Public safety is, at its core, a decision-making business. Police officers, firefighters, corrections personnel, dispatchers, supervisors, and command staff routinely make decisions with incomplete information, limited time, and considerable pressure. Some decisions involve life and death. Others may seem considerably less consequential at the time: how an employee responds to a difficult citizen, whether a supervisor addresses a developing performance problem, how an incident is documented, or whether a manager chooses to intervene when something doesn’t look quite right.
Yet seemingly small decisions can have very large consequences.
When we talk about public-safety lawsuits, the discussion naturally gravitates toward the incident itself. We talk about the use of force, the pursuit, the jail death, the employment dispute, or the alleged misconduct. Those are certainly serious matters, but the lawsuit is often only the final event in a chain of decisions that began much earlier.
That is why I believe public-safety organizations should spend less time asking how they can protect themselves from lawsuits and more time asking whether they are preparing their people to make good decisions.
That is a leadership question, not a legal question.
Good intentions aren’t enough
Most public-safety employees don’t go to work intending to make a bad decision. They generally believe they are doing what they have been trained and authorized to do. The problem is that knowing what a policy says, or knowing how to perform a particular task, doesn’t necessarily mean someone has developed the judgment necessary to apply that knowledge effectively in a rapidly changing situation.
An employee can know the policy and still make a poor decision. An officer can know the mechanics of a particular response and still misread a situation. A supervisor can know what the manual says and still fail to recognize that an employee’s behavior is becoming a problem.
This is where the quality of training becomes important.
Research examining police decision-making during stressful incidents has found that training designed to improve physiological control and situational awareness can improve performance and decision-making. One randomized controlled pilot study, for example, found that trained officers demonstrated improvements in situational awareness, overall performance, and correct decision-making compared with officers who did not receive the intervention.
The point isn’t that training guarantees good decisions. It doesn’t. The point is that decision-making is a capability that can be developed, practiced, and improved.
Unfortunately, too much public-safety training still treats learning as an exercise in information transfer. An employee attends a class, listens to an instructor, perhaps completes a test, receives a certificate, and returns to work. From the organization’s perspective, the training requirement has been satisfied.
But the real test of training doesn’t occur in the classroom.
It occurs when the employee is tired, angry, frightened, distracted, or confronted with circumstances that don’t resemble the examples used during training. That’s when we find out whether the person merely remembers the material or has actually learned how to use it.
If we want better decisions, we need to train people to think through decisions, not simply memorize the rules associated with them. Employees need opportunities to work through realistic situations, explain what they see, identify the alternatives available to them, and explain why they would choose one course of action over another. They need to make mistakes in a controlled environment where those mistakes can become learning opportunities rather than discovering their errors for the first time in the field.
Most importantly, they need to learn that circumstances change. A decision that was reasonable thirty seconds ago may no longer be reasonable because the situation has changed.
That is what competent decision-making looks like.
When so-called ‘leadership’ training teaches people to be afraid
There is another problem with leadership training that I believe deserves considerably more attention. Too many so-called leadership programs teach people to become risk-averse rather than risk-aware.
Those are not the same thing.
Risk awareness means understanding the potential consequences of a decision and taking reasonable steps to manage them. Risk aversion is something else. It teaches people, often indirectly, that the safest course of action is to avoid doing anything that might get them into trouble.
That may sound prudent. In public safety, it can actually create another kind of risk.
If an employee becomes so concerned about making the wrong decision that he or she becomes unwilling to make a necessary decision, the organization hasn’t eliminated the risk. It has simply moved it somewhere else. Someone still has to make the decision. Someone still has to act. And someone eventually has to deal with the consequences of not acting.
I learned this lesson in an interesting way many years ago.
I was conducting a day-long workshop on effective leadership. One of the themes of the workshop was what I called preempting the need for unnecessary exposure. In other words, good leaders don’t wait for problems to become crises before dealing with them. They recognize developing problems, address them early, make reasonable decisions, and take action before a relatively manageable situation becomes an expensive one.
Another group was attending a leadership program in the room next door.
