21-Foot Principle Clarified by Dennis Tueller and Ken Wallentine

https://www.virtra.com | The 21 Foot Drill is re-evaluated and put in perspective from the source himself, the creator, Dennis Tueller who discusses this HIGHLY contested concept with Ken Wallentine of the Utah Attorney General's Office in a sit down for CopTalks.

Transcript

Ken Wallentine: Are you familiar with the concept of the reactionary gap? It expresses basic principles of human performance factors. You've likely heard that action beats reaction. Human performance factors experiments conducted by Dr. Bill Lewinski and a staff at the prestigious Force Science Research Center demonstrate that a suspect can draw a gun from the waistband and point and fire in as little as nine- one hundredths of a second. The officer, even with gun drawn and anticipating the need to fire, needs an average of thirty-one-one-hundredths of a second to perceive the threat and pull the trigger. Understanding reaction time isn't new science. Now, toss in the requirement of recognizing the stimulus, is it a gun or a cellphone? And making a choice among possible responses and the reaction time gets much longer, the suspect doesn't have the equal time burden because he made the decision to draw and fire without any externally perceptible cue for the officer to see, that's the reactionary gap. The officer is behind the curve in the OODA Loop, sometimes even fatally so. Moreover, the officer has many things competing for attention, he or she can effectively attend to one stimulus at a time only, no matter how good you think you are at multitasking, science proves that you're not. Think about the last traffic crash that you investigated that was caused by a driver texting and driving, eating and driving, applying makeup and driving and so on. Those folks thought that they could pay attention to more than one thing too. Your eyes may be directed as a stimulus and still you don't see, this is inattentional blindness, perhaps you've experienced a common form of inattentional blindness known as tunnel vision. When you're facing a sailing or edged weapon or a striking weapon such as a baseball bat or tire iron, at what distance does the assailant present a deadly threat? How much space should the officer have between him and the assailant to compensate for the reactionary gap? What other factors figure into this calculus?
Ken Wallentine: There's a universal component of police training in the United States known as the 21-foot principle. Officers are commonly taught at the police academy to be ready to fire, move off line from the attack, take cover, or take some other decisive step when an assailant is threatening use of an edged weapon within 30 feet. Many police basic training courses include a scenario known as the Tueller Drill, in this scenario an officer in training is presented with a role-playing suspect, poised 21 feet from the officer and holding a knife, the role-playing suspect is directed to charge, while the officer trainee remains in place and defends herself or himself from a knife attack. Research initially conducted by Dennis Tueller and published in an influential article showed that an assailant armed of the short handle edged weapon, standing 21 feet from an officer is able to stab and/or slice the officer with the edged weapon before the officer is able to draw and fire his or her handgun more than half the time. And that even those officers who were able to fire are still very likely to be stabbed or sliced, consequently officers are repetitively taught that they should draw their weapons and be prepared to defend themselves from an edged weapon well before an assailant closes to a 21-foot distance. Officers are taught to be ready to respond to an imminent threat when an assailant closes to a 30-foot distance.