Law Enforcement responses to critical incidents or unusual occurrences require unique remedies and solutions involving creative and critical thinking skills.  The scope under which today’s peace officers must conduct business includes an expectation of problem solving and situational awareness to resolve complex incidents while remaining within policies, procedures and training.  Much of the basic training and in-service training is directed toward problem solving skills to resolve frequent occurrences.  When officers fall short of resolving situations according to public expectations, the entire law enforcement domain is subject to criticism.

Current peace officer training models follow the storehouse metaphor where it is assumed students are missing some critical knowledge or factual information and the trainer presents that new knowledge in the classroom.  This student is later tested to determine if the knowledge was transferred.  This approach does not work for higher level cognitive skills.  Cognitive skills depend heavily upon mental models.  Mental models are a cluster of causal beliefs about how things occur and evolve.  Mental models are used by the decision maker to organize real time information, prioritize objectives and anticipate changing events.

The initial management of current law enforcement responses to critical incidents tends to be procedure-based problem solving, forcing responders to seek solutions within established policies and agency procedures.  Newer officers can lack the procedural knowledge, experience and creative cognitive skills to reach sufficient situational awareness levels allowing for timely decisions.  These less experienced first responders have yet to develop the mental models gained from prior job encounters or training to reference for decision making.  

POST-certified courses have developed critical decision making skills through the Force Option Simulator, live fire exercises and simunitions training.  These perishable skills are updated every two years and allows for cognitive development for active shooter and uncommon occurrences.  If mental models can be developed through cognitive training to address these complex incidents, officers will be better equipped to make desirable decisions and ensure more creative solutions.  

It’s known that when experienced officers make timely decisions during critical incidents, they are relying upon previously established mental models stored in their schema that are referenced during the decision making process. Dr. Klein refers to this process as the "Recognition Prime Decision Making" (RPD) model.  Experts can assess a situation quickly, reach the proper level of situational awareness, and predict the development of most incidents using RPD.  This allows the on scene officer to make decisions and follow a course of action towards a successful resolution.  Mental models are embedded within an individual officer over many years of incident responses and a trial and error career.  Dr. Klein and POST believe these models can be developed through designed training.  

POST has recognized that cognitive skill training is extremely successful in many domains including the military, the airline industry, NASA and the medical field.  This training has improved the decision making skills of newer professionals and raised these skills to higher levels of problem solving.

POST will continue to collect data from identified domain experts and specified candidates.  Dr. Klein will provide POST a series of core cognitive skills and strategies for critical decision making which will be utilized to develop training that can be introduced into basic courses, in-service training and perishable skills training.

The initial stage of this process is the Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA).  This process assembles data from recognized experts in the law enforcement domain.  The data collection is best accomplished by both observation, scenario testing and interview methodologies.  The observation approach can be best achieved by on scene observations of critical decision making of officers confronted with unique circumstances.  This can be best completed through training exercises that adequately represent real critical incidents such as the Urban Shield program presented by the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office.

POST staff, Dr. Klein and his team, in conjunction with the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, has observed critical decision making as it occurred during Urban Shield and afterwards conducted interviews with the specialized teams for data collection.  Additional observations were previously conducted through scenario testing to measure the mental processes of line officers.  Prior to the scenario testing, interviews were conducted of selected candidates who are recognized in the field as expert level decision makers and industry mentors.  These interviews focused upon the mental models used during decision making challenges, and how event cues are utilized to trigger key decisions.  POST is continuing to facilitate interviews with a spectrum of law enforcement experts.

Once data collection is completed, POST will utilize the information to design curriculum and programs to develop cognitive learning and improve mental models.  The course objective is to develop more sophisticated mental models for our first responders enhancing their ability to resolve complex chaotic incidents as well as to counter new emerging criminal trends and extremist threats.  The training will provide experiences to enable trainees to discover more useful and accurate mental models that can be referenced later during actual incidents.

This study supports POST Strategic Plan Strategy A.1.1, Identify and convey information on emerging trends to the field.