Right before the world shut down for COVID, I was at a use of Force
Experts conference at the Tactical training center in Vancouver.
That's where I first met today's guest.
I was impressed with how clearly he spoke about pressure bending perception, memory,
reshaping events, and confidence drifting ahead of competence when training Mrs.
Reality.
That perspective was forged over decades of experience where he rose
to the rank of inspector in a large Canadian police service, working
deep in training and instructor development, as well as his role at
Force as a force science instructor.
He now hosts the Trainer's Bullpen podcast, where he explores
decision making perception and human performance under stress.
Welcome to the Silver Corp Podcast, Chris Butler.
Thanks for having me on.
It's an honor to be here.
Well, the Honor is mine.
Let me tell you that much.
You're a very humble individual.
I really enjoyed listening to you talk that now.
When I was going back, right, I think we were in the very last class that the
tactical training center was putting on right before everything shut down, and
they kind of pressed it a little bit further so we could finish that class and
then bang, world shut down, wasn't it?
I
believe that's exactly accurate.
As I recall, it was hours, and it may have actually even been while I
was still at the airport in Vancouver preparing to fly back to Calgary, that
everything was just collapsing, you know, a minute by minute at that time,
as you can recall, that was occurring.
So yeah, that was interesting time, wasn't it?
It sure was.
And you know, a lot's happened since then.
So you're, you're now retired, you've now got the trainer's bullpen, which is a,
uh, successful podcast where you talk to people all over the world about training
and the experience and expertise that you've acquired over many, many years,
I think was what, 20 years as a, uh, use of force expert behind your belt.
Is that, is that correct?
Yeah.
Well, that's close.
I mean, I think I'm, I'm going on to, uh.
25 years of doing expert witness work now.
But, and, and I appreciate the comments about, about being an expert, you
know, but somebody once told me that, you know, what an expert is, is it's a
drip under pressure, you know, expert.
But, um, yeah, I started the, I started the trainer's bullpen because,
um, what I realized, you know, so my passion is in, in training, law
enforcement, military security.
Um, and what I realized is that the more that I started to really dive into
the research around human performance and the best pedagogical or learning
approaches for designing and delivering training to make, make our people
perform well, like you said, in those very high consequence, rapidly unfolding
type of ambiguous incidents, um.
I don't, I realized that I, I knew very little about actually how to do that.
And when I started to explore other industries, so to go interdisciplinary
into, uh, military aviation, aerospace, uh, combat medicine, um, all of these
other domains that for years and years and years have put a lot of research
into how people actually learn and how to create great learning environments for.
Superior retention and transfer of skill.
What I realized is law enforcement pretty much did it exactly the, the opposite.
You know, if you and I were to, to have sat down and said, Hey, let's put our
heads together and come up with, let's come up with the training, that could
be almost completely the inverse of what the research says we should be doing.
That that's what I realize.
You know, and, and I, I realize I'm painting with a broad brush
here, so I'm not, I don't wanna be dogmatic sure about this.
And there are pockets of trainers that are doing phenomenal work who are all
over the research and have reformed their training and, and it's just wonderful.
But, um, we still have a ton of work to reform our pedagogy
in, in law enforcement.
It's sort of, uh, I often refer to it as the occupation that research forgot,
well, how were people training?
And how do you see training in the future being more successful?
Well, maybe I'll just, if I could back up a bit and just talk about
before I came into law enforcement.
So I was a search and rescue technician in the Rocky Mountains as a, uh, park ranger.
And so I actually got hired as a, as a park ranger because I was
a fairly competent mountaineer and, and technical rock climber.
And it was just at the time when here in Alberta and Canas country,
they were standing up their own search and rescue capability.
Up until that time, the government of Alberta had to rely upon federal
parks on park wardens to come in and do all of our technical rescues.
And the government decided that that was enough of that.
Um, they, they wanted to have their own capacity.
So I just was in the right place at the right time.
I'm probably one of the very few individuals who ever got hired with
meaningful employment because you could, you were a, a rock climber.
But, um, what I realized, so going back to your point about training,
is the six years that I was in search and rescue and I eventually
got put in charge of, of actually.
Teaching other SART techs, um, search and rescue skills,
technical search and rescue skills.
And when I got asked to do that, I thought, well, yeah,
I'm, I'm an expert at this.
Like, I, how hard can this be?
Like I, I'm, I was very confident in my own ability that I was very
on top of my game personally.
And so I thought Sure.
How hard could that be?
And um, you know, in, in hindsight, I realized the ignorance of that statement.
Because what, what the reality is, is you can have somebody who's exceptionally
personally competent at a skill and that has nothing to do with your ability
to actually create meaningful, deep learning environments for other people.
Mm-hmm.
To learn well in.
And so, but at the time I didn't realize that disparity and,
and my foolishness almost got.
Uh, several search and rescue people killed because of human error with a
rotary wing aircraft on a technical rescue where errors were made, and those
were errors that were, um, you know, we don't rise to the occasion, we fall
to the level of our, of our training.
And so,
mm-hmm.
That was a wake up moment for me, Travis.
It really caused me to, um, it was a painful wake up moment.
Um, fortunately we didn't lose anybody, but it caused me to really begin to dig
into the research that was out there around human performance, around learning.
And I started to shape the training for our SART techs
in a radically different way.
And I did that for the last four years of, of my, uh, being a SART tech.
And then when I came, uh, so I left and, uh, that, and I joined
the, the Calgary Police Service.
And when I came to Calgary.
I, I thought there must be something seriously wrong either with me or
with this training, because in the academy at the time, it was all very
heavily scripted, technique based.
