Use of force is a rare and unique permission that police are granted by society to help maintain law and order, but what are officers taught about this responsibility?

Sgt. Brad Fawcett is a trainer at the Justice Institute of B.C. where all municipal police recruits in the province are educated, and he also holds the title of provincial use-of-force coordinator. In an interview with CBC News, he walked through the training officers receive on use of force and the issues police encounter.

Fawcett estimates that use-of-force training takes up about 20 per cent of an officer's education.

"It may not sound like a lot," he notes, "but all the studies show that use of force by police accounts for less than one per cent of all the interactions that they're going to have with the public."

"The overwhelming majority of – over 99 per cent of calls – they're going to resolve just by showing up and talking to people," he said.

While at the police academy, officers are educated on a wide range of use of force issues:

Provincial standards.
Legal issues.
Physiological and psychological cues to watch for.
The national framework on use-of-force, which details the stages of police response in threatening situations.
Hands-on training also involves empty-hand tactics and how to use various weapons — from pepper spray to firearms. Municipal officers are also typically required to take refresher courses on firearms in some provinces on an annual basis depending on provincial requirements.

Fawcett says he puts a lot of emphasis on communication tactics aimed at de-escalating a situation or preventing it from becoming too volatile.

Threatening signs officers look for
An average person may not notice the signs of a person in flight-or-fight mode, but an officer is trained to be tuned into subtle physical clues of imminent danger, says Fawcett.

Among the signs are the jaw muscle balling up and the person's eyes darting around. Another clue is the clenching and unclenching of hands, because in flight-or-fight mode the extremities start to feel cold as blood rushes to major muscles.

"Police officers are seeing threat cues where other people might be looking at something and they don't see anything. And then they can't understand well, why did an officer do this?" said Fawcett.

"It's no different than a firefighter looking at the colour of smoke," he added. "It doesn't mean something to anyone else, but to the firefighter it means something important."

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2013/07/31/f-use-force-police-training.html