Police Use-of-Force Continuum

The Use-of-Force Continuum is intended to provide guidance for police officers on the appropriate, proportional level of force to use when trying to gain compliance.  There seems to be a logical progression in the modern continuum, constructed in with the goal of minimizing an officer’s use of force.  This research found that physical force (soft and hard) as a ‘lower’ force option than less-lethal tools is associated with increased officer injury.  

Main Topics

•There is a “muddy middle” in the continuum, complicating the logical progression of some type of force.
•What’s the difference between “injury” and “pain?”
•How can 120 different variations in the continuum all be right?

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Welcome to the Police in Service Training Podcast. This podcast is dedicated to providing research evidence to street-level police officers and command staff alike. The program is intended to help the police and law enforcement community create better programs, understand challenging policies, and dispel the myths of police officer behavior. I'm your host, Scott Phillips. If you've been working in the policing field for more than five minutes, you already know about the use of force continuum. If you have not worked in the field, the continuum provides a framework for officers, an appropriate, proportional level of force to use when confronting an uncooperative person. At one end of the continuum is the officer's mere presence. Essentially, just standing there wearing a uniform, badge, and gun can be enough to convince people to behave. At the other end of the continuum is the use of deadly force. A key to knowing what level of force is appropriate is the suspect's level of resistance. One of the problems with the continuum is that it's ordinal in nature. It is not like taking steps up a staircase in your house, which, if constructed correctly, one step is precisely the same as the one before and the one after. At first glance, the continuum makes a lot of sense, but when digging more deeply into what each step really means, it can get, well, clunky as you move from one step to the next. Basically, the continuum does not provide a standardized ranking of use of force options that is as logical as we might think. To help us understand the hidden complexity of the use of force continuum is Dr. Scott Mortgos. Scott is an assistant professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of South Carolina. He started his career as a police officer in Salt Lake in 2005, retiring as a deputy chief just a few years ago. He is one of a handful of former police officers who made the jump to academics, and not just for the fancy title. Scott has an impressive publication record for somebody who's a fresh academic. Thanks for coming on this podcast, Scott.

SPEAKER_01 2:15

Thanks for having me. Love the podcast. And you know, it's always guaranteed to have magic happen when you have two people with such a great first name come together.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

So that was not planned, but thank you for that. Okay, so I was looking at your background, looking at at uh the the articles you've written on your research history, and you've studied a variety of different topics. What drew your attention to the continuum?

SPEAKER_01 2:37

Yeah, you know, I I don't think it was really anything specific. Like I'm just interested in policing in general. I have been ever since I was a little kid. Nobody in my family was a police officer. I just grew up wanting to be a cop. Um and so really it's what I've thought about the most throughout my entire life, really, all the way through my professional career and now into academia. Um as I began being able to study some of these topics in policing from a research perspective during my uh graduate studies and now um as a professor, um, you know, this particular topic just kind of presented itself because it was one of the things I always just kind of had rolling around in my head when I looked at use use of force continuums, um, where like a question essentially would be like, I'm not sure these orderings really make sense. For example, in the paper that we're talking about today, one of the questions I pose is, well, is punching somebody in the head more or less severe than hitting them in the arm or the leg with a baton? How about pepper spray? Because there's many people, there's many agencies that put pepper spray above physical force. I just, I don't think a lot of these um rankings that you see in a lot of use of force continuums are very, very clear. And I just I thought it was an interesting question if we looked at it in a more um systematic and um uh uh uh statistical sense. Do we actually see these ordinal rankings bear out?

SPEAKER_00 3:56

All right, good. And the officer's use of force has always been a concern. Um I had Steve Bishop on last year discussing uh officer-involved shootings. Um, but why is this particular area of inquiry um of value or relevance to the police? I I mean, after all, you are tinkering with uh what I consider to be some of the sacred scrolls when you critique the use of force continuum.

SPEAKER_01 4:16

Yeah, well, some of those sacred scrolls are meant scrolls are meant to be questioned, I guess. Fair enough. I was ne I was never a troublemaker in my career. That's never been, you know, my approach to things. Um, but I, you know, I just I tend to have a knack for just like looking at something that doesn't quite make sense to me, and I have a hard time letting it go at times. And I'm perfectly fine. Like if the answer is is no, this actually does make sense, even if I did have a question about it. But I want it to make sense, right? Um and so I I think it is important in the sense that I mean when we talk about use of force, um, the vast majority of the conversation about use of force is lethal force. But that is just the the very, very small minority of force that is used by police officers across the country. Um, less lethal force, um, hands down, no question, is the vast majority of force that is used by police officers. And it's it doesn't get nearly as much attention, and it's um um substantially controlled by these use of force continuums. So I think it's important to understand what are these continuums, how do they influence how this most prevalent type of force is used, and what can that tell us about uh that particular topic?

