Trainer's Bullpen

Law enforcement officers are often faced with having to make critical shoot or no shoot decisions in rapidly occurring, ambiguous and high-consequence environments. The potential consequences of a decision-making error involving the use of lethal force carries serious implications. What rolecan training play in helping to develop more accurate decision making? In this interview Dr. Taylor explains...

The prevalence and impact of recruit injuries during academy physical training is a significant issue. Recruit injuries can cause recruits to fall out of the training cadence resulting in a failure to successfully complete the academy, back-trooping and in serious cases, eliminating the recruits law enforcement employment prospects altogether.   Therefore, the need for evidence-based injury preven...

The most important goal of police academy training is the retention and transfer of knowledge and skills. In this interview, Dr. Staci Yutzie, training manager at Oregon’s statewide public safety training academy, Department of Public Safety Training, or DPSST discusses the evidence-based, adult learning approach that was undertaken at the Center for Policing Excellence in Oregon to completely ove...

The use of the vascular neck restraint by law enforcement officers has been the topic of recent, intense, debate. Special interest groups have equated the use of the vascular neck restraint with ‘near-death’ experiences and have called for outright bans. Policy makers have been very critical of agencies that train and permit the use of the VNR, and some agencies have been influenced by heavy polit...

It is important to recognize the value of highly contextual training to equip law enforcement officers to be professional and adaptive decision-makers. However, the majority of current training practices often develop officers who lack the ability to transfer static skills into the highly dynamic operational demands that they face.   In this interview, Dr. Mario Staller, professor at the Universit...

For many years, law enforcement trainers and tactical professionals have been somewhat familiar with the importance of how intentional breathing techniques can help lower physiological arousal. This is a critical concept because physiological state directly impacts emotional regulation, attention and quality of decision making. However, there has been little in the form of evidence-based research...

All law enforcement instructors would agree that one of the core functions of police skills training is to develop great adaptive decision-making skills in our officers. The question that must be asked is, what is the relationship between instructor / coach feedback methods and the development of independent adaptive decision-making and, are there proven techniques that work better than others? In...

In this interview, Dr. Jonathan Wender from POLIS Solutions talk to the Trainer’s Bullpen about the ‘Adaptive Defensive and Protective Tactics’ (ADAPT) research report which was published in March 2022. You can download a copy of this report by going to the Trainers Bullpen website at trainersbullpen.com. This highly important research presents the current state of police control and defensive tac...

In this interview Dr Paula Di Nota from the University of Toronto discusses the findings and training implications of her research review ‘Complex Motor Learning and Police Training: Applied, Cognitive, and Clinical Perspectives’ (Frontiers in Psychology; 2019). The purpose of the review was to explore pedagogical best practices to bridge the gap between scientific knowledge of human performance a...

In this interview,  human performance expert Dr Rob Gray from Arizona State University and author of ‘How We Learn to Move’ and ‘Learning to Optimize Movement’ discusses the important findings of the research paper ‘Police Training Revisited – Meeting the Demands of Conflict Training in Police with an Alternative Pedagogical Approach’ (Policing; December 2020). While operational police action...

In this interview Dr Simon Baldwin from Carleton University walks us through the fascinating research study ‘A Reasonable Officer: Examining the Relationships Among Stress, Training, and Performance in a Highly Realistic Lethal Force Scenario’ (Frontiers in Psychology; January 2022). Dr Baldwin presents the findings and importantly, he addresses the critical implications for training to help build...

In this interview experts in behavior analysis, police psychology, ergonomics and exercise science Dr’s John and Dawn O’Neill discuss the results of their important study ‘Police Academy Training, Performance and Learning’. The study involved an empirical analyses of training at 3 large regional police academies in the United States during the motor training of simple and complex defensive and con...

In this interview human performance expert Dr Rob Gray from Arizona State University and author of ‘How We Learn to Move’ and ‘Learning to Optimize Movement’ discusses the important differences between ‘linear’ (technique based) and ‘non-linear’ (ecological) motor skill training. Dr Gray helps us interpret the findings of a fascinating recent research project that explored the different performanc...

In this interview about motor learning principles, Dr Tim Lee (McMaster University; Department of Kinesiology) discusses an important article he wrote for The Tactical Edge magazine in the Summer 2022 Edition, in which Lee outlined several critical factors that law enforcement trainers should consider when designing and implementing motor skills training. Implementing these important aspects into...