The Illinois Model

Adaptive Leadership Methodology, adult learning principles,  concept-based education, and process/procedure simplification have been reappearing in police training circles from many angles. Our cadre chewed on these ideas for a half-dozen years before engineering them into The Illinois Model. Sitting between lofty, abstract theory and concrete (and un-workable) procedure, our system holds a balance of useable and flexible "guidance."

Police officers attend to a wide variety of issues. The police culture has been identified as one of warriors, helpers, crime fighters, peacekeepers, public servants, law enforcers, community councelors, protectors, investigators, street lawyers, pursuers-of-justice, and first responders. To capture all these traits and descriptors with a single term, one could accurately use....problem-solvers.  (Any cop with a single gray hair on his or her head can write a book about the problems to which s/he has responded that weren't anywhere close to …

This is the lesson of a trauma/emergency room physician and his two weeks in police SWAT training. His performance in school caused me to re-examine the training and education I had been giving to police officers...and how culture might be more important than everything else.

My friend is a full-time emergency room doctor in a well-respected trauma center.  He was entering into two weeks of police training, more specifically Basic Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) School. The doctor decided to pursue a volunteer position on a local SWAT team's Tactical Emergency Medical Support (TEMS) unit. But this was not an abbreviated familiarization course tailored for doctors, nurses, or paramedics to become "tactical medics." This two-week school was to prepare veteran police officers for an assignment as full-blown SWAT team officers. This course is no joke.

Given that he had NO prior law enforcement experience, that his only firearms training was of the self-taught variety, and…