So you would have, you would stand on a match, shoulder to shoulder with other
officers, and you'd take a training baton and you'd hit a training bag and
you'd practice take downs with, you know, all very technique based, with no real
context to it, no meaningful resistance.
And the whole training was, was really like that.
And I thought, this is the bizarrest thing I've ever experienced.
Um, and then when I, I, so I, I went through the academy and, and at the same
time I was also, um, taking martial arts.
So I had this, what I, what I call my, I had this.
Cognitive schizophrenia going on because I'm taking mar these, this martial
arts training, which, and I had for several years before that, which was
all richly realistic with meaningful interactions between other combatants.
And, you know, that's where the pressure testing really proves itself, right?
Is when you're on mm-hmm.
You're actually fighting with somebody who's not going willingly
and who's giving you resistance and force and violence back.
Um, and then, so I had that all going on, and then I'm in
the academy getting this really ridiculous, rote mechanical, linear,
technique based type of instruction.
And I, I just realized this is, this is terribly wrong.
Terribly wrong.
Mm. And um, and of course the research bears, bears that out 100% is if you
want people to perform well, if you want retention and transfer of good
performance, good skill in the real world, which is in policing, for
example, like law enforcement, is what's called a non-linear environment.
It's a non-linear performance environment, which simply means it's ambiguous,
it's unpredictable, it's not scripted.
It requires constant perception, attention, decision making, adaptability,
that's a non-linear environment.
And if you want good performance in that type of environment, your
training needs to be replicate.
That all the way through, it needs to be a non-linear training environment.
So that's a long way of saying, you talked about the trainer's bullpen.
That's the, the origin of that is because I realized that, that what's
happening is all of this amazing research is being done around the world
into all different types of domains, but also including law enforcement.
But it seems that the implications of that research were not getting driven
down into the field at the academy level, at the agency level, where trainers
could understand the implications of the training and then actually apply it.
And so that's how the trainer's bullpen started.
I, I was hoping that this would be a forum for being able to have those discussions
where I could interview honestly some of the world's best high performance
human performance coaches, researchers.
People who have, they're academics who do this for a living.
Mm. And actually research this and publish textbooks and peer
reviewed journals and all that.
And I've, I've just had some of the most incredible conversations with
these people and, uh, and also met some amazing friends along the way, which is.
Awesome.
Well, I got, I gotta imagine from like a government institution standpoint,
who, which is generally highly concerned about liability and public perception.
They'd like to have something that's paint by numbers step by step, which
tends to lead towards a linear approach.
If this, then that, did they pass this qualification?
Did they, can they strike properly?
Can they hit X number of rounds with whatever round accountability?
But there's, like you're saying, a disconnect between meaningful resistance,
which brings to mind, Mike Tyson's famous phrase, everyone's got a plan
until they get punched in the face.
Right?
All of a sudden the plan disappears.
That's gotta be a difficult corner to square inside a large government
institution that wants to check these boxes for liabilities sake.
And you're saying, well, hold on.
There's gonna be some nuance here, and try to introduce that nuance.
And I guess if I were to extrapolate a little bit further, that
level of liability would only be exposed at a broader scale.
The more that conversations happen, like on the trainer's bullpen where
they turn around and say, well, you know, the knowledge is here.
Why aren't we doing
this?
Yeah.
You know, the old saying, ignorance is bliss.
Right.
And, um, you're, you're not, you're not, you're not culpable until you're aware.
And once you're aware, now you're responsible for making the changes.
Right.
And I'll, I'll often say to, to.
Trainers who, come on.
We have a, a five day methods of instruction course where we spend five
days, 40 hours going through all of this type of research and talk about the
implications and give them ideas how they can change and improve their training.
And usually by about Wednesday morning, there's a depression that sits in
across the whole class because the, and the comments are usually like
this, they realize that what they have genuinely believed that they
were doing the best for their people.
And this is, this is the thing, like, I wanna make sure I say this,
Travis, is I've yet to meet, to meet a trainer whose motives and passion
have not been absolutely pure, right?
Like they want to do what's best for agreed their, they want to do
what's best for their people and they think they are doing what's best.
And, but usually by Wednesday on the MOI course is there's
this, this fog of depression that sets in because they realize.
That how far out of sync the current training practices are.
And, and here's what I say to them in that I said, look,
look,
uh, here, here's all you're responsible for because you can't unscramble the egg.
And I tell them, I said, look, the pain that you're feeling right now is the pain
that cut me straight through the heart.
So you have, you have, uh, understanding peer here with
you, but here's the reality.
What you're accountable for is what you do with what you know.
So once you know better, do better.
Right.
And that's, that's all I'm asking you to do.
And I like to, I don't know if you're familiar with, uh, Covey's
work, but Covey, um, in one of his books, he talks about a sphere of
influence versus a sphere of concern.
And to your point about how, like it, you said, it's, it's a, it's a big.
Circle to, to square or something like that, or, uh, use a an analogy like that.
And Covey, Covey would say this.
He'd say, 'cause he, here's the human nature thing that we want, we often fall
prey to, is when we see the enormity of the change that needs to be made in order.
If we really wanna square all of our training to the research,
we have to flip academy models.
We have to change in the United States.
They have to, they would have to change post uh, training standards in Canada.
We would have to change provincial training standards.
Like it's an enormous heavy lift to do it.
And I'm not saying it's not worthwhile.
It is worthwhile.
But the danger is, is we can sit back and just be overwhelmed,
Travis, by the enormity.
Of the change that's needed.
Mm.
But then Covey would warn us, he would say, when you do that, what happens
is then what you have in your, in your circle of influence, your circle of
power, that you can make changes in you.
Nothing gets done because you're so overwhelmed by being concerned in what he
calls your circle, your circle of concern.
