ICAT training for police, short for Integrating Communications, Assessment, and Tactics, is a scenario-based de-escalation curriculum built by the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) to help patrol officers safely resolve encounters with people who are unarmed, non-compliant, or in a behavioral crisis. It teaches a circular decision-making model, crisis communication skills, and tactical positioning as a single integrated response. Independent studies of agencies that adopted it have found double-digit reductions in use-of-force incidents and injuries to civilians and officers alike.
What ICAT Is Built For
ICAT targets a specific slice of police work: encounters where time and distance let an officer slow things down. A person holding a knife in a parking lot, someone in a suicidal crisis on an overpass, or a disoriented individual refusing commands all fall inside its scope.1Police Executive Research Forum. ICAT Training Guide
It is not a replacement for firearms training or active-shooter protocols. Those remain separate. ICAT fills a different space, the one where traditional force-escalation models tend to produce worse outcomes than they need to.
The Critical Decision-Making Model
At the center of ICAT is the Critical Decision-Making Model, or CDM, a five-step thinking process that replaces the older force-continuum staircase many agencies still use. The CDM is circular. Officers cycle back through the steps as circumstances change rather than marching forward through a fixed sequence.2Police Executive Research Forum. ICAT Module 2 – Critical Decision-Making Model
The five steps are:
- Collect information from dispatch, bystanders, and your own observations.
- Assess the situation, threats, and risks to the public, the subject, and yourself.
- Consider police powers and agency policy that apply to the situation.
- Identify options and determine the best course of action.
- Act, review, and re-assess. If the approach did not work, start again at step one.
The circular design matters. Traditional force continuums implied that once an officer escalated, de-escalation was not part of the model. The CDM builds re-assessment into every cycle, so stepping back is a trained response rather than a deviation from protocol.
What Officers Actually Learn
The full curriculum runs across six modules: an introduction, the CDM, crisis recognition and response, tactical communications, operational safety tactics, and a final integration module built around video case studies and live scenario practice.3Police Executive Research Forum. ICAT Training Guide for Defusing Critical Incidents Two techniques inside those modules do most of the operational work.
The 80-20 Communication Principle
Officers dealing with a person in crisis are trained to spend roughly 80 percent of their communication time listening and only about 20 percent talking.4Police Executive Research Forum. ICAT Module 4 – Tactical Communications That ratio runs counter to how many officers are conditioned to handle non-compliance, where the instinct is to issue repeated commands. ICAT trains active listening, paraphrasing, and non-escalatory body language to build rapport before attempting to direct behavior. The goal is voluntary compliance, not forced compliance.
Distance Plus Cover Equals Time
When officers create physical distance from a subject and position themselves behind cover, they buy time to think, communicate, and wait for additional resources. The training materials note that many of the most questionable police shootings involve officers who closed distance, did not use cover, and did not take advantage of available time.5Police Executive Research Forum. ICAT Module 5 – Operational Safety Tactics Tactical repositioning is framed as expanding the range of options, not retreating. In close quarters with no cover, force is often the only option left.
The training also pushes back on the “we don’t have all day” instinct, encouraging agencies to adjust policies so officers get the time they need to manage these situations and let specialized resources like crisis intervention teams arrive on scene.
Does It Work?
ICAT is one of the few police training programs with rigorous, independently evaluated evidence behind it.
Louisville Metro Police Department
A randomized controlled study of the Louisville Metro Police Department found ICAT training was associated with a 28 percent reduction in use of force by officers, a 26 percent decline in citizen injuries, and a 36 percent reduction in officer injuries.6Police Executive Research Forum. Critical Issues Report – ICAT Training Evaluation That last figure is the one that gets attention, because it directly counters the argument that de-escalation training makes officers less safe. Officers trained in ICAT were injured at lower rates, not higher ones.
Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department
A separate evaluation of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department found a 19.6 percent reduction in subjects who had force used against them and a 25.2 percent reduction in subjects injured during force encounters, with no significant increase in officer injuries. Officers reported using de-escalation skills frequently during crisis encounters and found them effective in practice.7Glenn College of Public Affairs. Evaluation of Integrating Communications, Assessment, and Tactics (ICAT) Training
The Indianapolis study also flagged skill decay. About 40 percent of officers reported needing refresher training, and reinforcement from supervisors and peers mattered a great deal in whether officers kept using the techniques after the initial course.
How Agencies Get and Deliver the Training
The full program requires a minimum of 12 continuous hours of in-person instruction. PERF strongly advises against breaking it into shorter sessions spread across weeks or delivering it online, because neither approach has worked well in practice.8Center for Domestic Preparedness. Integrating Communications, Assessment and Tactics – PER-922 The target audience is all patrol officers, since they are the first to arrive at the incidents ICAT addresses. Research suggests a maximum effective class size of about 45 students.
Most agencies use a train-the-trainer model: a smaller group of officers attend a PERF-led course, then return to teach the full program to the rest of the department. Access to the curriculum materials, including slide decks, videos, and scenario scripts, is restricted to PERF members and officers who have completed a train-the-trainer course. The materials are not freely available for download.
Where ICAT Implementations Fail
PERF’s own guidance is candid about what can go wrong. Several patterns show up repeatedly:
- Cultural resistance. If an agency’s culture emphasizes resolving every encounter as quickly as possible, ICAT is unlikely to take hold.
- Policy conflicts. An agency whose use-of-force policy still follows a traditional escalation continuum will confuse officers trained in the circular model. Policy and training have to align.
- Role-player problems. In smaller agencies, officers playing subjects in scenarios often already know the trainees, which undermines realism.
- Weak instructors. Agencies that assign trainers involuntarily get weaker results than those that pick officers genuinely invested in de-escalation.
- Training decay. Without supervisory reinforcement and periodic refreshers, the skills fade. This is where most implementations quietly lose their impact.
Federal Funding Available to Agencies
The Department of Justice’s COPS Office runs a grant program called Safer Outcomes: Enhancing De-Escalation and Crisis Response Training for Law Enforcement that directly funds the kind of training ICAT provides. In fiscal year 2025, approximately $14 million was made available, with awards scaled by agency size: up to $250,000 for agencies with fewer than 50 sworn officers, up to $350,000 for agencies with 50 to 200 officers, and up to $500,000 for agencies with more than 200 officers. No local match was required.9COPS Office. Safer Outcomes
A separate track targets police academies and state training commissions that want to integrate de-escalation concepts into their standard curricula, with approximately $4 million available and a maximum award of $500,000. Both tracks cover de-escalation tactics, crisis response for people experiencing mental or behavioral health emergencies, and referrals to community-based services. Grant cycles typically open annually, so agencies interested in applying should monitor the COPS Office grants page for current deadlines.
ICAT and CIT Are Not the Same Program
Agencies sometimes confuse ICAT with Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) training. The two overlap in subject matter but serve different purposes. CIT is a 40-hour program that trains a specialized group of volunteer officers to respond to mental health calls, often in partnership with local mental health providers. ICAT is shorter, broader, and designed for every patrol officer regardless of whether they are on a CIT roster. Where CIT focuses deeply on understanding mental illness, ICAT integrates communication, decision-making, and tactical positioning into a single framework that applies to any high-tension encounter with an unarmed or non-firearm-armed subject. Many agencies run both, using CIT for their specialized responders and ICAT as the baseline for all officers.