SPEAKER_00 5:27

Yeah, so that's the thing that uh uh other people have mentioned. Why are we studying uh things that peep police officers don't too do too frequently, or why we why are we training in a lot of things that they're not doing too frequently? So that's kind of getting what you're talking about here. These the use of forces in the middle is uh the lower ends is often you know where where the force occurs. Now, I I wanted to to start about talking about your research with a question about the social contract. Uh it is important. I I don't want to make a joke out of it, but there's also this gives me the opportunity to mention one of my most famous quotes ever. Essentially, the the social contract means that individuals sacrifice some rights for the good of society and the state. Uh otherwise, man would exist in uh what Thomas Hobbes calls a state of nature where life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. That's the quote. But society and the state also have a duty to make sure citizens are treated fairly. So when agents of the state, that is the police, use force against citizens, it must be objectively reasonable. Isn't that the point of the continuum? We're trying to at least create some reasonably objective standard.

SPEAKER_01 6:37

Sure. And I do think that is the intent. And by no means should my research or anything I say here be uh taken as me arguing against continuums. Like obviously there needs to be rules in place. Um there needs to be rules in place in order to make sure that when force is used by the state against its citizens, that it's done in a manner that's not being abusive or excessive. Um, you know, I think oftentimes, I know I did as a police officer, you know, we I hear conversations about excessive force, unreasonable force. Um, and you know, you never really think about your use of force in that way. I think the vast majority of police officers do a very good job in very difficult situations. And frankly, the research bears out um that they use force in a very restrained manner um compared to what they possibly legally could use. Right. Um but that doesn't mean that problems can't arise. Like there has to be some sort of mechanism to constrain the amount of force an agent of the state, the police, um, use on its citizens. And when we talk about the subjectively reasonable standard, which is the constitutional standard, um, it's very, very fuzzy. Um, I know we don't like to think about it as fuzzy, but I spend a lot of time in this paper as well as other research I do talking about like that definition of objectively reasonable isn't as clear-cut as I think often we would like to think it is. And I think agencies and organizations um, even if just implicitly recognize this. And so these use of force continuums, these use of force policies go beyond typically what you see in that that um uh the floor of that constitutional standard and go even beyond that with these use of force continuums to put additional restraints on use of force or at least try to manage it in a way where it's mitigating the possibility of excessive force being used.

SPEAKER_00 8:32

And I think that's, you know, we are in a state right now where we society is asking uh for improvements in policing. I I never say re reform, I just hate the word reform, but trying to improve because I've said this in other podcasts, you know, aren't we all don't we all have a responsibility to improve things? Now, I didn't give I didn't give the continuum a lot of attention in the introduction because I know you're gonna be talking about it. And also I'm pretty sure most people already know what we're talking about. Uh but what makes what makes the middle of the continuum, and is I use the word clunky, what makes it so clunky? Because obviously deadly force at one end and mere presence at the other, but these things in the middle, what makes it so maybe not objectively reasonable?

SPEAKER_01 9:15

Sure. So I mean I think basically probably help to just like say what a continuum is first. Like a standard force continuum ordinally ranks varying levels of force and resistance along a continuum in terms of severity, with the explicit purpose of offering guidance on how to respond to specific forms of resistance. So uh, you know, if somebody is displaying this type of resistance, then this type of uh force is um authorized, and and so on and so forth, right? Depending on the level of resistance that's being experienced. Um I don't think there's really any question about either end of that continuum, regardless of how a different agency sets it up, right? You have officer presence and verbal instructions on the low end, and then you have uh lethal force on the top end. Those are pretty, you know, well set, and I think any reason I think every reasonable person can agree those are the ends of that continuum.

SPEAKER_00 10:06

Didn't you also have some information about the various use of force continuums in use across the United States?

