what's clear in my mind, and you had mentioned uh about the check swing and the the four tenths of a second potentially, uh brings me back to uh your segment where you had and talked about the 300 milliseconds that you know third of a second. So how can you begin to process that if you physically cannot?

SPEAKER_00 39:18

Yeah, and that's where uh what the question you're asking uh leads us right into the place where we realize that these observed times of performance aren't exact times, they create ranges uh where things tend to happen from perception to cognition to decision to action. There's a time uh draw an officer drawing a gun from a level three holster, for example. The numbers we have say that the average time is 1.7 seconds. To draw a gun from a level three holster to an unexpected stimulus, uh, get a sight glimpse and press the trigger, 1.7 seconds. Now, if we go to the action pistol match at the local gun range this weekend, we're gonna see plumbers and teachers with millisecond splits. They're they're light years faster than this data that we've gathered on officers with an unexpected stimulus, pulling, aiming, firing. Uh so that's that's one thing. It's important to remember these are ranges, and the way we perceive and the way we understand matters. You pointed out the P300 event-related potential. That's a that's a phenomenon that happens with visual stimulus. Uh, the amount of time from the stimulus becoming available to us to the amount of time that we, or to the time rather, that we become consciously aware of that change. And uh we've got a great video of a guy opening a door and a snake being on the the hinge of the door. And as the guy opens a door, unexpected stimulus, the snake bites him on top of the head, and you really go frame by frame and you see about 300 milliseconds from the head hitting from the snake hitting the top of the head to the guy beginning to respond. So that's that reaction time. Uh perception reaction is total response time. But we're looking at about 300 milliseconds for most of those. And I'll I'll tell your listeners pull out your cell phones and go to humanbenchmark.com, and you'll get a screen that says uh touch the screen to begin, and it'll say when the screen turns green, tap it. And this is testing our P300 event-related potential, the time it takes for the stimulus to appear to the time that we become consciously aware and begin to respond. And what you'll find is most people, the first time they do it, they're about three to four hundred milliseconds. They practice it a few times though, they get to a point where they're in the low twos. And so that's the the literature tells us that P300 isn't always 300 milliseconds, it's between two and five hundred milliseconds for a visual stimulus. What helps us be faster to your I mean, I'm taking a long way around to answer your question. Yeah, understood. What makes us faster and to be able to hit a baseball in four tenths of a second is a thing called schema. And it's when we've developed blueprints of how when something starts like this, it usually progresses like this. And so without all of the information being available, my brain goes to a blueprint that it has already stored from a similar experience and predicts what's likely to happen. So that that prediction, that anticipation, that's what allows us to speed up and go faster than if you were to stack linearly the P300, uh, the decision making, the action. That would be much longer, but because we our brains, we think our brains are storage devices, uh, but more than that, they're predictive devices and they help us predict what's going to happen so that when the saber-toothed tiger appears in front of us, we don't stand there and wait to see what's going to happen next. We have a predictive ability uh that enables us to respond to threats uh very, very quickly. And that's based on experience, that's based on knowledge, what you've learned, what you've done, what you've been told, and all of that combined. So there's a couple of types of schema. Uh, and and the ones that matter most to us are are uh there's there's people schema, there's event schema, there's place schema. So an example of a place schema is if you showed up at my house in San Angelo, Texas, and I greeted you at the door and you're like, hey man, I was passing through town. I really enjoyed the podcast. I wanted to stop by and say hi. And I say, Great, I've got some stuff on the grill out back. Why don't you run inside, grab us each a beer, and I'll meet you in the backyard? Where would you go? What room in the house? Let's start with room in the house. What room in the house would you go to to get the beers? Right. You would figure a kitchen. Yeah, you go to the kitchen. And then when you get in the kitchen, you're probably going to go straight to the refrigerator, open the refrigerator, and then look for what looks like a beer. That's a place schema. That's I've been here before. This is how things usually go. Restaurant, no different. I get to the restaurant and I sit down. What's likely to be the first question I need to be prepared to answer? What would you like to drink? So we know before we get on our phone and start scrolling, or before we get deep into conversation with whoever we're dining with, we decide I'm going to get a sweet tea. I'm going to get a water. And so we're prepared for that because we have a schema that tells us it began like this, it's likely to progress like that. And so we don't have to wait for them to ask what we want to drink. We've already made that decision based on the schema. And so that that is how we we respond to things more quickly uh than we would if we just linearly stacked those times.

SPEAKER_01 45:14

Sure. And I think you also had uh mentioned it uh within that uh not a term that has been coined by anyone in particular that I I know of, and maybe you do, uh training at the speed of life. So bringing that to reality, uh training that's repeatable, that's actionable, and that's at the speed of life, uh that's I think how we get those ranges, yes. So you know someone who has been able to have good training, repeatable training, uh that has done that at the speed of life, that has done it with uh knowledge uh can potentially have some of that schema already worked out and potentially uh do it a little bit faster than someone that that has not, potentially.

SPEAKER_00 46:17

But then we can and a lot of that is decision making uh because of the way we make decisions. Before I move too far, though, I want to I want to tip the hat and give credit to Ken Murray uh for for coining that phrase and writing that book, Training at the Speed of Life. I'm sure it's been used uh universally, but it's a good opportunity to to point out uh Ken's good work with that book. Uh but the schema that they do allow us to decide faster and to respond faster. Uh and that's not always a good thing. Sometimes the decision that we make, people often mistake decision making in time compression with the type of decision making we use when we're uh planning out our day's events. I've got to go to the dry cleaner, then I need to go to the grocery store, and I need to go to uh the vet and pick up some flea shampoo. Those are my three things that I need to do. So I'll probably start with the grocery store. No, if I do that, then the ice cream's gonna melt. Uh let me go to the vet first. No, that's closer than uh the dry cleaner. Okay, got it. I'm gonna go to the dry cleaner, then the vet, then the grocery store, and I'll come home. That's a consequential, intentional, rational decision-making process that involves identifying our options, comparing our options, imagining how it's gonna play out, war game and whiteboarding, and then picking the best one. And then, oh, by the way, if in the middle of that something changes, we can change our mind and adjust our performance based on this new information. That is not how we make decisions in time compression. And Daniel Kahneman's research tells us that's not always the way we make decisions when we have uh discretionary time. We tend nine times out of ten to resort to a system one approach, which is fast, frugal, uh, taking the first, not necessarily the best option, and moving forward. Sometimes that leads to the wrong decision. Uh, but that's not an intentional choice. When we make decisions under time compression, where I did you look at Gary Klein's work with uh recognition prime decision making, Kahneman's work with intuition, all of this body of research tells us in general, we look at a situation and we identify a pattern. And the pattern presents a problem or a question that has to be addressed or answered. We then pick the first thing that fits that pattern that our brain doesn't immediately reject. I'm watering the house, I notice that my uh shrubs are on fire. What should I do? Well, I should I should go to start the car and charge my phone. No, that doesn't matter. My brain immediately rejects anything other than using the water hose that's in my hand and spraying water on the fire. In that case, it's the right choice, but sometimes it's not. And it's not that we picked the wrong choice, it's that the pattern and the solution were mismatched. And it was done in time compression where we didn't have the opportunity to weigh options and we didn't have the opportunity to change course based on new information. So decision making is its own, its own days worth of discussion.

