Natasha Korva

Police officers are sometimes faced with a situation where they are required to draw their firearm and shoot at a suspect. While RCMP officers must qualify annually to use their firearm in the field, research suggests that tests such as the RCMP’s Annual Firearms Qualifications (AFQ) test will not be predictive of how an officer might perform in real world use of force scenarios. To test this we conducted a study where we collected RCMP officers AFQ scores and had these officers complete two types of scenarios on a firearms simulator at the RCMP. Officers completed an Active Shooter Scenario, which was intended to simulate a high anxiety, mentally straining, and operationally challenging environment, and a series of Reaction Drills, which were intended to be less anxiety provoking, mentally straining, and operationally challenging. We predicted that AFQ scores might correlate with performance on the Reaction Drills, but that this would not be the case for the Active Shooter Scenario given how different this setting was likely to be compared to the AFQ setting.

While the results confirmed that the Active Shooter Scenario was more anxiety provoking compared to the Reaction Drills, and more dependent on good communication skills, AFQ scores were correlated with certain performance measures (e.g., officer reaction speed) in both the Active Shooter Scenario and the Reaction Drills, and other performance measures (e.g., shot accuracy) in the Reaction Drills. These results do not support the hypothesis that AFQ scores will not correlate to performance in settings that likely differ in psychologically important ways from the AFQ environment. Other results indicated that certain officer characteristics, such as having a strong grip strength, having received specialized firearms training, and having been/or being a firearms instructor, all related to superior performance in use of force encounters.

This study was the first ever to test whether the RCMP AFQ test relates to use of force performance in other scenarios. By examining the relationship between AFQ scores and performance in other use of force encounters, it was found that the AFQ may be more useful than previous research would suggest in predicting performance in other use of force encounters. While one would want to be cautious in putting too much weight on this finding (and others reported in this thesis) given the limitations of the current study, we hope that this study provides the RCMP with valuable information about the AFQ test and its limitations, and about how officer characteristics might impact officer performance in the field.