The Real Reason Officers Freeze: What Training Often Misses

When people think of failure under stress, they often picture someone running away. Fleeing from danger is a natural human response, and we expect officers to push through that feeling.

You’ve probably heard of “fight or flight,” but that’s only part of the picture. There’s a third response that doesn’t get nearly as much attention:

Freeze.

The freeze response is a natural, hardwired reaction that happens when the brain senses a threat. It’s not panic. It’s not cowardice. It’s biology. In that moment, your body can shift into a kind of tactical pause. Heart rate slows, muscles stiffen, and the brain kicks into high alert. This comes from deep survival systems in the brain, particularly the amygdala and something called the periaqueductal gray.

A study published in Scientific Reports (Hashemi et al., 2019) looked at police recruits in a simulated deadly force encounter. The researchers found that recruits who showed stronger signs of freezing, like subtle changes in posture and heart rate, were actually faster and more accurate when it came time to shoot. In other words, freezing isn’t always a failure. Sometimes, it’s your body buying you a second to process and act with precision. You can read the full article here.

Much like fear, the freeze response is rarely addressed in police training. Tactical training is a must. It’s the foundation of everything an officer is asked to do. You can have the right mindset and the ability to manage emotional responses, but if you don’t know what to do or how to do it, none of that matters.

Usually, though, it’s the other way around.

Officers often have the right tactical training but haven’t put in the mindset work to overcome freezing or what Bitsko Consulting calls tactical paralysis.

So how do we properly prepare officers to move through the freeze response and use it the way nature intended, to improve decision-making?

Here are a few approaches I teach in my online and in-person classes:

• Stress inoculation -Use less dynamic but still stressful situations to build awareness of how your body responds. An example would be clearing a building on a burglary call. Most likely, the suspect is gone, as they are in 99 percent of these calls, but since there’s still a chance they haven’t left, a small amount of stress remains. Take note of what you’re feeling and how your body is responding. Be mindful of the tactical decisions you're making and how you're able to push through and complete the task.

• Learning to be a leader- Changing how you respond to crisis can sometimes be as simple as a mindset shift. In law enforcement, we don’t always have the luxury of a supervisor making decisions for us. You can be the leader. Be the person who brings calm to chaos. Approaching a call with that mindset can make the difference between freezing and taking effective action.

  
  

We don’t get to choose how we feel in the middle of a high-stress situation. That response is built into us. What we can control is how we respond. That control comes through self-regulation, the space between the emotional reaction and the action we take.

Training your mindset is just as important as your tactics. As officers, we don’t like to even talk about the possibility that we may freeze in a tactical situation.  The truth is, if you are reading this and have felt that indecision inside, our training is for you.  You can access our Police Resiliency and Critical Incident Mindset Online by clicking here.