SPEAKER_01 10:13

Yeah, and also when we're talking about uh the use of force continuum being clunky, um, again, this isn't just based off of the one agency that we studied in this particular study. This is across a national um, this is across findings from a national sample of police forces. Uh, you'll see us reference this research in uh in our piece. Um, but what a national sample of use of force continuums found not long ago, it was only, I think, 2012, there were 123 different permutations of use of force continuums across the country. 123. So clearly there is not agreement even within the industry at large about what is more severe than others if we're seeing 123 different permutations. So, for example, 30% of the agencies put pepper spray in the pain compliance category, 29.2% put them in the hard physical category, 35.3% put him in the impact weapons category. So we can't even agree on where pepper spray belongs. You look at hazers, 60% put them with the impact tools, about a quarter put them with physical force, 13% put them with pain compliance, and 2% put them in deadly force. So again, this isn't just me having the question of like, ah, that doesn't really make sense to me. I'm just kind of interested in the question. This is clearly an open question in the industry at large if we're seeing over a hundred different permutations of use of force continuums across the country. The middle is where I think it gets clunky, and I think clunky is a good word for it because you you have less lethal force, and there's so many different types of less lethal force that make up this really clunky middle ground. You have physical force. Physical force can be broken down even to different categories, right? A lot of agencies will categorize physical force as soft physical force, which is like uh escort folds, pressure points, uh possibly, you know, pushing, shoving, whereas hard physical force is going to be strikes, punching, knees, elbows, that sort of thing. Uh, then you have pepper spray, uh, then you have a baton, then you have tasers, um, you know, and depending on whatever other new tool comes out, you know, at some point in the future. And if you look at these continuums, they're placing all of these intermediate tools, all these intermediate types of less lethal force on this rank-ordered system of which one, at least implicitly, is more severe than the other. But again, when we start asking like very specific questions about, well, is this really worse than that? Is this really more severe than that? Right, I think it becomes really muddy and really unclear very quickly.

SPEAKER_00 12:49

So, okay, before before we go much further, you mentioned tasers, OC, spray batons. Um, these are you know, the the tools that you know you don't have to use a fist. But that gets me to what do you what do you mean is as clearly as possible by physical force? Because, and again, we can we separate out the idea of hitting somebody with a baton, hitting somebody with a clinched fist, might be essentially the same thing. But is that what you mean by physical force? I'm not using any other tool.

SPEAKER_01 13:15

Essentially, yes. You're you're you're not using any other sort of uh police tool for force. So you're not using a baton, you're not using pepper spray, you're not using um a taser, you're using physical force of some kind, whether that's grabbing somebody, whether it's doing a takedown, pushing, shoving, giving a punch, uh, what have you. Now, again, there's gradations even within that one category of physical force, which again, it just continues to muddy the water there. But when we stop physical force, that's what we're talking about. It's simply some sort of manner in which you're using um um your own tools, your hands, knees, whatever, um, uh to exert force on somebody rather than some kind of tool you might carry on your belt.

SPEAKER_00 13:54

All right. The article also stated, um, I'm gonna quote it, less lethal force continuum are better framed as having a having nominal properties rather than ordinal properties. What's the difference?

SPEAKER_01 14:08

Yeah, so useful force continuums are set up ordinally, right? As we've talked about. And I won't rehash it again, but essentially we're saying, okay, this this type of force is more severe than this type of force, which is more severe than this type of force, and so on, which is why you have that kind of stepped hierarchy of what's allowed based off of what the uh resistance level is. That's an ordinal structure in that there are clear um levels of something is more or less than another. Now, the distance between those levels don't necessarily have to be evenly spaced, but there is a clear ordering nonetheless. We can say this is more severe than that, and this is more severe than that. When it comes to uh nominal, it's basically just saying these are all just essentially different types within the same category. One isn't necessarily more or less severe than another. Um you can think about uh I think the easiest example is eye color, right? Eye color is a nominal variable, right? Green, blue, um, brown. One isn't better or less uh than another. They just are different types of eye color. That's what a that's what a nominal variable is. And so if we're applying that to a use of force continuum on these less lethal um types of force, what we're saying is physical force, pepper spray, taser, baton, they're not there's not a clear order ordering of one being more or less severe than another. They're just different types of this overall category of less lethal force.

SPEAKER_00 15:36

Okay, so based on the proposition that the continuum is nominal, you came up with a few hypotheses. What were they?