SPEAKER_01 49:42

Absolutely, and that brings us a little bit uh we'll talk about expert novice and trying to make someone an expert in whatever, and then have them perform as an expert and what the novice does or can do, um that's kind of what we're talking about here. We're discussing someone who can act and react as an expert, or someone who acts and reacts as a novice.

SPEAKER_00 50:15

Yeah, and and uh there's been a lot of work on that, especially in the sports world. And there's a a term that comes out of that research. Uh Dr. Joan Vickers is involved in that research, and there's a there's a lot of uh Mark Williams is involved in that kind of sports research, uh that boils it down to the the what, where, when, and how. And when we know what to look for, which is the information that's gonna be the most salient to my successor survival, we know where to look for it. Um, I am a linebacker, and I know that a lot of information about who I need to go after is gonna be based on the visual focus of the quarterback. So I'm gonna watch the quarterback's body positioning and I'm gonna watch the quarterback's eyes if I can to try to decide where I'm gonna go. That's the what, the information based on their focus, and then the where is it's on the quarterback. I'm looking right there at him to get this information. Uh, the what, where, when, when do I need to look for it? And then the how to make sense of it once I see it, how to interpret it and apply it to my situation right now. So that's called game intelligence: what, where, when, and how. We apply that to law enforcement. And and you made the reference to training at the speed of life, high fidelity training, contextually relevant training, uh, ecologically designed training that we don't tell someone, okay, we're gonna put you in a in a technical mount position, and we want you to handcuff this person. I want you to go from standing to a double wrist control to a takedown to side control to a technical mount to a kamura, and then to the handcuffing. I want to go from A to Z, not jump in at F. So that's the and we have to build the context around these scenarios, and we have to let the scenarios play out in a way that gives the the trainer the opportunity to do some questioning along the way, very, very well-framed questioning, not why are you standing here? Uh, that tells a cop I'm standing in the wrong place. But tell me about your position. What can you see? Where can you go? And then and then we move through that scenario and we see the consequences and and we become better. And that is then a mental blueprint that that trainee has to refer back to when they have to make a decision and time compression. That becomes a schema, that training iteration becomes a schema uh that they get to refer back to. I I had a call from a TECC student one time. We had we had trained in uh El Paso, and we were, among other things, doing tourniquet application. And we were doing lower body tourniquet application, starting with direct pressure, starting with hands-free direct pressure, uh, going into retrieving the tourniquet, applying the tourniquet. And he, from that day forward, started carrying a tourniquet in his boot. At the time, cops didn't care tourniquets on their belts. It just didn't, it wasn't shiny, it didn't look nice. So they they had to hide them. Well, this guy had one in his boot. He goes on a uh arrest uh with a with a team of guys, and the crook is hiding in the outdoor bathroom of the gas station. They open the door and they're met with immediate gunfire. And this particular troop catches one in the vest and one in the thigh. It shatters his femur and it decimates his femoral artery, and he is bleeding out right there on the scene. And you hear on the video he's he's shouting, I need a tourniquet, somebody bring me a tourniquet. And then you see him remember, oh, I've got one in my boot. And so he takes it out and he starts self-application, and then his buddy comes along, applies direct pressure. And to this day, that guy is a very healthy, active member of law enforcement with to what the way I understand it, very few deficits because of that serious wound. And it was because of his immediate action. Well, he called me from the hospital after they had controlled the bleeding, they got him into surgery, they'd removed the tourniquet, and all that good stuff had happened. He called me and he said, Hey man, I I knew what was going on before I knew what was going on because we had done so many repetitions and so many content, more important than repetitions, contextually relevant repetitions. I was able to act quickly, and so was my partner. So it's to see that stuff play out in real life is is super rewarding and and super cool, and it just supports what you're saying. We can't just look at a PowerPoint and learn about stopping massive uh extremity bleeding. We have to do some contextually relevant training, uh, high fidelity training to make that stuff sticky.

SPEAKER_01 55:09

Oh, uh absolutely a hundred percent. Um and that's where the the training world uh is finally catching up in in some sense, but also we need to take in the sense of law enforcement uh what jurisprudence we're dealing with and mix that in. And we we as uh trainers or policymakers need to understand that that changes uh constantly and that it takes vigilance and it takes understanding.

SPEAKER_00 55:47

Yeah, one of my uh one of my uh closest mentors has this thing that he says uh he says the answer to complexity is not found in simplicity. The answer to complexity is found in understanding. And if if we try to apply, if we try to force couple things, because I know this very well and I see this as the problem, the hammer, you know, if the only thing we carry is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail. That's a lack of understanding. That's that's applying simplicity to a problem. Uh the understanding piece comes from uh, well, first of all, uh a deep understanding of human performance capability and limitations, uh, but also understanding where that stuff applies and how often we need to check our, you know, there's that training cycle where we provide the training, we evaluate the training, we adjust the training, we redeliver the training, we evaluate the training. We and if we're not doing that, if we're not evaluating the way we're applying these things uh by keeping up with the events that are happening in real life, then we're selling ourselves and our agencies and our officers and ultimately our public that we're sworn to protect, we're selling them short. One of the things I did uh with the use of force review board at my former agency is in addition to having expert qualified voting members, we had non-voting members that would leave during deliberations. We'd have an executive session. Uh, we'd have the officer present if he wanted to be present so that they could fill in blanks or offer guidance because this isn't an inquest. This isn't a that we're not out to get anybody. We're out to find out the historical truth as well as this officer's perceptions as they apply to the historical truth. So it's helpful to have the person who had the perception in the room. But in addition to that, we had non-voting observers, and those observers would come from the EBOC, the emergency vehicles operation course, they would come from firearms training, and they would come from the uh the medical component, the TECC component, so that they could watch in real time what's happening on the streets when officers are using force, either with their vehicle in a pursuit or with their pepper spray, their baton, their firearm. And and that becomes a way to stay vigilant, to your point, and continuously apply appropriately uh the right standards and the right research and the right training to the right people in the right way.

