Tactical Decision Making

Domestics are volatile, dangerous, and frustrating. Screaming and shattering glass was about all that we had to go on while en route to the call — limited information was par for the course.

The white clapboard triple-decker apartment building was like three buildings in one — two large ones on either end connected by a smaller one in the middle that boasted a columned portico over the main entrance. I had been there a number of times before and never seemed to go in or come out the same way twice. The outside was pretty bland and unassuming, but inside was a maze of doors and common hallways. Apartments numbers were rarely marked, or if they were, the order didn’t make any sense.

Sometimes you can read a house or a building just by looking at it. By that I mean you’re able to get a general idea of the interior layout by looking at the placement of the doors and windows from the outside. This building was not one of those places.

Broken Window Theory

At six o’clock in the morning the inner city was quiet, as its normal wakeup time is somewhere closer to noon. With little traffic to create ambient noise, sound traveled with ease in the early morning air. I parked my cruiser and walked toward the building that the 911 call had come from. Echos of a woman screaming and a man yelling bounced and reflected off tightly constructed buildings making it hard to tell where exactly the voices were coming from. As I got closer, a neighbor in a second floor window called out, “He’s killing her in there!” and pointed across the street. I looked in the direction she indicated and noticed the broken glass on the sidewalk and the shattered first floor window directly above it.

The broken window punctuated a dark room, backlit by a rectangle of artificial light coming through the doorway opposite the window. Between the broken window and the sound of yelling it was obvious that I had found the apartment I was looking for. I crossed the street with my gaze fixed on that window and saw a man dragging a woman across the room by the neck. First I tried getting in the apartment building by the main entrance, but it was locked. I ran back around to get another look and hoped some solution would present itself for getting in there to help this woman. Precious seconds were wasted.

Waiting For Backup

With my backup still on the way I took the opportunity to peek inside and get a lay of the land. As I stepped closer to the window sill, which was just about eye-level, I saw the top half of a young woman just inside the window. I couldn’t tell if she was sitting or lying, just that she had her head down somewhat lying across her folded arms, and tangled dark hair clinging to her skin. She had a number of small cuts on her arms and face like she had been dragged through broken glass. She was conscious but not responsive, in a sort of delirium or shock.

From behind her sudden movement caught my eye. I saw a man pass by from left to right across the aperture of the doorway. He walked quickly, deliberately, giving me the impression he had a goal in mind but also that he didn’t yet know that I was there. At that moment I decided that I wasn’t going in alone, but I also knew that I couldn’t wait for my backup to arrive. 

A Window Of Opportunity

Fearing that it would take too long for me to find another way in, and once I got in there, to find the right apartment in the maze of the interior, I cleaned the window sill of the remaining glass, grabbed the woman by her armpits, and heaved her out the window. Just as her feet cleared the sill I saw the man in the doorway of the room pause long enough to look in and see what was happening. Thankfully, he chose to ignore me and run for it just as more units were arriving on scene.

I carried the woman away from the window and set her down near my cruiser. She couldn’t give a coherent statement and was in a catatonic state. She was taken by ambulance to the hospital and the bad guy was chased down by responding units and taken into custody. From the time I arrived and pulled her out to the time my partners locked up the bad guy was probably less than 30 seconds.

Not A Democracy

In our world, things move fast and time is almost always of the essence. (I’m talking about police work specifically, not planet earth in general). According to an article in Psychology Today the average person can make 35,000 decisions on any given day. Decisions that range from simple ones like what to eat or what to wear to complex ones like whether or not to wash our hands with soap after using the bathroom because someone just walked in as we were coming out of the stall and worry what this person will think of you if you don’t. Obviously all decisions are not created equal. Some are more pressing than others and some carry greater and longer lasting consequences than others.

As police officers we often do not have the luxury of time when we make a decision. We can’t call our closest and wisest friends and allies to sit around a conference table to discuss the pros and cons of whether or not we should draw our weapon to defend ourselves or take a vote to decide who goes to jail for a domestic assault. Police work is not a democracy nor is it tantamount to a series of committee meetings. If that were the case nothing would get done and a lot of people would end up dead. No, we have to make a myriad of decisions, make them well, and make them fast.

Scale And Speed

When we start to say these things out loud, on one hand it’s easy to say, sure, that’s obvious, but on the other hand we have an oh-crap moment as we realize that’s a ton of responsibility. Being a cop isn’t all crisp uniforms, sunglasses, and sunshine. The job and the decisions that go with it carries a lot of weight and long term consequences. What this all means is that if we want to be good at our job and if we want to stay alive then we need to be good decision makers at scale and at speed.