SPEAKER_01 15:45

Yeah, so really there were two specific things we wanted to test. First was this idea of ordinal and nominal. So our our research proposition, our overarching research proposition in this particular study was less lethal force continua are better framed as having nominal properties rather than ordinal properties. So we're we're testing it. Like I I think, and my co-authors thought looking at this, we think these are better described as nominal um uh categories rather than ordinal, um, like we discussed. And then specifically, I was very interested in uh injuries, right? So the first hypothesis that we gave was is the use of physical force is associated with higher rates of injury to police officers than those of other forms of less lethal force. And then we also hypothesize basically the same with subjects. Use of physical force is associated with higher rates of injury to subjects than the use of other forms of less lethal force. There's other literature that that, I mean, you get some mixed findings, but overall, there's literature that backs this up uh that you tend to see more injuries with physical force, um, which makes sense. I mean, you're in much more close proximity. There's more of an opportunity for physical injury to occur if you're physically interacting with each other during physical force rather than maybe standing up to 20, 25 feet away using a taser. Um, but those are the hypotheses that we were testing.

SPEAKER_00 17:01

Can you give us an overview of uh how you you got data that could help you answer the question?

SPEAKER_01 17:07

Yeah, so we we we uh we were able to get use uh an entire year's uh use of force data from a large agency um and look at whether this research proposition as well as the hypotheses uh would would bear out. Um there's about, if I remember correctly, there's about 700 uses of force across that year. Um and the way that they were categorized in this particular agency, because we were uh we needed to be able to look at recorded um subject level resistance as well as uh the use of force by police within the system that this particular agency captured the use of force data, which they were required to fill out any time they used force. Um, there were five categories for each. On the subject resistance part, um, somebody could be categorized as either being compliant, passive resistance, defensive resistance, active aggression or deadly force. And then on the side for police force, when looking at this continuum type question, there was officer presence in communication. There was uh physical force, both soft and hard. We couldn't separate those two. Those really collapsed together just because that's just how the data was.

SPEAKER_00 18:17

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 18:17

Uh, but then intermediate weapons came after physical force. So that would include pepper spray, taser, and baton, and then deadly force. Um, there were four incidents of deadly force used during that year. Those were taken out because we weren't interested in that particular question on this. We were much more interested in the uh less lethal type of force used.

SPEAKER_00 18:34

Okay, so they'll be using a larger agency, which is which is nice because it gives you the opportunity to collect, as you say, 700 use of force incidents over a single year, you're gonna get a lot of variation in the whether it's taser, pepper spray. Did did they use uh both the taser and the pepper spray? Because I know some agencies will have one versus the other.

SPEAKER_01 18:52

Yes, uh all all all of the intermediate tools that we just listed, that I just listed, um, those were available and used by officers over this year.

SPEAKER_00 19:00

Okay, so you you you have all these these uh sources, the sources of data, all these incidents. What were your results?

SPEAKER_01 19:08

Yeah, so we were actually uh first I'll talk about injuries and then we can kind of go to the overarching question of ordinal versus nominal um categories within a continuum. But when it comes to injuries, um we were able to find evidence for one of our hypotheses and evidence against another hypothesis. When it comes to officer injuries, uh what we found was that officers were much more likely to be injured when using physical force than using some other type of intermediate force. So that is to say, officers were much more likely to be injured using physical physical force rather than when they used pepper spray, a baton, or a taser, which again, for reasons we discussed earlier, makes intuitive sense, right? At least to me. Uh because you're closing the distance, there's more opportunity for harm to occur, physical harm to occur. We expected the same outcome for um subjects for uh that force was being used on, but we actually found the opposite. Um we found that uh subjects were much less likely to get injured when physical force was used, and more likely to be injured um when some other type of intermediate force was used, being pepper spray, baton, or a taser. And I think there's some nuanced uh understandings that go into that that we can talk about, I'm sure.

SPEAKER_00 20:24

Um go ahead, go ahead and talk because this is we've A, we've got the time, and B, this is important to understand nuance because a lot of people think things are so black and white, and they're just not.

SPEAKER_01 20:34

Yeah, so there's disagreement in the literature as well as within policing what an injury is, or at least what we should quote unquote count as an injury, right? So if you look at some of these types of intermediate force tools, let's look at pepper spray, for example. There are many agencies, including including this particular agency, where um you know you're causing pain and irritation for usually for an extended period of time by using pepper spray on somebody, that's considered an injury. Right? Uh when you use a taser, you're almost always, unless you miss or uh it just doesn't make good connections, you're gonna have some sort of um you know slight laceration from the probes going into their skin, small burn mark, what have you. Um so really what ends up being what we when we when we're talking about injuries, the fact that you're using that force, that that specific type of force, means there's going to be an injury, depending on how you actually categorize injury.

