A couple of times a year we still read about a police officer killed during training supposedly conducted with safe or unloaded weapons. Now despite any number or trainers and organizations publishing their rules for simulation training, and despite the existence of several well-attended multi-day schools devoted to running such simulations, we are still losing a couple officers a year to these tragic accidents. The National Tactical Officers Association has compiled a good summary of these deaths online (police training deaths link below).

These deaths are completely unnecessary!

Let's follow the logic. Why do these accidents continue to happen? Well, the obvious reason, and the place to start, is that clearly live weapons were somehow introduced into the training area. Why does this happen despite any number of good safety protocols existing? Clearly either 1) no good safety protocol was implemented, or 2) a good safety protocol was implemented but insufficiently followed.

Why would reason 1 - no good safety protocol implemented - happen?
This one lies squarely on the backs of the person in charge of the training. It is due to laziness, ignorance, incompetence or all three. (You'll have to excuse my strong language here, but we're talking about fellow officers being killed.) We still see way too many simulations run off-the-cuff, with some half-assed protocol ("OK, everyone leave their gun in the spare room over there and then reconvene here so we can get started") kinda-sorta implemented, some of the time. Included here as half-assed are "protocols" that fail to search an officer anytime they leave the simulation area - to take a call, hit the head, go to lunch, or whatever. Now why would someone in a position to be running a simulation in the first place fall prone to laziness, ignorance, incompetence or all three? Part of the reason is that we simply, as a profession, do not have a culture of safety in simulations. Think of it this way. Generations ago, gun safety on the range was all but non-existent. Go to the range in the '20s or '30s and you'd see muzzles pointed everywhere, including by the instructor at students during demonstrations. That attitude has now changed 100%, and we now live and breathe the four cardinal firearms safety rules whenever we engage in firearms training. Our firearms instructors are (if they are any good) merciless about enforcing them. The level of consciousness about firearms safety that we all (hopefully) have now is simply ingrained in us as part of the culture of armed professionals. Sadly, we simply haven't reached that level of concern - as a cultural norm - with simulation safety yet. No one howls when a simulation is run unsafely; no one gets fired; no one gets disciplined. But as simulations become more and more standard in law enforcement training - driven by the courts and by low-cost simulation technologies like airsoft - it will happen. In 30 years, our kids or grandkids will look back at these training deaths and wonder "What the hell were they thinking?"