Law enforcement is characterized by long, extended periods of boredom, paperwork, and menial tasks of repetition. While the quality of an officer’s reports, interviews, and evidence collection are important to the outcome of a case; the manner in which an officer conducts themselves during a high-stress incident can have tremendous effects on life, limb, and reputation. Every cop who has been through a high-stress or critical incident has been acquainted with the effects of an adrenaline response.
The adrenaline response is commonly referred to as “Fight or Flight.” When faced with a perceived threat, the body naturally activates the sympathetic nervous system. This response prepares the body for the perceived threat and is a primal instinct. Adrenaline kicks in, heart rate increases, blood moves from extremities towards the core, pupils dilate, etc.
Negative Panic — Freeze
For years, there was a belief amongst law enforcement that fight (confront the threat) or flight (run from the threat) were the responses to a threat. Unfortunately, hard-learned lessons have determined there are more possibilities. The most common addition to fight or flight is freeze. Freeze is a form of panic or negative panic. Negative panic happens when the brain effectively locks up and the individual doesn’t respond to the threat appropriately.
I use the hard drive in a computer as an analogy to describe negative panic. The human brain is the hard drive. Our threat response is ingrained from a young age (for most of us at least) to write files into our hard drive that we access later to determine a plan of action. But what happens if you attempt to access a file that is absent, corrupted, or damaged on the hard drive (e.g. something we’ve never thought could happen to us)? Our version of “the blue screen of death” occurs — negative or traditional panic. Panic, or “freezing”, is a dangerous thing to occur in law enforcement. If an officer has failed to write a response onto their hard drive, they can overreact or fail to act in response to the perceived threat.
Prepare for the adversarial response.
As a field trainer, I run into this scenario quite often amongst “green” trainees where this is their first cop job. The average person isn’t used to being faced with an adversarial response. In the digital age, most confrontations occur behind a computer screen or phone on social media or online chat rooms. As the digital generation has reached the age to enter law enforcement, those entering the profession seem less experienced in the complexities of face-to-face confrontation.
When a rookie first gets into my car, they’re nervous. It’s to be expected. The pressure of being graded, the anxiety of making a mistake, and the profound risks of law enforcement are on every new trainee’s mind. My initial expectation of any trainee is to conduct a traffic stop — arguably the bread and butter of proactive policing. For most trainees, their anxiety is through the roof. The unknowns in conducting a traffic stop are nerve-racking. Most end without incident, but some end in gunfire, fights, or other profound consequences.
The nerves kick in as the trainee recalls their academy training: call out the stop, location, vehicle description, license, etc. They nervously approach and I watch as they fumble through the stop. Occasionally, trainees are confronted with a situation they’ve never faced before. The driver is confrontational, armed, or there are additional criminal factors present that must be addressed. Sometimes, the trainee locks up, or “freezes,” and I have to step in while others take appropriate action and continue working the stop.
Human behavior is a fascinating thing.
The law enforcement profession is the advanced study of human behavior and its application thereof. My working theory behind those trainees who acted, and those who didn’t, is the real-world manifestation of “freeze.” The better question at hand is why those trainees, and other officers, freeze during these situations? The answer to that question is simple. What has that officer done to write a file onto their hard drive (brain) to respond appropriately to the stimulus presented before them? Prior experience goes a long way in governing how an officer will respond to a situation. If you’ve faced that stimulus before, you have an idea of determining how things will go and, from prior trial and error, how to respond.
Unfortunately, personal experience, while a great teacher, has a limited scope of influence on one’s response. Our experiences play a tremendous role in our behavior. They shape our most visceral reactions and even generate an implicit bias to external stimulus. However, the greatest teacher is the experiences bourn of others. A single person’s experience, no matter how diverse, is limited. The expanse of information available from others’ experiences and the creativity of our own imagination is limitless.
The best trainees I’ve had, along with the best officers in the profession, are constantly learning. They review after-action reports, body camera footage, and seek out the best training possible to expand their knowledge. Furthermore, they don’t view other’s incidents from a spectator’s perspective. They attempt to put themselves in those situations as if they were in that individual’s position and evaluate the mistakes alongside the sound judgment calls. They don’t do Monday-morning quarterbacking nor do they live in a tactical fantasy. They understand the things beyond our control while addressing the things we can — attitude and effort. A sound attitude with concerted effort will maximize, not guarantee, a “best-case scenario.”
Prepare for scenarios in advance.
None of us are exempt from the human condition. We are destined to fail if we don’t address scenarios in advance. How can anyone expect to succeed under adverse conditions if they’ve never trained for it? If they’ve never, at a minimum, played out scenarios, step-by-step and possibility-by-possibility; how can someone expect to respond when faced with a confrontation where life and limb are at stake? The consequences of negative outcomes are too high for anyone, the armed citizen or law enforcement alike, to not consider such a confrontation as a potential reality.
Albert Einstein once said, “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” We are all students of life. Education never ceases. For those of us in law enforcement, the ones that stand out and prevail in the face of confrontation are the ones who have written the most “files” to their mental hard drive and looked at the possibilities and outcomes. They have sought the experiences of others as a teaching point and are realistic in their assessment of their abilities as well as the harsh realities of violent confrontations. To draw from Einstein, they bear no special talent and are only passionately curious as to their survival. We can all take lessons from such wisdom.
