Rescue Marksmanship: The Standard Police Firearms Training Is Missing

Download the TF70 Rescue Marksmanship Patrol Institute White Paper.pdf

Download the TF70 Rescue Marksmanship lesson plan.pdf

Police don't shoot for a military purpose, but we train officers as if they do. That inherited error sits underneath most of what's gone wrong with law enforcement marksmanship over the past twenty years, and it belongs on the desk of every chief and training commander, because the agency carries the liability when an officer fires and misses or even worse, strikes what they had not intended to.

I've spent more than twenty years training law enforcement officers across the country. The recruit walking in today is no less capable than the one who walked in two decades ago. What's changed is what we ask of him and what we're willing to settle for. We lowered the standard, called the result qualified, and then acted surprised when accuracy under stress turned out poor and public trust in police shootings kept eroding.

This is a case for changing the standard. I call it rescue marksmanship. The argument starts with how we got here, runs through the difference between what soldiers do and what cops do, lands on the Constitution, and ends with something a command staff can adopt and defend.

How the standard slipped

Three things drove the decline, and none of them happened on purpose.

The first is staffing. Small and rural agencies run high turnover, which keeps executives in a permanent manpower shortfall. When the daily priority is bodies in seats, hiring and retention standards drift down toward the state minimum, because the minimum is what keeps the agency staffed and the calls answered. Add chronic underfunding of use-of-force training, and the same recruit who could have been developed into a competent shooter instead graduates to the floor of what the state allows. The raw material didn't get worse. The investment did.

The second is the credentialing culture. Over fifty years the trade bureaucratized, and a paper certificate became the proxy for competence. The trouble isn't only that the new officer is held to a minimum. His instructor is too. A forty-hour firearms instructor course, an instructor development course, and a man is certified to teach other men how to apply lethal force. Most never train past that point or sharpen their own skill again. So a department can only teach what its instructors absorbed years ago in a short course, and the ceiling stays right where it was set. It's been holding for a long time.

The third is the part nobody says out loud. A certified instructor has a position to protect, and consciously or not, he guards it against the younger officer who might be ready to replace him before he's ready to retire. Ladder-pulling. For two decades that instinct has kept any real apprenticeship pipeline from forming in a lot of agencies, however informal, across every training discipline. Knowledge that should be handed down gets hoarded until it retires with the man who held it.

Put the three together and the system produces less capable officers from the same starting material, certifies them against a low bar, and has no built-in way to raise that bar over a career.

What a soldier does, and what a cop does

Here's the foundational mistake. Law enforcement firearms training was built on general purpose forces military marksmanship, and military marksmanship is combat shooting. In a combat context the gun serves the mission. A hit that lands anywhere on the target and produces a disabling injury is acceptable accuracy, because the standard is to stop the target from being an immediate problem to the mission. Anywhere on the silhouette, inside the time, counts as a pass. Aligned with the above, with rare exceptions, when a young Soldier has to press the trigger to the rear, he happens to have all of his friends with him, with their rifles and machine guns all generally shooting in the same direction and at the same threat.

A police officer never shoots for a mission. The only time the Constitution permits an officer to use deadly force is to rescue. He fires to stop the imminent death or serious bodily harm of himself or another person, whether that harm is happening now or is reasonably foreseeable. If he doesn't fire, someone is reasonably likely to be killed or gravely injured. Strip away the circumstances and every justified police shooting, without exception, is a rescue. Opposed to the above, that officer is generally by himself as well.

If the purpose is rescue, then certifying officers to a combat standard certifies them against the wrong test. The gap shows up on the street as a high round count relative to rounds that actually land where they stop the threat. Officers fire a lot and hit little, and the rounds that miss don't vanish into the air. They go somewhere, often into the environment behind the suspect. That is the accuracy-under-stress problem in plain terms, and it's a real part of why some of the public who we serve no longer trusts what it sees when a police shooting makes the news.