So, you know, the thing is, here's what, here's what trainers just need to focus
on, is what do you have control over?
What can you change?
What can you improve?
And tomorrow morning when you're on the range or you're on the
mats or whatever it is that you're teaching, you can make these changes.
There's a whole variety.
Of improvements that you can do in your training that will make your learning
for your people so much deeper and richer and meaningful without changing the big
structure within which, uh, you work.
So would would that basically be saying, okay, we've got these performance
objective checks that we have to go through for the department, we'll check
'em off, but we'll also add some nuance and maybe just have a side project or
some ancillary training kind of around it to give different perspectives.
Would that be sort of the approach?
Well, that certainly could be one of the approaches.
And, you know, an example of what you just said would be firearms qualification.
So we, we, we know from the research, I mean, this is not, there's
no, the, the jury has returned a verdict and it's guilty on, on this.
The firearms qualification in law enforcement is an
absolutely meaningless exercise.
So it has nothing to do with an officer's ability to, to use combat shooting
effectively, safely, correctly in an operational real officer involved
shooting, setting, uh, administrative qualification shoot has zero,
zero relationship to performance.
Mm-hmm.
I agree.
And yet, and so, but here's what happens, and I just had this conversation with
a very good trainer from Ontario, um, this week actually about this is
what happens is so much emphasis gets put on the firearms qualification.
Shoot that now we begin to consume so much of our training hours.
To get our people prepared to a level where they can pass this ridiculous
administrative qualification shoot.
And so not only is now is the qualification shoot meaningless,
but we've completely wasted all of those valuable training hours that
we could have been doing training to make our people much more effective,
safer, better combat shooters.
So my, my encouragement there is, yeah, look, you're, you're, you're
pro, most trainers are not at the level where they're gonna be able to
influence change at a provincial or state qualification shooting standard.
But let's, at, let's at least recognize a couple things.
One is it's a pointless exercise, but it needs to be done for
administrative purposes.
Hmm.
Got it.
There's maybe, in some places there's legislations, regulations,
we gotta do this thing.
So here's the point.
We recognize it's meaningless, has no bearing on performance.
Let's put the minimal amount of time needed in order to.
Pass this qualification shoot, rather than training for the qualification shoot,
let's put the majority of our time and our emphasis into actual combat shooting
skills that will really serve them well.
Um, on the street.
And, uh, actually I'm,
yeah,
sorry.
I was just gonna, I was just gonna say one, one trainer, firearms trainer.
I think he, he really did a, a great job kind of embracing
this and what his approach is.
So he spends the bulk of his time with his people in very
non-linear ecological combat firearm shooting type of environments.
So he starts with, um, cert Pistols.
He graduates them to Airsoft.
Blowback green gas weapons.
He goes from Airsoft blowback green gas to stimulation now
doing force on force stuff.
And uh, then he'll go into live fire a little bit.
He'll come back to doing really meaningful force on force combat
encounters with airsoft and munitions.
And so he's dialed back the amount of live fire significantly and upped the
non-consequential firearms technologies such as Airsoft certs, munition.
And what he's found is now when they go to shoot the qualification shoot, it is like
white belt level easy for people because they've already been training mm-hmm.
For 80% of their firearms training at a serious combat.
Force on force level that now putting a stupid hole in a piece of paper while
standing stationary, it's, it is not.
Mm-hmm.
It's not a challenge.
And I'm like, well that's, that's exactly right.
Yeah.
And what that old saying, train hard, fight easy, train
easy, fight hard and die.
Right?
It's, um, yeah, who was it that wrote, uh, train training at the Speed of Life?
And he was talking about, uh, uh, some states that have gone away from the
traditional how many rounds you can put into a target, uh, in a timeframe
at certain distances to a single round course of fire, where instead
of measuring their, uh, ability to repeat it at these distances, they're
measuring their decision making.
Did they make, make the right decision at the right time, which.
I think especially in Canada's model that we've kind of adopted and shared
across, uh, federally might introduce a lot of subjectivity into something that
would be otherwise arguably objective.
There's a lot of subjective, um, uh, pass or fails, which could make the
lawyers a little bit, uh, twitchy and the people signing off on it.
But, uh, would that be, you think a better model judge a person on their
decision making ability in the situation?
Yeah.
Well, I think for sure.
I think there needs to be both of those.
That definitely perception in, um, decision making, performance accuracy
is, all of those are certainly important.
I mean, in the current qualification shoots in that most agencies,
states, provinces perform, there's minimal to no decision making.
It's.
When the target turns from the holster fire right through route, you know,
it's, it's that kind of nonsense.
But, um, but here, let, let, let me give you a, uh, an example
of some very significant change that's happened as a result of
taking an evidence-based approach.
So, and this is a, a shout, shout out to Dr.
Simon Baldwin from the re research section of the Royal
Canadian Mounted Police, the RCMP.
Um, what Dr. Baldwin and his colleagues did is they did an analysis of officer
involved shootings for the RCMP.
I think it was just over a 10 year study of all officer involved shootings.
They looked at distances, they looked at lighting, they looked at number of
rounds fired, they looked at timing.
Um, all of these very important variables.
And taking that evidence from 10 years of analysis of what does
these shootings, what do they actually look like in the field?
What's the distances?
Mm-hmm.
What's the speed, what's the number of shots, what's all of that stuff?
And then they changed the A FQ, the annual firearms qualification for the RCMP.
They went away from a whole bunch of ridiculous type of shooting on the range
in their A FQ, which they had done for years and years and years, and mm-hmm.
Changed it, changed it to a six round qualification, shoot, close distances,
um, including movement, the use, use of cover, all that type of stuff.
So still a lot, I still a lot of improvement that could be
made, but what a great shift in the right direction for sure.
