OODA and Safe Officer Response

By Thomas V. Benge and George T. Williams

Let’s get down’n’dirty about officer safety.  A key component is responding with effective force in-time, on-time to make a difference.  SWAT guys and "switched on" patrol cops tend to believe they are elite because they "get it."  Many police trainers seem to think that if only they tell their officers to "be safe" and to "watch his hands" enough times, they will finally "get it."

Why do some "get it," and others seem to have no clue?  Officers are injured, and, sadly, murdered, because their training (and sometimes the job itself) fails to support their taking conscious and, at times, automatic steps that will lead to their resolving safety problems.

While skills and attributes vary widely, nearly every officer fundamentally knows how to respond to assault. The selection of empty hand response, OC spray, taser, baton, or firearm is relatively simple given a complete understanding of the situation.  The breakdown in effective response, however, is generally because the officer fails to recognize the significance of what he is seeing, and becomes preoccupied with attempting to place what was observed into meaningful context—rather than taking timely action.  In the real world, officers almost never get the whole picture before being required to act. Failing to act in time results in officer injuries and murders.

The vast majority of assaults on officers--including their murders—occur with some warning.  Officer murder studies show the average murdered officer had several, and sometimes numerous threat indicators cumulatively weighing against him until survival became impossible.  It is the awareness of, and, more importantly, the context of these threat indicators that is key to the safety of any officer in a particular situation.

Understanding how we as human beings make decisions under stress and what part of the process is critical to survival will permit police training to facilitate officers effectively responding to their safety needs.  It also permits the officer to better decide when action—especially a force response—is needed to change the situation to the officer’s favor.  Crisis decision-making can be best explained through the "OODA Loop" theory.

OODA

To paraphrase Yogi Berra, "90% of the fight is half mental."  The type of physical skills employed within a conflict is only mildly interesting, and accounts for only a small part of the outcome.  You may be the biggest, baddest guy in the valley, but if you don’t understand the other guy is reaching for a handgun, you have a good chance of being a dead tough guy.  Instead, it is the ability to operate mentally faster than your opponent that permits you to win.  Without the mental processes inherent in decision-making working smoothly during the fight, all of the master instructor black belts and Expert Champion Shooter trophies combined in the world will mean nothing in helping you survive.

OODA is the inherent mental process we all use during crisis.  The OODA Loop is a series of phases: Observation, Orientation, and Decision, resulting in Action.  Understanding how this Loop works while incorporating it into training and how you do business is vital to recognizing threats and then acting effectively in time.  While there are many internal and external feedback loops (and Loops within Loops), recognizing the four phases can assist officers and their trainers in creating faster, safer decisions and behavior in the field.

OBSERVE: This is primarily a result of the senses of eyesight, hearing, and touch.  You see movement, you hear your partner yell, and/or you feel the suspect’s movement.  You must first observe a threat before you can respond.  A WWI fighter pilot said, "First look, first shot, first kill."

The "observation" phase is simply the collection of data that has not yet been assigned meaning.

ORIENT: To "orient" is to put the gathered information into context—what does what I’m seeing, hearing, and/or feeling mean?  Raw data is useless.  All information must be assigned value before it can be used meaningfully to create action.

Humans orient to what is observed through pattern recognition.  We take raw information, discern the available patterns, and then quickly place the info into context. The more quickly the pattern is identified and matched with past information, training, and relevant experience, the more quickly we orient to the situation.  Therefore, the more familiar an officer is with what is observed, the more closely the pattern fits, and the more quickly that information becomes useable data.

A problem arises when the information observed is unfamiliar, and doesn’t fit previous recognition patterns. Sometimes the orientation is forced and a decision is simply a "best guess."  More often, the officer gets stuck in attempting to discern what the observed information actually means.  Because any police action involving force carries administrative, criminal, and civil peril, as well as the officer’s personal well-being, there is a great motivation and driving need to make a "good decision." It often becomes more important "not to be wrong" than to act in self-defense.  Hence, "inaction paralysis" develops; a self-defeating loop of attempting to orient to the information stalls any action under the accumulating pressure of each passing moment.

DECIDE: The contextual information is employed to make a decision.  The information possessed at the time is processed and the first available reasonable solution is committed to.  This is where training and the officer’s experience play a huge part in the outcome of decision-making.  The more familiar the individual is with the patterns they believe they are presented (orientation), the more quickly a decision is made.  Rather than the "best choice" (implying a process where options are compared), decision-making during dynamic crisis ALWAYS reverts to a "good enough" or "satisficing" choice, where the resulting action will suffice in satisfying the needs of the situation.

ACT: The decision is acted upon, and a physical response results.  The action may be a trained skill that is so ingrained as to take no thought and is seamlessly employed.  Or it may take a concentrated effort to act in the desired manner that may or may not be sufficiently skilled to be effective.

