Evaluating performance of law enforcement personnel during a stressful training scenario.

Police trainees who were ready to graduate from the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) volunteered to participate in an exercise designed to evaluate their survivability. In a highly stressful interactive scenario, which included a hostage situation, performance was evaluated for a range of responses, including: shooting judgment and accuracy, communications, and coping with a weapon malfunction. Nineteen percent of subjects shot the hostage, a failure rate that falls in the reported range of friendly fire casualties in military combat.