Incident Strategy and Tactics (Part 2): The Importance of Teaching Your People How to Change Their Own Diaper
This is a followup to Part One , where I contended the bulk of police training wrongly focused on tactics at the cost of neglecting more critical strategic issues. However, there is only so much a police officer can do to control or influence a situation in the field. Since not everything goes to plan, officers must have the skills and abilities to fix a situation when it goes bad. While moderating a recent class on Incident Command for supervisory and senior police officers, I asked attendees what aspect of police training was needed most back at their respective police agencies. One student said, " Weapons training...we get into a lot of officer-involved shootings. " I questioned whether some of the shootings could have been avoided had officers implemented more stabilizing strategies. I used the analogy of potty training versus changing one's own diaper . Based on the head nods from other students while I explained my theory, a point was made: maybe some of thes