The foreword for a recent book on casualty care for cops poses two questions that every officer should face up to realistically: If wounded, “how will you survive?” And “What will you do if no one can come to your rescue?” The answers lie in the 129 pages that follow in Officer Down! A Practical...Read More
Not that you need more stuff to hang on your duty belt, but here’s an addition you might consider: a pouch you can reach with either hand that contains a one-handed tourniquet. If you or another officer are wounded and bleeding badly, it could make the difference between life and death. Although a number of...Read More
Is it true that an old standard of first aid training—attending to Airway, Breathing, and Circulation (bleeding) in that order when treating injured parties—is now obsolete? In a report about downed-officer rescues published in Force Science News [Transmission sent 3/16/09], Dr. Matthew Sztajnkrycer contended that when caring for downed officers, ABC should be reversed to...Read More
Surprising preliminary results from a survey about responses to downed-officer rescues suggest it may be more practical to modify training and equipment related to this high-intensity field challenge than to try changing officers’ instinctive responses. “Officers appear to view risk in this situation very differently than would be predicted based on studies of risk in...Read More
Over the last 6 months, Dr. Matthew Sztajnkrycer, a “SWAT doc” from Minnesota, has exposed some 150 officers to this stressful and revealing training exercise: A patrol officer, answering a domestic violence call, is shot down as he exits his unit. Officers responding to 911 calls from the scene observe him slumped in a seated...Read More