LET OBJECTIVES DICTATE YOUR TACTICS
Several years ago police officers were dispatched to a call of a suicidal subject. A man was armed with a high powered rifle and was threatening to kill his wife and himself. The first officers arrived and began setting up a perimeter. Without warning, the wife ran out of the house and was grabbed by perimeter units. Her exit was followed by the sound of a gunshot from within the residence.
One of the officers transmitted ‘Shot fired inside’over the radio. Immediately a field commander, who was enroute but not on scene, ordered the officers over the air to ‘Make entry’. They did, and found the male at the top of the stairs, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The officers also realized that they had been extremely lucky on that call. The male’s position at the top of the stairs looked right down into the kill zone: the front entryway. The officers’ body armor would have been no match for the powerful .308 rounds in the suspect’s hunting rifle. The suspect could have killed the officers before they even figured out where the shots were coming from.
Next to surrendering, the suspect shooting himself was the option most favorable to the survivability of the officers on scene. Making an entry to check on the suspect’s welfare was the most potentially dangerous for the officers, since the wife had fled the house and was not in harm’s way.
The officers were ordered to make entry based upon the assumptions of their supervisor. He assumed that the suspect had shot himself. His assumption turned out to be correct, but the suspect could have just as easily chosen to assault the officers as they came into the house, or he could have exited and attempted escape while still armed. Numerous other violent possibilities exist.
At the scene of a police field operation, be it a single armed barricade, hostage situation, felony stop, area search etc, all suspect options must be considered as viable and must be prepared for. If you assume anything, you should assume that the suspect will attempt the most dangerous option. Hope for the best if you want, but prepare for the worst and you generally won’t get surprised. If you didn’t prepare for it, and the suspect didn’t try it, then you just got lucky.
When you walk away from one of these incidents, always ask yourself, “Did we just get lucky? Or did we win because our tactics were superior to our adversary?” If you are searching a house for an armed suspect, and you walk up to a closet and simply fling the door open and stick your head inside, you are assuming (and in fact betting your life) that the suspect is not inside the closet. Why not assume that he is in there and use the appropriate tactics and manpower to clear the closet?
The same principle holds true for the suicidal subject described in the first paragraph. Why assume that the suspect had attempted suicide? No one on the perimeter witnessed him shoot himself. Why not instead assume that the round was fired at perimeter units and that the suspect was still a threat? The incident commander in this case determined that his objective was to rescue the suspect from a self-inflicted wound, thus he chose the tactic of an immediate entry.
In police field operations, one of the reasons for improper tactics, injury and death is a failure to correctly identify the objective of the operation, or to ensure that all involved have a clear understanding of what the objective is. Of the nine principles of winning,(maneuver, objective, offensive, surprise, economy of force, mass, unity of command, simplicity, and security), objective is the one that drives the others. The objective is simply what you wish to accomplish. Some refer to it as the mission of the operation. Either way, it is the final outcome of the operation and may include: safeguarding lives, prevent escape, preserve evidence etc. Whatever it is, the objective must be clearly defined. Once the objective is defined, then the proper tactics can be developed and applied to accomplish it. Once the objective is defined and understood, complex problems become easier because difficult decision points always come back to the objective at hand.
Objectives are often determined by the Priorities of Life. They are in order: Innocents, Hostages, Police Officers, Suspects and Property. I did not make this up. It is an accepted standard of the International Chiefs of Police and the National Tactical Officers’ Association. Some cops may not like that fact that officers lives are not the top priority. Officer survival training teaches that “You go home at the end of your shift no matter what”.....not entirely true. If your safety came first always, you’d never leave the parking lot of the police station. You already put into practice the priorities of life but may not realize it. When you get out on an icy freeway to direct traffic at a crash, you are putting the safety of others above your own. Every time you kick a door to stop a domestic battery in progress, you enter a situation where you may be injured or killed, but you are doing it to help an innocent person.
Another good example is the Active Shooter. During an active shooter incident, your objective is to force the assailant to stop killing innocent people. This can be accomplished many ways, such as killing or wounding him, forcing him to hide, forcing him to shoot at the police, forcing him to flee, but they all have to be done by actively interjecting yourself into the problem. It cannot be accomplished by sitting outside and setting up a perimeter. You also will be ineffective if you enter the school and start evacuating wounded students while the suspect is still running around shooting people. When you focus on the main objective you realize that you will have to bypass the wounded until you close with and neutralize the suspect. You can see why it is important that everyone on the initial entry element has a clear understanding of the primary objective prior to going in. You will put yourself at risk to ensure the safety of innocents, based upon the objective.
Take the same school and same suspect but now all the students have fled and you have a single armed and barricaded suspect inside with no hostages. Your objective now is to prevent his escape and not get any civilians or cops killed. So your tactics are to isolate, contain, attempt contact and slow things down.
Adherence to the priorities of life as you develop your objective also forces you to adjust your tactics accordingly. This may mean that if you have only three officers to serve a search warrant on a fortified location with armed suspects, maybe you wait a day until the bad guys go to the store, detain them and go serve the warrant on an empty house. Not as exciting, sure. Could you lose some evidence by waiting? Of course. But if your objective is to safeguard life above protecting property then the choice of tactics is an easy one. Otherwise you are making the assumption that everything is going to go your way and just hoping for the best. ‘Hope’ is not a tactic!
Of course there are times when aggressive dynamic action will actually make the operation safer for officers and suspects alike; when the principles of surprise, speed, economy of force and mass are on your side, in other words when it is to your advantage to use them, and when the tactics have been dictated by the objective. The risk is there, but it is calculated. Determine the objective first, and the proper tactics will reveal themselves.
“In critical and baffling situations, It is always best to return to first principle and simple action”
- Sir Winston S. Churchill