What makes a good decision? What makes a bad one? Sometimes it’s hindsight and sometimes it’s the direction the political wind is blowing. Other times it’s determined only by the outcome or by the simple fact of whether or not we followed department policy or the law. Decisions can be easy in a climate controlled room far from danger and absent from stress — where most committees and Monday morning quarterbacks make theirs — but those exact same decisions can get exponentially more difficult when a life hangs in the balance and there is one, maybe two seconds to decide what to do.

If you want to make good decisions with limited time and resources, you’ve got to be well-grounded in several areas.

1. Common Sense

I don’t care if you have the IQ of a NASA rocket scientist, if you don’t have common sense you’ll make a terrible cop who makes terrible decisions. Much of what we do and the choices we make in how we handle any given situation stem from common sense. Treat people the way you would want to be treated, tell the truth, use discretion, understand competing harms, remember that everything is not black and white, and that you can be both kind and firm at the same time — you don’t have to be a jerk to be effective with people and efficient with things. You’ll make better decisions when you look at problems and situations through the lens of common sense.

2. Training

When it counts you will not rise to the level of your expectations, you will fall to the level of your training — especially in exigent circumstances. Much of the skills we need as police officers are perishable, meaning they fade over time if they are not used or practiced. When we forget what to do or how to handle something in an emergency this can induce panic which in turn causes our logical brain to shut off which is the one thing we need to make good decisions. You don’t have to be an actual Navy SEAL to keep up with your training, you just have to be intentional.

3. The Law, Policy, and Best Practices

You can make good tactical decisions but bad legal decisions if you don’t know the law and department policy and how to apply it. And of course you can make good legal decisions but be a tactical dunce putting yourself and others’ safety at risk. You’ve got to have a good working knowledge of both. Where the law is silent or lacks precedent, or where tactics or strategies are open for interpretation, you should know and follow best practices derived from similar scenarios you may be faced with. This is probably the area we like the least because it involves reading, memorizing, and understanding boring stuff like case law and after action reports, but it is oh so important to ground yourself in it.

4. Prioritization

Some decisions are more urgent than others, some are more important, and some are neither. I know you may be shocked by the intellectual depth of that statement, so I’ll give you a moment to recover from it.

Okay, that’s enough.

To steal a portion of Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Habit 3 is about putting first things first. Covey uses a time management tool he calls The Management Matrix¹ which helps prioritize things that require our attention. In the same way I think we can apply that matrix to decision making. It looks like this:

Urgency requires immediate attention. Urgent things act on us, they press on us, they are the most visible.  Importance has to do with results. Important things contribute to our mission, our values, or our goals.

If something is both urgent and important that needs to be addressed first which is why it’s in Quadrant I. It’s the stuff that is life or death, exigent, or both. Important things that are not urgent need to be acted on second, because it contributes to the success of the mission or our ultimate goals, activities like training and planning. Urgent things that are not important are interruptions, things like ringing phones, emails, and other trivial matters that fight for our attention. Quadrant IV is essentially made of time wasting activities that can be put off until never. The matrix acts as a filter to help us determine what it is that we should actually be doing first, doing right now, and what can wait or what we should delegate.

Hero Now, Loser Later

Now, in real life when you’re in the sauce, that is not the time to crack open a law book or start rehearsing reloading drills. The time for that was in the past. The present is the time for action. Immersing yourself in the activities, the training, the habits that will help you make the right decisions so that you will be successful when it counts is your job and I daresay your duty. That is all Quadrant II stuff and where you should be spending the majority of your time. Set yourself up so that you don’t make a rash decision and feel like a hero now, but a loser later.

You might make 35,000 decisions or more in a day, but the one you make when a life hangs in the balance will outweigh them all.

__________________________

• How is your track record making decisions?
• Is there a pattern between those made in crisis vs. comfort?
• Are you doing the work up front to set yourself up for success?
• Are you relying on your expectations or on your training?

__________________________

Thanks for reading! Do you have a story that you think we could learn from and that you’d like to share with Johnny Tactical nation? Fill out the contact form and include your name, rank, and department, or email it to [email protected] and follow these guidelines:

– It must be a firsthand account
– True
– Have a lesson, principle, or tactic to apply
– Cleaned of names, dates, and places
– Include your call sign

If your story is selected and published in our blog you’ll get the credit using your call sign and we’ll send you a free Live Tactical t-shirt!

__________________________

¹Stephen Covey, The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons In Personal Change (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989 and 2004),160.