FEEDBACK: Now the "Loop" begins anew with feedback, driven by orienting to the results of the action.  If the action was completely successful, the officer will observe and orient to that fact.  If only partially successful, the decision-making, based on reorienting to the new information, will modify further actions to gain a successful outcome.  If the initial action failed, the officer will be forced to go to the next choice in decision-making and pattern recognition, again, based on past performance, relevant experience, and training.  This will lead to more action, an observation of the results of the act, orientation to the new information permitting better decision-making for the next action.

Officer safety, and fighting, is about "time"

There may be hundreds, or even thousands of OODA Loops spinning on and on during a twenty second fight. Each series forms a distinct representation—or snapshot—of the situation the officer actually saw, thought he saw, then decided what to do based on his belief about the situation at the time he put what he saw into context.

All action is based upon your belief of what happened when you observed the info, and not on what is "actually happening now."  Therefore, no discussion of OODA can be complete without a discussion of "reaction-response time."  However, space limitations do not permit that discussion within this article.  Suffice it to say, that every decision and every action you make is based on a belief of what you saw tenths of seconds (or longer) prior to taking action—with every decision you make, you are literally 0.2 seconds (and likely more) behind.

The entire concept of the OODA Loop is a method of aptly describing time in a conflict.  Which ever side—"Tom" or "Jerry"—more efficiently manages time while moving through the OODA phases, the more likely that person will initiate meaningful actions positively influencing the outcome.  Efficiently orienting and then quickly making a "satisficing" decision to act given the context of the situation gives Tom the ability to move more effectively than Jerry  Rapidly processing through the orientation phase permits better and quicker decision phases. The result is effective physical actions than Jerry cannot keep up with.  This permits Tom to "get inside ‘B’s’ OODA Loop."

To get inside his Loop means that Tom is now controlling the momentum and direction of the conflict, and results in Jerry making increasingly irrelevant decisions vis-à-vis current reality—Jerry is now completely reactive to Tom's actions (the old academy mantra is true: "action beats reaction").  Tom is now driving the event, and is able to move faster and faster through the OODA Loop.  The cumulative effects of injuries, pain, alcohol, drugs, and fatigue further retard Jerry's effective decision-making.  Jerry's OODA Loop is lengthening, his decisions are slowing and are rapidly growing irrelevant to his current reality.   His decision-making and resulting actions have finally ceased as Tom overwhelms him—Jerry is no longer in the fight, and is simply "there" until Tom decides the fight is over.

Orientation is the key to proper—and safe—conduct

There is no more important component to crisis decision-making than the orientation phase.  Failing to orient to the information means a late, or worse, no reaction to a developing threat.  A subject guarding his right side, a bulge in the waistband, not complying with orders to stop moving and show his hands, his face changing to a mask of concentration, stopping in mid-sentence, and a quick move toward the waistband with his right hand likely means a gunfight is already underway.

Orienting very early to the subject guarding his right side and not showing his hands will likely result in the officer drawing his handgun, with all of the consequences made clear if compliance is not gained.  An early orientation means the officer can draw his handgun and be in a shooting (hitting the subject before he is able to complete his own draw).  Moving to his own handgun at the same time as the suspect is reaching for his will result in a gunfight (an exchange of bullets).  Not reacting until the threat is confirmed (orienting to the verified fact that the suspect has a gun) and it is indeed loaded (because he is shooting) will likely end in the officer’s injury and death.

Understanding the "whys" of an officer waiting for confirmation allows us to teach officers how to respond to threat within the confines of OODA theory, especially the orientation phase of reacting to threat indicators.  This is clearly the key to teaching better tactical and force decisions earlier.  Better force decisions allow for a safer officer—with decreased civil, criminal, and administrative liability exposure.

Waiting for confirmation

Most officers operate on a day to day basis as an investigator of crimes.  They take calls, sometimes scuffle, but rarely experience a serious "fight." Most officers will never fire their handgun at a live threat.  "Routine suspicion" of suspect activities and behavior interpreted as criminal and not threatening becomes embedded into police habits.  When hands disappear, this routine suspicion almost always signals criminal avoidance behavior rather than a threat to the officer. During a career, in fact, most officers will encounter relatively few individuals who will really attempt to harm them beyond what is necessary to escape—until, of course, they do.

Because most officers see themselves as "crime fighters," their experience teaches them that talking to subjects who are exhibiting criminal behavior will get them consent searches and information about criminal activity.  This leads to more arrests and seizures, which is a large measure of success in the police world. Negotiating is how they do their "cop thing," and they are successful at it.  They build a career of solid arrests as a productive and competent officer.

This "cop thing" is about investigating, figuring things out, understanding "why" and making sense of often complicated situations.  Another part of the cop’s world is that the clock is always ticking.  Officers know they are responding to a problem that took ten years to develop and spin out of control (the reason the police were called in the first place), yet there is limited time to discern the problem and solve it.  In the back of every officer’s mind is the knowledge that there will be another call after this. There is an ever present pressure to "wrap this up."