No kidding.
And for a large federal police force to start making that movement, like
that's, that's a big wheel to turn.
And if they're making those steps, others are gonna follow.
Yeah.
Right.
And I, yeah, I, I'm encouraged to see that they're leading the
way, I think in that right now.
And, and like I said, there's still a lot of improvements that that
can be made, but that's, that's really the approach to take, right?
I mean, when it comes to not just firearm shooting, but even all of your
combatives, your less lethal weapons, all of that type of stuff is where did
the res, where do, where do we start?
Researchers tell us.
So if we're looking at designing, and this applies to any learning
environment, okay, so let's say you have to take a, a group of individuals
and train them for performance in some type of a performance environment.
The first place you go is you go to that environment and you
go, what are the conditions?
What are all the variables that are going to be there?
The context.
You, you know, the what are, what are the, the speeds with
which things are going to occur?
What does the environment look like?
What's the lighting look like?
What's timing, what's what, what does the learning environment look like?
It's called the criterion environment.
You go to the criterion environment, that performance domain, you pull
out the critical variables, and that's your start where you now have
something to start to build training.
And that's, that's the, that's the approach that all we all need
to take is a very evidence-based approach to learning like that.
So the Silver Core Podcast has a, has a high law enforcement and
military listenership, and I'm sure the trainers bullpen even higher, uh,
listenership just based on the subject matter that's being talked about.
But there's also a very large civilian contingent that listens to the podcast.
And there's gonna be people who are training.
The high school basketball team, there's gonna be people who are training in,
in different areas of life that don't have the same consequences that law
enforcement training's gonna have.
It's, did we win the game or did we lose the game?
Yeah.
But that said, I would think there's a lot of, um, a lot of parallels just in a
training model that they could use to help their team succeed, help their team excel.
Would you be able to identify any parallels or things that p trainers
could look at that could take it from the, the rote traditional
training style to something that's going to actually work with what we
know of how the human brain learns?
Right on.
No, you're, I love it.
Thank you.
You're, you're exactly right.
Is, is the, the, there is no corner or monopoly on.
Of all of the stuff that we include, like for example, in our methods
of instruction course on this isn't a law enforcement specific.
We have robbed and pillaged from all of these other domains, including high level
performance like sporting domains that are, where there's ambiguity, rapidly
unfolding, decision making, attention, vision, orientation, adaptability.
Like we could be talking about rugby, we could be talking
about football, soccer, tennis.
Um, you know, one of, one of the, mm-hmm.
I think the guest that I've had on the trainer's bullpen, who has
the highest, uh, downloads for his podcast is Dr. Mark Williams.
Dr. Mark Williams is a motor skills expert, um, over the
pond, and he's published.
More peer reviewed papers than I care to count.
And he's got textbooks out.
And, um, but his domain is not law enforcement or the military, but law
enforcement in the military and aviation.
And they have taken all of those important concepts from that
domain and brought them in.
And, you know, one of the, one of the common things, Travis, that happens
on it, on every one of our courses, because a lot of our, our trainers
are also, they teach, uh, BJJ or they teach some other martial art.
Mm-hmm.
Or they teach their kids soccer or football.
One of our students was a, a university basketball coach,
coached at the basketball level, varsity level basketball.
And, uh, he realized.
As he's going through this course, there's like two parallel things
going on in his, in his brain.
One is as a, as a law enforcement trainer, how all of this stuff applies.
But then parallel to that was like, he was like, oh my gosh.
And these trainers that are coaches also on the side are going, all this
stuff applies here, here and here and here in how I coach my kids.
And so there's just, there's this wonderful synergy between
the two that are connected all the way, all the way through.
So you, you're right.
It's just this is how people learn.
This is how people learn.
What are some of the things that surprise people that come on the five
day MOI course that traditionally they've looked at as this is the way
things are done and that they can take away applicable to their own life?
Uh, yeah.
So therefore there's lot, there's lots of surprises.
I can give you a few of them.
I think the, the first one is, um, the frequency with which we
mistake performance with learning.
And what I mean by that is, mm-hmm.
So in in motor skills acquisition, there's something that's called, um,
um, the, uh, illusion of learning or performance improvements.
And that is the improvements that you see during a training event.
So let's say we're teaching somebody, a group of people at the beginning of
the day and at, they're really, they're really poor at the beginning of the day.
But as the, as we go on throughout the day, you see them get better
and better and better and better.
We think, wow, look at the learning that's taking place, right?
Well look at the learning that's taking place.
No, that's called a performance improvement and it has nothing
to do, perhaps with whether actual learning is taking place.
And so this is the big shock initially for trainers, because here's the problem
with this is if we confuse performance improvements with actual learning, and
by the way, learning is only measured after the training event so that you, you
have what's called a retention period.
So I would say I'm doing some training with you and we end the day, then we
would have a retention period of maybe several days or maybe a week or maybe a
month, and then I would bring you back, Travis, and I put you in exactly the
same context and say, okay, there you go.
Let's see how you do.
Now what I'm measuring is your retention for that skill.
Um mm-hmm.
So that's one criteria for measuring whether learning is taking place.
Is it retained long term after the, the training event.
The second measurement is what's called, hmm.
The second measurement is what's called transfer.
And transfer means, and this is super important for non-linear
performance domains like law enforcement transfer means, now what?
I bring you back after a day, a week or a month, I bring you back.
But the conditions are not exactly the same that they were when you performed it.
I've added some variables to it.
I've changed some things.
Maybe I've lowered lighting, change distances, change, whatever.
So I've changed the context.
Is your brain now able to still retain the Correct.
So read what's happening, be able to retain and recall the, the correct.
Problem solving for this and then modify it as needed in
order to still be successful.