SPEAKER_01 58:31

Well, that's outstanding. If uh and that is usually the intent of most agencies and the intent of uh most trainers to do that. Um, but we have to do our own due diligence and make sure we're we're listening to the right people and we're we're also doing the right things. Um, so that that's really important.

SPEAKER_00 58:57

Yeah, it really is, especially in 2025. Or excuse me, that's an example of a slip and capture error, by the way. Uh, we can get into more of that later. In 2026, everybody has a platform. You and I have this platform right now. We could be completely full of BS, and and a viewer that doesn't know what they don't know would never know. So we have to be good stewards of our platforms. Uh and and folks like you set the standard for that, and I thank you for that. Uh, but we also got to be aware that not everybody is a good steward of their platform. And they'll hear something that sounds cool or looks neat, and they'll put it on their TikTok, they'll put it on their Instagram, they'll put it on their Facebook, and they'll talk about it on a podcast. You know, we used to be super secretive and we used terms like law enforcement sensitive when we talk about training. There's no more of that. That's gone. Uh, you you can't open up social media because the algorithm knows what you like to see. And if you like guns and tactics and things like that, the algorithm is going to send you guns and tactics and things like that. You can't turn on social media without seeing somebody with a tactical beard and a, you know, a schmedium t-shirt and a carbine doing some building clearing thing. And and to the to the untrained eye, it all looks cool. Uh, the beard and the velcro and the oakleys make it legit. And so they start watching those things and absorbing that as good information. Not looking for credentials, not being skeptical. Like that's one of the core components of the scientific attitude is skepticism. We have to be skeptic skeptics of the information we're consuming. Uh, and that, yeah, that's a huge piece.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:43

Yeah, for sure. Uh and it brings to it to also the point of uh there is a big difference, and people some just because they don't know, uh, big difference between military training and law enforcement training. So we we can start with just rules of engagement and you know what we're doing as opposed to the myriad of things that law enforcement has to uh take in consideration uh differently. And again, it depends on the the the context, but um seeing some CQB or close quarter, you know, uh drills by uh Navy SEAL or you know, Force Recon or somebody, and then you know looking at what uh a SWAT team might do going in or an SRT or whoever uh a little bit different, right? Yeah, so that's another piece where you're dealing with uh some individuals that get their ideas and training uh from movies, TV, TikTok, I mean real stuff, but is it necessarily what's applicable to what they're trying to look at or do now?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:12

Yeah, and and it it really hits that danger zone when because we look when we look at the core mission of law enforcement versus the core mission of a direct action military unit. Uh the law enforcement mission is to serve and protect the citizens, and and that includes bad guys. We serve and protect the citizens, even the ones that are making a bad decision right now. Uh it's our sworn duty to serve and protect. The military direct action mission is to locate, close with, and destroy. It's completely different at a foundational level. And and when you look at comparing tactics, you know, we may use a noise flash diversionary device. A lot of people call it a flashbang. We might use a noise flash diversionary device before we enter a room, but when we do, the first thing you do is peek and and clear that room, make sure that you're not throwing that that uh flashbangs out of sight so you're not blowing things up or setting things on fire. You have to have visual confirmation of where you're gonna deploy that flashbang because you don't want to have collateral damage or unintended impact on on people that aren't an immediate threat to you. Whereas in the military, it's an M67 frag, and you don't even have to look. You're throwing it in there, you're blowing up everything in the room because our purpose is to close with and destroy. So, yeah, those are grossly oversimplified examples. Uh, but uh we do have, there are some phenomenal uh special operations veterans on social media now teaching wonderful tactics through a lot of experience and training. And they, this is why I say military veterans become some of our best police officers because they have that basic indoctrination into that fraternity you mentioned. They have that basic indoctrination into uh we do scary things, we we go toward the threat rather than running away from the threat. And then they evolve, we evolve uh to take that base experience and apply it to the much more nuanced example that we we see in law enforcement, where uh we may go. Uh we had a couple of wonderful troopers in North Texas go from a man shooting a handgun directly at one of them, them returning fire with uh car beams, putting the suspect down, stopping the threat, and within seconds were applying direct pressure, retrieving their uh first aid equipment, and trying to trying to stop that guy from dying. He forced them to use deadly force, and so they did, but they immediately responded uh with first aid and and life-saving procedures. And and even the the prosecutor's office that viewed the evidence said that is some of the most professional policing I've ever seen in my life. And that's that's a product of having uh that military experience and then marrying that with the responsibilities and law enforcement and and becoming a wonderful servant.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:30

Absolutely. Also, uh I think it it speaks toward leadership, so we haven't discussed that, but uh no matter what rank you are, uh there is some form of uh leadership that one learns uh in the military. So taking that and then transitioning it into uh law enforcement, uh that's another key point. Um where now we have someone who is and we can have this. Argument over uh can leadership be taught? Is it innate? And you know, we can go on and on and on, but you know, uh somebody can be put in position and not necessarily deserve to be in that position. We got it. There's politics, and we can get beyond all that.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:17

Obviously, hypothetical, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:06:19

Hypothetical. So we'll we'll just kind of say that from uh in Marine Corps perspective, the Lance Corporal who has responsibilities understands that they they have some sort of responsibility up to where your company commander, even you know, on the company level captain, you know, understands what that is, and then you take that and everywhere in between. And I I think having that base um also adds to the schema, as to where someone can become a a not a novice, but an expert, because they know where to potentially focus that attention. And and back to like Dr. Vickers, where you're spending X amount of time, whatever that might be. Um I know what I'm looking at, and I spend a little more time looking at that than someone who isn't familiar with it. So you know, that's where we can kind of kind of see uh where either prior law enforcement experience or prior military experience is gonna help.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:38

