Ongoing training is essential

In the police academy they teach what is referred to as "defensive tactics" and other techniques like lock flow (a series of arm restraints), and how to utilize pressure points. These techniques are valuable to any deputy when confronted by violent offenders and physical force is necessary.

However, there are so many other types of confrontations faced by law enforcement that this training falls short of handling them all. They also teach a technique referred to as "verbal judo" that does lend some help with trying to avoid physical confrontations, but even this is limited training and focuses on a certain group of people.

One of the challenges in training for law enforcement is all the different types of people and calls to which deputies must respond. Over the past few months, we have been sending deputies to the Crisis Intervention Training with the Nevada Police Department. This training helps with handling calls through verbal help instead of going hands on and the potential for the situation to become violent.

We have held training with the Juvenile Office to help the deputies better understand how to deal with juveniles, and this week deputies were invited to Heartland Hospital for a tour of the building and training from some of their staff. Heartland deals a lot with kids of all types, but much of what they talked about with the deputies is how many children they work with who have become psychologically and physically damaged.

They are working with the Sheriff's Office to help provide a type of "verbal judo" training that would be geared more towar dealing with children in crisis situations, rather than adults. It can also be difficult to "switch" back and forth from one type of conflict to another, but with the right training, it can be accomplished.

I had a retired police officer once tell me about a time when he responded to a child who was not breathing. He said he performed CPR on the child for several minutes until EMS arrived and was told shortly after the ambulance left that the child did not survive. As soon as he cleared from that scene, he was dispatched to a house about a stolen car.

The officer said he tried to act considerately, but all that was on his mind was the small child. When he got back to the office, he was told that the resident filed a complaint against him for not being friendly enough. Would it be hard to be friendly after dealing with the death of a child? Maybe, but it also was not the victim of the car theft's fault the officer had been at that call, and the victim still had a legitimate issue that needed to be addressed.

This common occurrence in law enforcement can be helped by providing training to deputies that helps them learn how to deal with different types of calls back to back. I look forward to future training with Heartland and other groups in our area.