And that's called transfer.
Transfer is the ability to not only recall information, but to recall
it and then change it on the fly.
Change it on the fly in order to accomplish, Hmm, your objective.
So this is the, the biggest shock for trainers because if you confuse
performance improvements with actual learning, then what happens is all
of your training design, your whole pedagogy is then, um, performed in
such a way that your emphasis is on getting performance improvements.
If your emphasis is on actual learning for retention and transfer.
It's going to drive the way that you design and deliver training in
a radically different way because you're actually, you don't care.
You're not measuring performance improvements during the training.
And so you're creating now a very contextual, uh, interleaved spaced
problem, full learning environment with the correct amount of pressure.
And we talk about what is the correct amount of pressure, how many mistakes are
necessary for good learning to take place?
So there's, there's a, there's a second shocker for trainers because
a lot of them view errors and mistakes in training as the enemy.
And I know I did.
Like I did forever as a, as a firearms instructor.
I can't tell you the amount of hours that I spent on the range thinking if I could
just get this beautiful draw stroke in.
Like just get the biomechanics, the fundamentals of this draw stroke,
and we'll do a hundred or a thousand of these draw strokes on the range.
And I was of the thinking mm-hmm.
That if I could just get that performance to that level with perfect performance
on the fundamentals, that that's what would come out in the real world.
And of course we know from the real, that's exactly wrong.
That's that's totally wrong.
Mm. But,
um, so it, when we understand that adding pressure, allowing struggle, allowing
your people to problem solve on their own, not spoonfeeding them solutions,
let them find their own way to being.
Solving problems.
And then as an instructor or coach, my feedback is not what's called
directive extrinsic feedback.
I don't tell people what they're doing wrong.
I don't tell them what they need to do to correct it.
You need to take what's called a Socratic approach, which is just getting your
people to recognize on their own what is the problem that's facing them.
Why are they struggling to be successful?
And then third, what do they need to change in order to accomplish
the outcome that they want?
And then once they do that, they own it.
They own the solution themselves.
It hasn't been sped spoonfed to them.
You haven't handed it to them on a silver platter.
You've allowed them to struggle.
You've allowed them to make mistakes, and you've carefully and slowly,
um, provided the type of Socratic feedback that's needed for them.
To solve their own problems.
So it's it, there's two radically different trajectories
in motor skills training.
So if you take the performance-based approach, your training is very linear.
It's static, it's non-con contextual, in and error.
Uh, mistakes are viewed as enemies.
We don't want them in training.
But if your focus is on learning and retention, it's exactly the opposite.
Your learning environment includes pressure early on, contextual
realism right out of the gate.
We don't focus on fundamentals.
We allow errors and struggle and problem solving, and that creates a
very powerful learning environment that optimizes retention and transfer.
So
that brings to mind who was it?
Uh, uh, US General or Colonel says, said, don't tell somebody how to do something.
Tell 'em what you want to see accomplished and let 'em surprise you with the results.
Um, but in that same breath, that's gotta be really difficult to do at a
departmental level with hundreds of people coming through all the time.
Um, is that just a fact of life?
It's gonna take more time and require more one-on-one training to be able
to have that Socratic approach?
'cause I, I gotta imagine at large scale, that's, that's
gotta be a tough thing to do.
Yeah, no, the, the interesting thing about it's is it doesn't
take any more time at all.
And there's, there's been research that's been done on that.
So it's a, it is a great question.
Thank you for asking that.
But there's been research that has compared a very linear, uh, block
type of training approach, which.
The standard, what we typically see in many law enforcement
academies Mm, is non-con contextual.
I focus on techniques, block approach to training and compared it to, um, training.
That is interleaved, that's space that includes Socratic type of, or deci.
There's another term for it.
I, I refer to it as Socratic feedback.
Dr. Joan Vickers calls it decision training, and that's a good term for
it too, because it implies in there that what we are actually creating is
people who know how to make decisions.
Wow, that might be important for cops, right?
Mm-hmm.
The ability to make decisions, not just do a thing.
Not just do a thing.
Yeah.
But to know when to do it, why to do it, and how to change it, and
when to stop, and it's decision training, that's important.
And so the, the research has compared apples to apples on this as far as time
goes and has found without changing any of the time, the retention and transfer.
On the nonlinear type of approach to training is like, it's vastly superior.
Un like the, the, when, when they, they measure the retention and
transfer on all of these studies.
It's just alarming to see how much better the, the performance is on people who
have gone through a very non-linear type of, of learning environment.
But the problem is, as long as we keep our fixation on the immediate performance
improvements, like we gotta check sheet man, and I'm going check, check, check,
check, check on the box during, mm-hmm.
Training event.
And I sign you off and I say, you're good.
You're good to go.
You're not good to go.
This, this has no bearing at all on your level of learning that took place or
your ability to retain it and use it.
Street when it counts.
Now here's, here's a topic that I thought would be interesting to
explore and it's gonna be topical.
So as a expert for the courts, you've been called in on hundreds
and hundreds of different cases to opine on use of force situations.
And your role is strictly as an expert for the courts.
You're not advocating for one side or the other.
You're providing the information that's available to you based on your experience.
Very few people out there listening to this are gonna have your experience
and that level of expertise when it comes to looking objectively at
things that unfold in the media.
And right now we've got a hot topic in the States in Minneapolis.
There's that ice shooting.
Now we don't have all the information yet, but I'm wondering if you
could take us through perhaps.
An objective, uh, approach that somebody in your position would look at when
they're looking at videos and whether those videos tell the whole story
and when it comes down to training.
And so objectively start pulling apart, uh, what would be important to look at?