There's a deeper distinction underneath the accuracy one, and it matters more for command than the hit ratio does. In the military, someone other than the trigger-puller, usually a leader at the squad or higher, decides before the engagement that a target may be engaged. The man pulling the trigger inherits that decision and executes it. In law enforcement there is no one above him. The officer pulling the trigger owns the constitutional decision himself, alone, in the moment, with no authorization from anyone. Combat methodology drills the mechanics of shooting and skips the part that's actually the officer's burden, which is whether to fire at all. Producing a casualty is not the police mission. Rescue is, and the officer carries the whole weight of deciding it.

Where the authority comes from

The military's constitutional obligation and the police officer's are not the same. That alone is reason enough to fund the training time and resourcing this demands. You can't ask an officer to make a rescue decision and execute it with precision, alone, under stress, and then resource him to a forty-hour floor and an annual qualification.

The authority itself runs deeper than most use-of-force training ever goes. It begins in the Preamble, in the charge to insure domestic tranquility. Federalist No. 17 carries it into structure, explaining that domestic law enforcement is the business of the individual states rather than the federal government. So each state sets its own standards inside the outer limits the Constitution fixes, and the floor a state chooses to accept is a policy decision, not a law of nature.

Rescue shooting sits squarely inside that framing, because every state's authority rests on the consent of the governed within it, and consent is where reasonableness enters. The Supreme Court drew the operating lines. Graham v. Connor (1989) holds that an officer's use of force is judged by objective reasonableness, from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, on the totality of the circumstances, without the distortion of hindsight. Tennessee v. Garner (1985) holds that deadly force against a fleeing suspect is unreasonable unless the officer has probable cause to believe the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical harm. Graham gives you the reasonableness test. Garner draws the boundary: you don't shoot to stop a flight, you shoot to prevent grave harm. Each one describes a rescue.

Now connect reasonableness back to training, because this is the point command tends to miss. The reasonable officer Graham describes isn't only reasonable in the split second of the decision. He's reasonably trained long before the split second arrives. When a citizen calls the police in an emergency, he expects an expert to come through the door, whatever the emergency is, and that expectation is reasonable for any community to hold. The combat standard doesn't produce that expert. A precision standard can.

The standard itself

Rescue marksmanship raises the bar to match the constitutional test. The officer should be able to fire only as many rounds as necessary, with the precision to stop the threat immediately, onto a three-inch target at realistic distance and time, scaling to six inches at the longer pistol distances where the difficulty is honest.

The small target isn't arbitrary, and the physiology behind it is worth a chief's attention. Duty pistol cartridges are underpowered for the job we ask them to do. An immediate stop requires hitting a small area precisely, because the rounds we carry won't reliably do it any other way. The target area that actually ends a threat right now is small. Training to a man-sized silhouette trains the officer away from the only thing that works when the timing is measured in fractions of a second.

One point has to be stated flatly, because it's the first objection a legal advisor raises. The three-inch standard is aspirational. It is not a pass-fail employment gate, and no officer should be fired for failing to hold it cold. Human physiology and psychology guarantee a percentage of missed shots in a real emergency. That isn't a training failure, it's biology. The reason to train to a precision standard in the calm of the range is to shrink the officer's error margin so far that when rounds do go wide under stress, they're still landing on the suspect instead of sailing past him into the public behind him. You train tighter than the street will ever demand, so the degraded real-world result still lands where it's legally justified. That single idea is the whole argument.

Why the tracker protects the agency

The mechanism that runs this is a performance tracker, and it does four jobs at once.

It diagnoses. The tracker gives each officer a repeatable, dated picture of where he performs across distance, starting position, and weapon transition, and it gives the instructor a clean read on exactly which stages a specific officer struggles with. It isn't a qualification. It's an instrument for finding an individual's weak points and working them deliberately.

It scales across a career. Accuracy comes first, and the clock stays off the score until an officer can shoot a clean zero across the standard. Only then does time get added, and from there the aim is shorter times while accuracy holds. Once the foundation is solid, the same fixed standard gets shot under harder conditions, in low light, under night vision, or with movement and deconfliction between stages run as one continuous timed evolution. The benchmark never moves. The conditions get worse. That's what turns a single drill into a development tool an officer uses for twenty years.