SPEAKER_00 21:30

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 21:30

Right? So by definition, you're going to have an injury by using these types of force if that's how an agency categorizes an injury for a subject.

SPEAKER_00 21:39

Okay, so I wanted to explore this just a little bit more. Uh when when uh again, I always reference my own history here, which is I don't care if people get annoyed, that's fine. Um we we were taught come along techniques. I'm not sure if you mentioned those earlier, but come along techniques are ridiculously, can be ridiculously painful. They can hurt like hell. But that point was that you're not actually injuring somebody permanently. You're just causing a great amount of pain, whether it's a temporal mandibular joint or the with the wrist lock that um that they taught us. And we practiced it on each other, and it it hurt, but there's no permanent injury. So that that's what I'm getting at here. When you know, you know, I can understand a taser being an injury because of the probe, you know, piercing your skin. Okay, fine, fair enough. But pepper spray, it's it I've never been pepper sprayed, but I imagine that's harmful as uh painful, excuse me, as well. But but there's, you know, should we be reconsidering these kinds of things as injuries? I guess that's maybe what I'm getting at.

SPEAKER_01 22:41

Yeah, you know, and I don't have like a clear answer to that. I I can tell you I'd rather be tased than pepper sprayed because the taser's done in five seconds, whereas the pepper spray, for me, it lasted at least 24 hours. It was horrible. Regardless. Regardless. Um, you know, I don't think agencies make these decisions based off of trying to make researchers' lives easier and understanding what actually results in what most people will consider a real injury versus a not real injury, right? There's a whole bunch of other stuff that goes into these decisions. If somebody is complaining of an injury or specific type of pain, there are a lot of other incentives at the organizational level to make sure that that's documented properly and that they can show somebody received some sort of medical attention, right? There's a whole bunch of um issues regarding um, you know, litigation, liability, and all that kind of stuff. So I'm not naive enough to think that there aren't other things going into these decisions beyond making my life as a researcher easier. So I think we do have to recognize that. But as long as the decisions are going to be made along those lines, which I think just from a purely utilitarian perspective from an organization makes sense, or at least can make sense. I think when we talk about this topic, we also need to be very clear about what we're saying an injury is and is not, because that really has an impact on how we evaluate what type of force possibly is more or less likely to cause an injury to either party. Uh a lot of it depends on what we're actually defining as an injury.

SPEAKER_00 24:16

Yeah, but I can also see sometimes where there might be an um, I'm gonna say an accidental injury if somebody's coming at you and you push them and they fall and they scrape their knee or something like that. The push wasn't you know in intentionally trying to be injurious, it just you know resulted that way. But um so I'm gonna ask you for your recommendations in a second, but I'm I'm maybe preempting it with this question. Uh should be we should we be researchers and again, whether police uh to take our take our advice or not, this is entirely up to them. We're the ones providing them the information, they're the decision maker. But should be they they'd be looking at the the continuum in order to to to modify it a little bit where all as you say, if these things are nominal, where one you know they're all kind of injurious, they're all kind you know, if I'm not using physical force, it's a tool. If it's a tool, they're all kind of the same thing. Something you know is gonna be damaging. So should they be changing those uh changing the continuum around?

SPEAKER_01 25:12

Yeah, so I I think I guess to like the overarching finding that we found, because I don't think we've hit on it yet. But the overarching finding was is that when it comes to the results that we got looking at whether or not the um types of um uh less lethal force used uh actually held up to these ordinal assumptions, like having clear rankings of which one is more severe than others, we did not find that. Um it frankly, it was very ambiguous. Uh pepper spray was found below physical force. Um baton was found was found to be above tasers. And again, we're talking about you know statistical results here, which I won't get into the technical details of. But suffice to say, the ordering used at this agency, which is a very commonly used ordering when it comes to use of force continuums, um does not stand up to statistical scrutiny when it comes to which uh that ordering for which one is more severe than another. And even when, even if we were to uh kind of like reshape it uh to where maybe they would be an ordinal order, they're all extremely close together. There's not a lot separating them. And so really we make the argument that when it comes to these types of less lethal force, really they uh should be characterized more as nominal than ordinal variables. Um and we should perhaps be rethinking about these, be rethinking how we use and put together these use of force continuums. Um because if we're if we're explicitly telling and training officers that these are the orders of which types of force are more severe than others, and then we're holding them to those types of orderings, uh, but we're seeing this really kind of trade-off between officer versus subject injury because of that ordering. Are we at the optimal outcome there? I would argue we're probably not. Um, and it's not just me. Um, the national consensus on use of force uh that came out from the IECP as well as a host of other professional organizations actually put this in their uh paper saying, really, you should think about rethinking using these continuums and putting it more in line with um whether or not the type of force used was objectively reasonable based off of the circumstances presented to the officer. And I think at least logically, that makes more sense if we're looking at these types of use of force as nominally similar rather than ordinally ranked by severity.