And I definitely don't, I'm not asking you to opine one way or the other on
this one, but, uh, a framework that people can use that they can then apply
to anything that, uh, they look at and start making their own decisions.
Yeah, no, that's a, that's a really good question.
Thank you for asking that.
Um, so video first of all is, is can be very helpful in obviously
in a use of force investigation.
And when I, I do a review, I always want as much video as I can get.
Um, however, video can also be extremely dangerous.
It can be dangerous in this way.
And we've seen it.
I mean, you're right.
This is topical.
We saw this play play out literally within minutes after the mini, the shooting by
of, by the ice agent in Minneapolis, where people were opining with a high degree
of confidence on one way or another, whether why this shooting was completely
inappropriate and unlawful, and the officer should be charged criminally.
Um, and then on the other end, there were people saying, no,
this was completely appropriate.
Um, and they were, they were very dogmatic about that assertion.
But here's the danger in both of those ditches on both of those sides is video
can never tell us why something happened.
It can never tell us why something happened.
It can tell us usually what happened.
It can tell us the, the vehicle was positioned here at this point in time.
The vehicle began to drive forward.
It appeared that the wheel had been turned to the right because the front of the
vehicle started to go in that direction.
We know there was an officer standing here and here and here, so that's
all super helpful information, but it can't tell us why something happened.
Like why did an officer perceive that in that circumstance where he was
standing, that it was necessary in order, uh, to, to save him or somebody else
to fire his weapon in that situation?
The only way that we, that we can know that is through an analysis and, and
I'll just speak here in for, in Canada, because that's where I do pretty much
all of my expert witness work, is we have a case called RV NASA golic, which is
a, a, a foundational use of force case.
And uh, NAS tells us that.
What's critical in a review of any use of force by a police officer is what's
called the totality of circumstances.
The totality of circumstances, and this begins at the very
first instant that the call.
Comes in.
And so I'm not talking now about the Minneapolis one, I'm just talking
generally, but from the first moment that a call an officer becomes aware of a
call comes over the radio, Hey, dispatch comes on, says, do I have, do I have
a unit in the whatever, whatever area?
We have a neighbor, uh, reporting that her next door neighbors are away on
holidays, and there appears to be a male in the backyard casing the windows.
Okay?
So as soon as that call begins to come in.
Officers start forming their assessment of the risk of what might be going on.
And as more information comes in, as they're responding to the call comes
over the radio, it comes on what's called their MDT, their computer
in their car, Bing, bing, bing.
All this information comes on, starts formulating more of an assessment,
and then they get on scene.
They're making their own observations.
What are they seeing within this, within this context?
All of these factors, the environmental factors, the number of subjects, the
number of officers, the lighting, the footing, the timing, the
distances, the po, the belief that there may be weapons present or not.
The um, I impact of drugs or alcohol.
Um, on a subject or subjects, the number of subjects.
Is this a controlled scene or an uncontrolled scene?
Is this, uh, a massive disturbance outside of a bar where there's 50
or 75 people that are intoxicated and yelling and screaming?
Or is this a contained situation?
Maybe this is inside of a, of a detachment or a police, uh, lockup facility.
So all of the totality of circumstances, irrespective that each one of these
events may have been captured on video,
that's the totality of circumstances.
So the video is only one small slice of an, of a complete fulsome,
fair fact finding investigation.
It's only one slice.
But here's the problem, and you know this because we're all prone
to it, is video is highly emotional.
It's powerfully visceral.
Mm.
And we can watch a video of something happen.
And without even trying to do this, we automatically come to a biased perception
of whether what we see on the, on the video is appropriate or not appropriate.
And by the way, law enforcement officers are some of the worst offenders at this.
We eat our own brothers and sisters within, you know, somebody, I love this
saying, somebody said that a lie can travel all the way around the world before
truth has a chance to put its shoes on.
And, um, that's, mm-hmm.
That's exactly the problem with video.
And so, you know, from a leadership perspective, a law enforcement leadership
perspective, how you stand in front of the public, in front of a media scrum
after a significant event, perhaps even that looked controversial on video, how
you talk to the public is incredibly.
Important, um, because there's gonna be a lot of emotion in everybody who's
watched that video and they've come to decisions and they need to, they
need to feel that the, the agency is honest, transparent, and, but
also doing a thorough investigation.
So you almost need to bring the temperature down in the room, if
you know what I'm saying, um, when you're talking about these events.
Sure.
Let's just turn, let's just turn, okay.
We need, we need more light and less heat here, right?
And the only way we're gonna get more light on this is by taking the
time being patient and allow the investigation to mature and tell us
exactly what happened and why it happened.
Um, but yeah, the, the video can be, can be very misleading.
And in fact, here's another thing.
Video can be wrong.
Mm-hmm.
Talk about that.
Oh, well, well, it's a simple concept.
I mean, video, video is nothing but an artificial tech technological recreation
of an event, and it may be no more or less accurate than an officer or witness's
memories of what actually occurred.
So, and, and there, there's multiple technical reasons for this.
In video, um, frame rate things may have been missed between actual frames.
Uh, there's something that's called predictive video.
So there's B frames and P frames and I frames and video.
They're not all the same.
In all of the, all of the frames of something that's been filmed,
there's what's called P frames.
And a P frame is what, the reason it's called a P frame is
because it's a predictive frame.
So, for example, you take your, your iPhone Travis, and you're
filming something that's happening.
Not all of those frames are actually capturing what's
happening in front of your camera.
There's what's called I frames, and an eye frame is a frame that's
capturing the majority of the, of that information that's right in
front of the lens of your camera.
And then there'll be a whole bunch of more frames.
And then eventually there'll be another eye frame, and then a whole bunch of
more frames, and then another I frame.
But in between those bookends, in between those I frames are what's called P frames.
