A little over a year ago, the RBTA was putting on a 5 Day Instructor School at a major metropolitan agency. During one of the scenarios, there was a belligerent man refusing to leave a business to the point where the police were summoned. After a brief argument with the individual, the Role Player was directed to display a pistol, and in a reasonable amount of time if the officer did not adequately respond, the Role Player would point the pistol at the officer or somebody else. There was not Talk solution to this scenario.
It was astounding how many of the “students” planted in front of the armed Role Player without any movement in any direction. This is so common when we run these schools that it makes me shudder about how many officers across the country are putting themselves in harms way on a daily basis. During the debrief, and ultimately the remediation, there were several instances – heated instances – where the officers that were acting as “students” dug in deeply over “planting” and not moving. In the “seek first to understand” world that we come from in the facilitation component of a debrief, the “students” would rationalize just standing there even after experiencing that it was probably the most hazardous place to be (given the circumstances – to be sure there are people out there reading this right now chiming in with ‘well, that depends’ … it ALWAYS depends … in this instance, there really was no ‘depends’).
It got heated. VERY heated. And so, the matter was dropped.
The article that is the point of this post makes some interesting points about all of this. Give the article by Dustin Salomon a read.