Yeah, and and you can't discount the importance of the influence of those that have come before us, the things that they teach us, because we can often we can often substitute schema with procedure, with trained procedure. You don't want to choreograph uh to the point that everything you're doing is you know intended to dance to one song, but we can often replace schema with process, and what I mean by that is uh we we teach officers when someone approaches you and you suspect something might be going on, you look at the whole body and then you look at the hands, and then you look at the waistband, and then you look at the face. And we teach that sequence because history has taught those with schema. The first thing we need to do is if we look at the hands first and we see a gun in the hand, and we decide, oh, gun in the hand, I'm gonna shoot. And then we realize that person had a badge around their neck. The first thing we look at is the whole body so that we can determine whether or not this is a friendly, whether or not this is somebody with blood dripping all over them. And then we look at the hands, then we look at the waistband, then we look at the face. Uh, the the reason for that is based on individual experience and schema, but then we put that into a process. The same reason that we conduct high-risk stops, the way we conduct high-risk stops. If it's a stolen car and the driver comes back to have a history of assaulting the police, we're not walking up to the window. We're calling them out. Uh, and all of those things are intended to they fit right in with schema, but they also teach the younger, inexperienced officers uh what to do and why.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:17

Yeah, hence a very good FTO or coach or you know training program uh being formalized and rotating a couple of different officers in in that uh role to bring that experience to those officers that are just starting. So uh that's I I guess something that's a little bit more accepted now. Uh, but it also goes back to case law where we're looking at training and experience, right? So ultimately we're discussing training experience here. So what is your training experience? If you have none, where are you drawing it from?

SPEAKER_00 1:09:59

Yeah, right. Uh there was a guy that I used to work with, and he was oh man, he probably had 10 years on. And I was riding with him one day, and and uh we are coming to an intersection and we see two cars bump into each other, and you know, not a big deal, just a little traffic collision. One of them ran a red light, and the guy who ran the red light bumps into the car, and so I reach over to turn on the lights, and he's like, hold on. And within a second, the driver that ran the red light and bumped the other car takes off. And and so you know, maybe that's that's not the greatest example because if we had turned on the lights, perhaps he hadn't a run. But this guy has learned through experience that sometimes just uh don't rush into things, I guess is the point. Don't rush into things because you don't know what's going to be there. If you have discretionary time, use it, create distance, look at some options, and and this is the difference between what you referred to earlier is judge Justice Ridquist's quote from Graham versus Connor that these events are uh tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving, quit fast and in a hurry. And so when we don't have discretionary time, uh we don't have discretionary time. All of these human performance elements are gonna be at play. But when we do, one of the benefits of force science training is that we take this human performance research, we show you that somebody can draw a gun from their waistband and shoot you in the face in a quarter of a second, and it's gonna take you at least 1.7 seconds to draw and return fire. We also found that on average, there's about a quarter second shot cadence. So at a second, if you take a second, we're looking at five shots because the first shot is at zero, a quarter second, half second, three quarters of a second, one second, five shots in one second. So that 1.7 minus the quarter second, you're looking at five, six, seven shots coming your way before you even get to return fire. So we we arm officers with that information, not to tell them shoot first and ask questions later, which unfortunately some people think is the purpose of our training. Instead of that, the purpose of the training is as you're arriving on this scene, know the limits of your performance and don't let yourself get into a situation where you're standing toe-to-toe with somebody who can shoot you in a quarter of a second, and you're not going to be able to draw until almost two seconds. Uh, and and it also, you know, what are your other options? Should we control the weapon? Should we run? Should we uh go hands-on? There's there's just so much to learn that that we've learned through other officers' experiences and then analyzing those cases. And that's part of the benefit of force science training is giving officers the information they need to know about what their limitations are and what that means to the to the tactical situation they're about to enter. Maybe I just hold off for a second. Maybe I call for a dog, maybe I call for a drone, maybe I get my supervisor en route. You know, my partner's almost here. Why do I have to go in right now? Uh, and so when we have discretionary time, uh we we should use it.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:14

Oh yeah. So uh time and distance is something that has been talked about over and over and over again. But now we can put some context to it and as you had mentioned, discretionary time. Yeah, do you do you have that availability and also the totality of circumstances or understanding being armed with that knowledge going to that incident or whatever it might be? Um we're already filling in those blanks, you know, anyway, through uh whatever predisposed schema that we do have. But you know, once we get there, can we create that time space distance, you know, to to give us some more discretionary time? Or is it something that requires immediate action? And if it does, where are we drawing that from?

SPEAKER_00 1:14:16

And so it's a good time to go back and point out that although force science does not teach tactics, right? We we teach the data and the evidence from the research that informs other officers and agencies to develop their own tactics. Uh, but a good example of of not having discretionary time and then using you you mentioned bias, using hindsight bias to inform our review of an officer's performance just played out in Austin, Texas, uh, where an officer had been convicted uh in 24 of deadly conduct. Uh it they bumped it down from murder to deadly conduct. He and his partner are responding to a fifth-floor call of a man in emotional crisis, got a knife to his neck, walking around the building. The officers get to the fifth floor, and this is all public record at this point. The officers get to the fifth floor, the elevator door opens. There's the guy with the knife to his own throat looking into a mirror. He turns around to the officers, steps toward them with the knife in their direction. They're within five feet from one another. We know that you can it is fractions of a second to cover that distance and slash. The officers took the first solution that fit the pattern. Man with a knife walking toward me, ignoring my commands to stop and drop the knife. That pattern I recognize as an imminent threat of serious bodily injury or death to me. That's a bad thing. My bad thing stopper is right here in my holster. So bad thing, bad thing stopper. Uh, that's that's a phrase I get from my friend Mike Masingo, uh, one of the geniuses I get to work with. He talks about the bad thing and the bad thing stopper. We've rehearsed that motion so many times. That is the pattern. The solution that fits that pattern is right here. That's the first, maybe not the best, especially through hindsight, but it's 100% what he reasonably believed to be necessary in that moment. And when we look at it through a hindsight lens, we have the benefit of seeing how the movie ends. We don't just see it up to the point where the decision to use deadly force was made. We see it all the way through. And when we get to watch something all the way through, we might see that conditions change, the doors close, the person drops the knife, all the things that we don't get the benefit of seeing, because if we wait for that situation to play out and see what happens next, that might be the last thing we ever do. So this isn't to say that there's some hovering uh danger imperative that we need law enforcement to train and live under. Everywhere we go all the time, somebody's trying to kill us. That's not the case at all. And that's not what that's not what the research or the training points to. It simply points to what we can and can't do from perception to cognition to decision making and action within certain time constraints.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:25