And those P frames, they're predictive.
The technology makes it up based upon the bookends of the P frames.
Mm-hmm.
As to what is going is is going to be on all of those frames in between.
And I've seen videos and so we're talking about use of force events that are
happening in fractions of a second here.
Okay.
So like a punch, for example, 170 milliseconds.
170 milliseconds.
To give your listeners some perspective, an eye blink is approximately 330
milliseconds, the average eye blink, so literally within the blink of an
eye, you can miss a complete punch.
Within the blink of an eye, you can miss a stab or a slash with a knife.
Those occur in about 140 to 170 milliseconds.
So I and I have seen on video, so for example, um, cell police, cell lockup
video, those very complicated systems that have multiple cameras in them,
some of those cameras are gonna be filming at eight frames per second.
Some at 12 frames per second, some at 30 frames per second.
And it always changes, by the way, it's never consistent.
It changes constantly.
Hmm.
But I've seen videos where an in.
Tire head turn and a spit has been missed on an eight frame per second video.
And, and so here, here was the case.
A sergeant in a police lockup facility went to get a drunken individual out of a
cell because he was trying to pick a fight with somebody else who was in in the cell.
They'd both been arrested separately.
Not re but he's trying to pick a fight with his cellmate.
So the sergeant thinking, well, he's like, I'm gonna separate these two.
So he goes and gets this guy out of the cell and he's
walking him down the corridor.
And, uh, on the video, the first video I was given to review this.
What you see is as the sergeant's escorting him down the hallway, suddenly
the sergeant, he comes up with an elbow, right elbow, and he smacks the guy across
the side of the fri of the, of the face, across the jaw, knocks him out, guy falls
to the ground, and you look at the video and you go, oh my, that was horrible.
That looked terrible.
Well, what, what does the sergeant say happened?
I, in his statement, he says, I'm walking the guy down the
corridor to the next cell.
And I hear, and I, he immediately recognized this guy was welling up
a, a big, uh, oyster, a hok on him.
And he says, as I, as I begin to turn, as I begin to turn my head towards
him, he spits right in, in my face.
And then he said, before I knew what I had done, I hit him with the elbow.
Now, look, I'm not justifying the elbow strike.
That's not the point here.
The point is that why wasn't it captured on the video?
It wasn't on the video.
So I called, I called up the, um, agency that sent me the video
and I said, Hey, do, do you have any other video of this event?
They said, oh, yeah, we got lots of different cameras and angles,
but we thought we'd just send you, um, what had the best view of it.
I said, I don't want the best view.
I want all of the video.
Send me everything.
So I got, I think, a total of eight different camera, uh, angles on that.
And sure enough, the very next video, uh, once I received it,
I watch it, and there it is.
You see the guy, the head turned the spit on the officer's face.
But if all you would've had.
Was that first video, Travis, you'd have looked at that and
go, that officer is lying.
He's lying.
That didn't happen.
It was completely missed because of
the
frame rates.
Um, another thing with video, especially with body-worn camera, and this is really
significant, is because, um, body-worn camera, well really even CCTV video
uses what's called a fish eye lens.
Okay?
So it's, it's a wonderful lens for capturing out to about 150 to 170 degrees
of what's happening in front of the lens that's being worn on the officer.
Mm. So
it's great for capturing a whole lot of data, but the problem is that is
not at all how human vision works.
So human vision works.
We're about equivalent to a 50 millimeter lens.
Our eye is about a 50 millimeter lens and.
What a fish island does is it grossly distorts distances.
It makes things look as though they are much further away from us than what
they actually are through human vision.
So now why is that relevant?
Well, let's say you have an individual who's got a bat or a knife in their
hand and they're coming towards an officer, walking towards an officer,
and he's challenging the individual.
And then eventually the officer makes the decision to shoot.
Subject crosses his line in the sand, and he decides to shoot this individual.
So when we watch the body worn video of that, now what it will look
like on a fisheye lens is that the subject was about twice as far away.
As what he actually was.
So he may have only been eight feet, 10 feet away from the officer,
but your perception of, of the body-worn camera is it may look like
he's 25 or 30 feet away from you.
And, um, and that can be very important because if we're holding officers to a
standard of reasonableness, objective and subjective reasonableness based
on their perception, then we've gotta be super careful with how
we understand and interpret video.
And I mean, those are just two things, but there, there's like, um, 10 or
12 critical things where video can lead reviewers in a very dangerous
direction if we're not careful with it.
And, you know, I didn't, I don't think I mentioned this earlier,
but I've, I've got a three day use of force investigators course.
I mean, you heard, you heard me at the conference.
Um, but, uh, I do have, mm-hmm.
I, I have a three day course where I go through.
All of the Canadian law on analyzing use of force.
We go through all of the human factors, implications of it.
We go, uh, we have an extensive section on video.
Um, going through everything that we just spoke about here, how to
properly use video, how to seize it correctly, how to analyze it
correctly, understand it, interpret it.
Very important.
That was eyeopening to me when you were first, we were chatting about video and
how video is processed and how it works.
And I've actually taken that and I've applied it to my podcasting too.
And it might kind of sound silly, but just the knowledge that cameras
will have predictive frames.
Because if it's always taking in every single pixel and every single
bit of information all the time, that's huge information overload.
And when I'm having a podcast with somebody and they've got poor bandwidth
and they're a hand talker and they're moving around, that's a lot more
information that's being transmitted.
'cause it's continually having to refresh and not predict.
Let's say like your background there, the trainer's bullpen.
And something that I found that's helpful is I'll use that
knowledge of these predictive frame rates and say, you know what?
We've got a really poor connection.
I can either turn off the video and then we can just do audio.