During a break, one of the participants from that group approached me in the hallway. He told me that he liked my training much better and then added something that I have never forgotten.
He said, “It is good business.”
I asked him what he meant.
He explained that he had just come from the training in the other room and had come away with a very different feeling about leadership. Then he gave me a remarkably candid assessment of what he had learned.
“I came away afraid to talk to my own employees.”
Think about that for a moment.
If a supervisor attends leadership training and comes away afraid to talk to employees, what exactly have we accomplished?
A supervisor who is afraid to address a performance problem hasn’t eliminated the problem. The supervisor has postponed it. A manager who is afraid to make a reasonable decision hasn’t eliminated risk. The decision has simply been delayed, transferred upward, or left to circumstances that will eventually force someone to deal with it.
And a leader who believes that the safest course of action is to avoid anything that could possibly result in a complaint, criticism or disagreement may not actually be managing risk at all.
Sometimes that leader is creating risk.
Effective leadership isn’t about eliminating risk. That is impossible. It is about recognizing unnecessary exposure and dealing with it before it becomes a larger problem while still giving people the confidence and judgment to make reasonable decisions when action is required.
That distinction matters enormously in public safety.
We should want employees who understand consequences and think before they act. We should want them to recognize when they need additional resources, when they need to slow down and when a situation has become more serious than they initially understood.
But we should also want employees who have the confidence and judgment to act when action is necessary.
The objective of leadership training should never be to create people who are afraid of making mistakes. It should be to create people who are better prepared to make good decisions.
Supervisors are part of the equation
Employees don’t operate in a vacuum. Their behavior is influenced by what the organization expects, what supervisors reinforce, and, perhaps most importantly, what supervisors tolerate.
This is one of the reasons supervision is so important to organizational performance.
If an employee repeatedly makes questionable decisions and nobody talks to the employee about them, the organization should not be surprised when the behavior continues. If a supervisor routinely says, “That’s just the way he is,” the organization has made a decision of its own. It has decided that the behavior is acceptable enough to leave alone.
Tolerance isn’t neutral. Over time, what an organization permits becomes part of what it teaches.
Research has identified supervision as an important factor in police behavior, although researchers also caution that much remains to be learned about precisely which supervisory practices are most effective and how they should be implemented.
That shouldn’t be particularly surprising. Supervisors are the people closest to the day-to-day behavior of employees. They see things that command staff may never see. They hear the explanations, observe the patterns and have opportunities to intervene long before a problem reaches the level of a formal complaint or lawsuit.
Good supervision therefore isn’t simply about catching people doing something wrong. It is about recognizing patterns early enough to coach, correct, and redirect behavior before a problem becomes something much more difficult to manage.
More training isn’t necessarily better training
There is also a tendency in public organizations to respond to problems by adding another training requirement.
Something goes wrong, so we create a new course. Someone makes a poor decision, so we require another four hours of training. A complaint occurs, and everybody is required to sign an acknowledgment that they have reviewed the policy.
The organization can then report that it has “provided training.”
But has it actually changed behavior?
That’s a much harder question.
Recent research examining officer and supervisor training found that the relationship between training and use-of-force behavior is more complicated than simply assuming that more training automatically produces better outcomes. Some forms of training were associated with lower levels of force, while other findings were less straightforward.
That should cause public-safety leaders to think carefully about what they mean when they say they need “more training.”
The question shouldn’t be how many hours were provided. The question should be what capability was developed.
And ultimately, the most important question is whether employees demonstrate that capability when they need it.
A certificate tells us that somebody attended a class.
It doesn’t necessarily tell us what the person learned. (See my article, “Are You A Purposeful Adult … Or A Bling Chaser?” for more detailed insights.)
Decision-making has to be practiced
If decision-making is an important part of the job, then decision-making needs to be practiced.
That doesn’t mean giving employees more lectures about making good decisions. It means putting them in situations that require them to make decisions and then examining how they arrived at those decisions.
What did they see? What did they miss? What alternatives were available? What information would have changed their decision? When did the situation change? What would they do the next time differently?
