Your Recruit’s Training Is Being Decided by the Radio

Every DOR is complete, so no one in the field training officer (FTO) program is concerned. But the recruit’s FTO likes traffic work and is good at it, and the recruit’s record shows it: 11 traffic stops, two domestics, and not a single welfare check or mental health call. Nobody chose that mix. The radio sent what it sent, and the FTO took the calls they always take.

In our last post, we made the case that by week four, a field training officer needs to know what a recruit still hasn’t done. This one is about why those gaps form in the first place. Some come from the dispatch queue, but some also come from the FTO themselves. In both cases, the recommendation is the same: don’t leave field training to chance.

Who decides which calls a recruit sees in a field training officer program?

In most agencies, the dispatch queue decides what a recruit sees, with help from the FTO’s habits. That’s chance exposure. Deliberate exposure means someone tracks which calls the recruit has seen and steers the next shifts toward the ones they haven’t.

High-volume calls arrive without any help. Traffic stops, report calls, and radio work fill almost every shift. But a handful of requirements may never come in a training window that typically runs 12 to 16 weeks, especially in a smaller jurisdiction. In these cases, every FTO program relies on role-play, mock scenarios, and discussion in place of real calls.

A well-run mock is real training, and isn’t cause for concern. What is, however, is finding out you need one in phase four, when the calendar is tight and the recruit is weeks from release.

Can the FTO be the reason a recruit has a gap?

Every FTO has calls they like, calls they’re good at, and parts of the jurisdiction they know best. A trainee who rides with them for weeks absorbs that comfort zone. The FTO isn’t doing anything wrong. They’re just working the way they always work.

This is the half of chance exposure that rarely gets discussed. The radio creates gaps at random. An FTO’s preferences create them in a pattern, one that repeats with every trainee they get.

On paper, it’s invisible. A DOR records the calls that happened. It never records the call the FTO let another unit take.

The comfort zones limiting recruit exposure

Benchmark’s Mark Pfetzer spent 20 years at the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office, where he worked as an FTO and later rebuilt the agency’s field training program as its coordinator, drawing on several FTO models rather than adopting one off the shelf. Geography was one of the gaps he found. Some trainers stayed in the one or two districts where they felt most comfortable, and in an agency with eight districts, a trainee riding with them learns a fraction of the jurisdiction.

As an FTO, Mark handled it himself by asking trainees directly which districts they had and hadn’t worked, and where they felt they needed more time, because the paperwork wouldn’t tell him. As coordinator, the program started tracking it and acting on it, including moving FTOs between districts so trainees got broader exposure.

Call types are also a place where gaps show up. Ashley Olsen is a former FTO and sergeant who now works with agencies at Benchmark. She remembers an FTO who disliked death investigations and avoided them. That’s a real hole, not a paperwork one. A recruit who never runs one hasn’t practiced scene control, evidence awareness, or the notification that follows.

What does a lopsided field training officer program record look like?

Picture a trainee’s record: 11 traffic stops, three DUIs, two domestics. Nothing on that list is alarming by itself. Read together, it describes a training experience with a hole in the middle.

In this case, only two domestics is the flag. Domestics, mental health calls, and welfare checks are the volume work of patrol, the calls a solo officer will handle every week. Two exposures by week five means the recruit is behind on the part of the job they’ll do most.

A record like this also says something about the FTO. A traffic-minded FTO tends to produce a traffic-heavy trainee. That’s not a problem to punish, it’s a pattern for the coordinator to manage.

How do good FTOs already steer exposure?

Deliberate exposure isn’t a new behavior that agencies have to train into their FTOs. Good FTOs already do it on instinct. They take the call the recruit needs, even when it isn’t theirs.

If the recruit hasn’t worked a commercial burglary, the next one that comes out gets jumped, out of district or not. If they need a domestic, the FTO asks dispatch to send the next one.

As Mark puts it, “We’re not building the system for a lazy FTO, we’re building it for a good FTO.”

What instinct runs on, though, is memory, the FTO’s own picture of the recruit. That picture doesn’t transfer when someone else is covering, and it doesn’t show the FTO their own blind spots.

How can a field training officer program build deliberate exposure without new software?

Success comes down to making exposure visible on purpose. These five habits work in any field training officer program, on paper or not.

• Keep a call-type tally separate from the checklist. This only needs to be one page, counts by call type, updated at the end of each week. While the checklist might say “done,” the tally says “done once.” These are two very different things.
• Rotate districts and shifts by phase. Set the rotation at the coordinator level so it doesn’t depend on any one FTO’s preference.
• Ask the recruit where they haven’t been. Recruits know which districts they haven’t worked and which call types they haven’t seen. They just rarely volunteer that information.
• Compare trainees who share an FTO. The same gap across 2-3 recruits points at the FTO’s comfort zone, not the recruits.
• Schedule mocks when a gap becomes likely. Don’t wait for the final phase to discover what the radio never delivered.

What can a covering FTO do with an exposure view that they can’t with a binder?

With a binder, a covering FTO would have to count call types across dozens of DORs, so in practice they don’t. With an exposure view, the gaps are on one screen before briefing ends.

That’s what call-type exposure in Benchmark FTO is built for. It shows which call types a recruit has been on, how many times, and what’s not observed yet, alongside the DORs and checklist it comes from. Nobody tallies anything by hand.

The assigned FTO sees which calls their trainee hasn’t been on yet, the recruit sees their own gaps, and the covering FTO starts the shift with a plan. For the coordinator, a traffic-heavy record gets caught while there’s still time to change the shift assignments, not at the phase review.

Don’t leave field training to chance.

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