Or if you're able to stop moving so much, it's gonna be less
data transmission 'cause it's gonna predict those frame rates.
So that, that was an interesting little thing that you probab probably wasn't
your point of your, your whole thing when you're talking about it, but I've
been able to apply it in, uh, what I do.
Yeah, no, that's, I I've never heard that, uh, applied in that way
before, but I mean, that's brilliant.
You're exactly right.
And I, I mean, most professional photographers, like when they buy their
high-end equipment, they will go into the settings and they'll set all of
their settings to only record iframes.
Um, um, and that gives of course, the richest, most accurate, vivid
detail of what's actually happening.
But, uh, the data.
Storage.
The data use on that is massive.
It's massive.
But our iPhones and smartphones and, and things like that, they,
they don't record that way.
Um,
well, you've also, so you touched on something and that was the
emotion, the emotion that's involved.
You watch a video and you have a visceral response one way or the other.
I mean, people don't want to see something that's not just, that's not right.
That's violent in nature.
It's, it's pretty natural.
How often do you find the emotional aspect heavily influencing the,
let's say, the legal outcome?
Like I look at like the Floyd example, the George Floyd in the States, or was it
Robert Zans here in, in Canada, and the amount of media attention that surrounds
it and the emotion that surrounds it.
How subject are, are courts to being influenced by that emotion or politics?
Yeah.
So, you know, I think the courts are less prone to be, um, influenced
heavily by video in my experience.
And the reason for that is, is because by the time something actually has got, gets
into the court, we're now a year and a half to two years, three years post-event.
So the emo there's no emotion, uh, to it anymore.
And I think, you know, my experience has been the judiciary for the
most part is very alive to the fact that video does not tell the story.
And there's actually case law on that.
There's like five or six really instructive case, case law, uh, in
Canada now, um, that helps guide judges and juries into using video.
Correctly.
Like not, for example, not doing a frame by frame analysis, not Um hmm.
Because what, what happens is, um, that's obviously not how
we experience the world, right?
And so you can't, you can't be slowing something down, uh, something that
happened in three seconds or five seconds or whatever, and going in, uh, on this
frame here, you can see clearly that the individual was doing this and this person.
Like, no, you, you, you know, uh, and there's still, there's still
Crown prosecutors who try to do that, uh, despite case law says not to,
but, um, here's where I, I see video being the biggest, I think, stumbling
block on an emotion side, and that's the leadership in police agencies.
Um mm-hmm.
I've, I've had, I've had cases and I, I have one recently here in
Alberta where an officer's leader.
They wanted this guy fired within like less than 24 hours after this
incident got uploaded to social media.
Of course, you know, that's what happens, right?
And take a clip outta context.
Mm-hmm.
Um, and, and you don't even know if the clips been modified.
I mean, in today's age of ai, you don't even know if that actually happened.
And yet, and so here it is.
Mm-hmm.
Up uploaded to social media and you've got, uh, white shirts who are wanting this
caught fired within less than 24 hours.
And this is where I, I see the biggest failure is in strong
leadership to understand a, what is the fall fallibility of video?
It doesn't tell us what actually happened.
It may be largely an error, it may be completely false.
Um, but the reality is that.
The public are going to be emotionally invested in this video.
So we recognize that we, you know, you gotta stand in front of the
public and say to them, and look, I, I hope like this is, um, I hope we
never reach a day in a society where we cease to be horrified by seeing
violence between human beings on video.
Like we just become numb to it.
I hope we never get to that point.
Mm-hmm.
So in a sense, I understand when the public sees a video that looks,
you're just trying to make sense of it, it just looks horrible.
I understand the emotion and the anger.
Um, but stand up in front of your people, stand as a leader,
stand in front of your people.
Mm-hmm.
You're at the tip of the spear and say, look, so I understand what you've seen
on the video, I've seen it myself, and I also have a lot of questions as to
what happened and why they happened.
And I commit to you that this investigation will be very thorough.
It'll be neutral, it'll be fact finding.
And when we know exactly what happened, I'm gonna report back to you as soon as
we know the results of this investigation.
But until that time, I'm not going to speculate on what occurred
based on what I see on the video.
And, you know, encourage them to just be patient and wait, just
communicate well, like with the public.
It's, uh, it's not a hard thing to do, but you gotta stand in front
of your people and protect them.
You gotta have some cahones.
Yeah.
Moral courage.
Yeah.
And that's, it's, you have to have moral courage.
And that's something that, uh,
isn't always, isn't always present.
That, uh, that's, uh, very well said.
Is, is there anything that we should be talking about?
That we haven't talked about or that we should be leaving the listeners with?
'cause I've got, I got so many things here and I know I'm, uh,
we have compressed timeframe here.
There's a bunch of things that we're gonna have to come back and
touch base on at a later date, but is there anything we should be
talking about that, that we haven't?
Oh, no.
I mean, I, I don't think so.
Um, I think we've had a great conversation around the things that you asked about
and, and I agree there's, there's all we could be going on for, for a, a day or
two talking about all, all of this stuff.
But, uh, I appreciate the opportunity just to come on and
have this conversation with you.
Chris, thank you so much for taking the time to share your perspective.
For the listeners, take a look in the description, there's gonna be links to
where you can find more about Chris.
You can find him on social media and his website and, uh, follow his podcast.
The trainer's bullpen.
It's, it's amazing.
If you like this, there's a lot more of that there.
Thank you, Chris.
Thank you.
And can I, I just add on that, on the trainers bullpen, like it's not
behind a paywall or anything like that.
It's freely available and accessible to trainers bullpen.com.
Trainers bullpen.com and we'll have a link in the description as well.
It was an absolute pleasure.
I appreciate you.
Thank you, sir.