Tunnel vision and the incident commander: why the command post falls apart, and how to fix it

Taking chaos and turning it into control is the hardest work on the scene. It’s also the work that gets quietly sabotaged when the commander is buried in administrative tracking instead of commanding.

Picture a big public event, a crowd of thousands, units spread across the venue. A fight breaks out near one gate and the IC locks onto it: pulls officers, works the radio, watches it settle. While that corner has everyone’s attention, a second crowd is building on the far side, a medical call turning into a push, and nobody is calling it because the person who would is buried in the first one. By the time it gets loud enough to break through, it is already the bigger problem. That is tunnel vision, and it is where command posts fall apart.

It does not take a crowd to do it. The radio has a ton of traffic, the phone in your pocket won’t stop buzzing, every unit that can respond is saying so, and someone on scene is standing in front of you trying to tell you something. You’re supposed to be reading the threat and getting the next decision right, and instead you’re trying to remember who you put on the perimeter.

Pull the after-action reports from almost any critical incident and two findings come up again and again: communication broke down, and the command post was disorganized. Not the tactics. Not the officers’ courage or commitment. The coordination. The picture. The way information did, or didn’t, move. It’s a situational awareness failure, not a personnel one.

That’s not a knock on the people running these scenes. It’s the predictable result of asking one person to do two fundamentally different jobs at the same time, under the worst conditions imaginable.

The two jobs an IC is doing at once

When you take command of a growing incident, you’re responsible for two things that pull in opposite directions:

• Solving the problem. The tactical and legal decisions only you can make: reading the threat, weighing force against the standard, working the incident toward a resolution.
• Managing the machine. Tracking who’s on scene, what they’re assigned to, what’s already happened, and what you still need.

The second job is administrative, and it never stops. Every unit that arrives, every assignment you make, every request that comes in is one more thing to hold in your head, and meanwhile the phone won’t stop, the radio won’t stop, and someone on scene is trying to tell you something. That’s how tunnel vision sets in. The administrative load crowds out the decisions, and the picture narrows to whatever is loudest in the moment. The decisions you’re crowding out are the ones that matter most: the force decisions, weighed against Graham v. Connor and California’s “necessary” deadly-force standard under Penal Code 835a as amended by AB 392.

The question that exposes it: “What do you still need?”

A supervisor or a chief calls in and asks the simplest, most reasonable question there is: “What do you still need?”

If you’re holding it all in your head, that question is a scramble. You know roughly what you have. You’re less sure what’s missing, because what’s missing is, by definition, the thing you haven’t had a chance to think about yet.

With the picture organized in front of you, the answer is immediate. You can see that you have four units on the perimeter, that you’re short one for an arrest team, that the arrest team hasn’t actually been formed yet, and that EMS still needs to be moved to staging. The gaps are visible before they become the thing that goes wrong, not discovered after.

Incident Command does the administrative job for you

This is exactly what a shared incident command workspace is for. It organizes the administrative load early, so it stops living in your head:

• Current resources. Who’s on scene and what they’re assigned to, visible, not remembered.
• Future resources. What’s requested, what’s en route, what still needs to be called.
• Incident history. What’s happened so far, captured as it happens instead of reconstructed afterward.
• Gaps. The perimeter hole, the unformed arrest team, the EMS unit that isn’t staged: the things you’d otherwise only catch when someone asks.

And if you’re running a scribe, they work inside the same live workspace, so what they capture is the operational picture itself, not a separate notebook that has to be reconciled later.

A complete picture, for you and for everyone joining

The same organized view that keeps you out of tunnel vision is the one every supporting role inherits. When a supervisor, a SWAT element, or command staff joins, they don’t pull you off the scene to get briefed. They step into the command view you’ve already built. That’s the value at the center of the patrol to SWAT handoff. The administrative coordination that used to consume you becomes something everyone can see for themselves.

Put your energy where it belongs

Here’s the real point. The reason to offload resource management isn’t neatness. It’s that the decisions deserve your full attention, and right now they’re competing with bookkeeping.

The energy you spend remembering who’s where is energy you’re not spending on the things that actually decide how the incident ends: reading the threat, working toward resolution, and getting the force decisions right. That’s where the commander’s judgment matters most, and it’s exactly the work that suffers when administrative load takes over.

Organizing chaos into control will always be hard work. But the commander’s job is to stay above the whole scene and make the decisions only they can make, not to get pulled into one corner of it and become the system of record for the rest. Hand the tracking to the tool. Keep the judgment where it belongs.

BabbarOps is an independent commercial product and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated on behalf of any law enforcement agency. This article is general information for public-safety professionals and is not legal advice or use-of-force guidance.