Well, I can't follow that up with anything better. That's fantastic. So so great synopsis, great summary.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:32

And by the way, the the the conviction was overturned, and the officer, all the charges were dismissed, and the officer is is finally done with that terrible chapter of his life.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:44

And that is a good thing because as we know the the the letter of the law should have been, right? Well, what should it have been? Well, it should have been uh looking at the gram factors, looking at the totality of circumstances, looking at what the officer knew at the time based on their training experience, what are reasonable and you had mentioned that, and and that's the key here is what what was reasonable, yeah. Reasonable, necessary, you know, what was it?

SPEAKER_00 1:18:14

Well, and that's a hair that that gets split pretty often. Uh, it gets split in a bad way when officers start believing and and saying, Well, whatever I do, as long as I think it's reasonable, then then it's okay. That's not that's not what the law says, that's not what the case law says. It says that as an objectively reasonable reviewer, when I look at the circumstances, the totality of the circumstances as you knew them at the time, without the benefit of 2020 hindsight, could I, not would I, but could I see or have done what you did? Is your perception that your response was necessary to complete a legitimate law enforcement objective? Was that perception of necessity on your part? Is that reasonable? And and that's where the reasonableness standard comes in. You know, Garner says the word necessity or necessary or some form of that word over 20 times. So necessary is not a bad word, but we have to remember that it's not it's not required that the circumstances reveal that what you did turned out to be absolutely necessary. It's required that the circumstances reveal that an objectively reasonable reviewer thinks that your perception of necessity was reasonable. So, yeah, it's that's a very important hair to split. I appreciate you doing it.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:32

Oh, it it certainly is some of the the pillars. Uh we we talk about life pillars where uh you had mentioned with transition, the life pillar of financial stability, spirituality, whatever that might be, um mission and purpose. You know, we have the those pillars to build to for our own wellness, and then we have the pillars of uh, and the terminology changes depending upon federal, state, local, but your ability, opportunity, and jeopardy, and does that equal you know the the immediate use of whatever force, whether it's deadly or non-deadly? Um, and again, those terms change, you know, depending upon where we're at. And then we have our objective reasonableness standard. And what is that? What does that really mean? Is it necessary, minimal, and reasonable? And when we say minimal, most people think, well, minimal would be hey, drop the gun, right? Yeah. Well, that could be, but it might not be the most minimal thing to do. Uh so it it's so situationally dependent, and then we have to add on we have rules as law enforcement, bad guys don't. Yeah. So now you have to attend to, which is another thing that we we discussed and we'll kind of wrap up with. We're attending to or trying to attend to multiple things at one time when we know the bounds of human performance, say that it is nearly impossible to attend to multiple things at one time. So we expect the officer to make sure that they're not and then they should, in some sense, make sure you're not endangering innocent people, make sure that you know your target wants to be on, make sure that you know uh every bullet that leaves your firearm where you're responsible for. So we also know that the the hit ratio of you know good guy in this situation is extremely low. We're gonna get probably a 25% you know hit ratio. Why is that? Well, because of everything that we just talked about for the last um 45 minutes or so. So uh we we have to again incorporate that into our training. We are not shooting at, and you had mentioned this earlier, whether it was uh while we were taping or before, but we're we're not incorporating the idea of moving and shooting. We're not incorporating the idea that somebody's shooting back necessarily. Um we now have things like Virtua and other you know uh tools that you know you can wear a shock pack, you can get something shot back at you, you can get some consequence and and help build that that training. Uh but to understand what is reasonable necessary minimal, uh, we even have to go back a step further and say, and you've mentioned it, are you achieving a legitimate law enforcement objective? Why are you pushing forward to do that? And were you in your jurisdiction? Did you have the the right um what was the government interest? Yeah, well, what's the reasoning behind what you're doing? And are you acting truly under the color of law? And are you doing so judiciously? And and that is really where you know it kind of starts, but uh we we have so many things to to lump in, and we expect an officer to know all of this, and now we have to convince a jury what is it that the officer should have known. Um, not for science, but uh yeah, overall.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:40

