Exploring law enforcement decision making: Developing and testing models through incident command simulation training for law enforcement

Much of the complexity in policing stems from numerous conflicts and clashes built into the police function. Some of those conflicts and clashes are inherent in the nature of the policing task. Even though its complexity is definite, law enforcement decision making has to be considered like any other individual decision-making process, and accordingly, must be considered in any explanation of individual behavior because behavior outcomes are based upon decisions or judgments people have made.;There is no question that police organizations play a vital role in the quality of life of every community member. Law enforcement officers are required to make quick judgments and decisions that affect the lives and well being of officers and citizens that they have a duty to protect. However, there are two levels of decision making that present themselves in police organizations. These decisions fall into the domains of crisis management and strategic management. This research focuses on the latter.;Specifically, this study examines law enforcement officers' decision, making, where officers are required to make immediate, unplanned and unstructured decisions under simulated near-real world conditions that are often ill-defined, and have a high degree of ambiguity. Ever-present in naturalistic settings, ambiguity and uncertainty constitute major obstacles toward effective decision making mainly due to the varying degree to which decision makers conceptualize uncertainty and the different methods for coping with such conditions.;Research in the field of judgment and decision making often compares two approaches, the rationality of a person's intuitive judgments under uncertainty with analytically derived answers produced by format models. However, recently, decision-making research has undergone a shift from the "classical" to a "naturalistic" perspective, given the importance of decision making to real-world problems and the impact it has on how the field might advance. Although decision making, in a police context conforms to the naturalistic perspective, no specific studies have been found in neither the "classical" nor the "naturalistic" literature that directly relates to the decision-making processes of police officials. With the naturalistic decision-making model (NDM) being more applicable to a law enforcement context than traditional models, the NDM model guides this research undertaking by utilizing a mixed methodology in order to examine and analyze the decision-making process of police officers as they perform their responsibilities in a simulated environment.;The present research has no intention to explore the quality of decision making by law enforcement. However, simulation observations and the way that the scenario unfolded allowed the researcher to explore that aspect for future research and curriculum development purposes. The present researched mixed both qualitative and quantitative studies and investigates how law enforcement officials made decisions while operating under stressful conditions. The researcher observed, examined and analyzed six simulated incidents in pursuit of this inquiry. The hypotheses under inquiry were: while making vital decisions during an unanticipated event, female law enforcement officers apply intuitive decision making more often than their male counterparts; officers who worked longer in law enforcement and have more in-service training hours make their decisions by using their intuition compared to those officers who are relatively new to law enforcement and are less trained in the use of analytical cognitive decision making; officers who have a college degree apply intuitive decision making more often than the officers who do not have a college degree; officers who have longer in-service training hours, but no college degree, apply their intuition to make decisions more often than officers who have a college degree but less in-service training hours; officers who have a college degree, but less in-service training hours, apply their intuition to make decisions more often than officers who do not have a college degree but more in-service training hours; and finally, officers who participated more often in unforeseen events are more likely to apply their intuition to make their decisions compared to those officers who participated in similar events less often; officers who participated more often in unforeseen events, but are considerably new to law enforcement, are more likely to apply their intuition to make their decisions compared to those officers who served longer but participated in similar events less often.;Beyond these hypotheses, the researcher was interested is exploring the underlying patterns of law enforcement decision making models and their correlation with officers' age, gender, rank, years of service, in-service training hours, and previous critical incident experience. Two models were tested: Recognition Primed Decision Making, Model (intuition) and the Analytical Cognitive Model.;The present research found that while making vital decisions during an unanticipated event, law enforcement officers apply both the intuitive decision making and the analytical cognitive decision making models. Further than this, it was so obvious that even the errors were equally distributed at the initial stages, analytical cognition increased the amount of errors under time constraints without managing to implement other decisions and contingencies. When they implemented their decisions, compared to the intuitive cognition that corrected and applied several types of decision during the same time period until get the desired outcome, it was late. In this research, it was also proven that the officers who had previous incident experiences and more in-service training hours, made less errors and performed much better decisions in the simulation process.;The two main purposes of simulation studies are to characterize the effort and accuracy of various strategies in different decision environments and to develop insights into how processing might change if efficient effort-accuracy trade-offs are desired in selecting, one of the decision strategies. The simulation in the present research provides a task analysis of the problem of strategy selection in law enforcement decision making. Therefore, the expert systems and/or the artificial intelligence models which were developed by the rules derived from experts' verbal reports may be overlooking an important aspect of expertise (because they were all designed for an analytical cognitive decision system) that must be modified in order to start to seriously consider simulation studies such as the present one.