The National Law Enforcement Firearms Instructor Association is a Phoenix based organization made up of retired or active law enforcement officers. Jason, the head instructor, retired from Phoenix PD five or so years ago after running their patrol rifle program for a number of years.

The Advanced Firearms Instructor class is NLEFIA's most popular course. It is pretty much what much of their other FI courses are based on. I'd heard good things about it and had been wanting to attend for awhile. Well, I went to the class hosted by Phoenix Police Department last week and figured I'd share my experiences.

The class is three days long and started out with a few hours of classroom lecture. We introduced ourselves and discussed our department training programs and philosophies. We also discussed some benchmarks for what makes satisfactory training/drills and ideas on what we can do to make training more efficient. We broke up into groups and were given the task of creating four drills per group. Each drill was given a set of parameters that had to be met such as a certain type of firearm and a max number of rounds for the drill. Each drill was also given a max time limit of 45, 40 or 30 minutes. This timeframe included setup and running each drill twice.

Days Two and Three were spent running each other through our drills. After each run we'd critique our students who would then in turn critique us. Afterward the instructors would comment on what they liked or didn't like about the drills and changes to consider for next time.

Overall, the class was a positive experience. My agency runs skill builders and such now but, in my experience, we generally devolve into two categories. Cat One are the instructors who have little or no outside experience. Their skill drills usually consist of taking a piece of our qualification course and running that as a warm up or stand alone drill. Cat Two are instructors who shoot competition and usually set up some type of high round count field course. Both can be fun and beneficial but not as efficient as they could be.

With the topics covered and drills created in the NLEFIA class I now have a better understanding of what can be accomplished with a minimum number of rounds and in a condensed time format. I'd recommend the class to any LE instructor who wants to help take his department training to the "next level."

Too bad I didn't take photos or videos. But here's a drill that is representative of what we put together in my class.

https://youtu.be/QyE54yXUnP8

Thanks for taking the time to read my post.




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