Those are useful training questions because they force people to think.
This is especially important in public safety because stress can change human performance. Someone who appears perfectly capable in a classroom may respond very differently when confronted with uncertainty, threat, anger, confusion or rapidly changing circumstances.
Training therefore needs to do more than tell people what to do.
It needs to help them learn how to think when they don’t immediately know what to do.
That is a very different training objective.
The financial argument
There is a practical reason for taking all of this seriously.
When poor decisions contribute to preventable incidents, the cost to a public organization can extend well beyond whatever settlement or judgment might eventually result. There may be investigation costs, legal expenses, staff time, overtime, administrative costs, insurance consequences, and lost productivity. Command staff may spend countless hours dealing with an incident that should never have reached that point.
And eventually, somebody pays for all of it.
In the private sector, the cost may show up on a company’s bottom line. In government, the consequences ultimately find their way into budgets supported by taxpayers.
Research from Chicago provides an interesting illustration of the potential relationship between training and organizational outcomes. Researchers examined 8,480 police officers who received procedural-justice training and found that the training was associated with a 10 percent reduction in complaints and a 6.4 percent reduction in use-of-force incidents over the following two years.
That study doesn’t establish that every training program will produce the same results. Nor does it suggest that training is the answer to every public-safety problem.
It does, however, demonstrate something worth considering: training can change behavior – especially when clear expectations of learning are in place.
If we can change behavior in ways that improve performance and reduce preventable incidents, there is a reasonable expectation that we can also reduce some of the costs associated with those incidents.
The real cost isn’t the lawsuit
I have spent much of my career working with public-sector organizations on leadership and organizational performance. One lesson has remained remarkably consistent: problems rarely become expensive all at once.
They become expensive because somebody failed to recognize and act upon them early.
A questionable decision becomes a pattern. A pattern becomes accepted behavior. Accepted behavior becomes part of the culture. Eventually something happens that can no longer be ignored.
By that point, the organization may be dealing with much more than an employee problem. It may be dealing with a supervisory problem, a management problem, a training problem, a public-trust problem, and a very expensive organizational problem.
If a lawsuit follows, the lawsuit is simply another consequence.
That is why I believe public-safety leaders should look at organizational exposure from a different perspective. Don’t begin with the lawsuit. Begin with the decision that preceded it.
What decisions are employees routinely required to make? Are they prepared to make those decisions under pressure? Do supervisors know how to recognize poor decision-making? Do they intervene early enough to make a difference? Does the organization learn from mistakes, or does it simply add another policy and another training requirement?
And perhaps most importantly, does the organization’s leadership culture encourage thoughtful decision-making, or has it become so concerned with avoiding risk that employees are afraid to make reasonable decisions?
Those are leadership questions.
They are also questions worth answering before somebody else has to answer them for you.
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Author’s Note: The content provided in this article is designed exclusively for educational and informational purposes, reflecting opinions shaped by decades of leadership training and organizational consulting experience. It should never be interpreted as formal professional advice. By reading or engaging with this material, you acknowledge that no professional-client relationship is established and that these insights do not substitute for tailored guidance from a qualified professional familiar with your specific circumstances. Consequently, readers are strongly advised to seek independent counsel from licensed legal, financial, medical, or other appropriate advisors before implementing any strategies or making decisions based on these perspectives. Ultimately, you assume full personal responsibility for any actions you choose to take or omit as a result of reading this material, releasing the author and publisher from any liability for outcomes arising from your reliance on the text.
Additional Reading
A Training Method to Improve Police Use of Force Decision Making – Research examining training, stress response, situational awareness, and decision-making.
Procedural Justice Training Reduces Police Use of Force and Complaints Against Officers – Research examining the results of a large-scale training intervention involving 8,480 Chicago police officers.
The Impact of Officer and Supervisor Training in Police Use of Force Incidents – Research examining the relationship between officer training, supervisor training, and use-of-force behavior.
Police Uses of Force in the USA: A Wealth of Theories and a Lack of Evidence – A broader review of research concerning use of force, supervision, and police behavior.