SPEAKER_00 27:36

I mean, that's a it that's a mouthful. Any other recommendations? No, I'm serious. This is this is a comp this is this is why we're having the conversation. This the continuum is not nearly as clear as people would like it to be. It's not nearly as clear as people need it to be. And so this conversation, I'm not trying to make it funny, is really important. So are there other recommendations or considerations that police agencies should uh be aware of?

SPEAKER_01 28:08

Yeah, I mean, I I again I think use of force continuums um were put in place probably with good intentions, right? But could they they're trying to provide guidance to officers, and if there's a workable framework for officers to use, then they're much less likely, you know, take the organizational part out of it. They're much more they're much less likely to find themselves in some sort of hot water, whether it comes with the organization or whether it comes to legally, if there's some sort of workable framework here for them to go by and try to make it as easy as possible to make these decisions in very, very difficult circumstances. That being said, you know, in my mind, and based off of this research, it sure seems like we're trying to force a structure that really, in reality, isn't there. And I think agencies would be well served to kind of rethink through, okay, what is my use of force continuum? Does it really make sense the way we have it set up if we're using this ordinal ranking? And maybe we should rethink our assumptions about that. Um not only that, I think it also poses an interesting question as the profession continues to see new tools come out over the years. Um, where looking back at the history, as we started looking at like, okay, well, why do we see these rankings the way that we do? Because one of the things that the majority of agencies place pepper spray above physical force. I don't know not with the majority, but a good number of agencies place pepper spray above physical force, which doesn't align with our findings and oftentimes doesn't make uh doesn't really align with like my sense of what's more severe than the other, because typically a pepper spray will keep somebody from having to have physical force used on them. Um but when you look at the history of how these tools are added, it often seems that when a new tool comes out, it's just assumed or thought to be more severe because it's new. And I know we don't think about pepper spray that way because it's been around for a long time, but when you look at the history and the literature on pepper spray, uh it's very similar to what you saw when tasers first came out. This is a new quote-unquote technology, so there was a lot of unknowns about it. And so it was really kind of talked about being possibly more severe and needing to be constrained more than the use of physical force, even though based off of these results, we're more likely to see injuries when physical force is used rather than pepper spray.

SPEAKER_00 30:22

Okay, everybody that's listening to this, I apologize that we really didn't clarify this nearly enough, but I think we did clarify the fact that this is a complicated issue. And so many of the issues we've been talking about on the podcast have been. So, Scott Morcos, I sincerely appreciate your your time. This was it was informative and illuminating for a lot of people. I'm absolutely sure.

SPEAKER_01 30:42

Thanks, Scott. It was really nice actually meeting with you. And I I know this is one of those murky things where there's not a clear cut answer even after you do, you know, a piece of research on it, but I think it's posing interesting questions. And that's what we were really trying to do with this research was pose the question and have hopefully people think about it a little bit more deeply, especially within a police organization.

SPEAKER_00 31:00

Well, that's it, that as far as I'm concerned, that's part of our job to ask questions at early stages, try to find some information and generate uh so some knowledge so other people can follow us and improve uh improve upon what we've tried to do. Again, Scott, thanks for your time. I appreciate it. Thanks. Have a great day. You too. That's it for this episode of the Police in Service Training Podcast. I want to thank you, the listener, for spending your valuable time here. If you like what you've heard, please tell a friend to subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever they get their podcasts. And please take a moment to review this podcast. If you have any questions or comments, positive or negative, or if you think I should cover a specific topic, feel free to send me an email, which you can find in the show notes. Or you can find me on Blue Sky using the handle at policeinservice.social. Thanks very much and have a great day.