It gives operational leadership clean data to make prudent and justifiable requests for training and equipment resources to agency executives. A complete data set that captures the entire population of the agency gives unit leaders, training staff, and division commanders fact-based ammunition for requests for additional training and equipment. Agency executives need these data-validated facts to prioritize the need and to sell it to their city or county legislative and executive political leadership, in the hyper-competitive budgetary environment your chief and sheriff operate within. You have to give the Boss something more quantitative than “but we need red dots for our pistols because eerrmm-instagram.” The Boss at any agency has a more complex and difficult job than we sometimes appreciate.

And it documents, which is the part that should hold a chief's attention longest. Tracked over months and years, the form becomes a dated, objective record of the training an officer received and the competency he demonstrated, with the growth curve visible on the page. After a shooting, that record carries direct weight in court. It shows a jury that the officer didn't pass one qualification and then coast on it. It shows that he worked to be maximally effective in an emergency, which is the constitutional obligation itself, to insure domestic tranquility by rescuing and serving the people of his community. The same document that develops the officer defends the officer and the agency when the shooting goes to litigation.

Confidence buys time

There's a benefit to the officer that doesn't show up in a hit ratio or a court file, and it may matter more than either. An officer who has shot this standard a few hundred times and watched his own performance climb develops confidence in his marksmanship that's grounded in evidence, not bravado. He knows what he can do because he has the record that proves it to himself.

That confidence changes how he behaves in the worst few seconds of his career. The officer who isn't sure he can make the hit is under pressure to fire early, or to fire more, because doubt about his own ability pushes him to act before the picture is clear. Take the doubt away and the pressure goes with it. A shooter who trusts he can make a precise hit when he finally needs to doesn't have to grab for the trigger the moment the option appears.

When time exists, and it doesn't always, confidence is what lets him use it. The extra fraction of a second buys a cleaner look at the threat and a better read on whether lethal force is even necessary, with room to hold fire if holding is the right call. The under-trained officer rarely has that room, because he spends it managing his own uncertainty.

For the community, that's the heart of it. A confident officer fires fewer rounds and fires them later, only when the decision is as sound and prudent as possible. The same tracker that documents his competence in court is what built the confidence that let him slow down on the street. Precision and patience grow from the same root, and that root is years of honest reps against a standard that mattered.

What this asks of command

Adopting rescue marksmanship is a decision about standards and resourcing, and it lands on leadership, not on the range staff. It asks an agency to fund training past the certification floor. It asks command to treat the firearms instructor as a professional who has to keep developing, rather than a man who cleared a course once and teaches from memory. And it asks the agency to measure officers against the precision the Constitution actually demands instead of the silhouette the military handed us decades ago.

The return is an officer who hits what he aims at when it counts, an agency that can prove its training in front of a jury, and a community that gets the expert it reasonably expected when it called for help. Measured against the cost of a single bad shooting, that's a low price. It beats putting bodies in seats and hoping.

About the author and more resources

John Chapman, known widely as Chappy, is a law enforcement professional with over 34 years of experience in operational, leadership, and training roles. He is a published author and has specialized in the development and delivery of patrol and tactical law enforcement curriculums for over 28 years. Chappy is the Executive Director of the Task Force 70 Foundation, a non-profit focused on training, mentoring, and educating the underserved rural and small-town law enforcement officers and agencies across the United States. Law enforcement officers and American citizens can download the base curriculum that makes this topic actionable in their own organization by visiting the Task Force 70 website and clicking the “Resources” tab at TF70.org. Law enforcement officers and agencies are welcome to use this curriculum as a training lesson plan. The TF70 Foundation is funded solely through donations from Americans like you who want to rebuild the trust the People have in their local police. A monthly donation makes our mission possible, and can be made through the “Donate” tab on our website.