What if everything we know about police training — about fundamentals, drills, and mastering the basics first — isn’t wrong, but incomplete? Pete Blair is a Professor of Criminal Justice and Criminology and the Executive Director of the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT) Center at Texas State University. Dr. Blair is the host of the excellent Tactical Science blog on Substack.
For decades, training has followed a familiar path: first, we teach skills in isolation; then, we add a bit of context in role-play; and finally, we test it in a scenario. But the Constraints-Led Approach — or CLA — flips that sequence around. It starts with realistic, meaningful situations where perception, decision-making, and action develop together.
In this conversation, we’ll explore what that shift really means:
– How do we move from skill → role play → scenario to a more integrated, adaptive way of learning?
– What does it mean to rethink fundamentals — not as perfect techniques, but as patterns that emerge through context and interaction?
– How does the perception–action link help officers transfer what they learn on the range to what they do in the field?
– And finally, how do John Vervaeke’s four P’s of knowing — propositional, procedural, perspectival, and participatory — give us a deeper understanding of what true expertise looks like under pressure?
We also talk about the role of cognition, reflection and debriefing in training.
Practical examples
In our talk, Pete gives three vivid examples from real police training — a day-one traffic stop, a re-designed firearms course, and an arrest-and-control progression. Each one shows how the CLA turns drills into discovery: officers don’t copy techniques, they learn by engaging with real problems, feedback, and resistance.
🚗 1. Day-One Traffic Stop
Blair calls this an ideal entry scenario for beginning students.
Instead of spending weeks learning isolated skills, students start right away with a simple but recognizable traffic stop.
The exercise is highly constrained — the driver is cooperative — so the student isn’t overwhelmed.
Then the situation is varied: cooperative → non-compliant → aggressive behavior.
This way, students learn to make decisions, communicate, and position themselves through experience, not through step-by-step checklists.
🎯 Goal: to activate realistic context and participatory knowing from day one.
🔫 2. Firearms Training
Blair uses firearms training as a clear example of where the traditional model falls short.
In the U.S., it usually starts with classroom theory (safety, law, weapon parts), followed by static range shooting.
According to Blair, that sequence is “exactly backward”: teach safety briefly, then move immediately into representative situations using Simunitions, airsoft, or laser weapons.
There, mistakes can be made safely, and students learn to apply safety rules under realistic pressure.
Later, live-fire practice can be added in a shoothouse or RPAT-style design, where perception, timing, and stress are part of the learning process.
🎯 Goal: preserve the perception–action coupling — “the range should look more like the field.”
🤼 3. Arrest & Control (Empty-Hand Control)He provides a fully developed CLA design for arrest and control:
Start with passive resistance — the suspect is lying down with hands beside the body; the task: get the hands behind the back.
Next variation: hands under the body → learning to “pry.”
Then: suspect on all fours → officer practices mat returns or takedowns.
Finally: suspect tries to stand up → realistic struggling.
Both roles have their own win conditions — this is what Blair calls “aliveness”:
the suspect tries to escape, and the officer tries to apply handcuffs.
The trainer doesn’t give the solution but a goal and a task, nudging the students toward more effective strategies.
🎯 Goal: let behavior emerge from the situation itself — fundamentals arise as emergent patterns.
Important concepts
Participatory knowledge
Pete explains that participatory knowledge — the direct, physical, and relational experience of acting in a situation — is the ground of all learning. Drawing on John Vervaeke’s Four P’s of Knowing (propositional, procedural, perspectival, and participatory), he argues that real understanding starts not with rules or checklists, but with embodied experience. Only when students first engage, feel, and act in realistic contexts do theory and procedures gain meaning.
John Vervaeke talks about four ways of knowing — the Four P’s.
Propositional knowing is knowing that something is true — the facts and theories we can explain in words.
Procedural knowing is knowing how to do something — the skills we gain through practice.
Perspectival knowing is knowing what it’s like — having the situational awareness and felt sense of being in a certain context.
And Participatory knowing is the deepest form — knowing through active engagement, by being part of what’s happening.
It’s the kind of embodied understanding that transforms both the person and the situation.
Repetition Without Repetition:
In CLA, we avoid drilling the same movement repeatedly. Instead, learners pursue the same goals through varied means, adapting movements based on context. They repeat the outcome without much concern for the specific movements that were used. Coaches can alter constraints to introduce variability or guide the learner toward better solutions.
We shouldn’t teach the technique, because it was developed by someone else in a specific situation. What we should focus on are the outcomes we want the trainee to produce.
Solutions and Outcomes
A technique is a specific action that was used by a particular person to accomplish a goal in a distinct situation. If either the person or the situation is different, the technique may no longer function well for achieving the goal. We shouldn’t teach the technique, because it was developed by someone else in a specific situation. What we should focus on are the outcomes we want the trainee to produce.
Being skillful is not about repeating the same solution to the problem, it’s about repeating coming up with solutions to problems. (Rob Gray)
Perception–Action Link (PAL)
Practice should couple what learners perceive with how they act and the effects of their actions — these cannot be separated if you want transfer to occur. In other words, effective training connects what people see, decide, and do.
When perception and action stay linked, learning becomes real and transferable — but if you separate them, skills stop working once the situation changes.What we see shapes what we do, and what we do changes what we see next.
If training breaks that loop — for example, by practicing movements without real cues or feedback — people learn actions that work only in training, not in the real world.
Video
Audio