A friend called the other day to tell me that their home had been broken into, and some things had been stolen. He was asking me if I thought he should have an alarm installed.
Now my friend lives in an area that is not one of those places where there are nightly criminal antics. In fact, he moved his family there because they were living in a deteriorating neighborhood, and he wanted them to be safe. Once they got relocated to the country, he and his wife felt a lot better about their family's safety...
...until the break-in.
I asked him why he had not installed an alarm before the incident, and he told me that he thought about it, but it was expensive, and nothing had happened yet, so he decided to put it off. After all, he had moved out to where he was to get away from all that. In hindsight, he's sorry he didn’t have an alarm system installed sooner.
Life is like that: You can think of it as a series of judgment calls; sort of an on-going cost-benefit analysis. Since so few of us have unlimited time and resources, we take calculated risks, hoping things will work out. Most of the time they do, but sometimes they don't, and that can be costly.
Everything from putting off this year's flu shot, to delaying in stopping for gas when your tank is low. You can put off replacing the batteries in your flashlight, and you can skip that rest area stop on the turnpike, hoping you can make it to the next exit for your restroom break. You can wait to patch things up with your brother, until he gets sick and it's too late.
In all of these scenarios we are accepting a certain degree of risk, and hoping that we can get by with it; hoping that the possible negative outcome doesn't happen. Most of time, based on our experience and common sense, we make the right call and all is well. Once in a while we don't quite make it, and bad things are the result.
Law Enforcement Rolls the Dice
We do this a lot in police work as well. If you can't think of at least a dozen similar law-enforcement related scenarios, you're not even trying. However, there is one calculated risk that we take that has potentially huge consequences, and that is when we cut our training budgets.
In a more perfect world, we would have all the time and money we need to do the training that we all know needs to be done. That's not reality, so sometimes we have to make hard choices regarding allocation of limited resources. Even though it almost sounds trite to say it, one of the first things to be cut when budgets get tight is training.
The rationale for cutting training seems sound; at least to some people (these people are often called defendants). After all, training generally has no tangible pay off; you don't usually see an immediate, palpable benefit from your training efforts. You know that if you cut in other areas of operations, important elements of your department's mission may suffer. Failing to fund some supervisory positions, for example, can have a concrete impact on your overtime budget. Failing to purchase a particular piece of equipment can have specific ramifications as well.
But training? You can always postpone that, and pick it up again when things loosen up. Right?
Of course, intellectually we know that the idea of cutting training is fundamentally flawed. Depending what discipline we are thinking of cutting, less training can have an immediate, short-term effect, e.g. more patrol car accidents because we cut the driver training budget. It can have a long-term effect, such as fewer successful criminal prosecutions because we cut training for our investigators. It can also have an institutional effect, i.e. our department's philosophy or our approach to our mission can be undermined due to a lack of training. That can have serious implications for how we all approach our jobs, how we treat people (and each other), and our attitude toward life in general, and toward our profession in particular.
Cutting training is a good way to get someone hurt, and that's the most important negative outcome that can result. When an officer is hurt, the ripple effects of that injury can be traumatic for his or her fellow officers, the officer's family, and the community in general. When a suspect or an uninvolved third party is hurt, those ripples can be almost as traumatic. Whether the injured party is an officer, suspect or third party, the financial ramifications can be a nightmare.
Legal Implications of Failure to Train
We won't drill too deeply into this subject here, since every officer, supervisor and police manager knows how difficult it is to defend a lack of training once the legal process gets underway. There is one specific point that bears repeating though, and it's a point that cannot be over-emphasized: Lack of funding is never an excuse for failure to train. While training may not be the central issue in most police misconduct litigation, it is frequently cited as one element of a given case. The theory behind the idea that lack of money is no excuse for reduced training might best be analogized to the old saying that, You shouldn't bite off more than you can chew. In other words, if you decide to do something, in order to do it reasonably, you need to take certain measures, and one of those measures is to make sure you know how to do the thing you are planning to do. If you are going to fly an airplane, you must first learn how by taking lessons. If you're going to drive a car, you must first learn how to drive by attending classes. If you are going to do brain surgery... Well, you get the idea. If you can't afford the training, then you shouldn't undertake the activity. To do something risky without proper training is foolhardy, and is unreasonable.
The courts have long held that the standards for evaluating an officer's conduct have their roots in the concept of reasonableness. In some cases - negligent operation of a motor vehicle, for example - the standard in most state courts is one of reasonable behavior by the officer. In use of force cases, the federal courts require a standard known as objective reasonableness. When a governmental entity, such as a city or county, has a policy of not training for certain obvious needs, the federal courts have held that policy to be deliberately indifferent to the constitutional rights of the individual impacted by the untrained acts of an officer.
Trainers and administrators will remember that in the case City of Canton Ohio v. Harris, 489 U.S. 378 (1989), the United States Supreme Court opined that, "A municipality may, in certain circumstances, be held liable under § 1983 for constitutional violations resulting from its failure to train its employees... The inadequacy of police training may serve as the basis for § 1983 liability only where the failure to train in a relevant respect amounts to deliberate indifference to the constitutional rights of persons with whom the police come into contact..." [Then continuing in 'famous footnote number 10'] "For example, city policymakers know to a moral certainty that their police officers will be required to arrest fleeing felons. The city has armed its officers with firearms, in part to allow them to accomplish this task. Thus, the need to train officers in the constitutional limitations on the use of deadly force... can be said to be "so obvious" that failure to do so could properly be characterized as "deliberate indifference" to constitutional rights."
This can sometimes seem like a case of irresistible force meets immovable object, but that's just the way it is. When we consciously fail to train due to lack of money or resources, we are going way out onto a shaky limb. Most of the time, we get back okay. However, every once in a while the limb breaks, and when that happens our excuses for going out onto that limb are not acceptable in defense of our actions.
Affordability is not the standard that the courts have held us to.
Stay safe, and wear your vest!
