Your FTOs Are Spending Their Shift Documenting Training, Not Doing it

The shift is over, and the field training officer (FTO) is still in the report room, writing tonight’s daily observation report (DOR) from memory and putting in for the hour. Two other FTOs are doing the same thing down the hall. But command doesn’t see a training problem. It sees overtime. That’s why chiefs tend to buy law enforcement training software as an admin tool, when the real return is in the recruit.

In our first two posts, we wrote for the FTO and the coordinator: what a recruit still needs by week four, and why exposure gaps form in the first place. This one is for the chief and command staff.

Why should a chief care about a field training program they’ll never run?

A chief won’t write a DOR or ride with a recruit, but every officer the program releases carries its habits for a career. The program also runs on the time of a small group of FTOs who are patrol officers first, and that time is the chief’s to spend.

Three things make the FTO program a command-level concern, not just a training-unit one. Better program analytics produce a better-trained recruit. FTOs spend their time training instead of documenting it. And time not spent on documentation goes back into service, which means more calls and more reps for the recruit. The first two are worth acting on. The third is the one a chief rarely hears from a software vendor.

What do better program analytics change about recruit readiness?

In most agencies, readiness gets judged at phase reviews, from a stack of DORs and a checklist someone reconciled by hand. By then, a gap that formed in week two has had a month to settle in.

When the DORs and the checklist live together, the picture is current every day. The coordinator can see which trainees are behind, which tasks are still open, and which call types a recruit hasn’t been on. The FTO can steer the next shift toward the gap instead of hoping the radio delivers it. A recruit trained against a visible gap gets released with fewer surprises, and that’s the better-trained officer a chief is actually hiring.

What does FTO documentation actually cost an agency?

When DORs don’t get finished during the shift, they get finished somewhere else: on overtime, on comp time, at home, or parked on the side of the road. Each of those has a price, and most agencies never add it up.

Mark Pfetzer, who rebuilt the field training program at the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office as its coordinator, drawing on several FTO models rather than adopting one off the shelf, saw all of it before joining Benchmark. He had FTOs putting in for overtime or comp time to write DORs at the end of their shift, because they’d been too busy to write them during it. He did a lot of his own program work at home because he was behind. That’s a line item, and it grows with every trainee in the pipeline.

What is a recruit actually worth by the time they go solo?

A 2025 R Street Institute study of the police workforce puts the cost of training a single officer at roughly $20,000 to $100,000, counting academy tuition, equipment, and on-the-job training. And turnover is expensive. The cost estimate for replacing an officer with three years of experience is more than twice their annual salary.

Field training is a large share of that investment. According to the National Policing Institute, state and local officers average 503 hours of field training, about 12.6 weeks. That is the longest stretch of paid, one-to-one supervision an officer will ever receive.

That training investment shows up in that officer’s record long after the DORs are filed. Research published in the American Economic Review in 2026, using Dallas Police Department data, found that recruits assigned to field training officers with a higher use-of-force propensity went on to use force 14 to 18 percent more often.

The cost of getting it wrong isn’t spread evenly, either. A study of more than a decade of Chicago Police Department records found that officers in the top one percent for civilian allegations generated nearly five times the number of civil rights payouts and four times the total damages of their peers, while officers below roughly the eightieth percentile looked much like officers with no allegations at all.

That is the case for treating field training as a financial decision rather than an administrative one. An agency is not buying paperwork relief. It is protecting a six-figure investment in a person, at the one point in that career when it is cheapest to change the outcome.

How does less documentation turn into more training?

Time an FTO doesn’t spend documenting goes back into service. More time in service means more calls. More calls mean more reps for the recruit, and reps are what field training is made of.

This is where the argument compounds. Time savings usually get pitched as efficiency, a few minutes back per report. In field training, those minutes don’t disappear into a spreadsheet. They go into the recruit. An FTO who stays parked after a call to finish paperwork is out of service, and so is the trainee in the passenger seat. Every call that goes to another unit during that time is one the recruit doesn’t see.

It also connects to the exposure problem from our last post. A recruit who needs a domestic or a welfare check can only get one if the car is in service when it comes out. More time on the street gives a good FTO more chances to steer exposure on purpose. Across a 12-to-16-week program and every FTO-trainee pair in it, the difference adds up to a recruit who has done more of the job before going solo.

What can a supervisor realistically keep track of?

A patrol sergeant with FTOs on the squad is supervising field training on top of everything else.

Ashley Olsen, a former FTO and sergeant who now works with agencies at Benchmark, had ten people on her squad, four of them FTOs. She could spot-check DORs, but she had no time to confirm every one got done every shift. A DOR missing from last Tuesday was something she would never find. Busy shifts are exactly when things get overlooked, and they’re also when the most training happens.

A missing DOR is more than a paperwork gap. It’s a shift where nobody wrote down what the recruit did, how they did it, or what they still need. Good law enforcement training software flags it by date, so the sergeant sees it at a glance instead of discovering it at the phase review, if at all.

What does field training data say about the program, not just the recruit?

When one recruit struggles with a task, that’s a coaching conversation. When every trainee in a cohort fails the same item on the first attempt, the trainees aren’t the problem.

Ashley’s example is vehicle inspection. When a whole cohort fails their first one, she calls it “more of an ‘us’ issue than a ‘them’ issue.” The same logic applies to the FTO comfort zones we covered in our last post. Three trainees with the same gap under the same FTO is a pattern.

On paper, nobody sees the pattern, because nobody reads every DOR across a cohort side by side. When the records live in one place, the pattern is findable, and a chief and training staff can fix the curriculum, the FTO instruction, or the academy handoff instead of retraining the same item one recruit at a time.

What should a chief ask about their field training program this month?

There are a number of questions that can surface a cost or gap that’s usually invisible to command, whether or not your agency changes systems.

• How much overtime and comp time is going to DOR writing? Ask payroll or your training sergeant. If nobody can answer because it isn’t coded separately, that’s an answer, too.
• Where do DORs actually get written? At the end of shift, at home, or parked on a call. Each answer has a different cost, and all of them come out of training time.
• How would a sergeant know a DOR is missing? If the honest answer is “they’d have to go looking,” assume some are.
• What did the last cohort struggle with first? If several trainees stumbled on the same item, it’s worth asking what changed in how it’s taught.
• Which FTOs are carrying the most trainees? A thin FTO corps absorbs documentation load unevenly, and the most capable FTOs usually carry the most.

What should law enforcement training software do for a chief?

The right software should give FTOs time back and give command a view of the program it can’t get from a binder. That’s what Benchmark FTO is built around. The DOR gets finished in minutes, not after-shift overtime, and the FTO still writes and signs the evaluation. DORs and the checklist live together, so the program view shows where every trainee stands, what’s left, and which DORs are missing by date.

For the FTO, that’s time back. For the sergeant, it’s a missing DOR caught quickly. For the chief, it’s the loop that ties it together: less documentation buys time in service, time in service buys reps, and reps make the officer.

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