Key findings from the National Survey include:

• As it relates to officer safety threats, for agencies that reported a serious injury or fatality in the last three years, the most commonly reported events in which serious injury or death to an officer occurred were assaults (excluding gunshot wound or edged weapon) and motor vehicle collisions. However, executives ranked assaults fourth on the scale of perceived risks, labeling it only a moderate risk. Conversely, perceived risk for motor vehicle collisions (ranked first) was more closely aligned with actual risk (ranked second).
• Although motor vehicle collisions were reported as having the greatest perceived risk of killing or seriously harming officers, it did not have the highest levels of related in-service training provided by agencies or the highest levels of perceived need for future training. Training related to driver decision-making and high speed/pursuit driving and policy ranked among the lowest future training needs, yet data from the LEO Near Miss officer safety initiative suggests driver decision-making is one of the leading contributing factors for officer-involved motor vehicle collisions. In fact, 71% of officers self-reported that their decision-making was the primary contributing risk factor for either being involved or nearly being involved in a motor vehicle collision. Given these findings, one would expect that executives’ responses regarding perceived training needs would rank traffic safety as a top priority for officer safety training. This indicates a discrepancy between actual risks to officers and training provided to prepare officers for those risks.
• Executives placed their highest priority for future training needs on areas related to the use of force and physical threats that officers associate with force events, including trends in threats to officer safety, officer survival training, situational indicators of potential assaults on officers, de-escalation, scenario training on lethal and non-lethal force, and active shooter training.
• Law enforcement executives nationwide are struggling to balance providing additional and necessary training to officers with meeting the service demands of the communities they serve. Overall, the limited ability to pull officers from their daily duties due to workload demands (i.e. shift coverage) was identified as the most significant challenge, with almost half of executives identifying this as a major challenge, and 33% identifying it as a moderate challenge. An alternative to pulling officers off the street for training is to pay officers overtime to participate in training before or after shifts, or on a day off. However, having limited resources to pay for overtime was identified by the executives as the second biggest challenge. The order of these challenges was similar across region and agency type, but some differences were observed across agency size. For example, the smallest agencies (1-24 sworn personnel) were more likely to report not having facilities, equipment, enough trainers, and not enough funding for department-wide training as moderate or high challenges.