Training for life and death

Training must become instinct for life and death choices.

Deputies have attended a lot of training over the last two months! The Sheriff's Office hosted a Taser Instructor training class that brought members of law enforcement from Arkansas, Kansas, Iowa, and all over Missouri. This class was to teach instructors to be able to certify officers in their own agencies to be able to carry and use the Taser. Three people from the Sheriff's Office became Taser Instructors at this class.

Not long before that, two members of the Sheriff's Office attended training to become racial profile instructors (Missouri law requires all law enforcement officers to receive training in racial profiling for traffic stops each year).

Several deputies attended storm spotter training hosted by the Vernon County Emergency Management Agency, and the Sheriff's Office also hosted death investigation training, and has deputies enrolled in child abuse and investigation training.

Later this month, I will be attending a mental health illness conference hosted by the Governor's Office as well as the annual spring Missouri Sheriff's Conference. There are so many different areas a deputy must train in that it becomes difficult for some deputies to specialize in a certain area of law enforcement.

Deputies get called out to deal with domestic violence calls, thefts and burglaries, but they also get called to landlord and tenant disputes, and a whole slew of other civil related calls that must go through court to be solved.

Some deputies want to focus on DWI and other traffic related calls, some want to become Investigators, some want to specialize in cybercrimes, and the list goes on and on.

Deputies at the Sheriff's Office recently completed employee evaluations in an attempt to learn what special skills employees are interested in learning. Those requests were then sent to Corporal Blakely, the Sheriff's Office training coordinator. Corporal Blakely tries to find training that will help each employee learn the skills they are wanting to learn. Having instructors in our own agency will also help save money on mandated training requirements because we can teach the classes in-house.

Aristotle said "Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit."

Some things happen so fast when deputies are out on a call that there is no time to think. When there is no time to think, you must react and that will bring out the instincts of the deputy. A deputy's instinct must be molded and developed through extensive and repeated training.

A split second could make all the difference when it comes to life or death.