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COVER STORY it's important to stay in the fight and hold on until help gets there." A possible change in training approach could be to teach defensive tactics like a sport, by adding incremental, progressive resistance as the officers get more accomplished. "What we have learned from MMA A reality based system provides officers with real-world techniques and gives them the confidence to improvise... and survive. is that everything has to be tested," says ISR Matrix's Fuller. "We make a science of the teaching method; when we teach a skill, the student should be able to apply it to a moving subject. We teach it first with a static subject, then we go to progressive resistance. Eventually it becomes a realistic situation where you have to make the technique work. As soon as the people have an idea of where they are going and are doing the technique correctly, we have them apply it in a realistic situation." Realistic training Circle 78 on Reader Service Card 32 Law Enforcement Technology August 2013 www.officer.com One polarizing topic in defensive tactics is how to introduce realism into training. The risk is officers can become injured in realistic training that involves full contact. One side preaches that officers have to be placed under pressure to gauge how they will respond, to harden them for battle, so to speak, while the other side questions the logic in training that results in officers having to leave their jobs to recover from injuries incurred during training. "Our scenarios aren't full blown combat, but they are as realistic as possible," says Fuller. "If you just think the answer is sparring or pressure testing, you are going to injure people in training. This can become really expensive. That's the trick, balancing the need for realistic training with safety. You can go the wrong direction with things, that's why we use progressive resistance—sometimes people won't get to the highest level of intensity because of personal limitations. It all depends on the people you are training. The training has to be scalable." Realistic situations force officers to react instinctively, and the follow up and review is as important as the situations themselves. "Force option simulations are becoming more popular, because it makes officers think, and the