However, this time the officer is dealing with a prepared offender, someone willing and capable of killing the officer.  Having developed probable cause, the officer tells the offender he is under arrest, and directs him to move into a handcuffing position. As the officer is cuffing him, the offender pulls a hand free and reaches for his waistband.  If, at this point, the question arises in the mind of the officer, "Why is he moving?" a struggle to orient to the information begins.

What is this officer’s dilemma?  Everything in his job requires an explanation.  He does not want to lose his job by over-reacting.  He simply wants to justify what he does. Like every other call, he is trying to desperately address the "what’s" of the offender’s behavior.  Orientation stalls as more and better information is frantically sought, but the threat to the officer grows as the tenths of seconds click by.  The officer’s frustration grows. He knows time is against him, and this further inhibits "orientation."  "Something" is happening, but he just cannot get enough hard information to understand the situation fully.  This "orientation stall" puts the officer behind the suspect’s action (and decision-making), permitting the suspect to drive the conflict.  The result: this officer is about to be hurt.

Training OODA to meet safety needs

Effective OODA cycling requires the rapid orientation to the observed information in order to obtain the relevant decisions needed for effective action.  Training must support this need.  For years, the concept of "pre-assault indicators" has been presented to officers to alert them to possible impending safety threats.  While valuable to officer safety, it does not assist in quickly orienting to a rapidly evolving threat leading to the effective decision-making required to survive the next few tenths of a second.

A "pre-assault indicator" is defined as recognition of motor, attitude, physical, and speech patterns signaling impending or probable assault. Prior to responding, analysis of pre-assault indicators generates a decision-making process involving the legality of the officer’s action.  By its very definition, the decision process will now be delayed because enough information must be gathered to satisfy the officer’s legal and policy imperatives—every action must later be justified.  While training in recognizing pre-assault indicators is an important, indeed vital, component of safety training, it can actually feed into the average officer’s need to make sense of an offender’s actions.

The missing distinction in safety training between "wait to figure it out" and "act NOW!" is the "trip-wire response."  This is a response to a threat cue requiring no decision-making based on context.  Decision-making is simplified to the extent that upon orienting to it, the decision to take action has already been made. The response to this decision is ingrained through training, and the offender’s actions simply "trips the wire," initiating the response.  For example, a tug on the officer’s holstered handgun is a trip wire for the officer’s dominant hand to strike down on the butt of his handgun and press it and the suspect’s hand into his body.  No decision-making is required.  Given orientation to the "trip-wire" cue, the action becomes automatic.

In our earlier example, the offender’s hand pulls free and disappears during handcuffing.  The following criteria are set up in training to create a reasonable "trip-wire" response:

• A subject who is under arrest has no other legal option other than to comply with police commands. There is no discretion to do otherwise.
• Any movement to areas commonly associated with the carry of deadly weapons is threatening to the officer’s safety.  The officer may react to the possibility of his or her reasonable belief with reasonable force sufficient to overcome the threat created by the suspect’s movement.

A trip-wire response to the arrestee reaching to his waistband during handcuffing may be to shove the suspect away and draw the duty weapon (trip-wire response), making shoot/no shoot decisions (based on threat-cues, and initiating an entirely new series of OODA Loops).  Or it might be a quick hard takedown (trip-wire response), pinning the subject’s hand under his body until it can be safely cleared or controlled, or a deadly force response made (threat indicators).  All of these responses are reasonable given this circumstance.

Conclusion

Because an individual officer rarely experiences a life-threatening attack in his career, and is thousands of times more likely to be confronted by criminal behavior, the habit of "routine suspicion" during every contact is reinforced.  Once confronted by threatening behavior, it may take the officer longer than the suspect’s actions will permit to orient to the fact that this is not a simple "dope case," but is, instead, a life-threatening assault.

OODA is a simple yet sophisticated method of explaining how we make decisions under threat.  Observing, orienting, deciding, and then acting, with continuous feedback modifying each successive loop is how we, as humans with training and experience in crisis decision-making do our jobs.

Training to create effective OODA Loop cycling of pre-assault indicators and trip-wire responses should concentrate on the "orientation" phase of decision-making.  Training officers to "see" and "recognize" commonly experienced criminal behaviors as "threat" behaviors will permit a better, more rapid decision-making process that will serve to increase the officer’s safety and the quality of their articulation following their response.

Quick, life-saving action is often a result of the officer quickly and correctly orienting to the partial information presented to him at a call. Training must support that, and the best training concentrates on developing a knowledge base permitting the rapid identification of impending violence or threatened assault.  It gives officers permission to act reasonably without the cumbersome process of deciding about the lawfulness of their responses in situations where those decisions should already be decided based upon the suspect’s actions.

OODA is valuable to training and to understanding why officers are either successful in their conflict resolution with a suspect, or are injured or murdered.  Of the four phases, orientation is the key to keeping officers safe on the street.  The better we apply OODA concepts to training, the better we prepare our officers meet the threats they face.