April 20, 2015

If we are honest with ourselves, we experience close calls for injury or property damage on a daily basis—merging onto highways, running to catch a bus or just walking up and down stairs. You can probably think of such an incident in your own life in the last 24 hours—one in which after you regained your footing or got safely into the flow of traffic you thought, “Whew, that was lucky.” This is part of being human. In many workplace environments these are known as near misses. More specifically, a near miss is “an incident in which no property is damaged and no personal injury is sustained, but where, given a slight shift in time or position, damage or injury easily could have occurred.”¹

One of the best ways we can systematically reduce incidents that cause injuries or fatalities is to study these near misses. Research has shown there are hundreds of near misses for every serious incident,² and “history has shown repeatedly that most loss producing events (incidents), both serious and catastrophic, were preceded by warnings or near-miss events.”³ Systems like this have been used extensively in the aviation, medicine, petrochemical and nuclear power industries for years. They have proven invaluable in reducing preventable errors and have, undoubtedly, saved lives. Research has also shown that even just the act of reporting reminds workers of the hazards inherent in their jobs, helping them to change their own mental safety models and become more compliant with existing safety regulations.⁴ So if we take the time to track and analyze these near-miss incidents, we can use evidence to inform changes to policy, training and practice for increased safety.

Law enforcement officers are in a high-risk profession where opportunities for injury or damage to equipment abound. To help reduce this risk, the Police Foundation and the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office) launched LEO Near Miss in 2014. LEO Near Miss is an anonymous online error reporting system designed to help officers and agencies learn from the real-life near-miss experiences of their peers across the country. Officers can quickly enter incident details through a guided questionnaire and following an internal review, a report is published on the site.

Reports are searchable, quick to read and the lessons learned are clearly identified. In one report, an officer found himself with a gun to his head after assuming an alarm call was a false alarm and entering a building without waiting for back-up. He safely disarmed and arrested the robber, but learned the importance of waiting for back-up and taking alarm calls seriously, even if most are false. With no adverse consequences, most likely only his supervisor and immediate friends would have heard his near-miss story. Now, through LEO Near Miss, the opportunity exists for officers across the country to learn from his potentially costly error.

LEO Near Miss puts the power to prevent tragedy in the hands of those with the courage to share their mistakes. The more officers use it, the more it will provide their peers with the knowledge to help them go home safely every day.

To learn more about LEO Near Miss, visit www.LEONearMiss.org.
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¹ OSHA and National Safety Council Alliance, Near Miss Reporting Systems (Washington, DC: National Safety Council, 2013), http://www.nsc.org/WorkplaceTrainingDocuments/Near-Miss-Reporting-System….
² Frank E. Bird, Jr., George L. Germain, and M. Douglas Clark, Practical Loss Control Leadership, 3rd edition (Duluth, GA: Det Norske Veritas USA, Inc., 2003); Herbert W. Heinrich, Industrial Accident Prevention, 3rd edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950).
³ From Near-Miss to At-Risk: How Untracked Data Costs Lives and Kills Profit (Toronto, ON: Intelix Technologies Inc., 2014), http://www.intelex.com/download/documentation/77170c7b03854b93bcc21f46ac….
⁴ Peter M. Masden, “These Lives Will Not Be Lost In Vain: Organizational Learning from Disaster in U.S. Coal Mining,” Organization Science 20, no. 5 (September–October 2009): 861–875.