Well what's reasonable for that officer to have actually attended to and and become consciously aware of in that threat horizon where the camera is going to show a thousand different things. The camera is gonna capture when it's taken a picture, by the way. If it's 30 frames per second versus eight frames per second versus four frames per second, if it's four frames per second, that's four pictures every second. You can literally bounce a basketball in between frames and know for a fact that the person in the cap the camera bounced a basketball, but when you watch the video, it's just a video of them holding a basketball because the bounce happened in between frames. That that so knowing that an officer's brain is never going to function like a video camera, we only see what we attend to and we only hear what we attend to. Uh one minor uh thing I wanted to point out is when we look at Gardner and we look at other cases, minimal is not the requirement. Minimal force is is not the requirement. It's it's uh it's a reasonable level of force based on the perceived threat. Uh, but but even when we're reviewing that, if we use hindsight bias, that's one example, we know how it ends. So now we know, well, that if you would have let this play out, you wouldn't have had to do that. That's also not the requirement. It it's all about what the person attends to and becomes consciously aware of. Uh, and again, if we educate this up front, it's learning. If we talk about it after an event, some people apply a flavor of excuse making to it. But it's always true, and it's always true for human beings, not just law enforcement officers. One of the examples I like to use in in uh public lectures is or uh in-person lectures, is I'll ask someone, hey, who drove here today? And three or four hands will come up and I'll say, Okay, you drove here today. Can you tell me just generally the route that you took from the hotel or from your house to get to the venue? And they'll say, Yeah, I I left the parking lot, I took a right on Apple Street, and I took a left on walk, I took a right on don't walk, and and then I was here. Okay, good. Maybe they're reconstructing that from context clues, maybe they're reconstructing that from something else, but most likely they know that because they paid attention to it. It was an unfamiliar route, something they hadn't done before. So they were paying attention to the names of streets and the directions that they turned because the outcome that they wanted was to arrive at the venue at the right location at the right time. Simultaneously, they're doing other things that they're not paying attention to. So after I ask them, do you remember the route you took? I'll say, Okay, how many times did your foot touch the brake between the hotel and the venue? And they'll say, I have no idea. And that's the correct answer. The correct answer is not to guess. The correct answer is to say, I had no idea, because I wasn't consciously attending to my foot moving from the gas pedal to the brake. That is a function that we have practiced millions of times and we have mastered to the place of automaticity. We don't have to apply any conscious attention to moving our foot from the gas to the brake. That happens automatically when it needs to happen. Incidentally, the same is true for drawing a gun, reloading a gun, clearing a malfunction on a gun. Those things happen automatically because we practiced them so much. So when I ask how many times did your foot hit the brake, they'll say, I have no idea. And I'll say, Exactly. And then I go through the explanation. Well, I had one class where I asked a woman those questions, and she thought that it was a real test that she was somehow supposed to know how many times her foot touched the brake. So she told me the next day, she said, I went back to the hotel and I vowed that I was going to know exactly how many times my foot touched the brake on the way to the venue today. And so I left the hotel and I counted every time my foot touched the brake. And I said, Yeah, what happened? She goes, I drove right past the venue. She was paying attention to the process instead of the outcome. She's applying attention unnecessarily to the automatic things. And so the episodic memory of turn right, turn left, turn left, and then a right escaped her because she was paying attention to the procedural things that don't require attention. And if we explain it in that way, what that Woman's uh uh antidote, then it it sounds like education. But if we wait till after the fact and we say, well, the reason the officer said he fired four rounds, but he actually fired nine, he doesn't know how many times he fired the gun because he wasn't consciously paying attention to that. So uh this is a this is right smack dab in the middle of uh attention and focus and memory and and how all of that affects what we're able to to recall later. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:30

And and also time. Uh we can probably continue this for so long, but waiting a period of time for someone to recall a traumatic incident is so that we finally is starting to become a little more accepted. Um that's because we we have to process, we have to understand, and there's other things, and getting that immediate statement uh it has a place and uh you know Garity and other things come into play, and do you do you have to make a statement and all those other things? But um what do you really get a value from immediate statements sometimes? Um officers may not know how many times they shot, what they did, what what happened, and it may take quite a little while, 72 hours sometimes, 70 more, uh to to kind of process things, to eat and get close.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:36

The the the time is important, but more important than that is the sleep. Uh we look at research from Jessica Payne, from Robert Stickgold, from Matt Walker, and and we see the importance of sleep, uh the 90-minute sleep cycle, REM sleep, deep sleep, uh, wakefulness, course, all those shifts in our sleep, they all serve a different function in memory consolidation. So the next day, after a good solid night's sleep, uh that that's that's why some folks subscribe to the 24 to 48 hour waiting period so that they have time to get a good sleep cycle and then give their statement after their memory is consolidated. They still, by the way, might not recall how many times they fired or where they were when they drew their gun. That might require some recognition cues uh in the form of a walkthrough, a scene walkthrough, where they're, oh yeah, when I was right here, I noticed that, oh, that's where I reloaded. Okay, now I remember that's where I reloaded. That's why we do so much better on multiple choice tests than we do on essay tests, because we have recognition cues to help us remember the correct answer versus just pure recall. In any case, memory is consolidated over time, and sleep is a key component of that memory consolidation. So while some say 24 to 48 hours, force science subscribes to 48 to 72 because rather than studying for a test, getting a good night's sleep, and then having better memory uh recall, we're not going right to sleep after a critical incident. We just experienced a near-death interchange between two people. We just shot our gun at somebody. Somebody pulled a knife and tried to or did hurt us, and so we're not likely to get a good night's sleep right away. After that 48-hour period, we're more likely to get a good solid night's sleep, consolidate that memory, and then be able to give a statement. So it's it's a guideline, not a hard and fast rule. Everything an officer-involved shooting is one of the most individualized experiences in the world. It's gonna affect you different than it affects me. Uh, the guy who has a uh 100-yard sniper shot on somebody holding a knife to a baby's neck, that's gonna feel pretty clean, most likely. That's what he's been training for his whole life is to save babies. And he just had to do it by shooting somebody who made it clear that that deadly force was necessary. Something a little messier, uh something a little more up close and personal, perhaps, might have different effects. So while we might be able to interview the sniper that night, uh somebody involved in a situation like we saw in Australia, where an officer shot a fugitive in a hallway of a hotel, tried to do first aid, was covered in that suspect's blood, and then was forced to sit in an interview room in Australia in the summer when the air conditioner was out, with all of that human matter on his uniform, he's not as likely to be ready to interview that night. He's gonna have a lot more to work through. So it's an individualized experience that we can't rubber stamp, but but that 48 to 72 hours is a good guideline that we represent uh for taking a statement. Now, as far as the immediate statement, what do we gain from it? We gain public safety information. Uh I show up as a supervisor uh and I ask, hey, how many of them were there? Which way did they go? If you remember shots being fired, can you give me a general direction that they went, things like that for public safety, and then nothing else. Uh we want that person to have a chance to consolidate memory because the goal is twofold. When we look at interviewing an officer, we're not trying to be confrontational, we're not trying to get a confession, we're not trying to get anything other than the most and the most accurate information we can from the first interview. And the reason for that is we don't want to re-traumatize the officer. You've got to remember, this is a human being that was just in a life and death experience, a traumatic event, critical incident. And we don't want to re-traumatize them by having them tell the story 87 times. Uh, so those are the two considerations that that that lead us to to doing the right thing for the officer in that circumstance.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:57

Sure. So I'll bring up a very minute point with that. I want to end with um critical ootaloop, and uh we'll get to that in two seconds. Uh, one thing that I've noticed in in some jurisdictions um because you're taking and an officer involved shooting in uh OIS, you're you're taking that firearm from that officer because it's it's evidence. But now we never thought of this before, but now it's been thought of that officer doesn't have part of what they always have had, that's their uniform, it's them some jurisdiction are now giving that officer another gun. Um why? Because they understand you know the the importance you know potentially of that person not having that and re-victimizing the officer.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:53

Yeah, and and and you know, sometimes it's it's not an intentional slight to the officer. They they don't have the resources or the extra weapons or whatever. May not. I remember 30 plus years ago when I went through the academy and I had this class that you're describing. Uh, the instructor was so insightful he said, Hey, give them yours. Give give that off, give that trooper if you respond and the trooper has to give over his weapon as evidence, give him yours to put in his holster so that he can feel whole, so that she can feel complete and not vulnerable right after a near-death critical incident.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:28

Yeah, so holistically, we're we're getting a little bit better at understanding time re-victimization. Um and we also have to just kind of address real briefly that if an officer's intent was to kill someone, they should have made it through the psychological, let alone be on the job. So um they just theoretically took somebody's life, now they have to deal with that. So, you know, now they're uh a de facto um homicide um suspect uh right off the bat, right? They took something.

