Federal Case Law as a Guide for Training

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by Bernie Hogancamp, PCI #498
Homewood (IL) Police Department (Retired)
IPMBA President

While courts across the nation constantly hand down decisions that can alter our understanding and expectations, there are several landmark federal decisions relating to training that should form the core of our agencies’ training mission.

The first case, and the foundation upon which all others have been constructed, is City of Canton, Ohio v. Harris, 489 U.S. 378 (1989). The United States Supreme Court held that “a municipality may be held liable under §1983 for violations of rights guaranteed by the Federal Constitution, where violations result from the municipality’s failure to adequately train its employees, only if that failure reflects a DELIBERATE INDIFFERENCE on the part of the municipality to the constitutional rights of its inhabitants.

Failure to train cases can be established in two ways. The first involves a lack of training in an area where there is an obvious need for training. Decision-making training with respect to the use of deadly force falls squarely within the description of a law enforcement task for which there is a patently obvious need for training. The second method of establishing a failure to train is to establish a pattern of conduct by officers that would put the agency on notice of the deficiency, and the agency failed to respond with appropriate training.

The next case of note is Popow v. City of Margate, 476 F.Supp. 1237 (N.J. 1979). The officer in this case had continuing firearms training, but it was limited to marksmanship-style range training, and did not include conditions that he would encounter in the real world. The court noted that an officer would likely encounter low-light conditions, moving targets, and/or the need to fire in residential areas, and that the training should reflect those conditions.

The final case is perhaps the most specific to our training needs and should offer a clear guide to training necessity. Zuchel v. Denver, 997 F.2d 730 (10th Cir. 1993), established that deadly force decision-related training (“shoot-don’t shoot”) that consisted of nothing more than a lecture and a movie, was grossly inadequate.

In reviewing these last two decisions, Popow and Zuchel, it is clearly established that law enforcement agencies must conduct firearms training on a regular basis; the firearms training must reflect the environment that officers are likely to face, i.e., moving targets, moving officers, low-light conditions and residential areas if applicable to the agency being trained; and finally, agencies must conduct decision-making training with respect to when to use deadly force.

Annual or semi-annual qualification courses and other courses which emphasize speed under stress and marksmanship, without decision-making skills, may actually enhance liability by making officers more likely to accurately hit targets that they select by their faulty, untrained judgment.

Utilizing the language from the Complete Guide to Public Safety Cycling, police training should be guided by the Three R’s: realistic, recent and relevant. Training should reasonably re-create the real world environment and factors that officers will face to challenge their performance and judgment. It should relate to the types of circumstances and tasks that they are likely to perform and it should be recent enough to have an actual positive effect on that judgment and performance.

Although the latter cases are specific to deadly force, these factors that allow our training to exceed these minimum standards are clearly applicable to all law enforcement training.

Whether our concerns are officer safety or protecting ourselves from liability, or a healthy balance of both, we should be doing far more than simply avoiding being held deliberately indifferent in our failure to train. Doing less would be akin to training to fail.

Bernie retired after a 30-year career with the Homewood Police Dept., having served in many positions including field training officer, in-house instructor, tactical officer, detective, detective supervisor, tactical supervisor and training coordinator. He became an IPMBA Police Cyclist in 1993 and an IPMBA Instructor in 2001 at the IPMBA Conference in Cincinnati. He has been a conference instructor since 2003. He also teaches a variety of subjects for Northeast Multi-Regional Training (NEMRT), and has instructed at the ILEETA conference. He currently serves as President on the IPMBA Board of Directors. He can be reached at sgtbernie@live.com.

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