SPEAKER_00 1:36:10

And this is this is you know, almost every course somebody asks, well, you know, I get pushback because we're essentially treating officers involved and officer-involved shootings differently than we're treating felony homicide suspects or attempted murder suspects. And I tell them that the answer to that question is unapologetically, yes, we are treating them differently. We know where they work, we know uh what hours they work, we know where they live. They're not a flight risk. Uh they went through a background investigation, they went through a psychological investigation. In fact, they are among the very few people on this planet that have a piece of paper that says at one point in their life they were sane, and I can prove it. We have information on this officer that we don't have on the average felony suspect. Maybe, maybe the timing, the spacing, the cognitive interview approach works on some felony suspects too, but we can't apply it as often as we can with officers because they're in a uniform that we gave them, carrying a gun that we gave them, patrolling a dangerous area that we told them to patrol, and they got into a situation where they had to use force to protect themselves or someone else. And so, yes, we are gonna treat this person differently than we do an average felony, murder, or aggravated assault uh suspect. Yeah, 100%.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:24

Yeah, absolutely. And then I just will end up um real briefly um talking about bringing this all together, and that is uh I think what kind of ties it in is through uh Colonel Boyd and the OODA loop, uh that kind of ties, I think, a lot of what we're speaking of uh together. Uh what are your kind of brief thoughts on um how that kind of has this synergism to what we're discussing overall?

SPEAKER_00 1:37:56

I I think it's a it's a another example of the the reliability of research, whether it's formalized research, peer-reviewed and published in an academic journal, or whether it's uh uh qualitative research done by one of the best fighter pilots in the history of the world. Uh Colonel Boyd's OODA loop, obviously uh it's observe, orient, decide, and act. And we've been talking about that for the last hour. Uh to observe something, we have to first perceive it, and we have to either become consciously aware of what it is through our ventral stream visual system, which is very slow, or we we supercharge that with schema. And we know it starts like this, it usually proceeds like this. That's all observation. And then orientation is becoming consciously aware of where we are and beginning to respond or beginning to uh physically react to it. Uh decision is where we do that fast and frugal, take the first, not necessarily the best response that fits the pattern that we recognize, largely through schema, and then act is the performance, the human performance, the shooting the gun, striking with the baton, uh deploying a hellfire missile, whatever it is. So that that OODA loop is is a good way to structure the columns that these psychological explanations fit into. Uh, we get a lot more deep than just using the words observe, orient, decide, and act. We start, we talk specifically about the speed of vision versus the speed of hearing versus the speed of a tactile response and how all those things affect your total response time. But yeah, the OODA loop is a is a great way to start people's awareness when it comes to human perception, cognition, decision making, and action.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:53

Outstanding. Well, I literally and I I took notes why, because I learn every chance that I get. I'm a lifelong learner. And uh I really appreciate the the time that you've taken to explain a lot of information in a short amount of time. Um very well put together, uh broken down, I think rather well. Uh, I think people be able to follow it. Um, it's offering a bunch of what can I do next, you know, kind of thing. Uh so now they could, if they so choose, and we'll talk uh and end with how does one I already know these answers, of course, as I did many of the other ones, uh, but I asked them. So, how does one get a hold of uh Forest Science Institute? What is Force Science Institute, and what are some of the things that uh forest science institute offers?

SPEAKER_00 1:40:55

Force Science is a company. It's not uh as often thought by folks who hear it, they confuse force science with a particular brand or discipline of science. And force science is just the name of the company, and it sounds cool, so we like it. Uh force science as a company has three primary purposes. One is research, that's uh identifying or conducting research that applies to human performance as it uh matters to public safety. Uh, and and that goes all the way back to our beginning. We were doing research before we were doing any kind of training or uh anything like that. Uh, we also have training service, which uh, if you go on the website, force science.com, you'll see a training tab, and it'll say give you the opportunity to find training geographically or find it by topic. And we have training uh anywhere from uh force encounters, which covers the physiology and environmental effects on people intense. Yep. Force encounters course right there. You can do that online, you can schedule that in person. You can find one that's already scheduled in person and attend that. We have a version that is tailored towards security professionals, or I'm sorry, the we have a de-escalation class, a realistic de-escalation class, which we didn't really get to talk about, but maybe we'll come back and do that another time. I hope so. Uh realistic de-escalation class, also available online and also available in a format that's tailored for security professionals. That's the one that's tailored for security, not the force encounters yet. That's coming. We have our week-long uh hybrid certification course, which is kind of our our flagship program. That's the one that that put us on the map and and uh and helped us get to where we are. And that is the one that is attended most often. And then beyond that, we've got an advanced specialist course. So, what I did, I attended a short uh two-day course. I attended the week-long certification course, and ultimately I attended the uh advanced specialist course. We also focus in our training division on adult learning. We have a program called Advanced Instructional Methods, which is led by Mike Masingo, the genius I mentioned earlier. Uh, and that is all about applying what we know about how humans learn and how humans perform to making information sticky so that you walk away from a training having learned something, durable learning, something that you're going to retain and be able to transfer later, rather than just checking a box, doing good on a test, and then data dumping something. You know, Force Science did a study years ago, we called it the Academy Study, where we studied three major police academies, looked at over 10,000 videos of training, tracked performance of these officers over time. And what we found was using block and silo training, uh, officers forget what they learned by the time they graduate. They can't deliver an effective baton strike, for example, when we talk about psychomotor skills, or they don't know the answer to a question that they did when they got an A on a test, the illusion of learning, right, versus actual durable learning where we retain and have the ability to recall something. So training, the training program in our company is robust. And then we also have a consulting division uh that's led by uh Vaughn that I mentioned earlier, and uh we provide subject matter expertise, police practices, use of force. Uh, we even have the ability to provide uh litigation consulting uh to work through these cases to make sure that the right information is identified and analyzed and applied in the appropriate way so that the trier of fact has the information they need to make the right decision, not just the one that feels right. So that's basically where we're at research, training, and consulting.

SPEAKER_01 1:44:45

Fantastic. It's not like you've ever said any of this before. So okay, very good. Uh, I just wanted to make sure that at the end, uh, people that have stuck with it and listened to it, which I hope they have, uh, that they know about Force Science Institute and how to get a hold of uh the information. Um I myself have taken a few courses and I'm proud to say that I I've I've learned something every time. Um for sure. Yeah, there that's the de escalation one. And if I was to get up, I'd show you the oh, it's yeah, I will actually hold on.

SPEAKER_00 1:45:28

Oh, there's a force analyst.

SPEAKER_01 1:45:30

It's it's up there with my books that I wrote, but that's that one. So yeah, for for sure. So absolutely love it. Um, love your challenge coin displays. I wanted to get that myself. I got a couple over there, a couple over there. Paraphernalia all over the place. My wife yells at me all the time that I've taken over the office, but that's okay. Um you know, that's the way it is.

SPEAKER_00 1:45:58

I was given permission. We we bought this house when I retired, and we moved back to San Angelo and we bought this house, and I was given uh full run of the uh the area that has become the the office.

SPEAKER_01 1:46:11

Oh, that is that is how long it'll last, but I got it for now. Because what we didn't talk about besides the escalation was communication, and that that is uh 100% what we need to do is uh in the military and law force, but also uh with our significant others, that's for sure. Uh, absolutely. Uh would I love, and I'm not gonna put you on the spot, but would I love to be able to go through a little bit more of uh what de-escalation is because it's so misunderstood. Um absolutely, and I think that could be a segment of its own if you're ever so inclined. I'm not putting you on the spot, but we'll talk about it.

SPEAKER_00 1:46:50

No, I'd love to give just kind of a uh a teaser of what we provide, and that that's awesome. It plays right into your statement that de-escalation is misunderstood. First of all, people think that de-escalation is a skill set, some kind of mechanical skill set that we learn and possess and can apply regardless of the situation, and and that's an intuitive process for people to think that because that's how it gets represented in the news and in the media and on the court of public opinionslash social media. And it's not what it is. What de-escalation is, is a desired end state. We want a situation to reach a state of de-escalation where it is no longer as dangerous or as long or as uh unpredictable as it seems to be in the beginning. The only way you get there is by making contact to your point of communication. Two-way contact. That doesn't mean I say something. That doesn't even mean I say something and they hear something. That means I say something, they hear something, and I get feedback that they understand it. We have to make two-way meaningful contact before we can do anything. After that, we have to be able to find some appeal that we can use to build rapport for that person to give a darn about what we want this thing to turn out like. And so there's a lot of approaches and a lot of appeals and a lot of tools that Nicole Floresy and Derek Cruz are the two geniuses that run the de-escalation program, and they do a way better job of this than I do. But they'll tell you we gotta we gotta make contact, we have to build some rapport before we can ever hope to influence behavior. And so the lesson that that we take away from a force review perspective is when we're looking at an officer's performance and asking ourselves, did this officer de-escalate? We have to ask ourselves first, did that officer have the ability to make contact, or was this suspect so contaminated that they couldn't establish contact? And if you can't establish contact, forget everything else. If you can't establish contact, you can't uh develop rapport and you can't influence behavior. And one of the benefits you get from the de-escalation course is this book by Dr. John Azar Dickens called The TEB model thought, emotion, and behavior. We look at contaminated or uncontaminated thought, we look at high or low emotion, and we look at compliant or non-compliant behavior. And that's how we break it down. We're not diagnosing mental illnesses, we're not trying to predict future behavior, we're trying to diagnose or we're trying to decide rather, can we establish contact with this person so that we can hope to move forward in this process or not? And when we look back on a case, we analyze whether or not they had the opportunity to do those things before we say you did not de-escalate. So that's that's kind of the nuts and bolts in the framework of our course. Uh, highly recommend it, highly recommend it for law enforcement, I recommend it for nurses, I recommend it for anybody that wants to learn about emotional regulation. Regulation and identification of crises and some appeals and conver uh communication styles to use based on the situation.

SPEAKER_01 1:50:08

Oh, for sure. Communication is the the key of most uh understanding what listening is. Uh you alluded to to listening, uh active listening, uh, what that is, uh nonverbal cues. Uh there's so much to to get into where uh we we talk about what is you know de-escalation and yeah just getting there in the first place and and running the rapport, it's it's almost like interviewing and interrogation, you know, building that rapport.

SPEAKER_00 1:50:43

So one of the ridiculous things that came out of that Austin case that I mentioned earlier is people, adult people, smart adult people said out loud, those officers made zero attempts to de-escalate that scene in that in that three to four second scenario that played out from the door opening to a man with a knife that ended with shots being fired by both officers, and a third used a taser, they made zero attempt to de-escalate. My question would be please help me understand when they had the opportunity or the success in establishing contact. If they can't establish contact, drop the gun, drop the gun, drop the or sorry, drop the knife, drop the knife, drop the knife. And he's not responding. There's no contact. We can't de-escalate. So they did make an effort, they tried to establish contact and it failed.

SPEAKER_01 1:51:35

Excellent point. And brings us to um, unfortunately, the conclusion of this uh podcast episode, but it does open up the possibility of one more again without putting you on the spot. So that would be awesome. Let's do it. Oh, fantastic. Thank you once again uh for your time, Brian uh Baxter from uh Forest Science Institute, uh Forescience Institute.com, correct? Well for science.com.com. Uh please, if you haven't checked them out, please do so. Uh wonderful organization, uh fantastic research. And uh as Brian said, the the three prongs that they have. Um it take a look and thank you for your time today. And look forward to having you back again now that I have it recorded that uh we'll get you back. So that'd be great. All right, thank you very much. This is uh Jeff from Overwatch 5.9 saying thank you for staying to the end, and we will see you next time. Thank you.