By Chief Joel F. Shults, Ed.D.
For various reasons, my wife and I decided to home school our two children for a year. One of the things that we discovered is how efficient and flexible homeschooling can be compared to public schools. Movement from class to class or activity to activity, slowing down for some students, managing discipline, and scheduling meals, snacks, bathroom breaks, and bus lines steal from instructional time. Individualized learning at home, blended with experiential learning such as supermarket math, can create a rich and efficient learning environment.
Much law enforcement training follows the public school assembly line pattern designed to accommodate the industrial factory age. Make no mistake, I am a supporter of both public and homeschooling. My wife is a teacher, I sit on my local school board, have a doctorate in education, and our partly homeschooled children grew up to be a special education therapist and a university professor. So, my observation that much of a school day is devoted to creating efficiencies of mass movement is not harsh criticism, but a question of innovation.
There has been too little innovation in police training and, in some ways, we’ve gone backward. Recently renewed calls for officers to have college degrees, first articulated on a national basis from a Presidential Commission Report initiated by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, do not answer the call from current police reform advocates for better training.
The typical entry to policing involves reaching the age of 21, completing a police academy either before or after being hired, undergoing a period of closely supervised field training, then fully entering into police responsibilities while completing a probationary period and frequent evaluation. According to the National Police Foundation, about one third (30.2 percent) of police officers in the United States have a four-year college degree. A little more than half (51.8 percent) have a two-year degree, while 5.4 percent have a graduate degree. In addition, well over half of law enforcement basic training academies are part of a college campus. So, for discussion starters, the law enforcement career has a much higher percentage of college-educated officers than critics imagine.
A U.S. Bureau of Justice Studies report shows that the average police academy is 21 weeks long. The field training programs where an officer rides with a training officer can range from several months to a year, with a probationary period that may last up to two years. After that, critical skills are retained with in-service training, training required by insurers to avoid liability, and specialty training and new curriculum items. This creates a full plate for agency training officers and leaders.
The double-edged sword of training means that while it may create a better officer, it removes the officer from service. That means that training needs to be justifiable and efficient. Current models of police training often rely on a certain number of hours in a subject. Measuring learning by the number of hours in a classroom has never been a valid way to determine whether the objectives of a course have been met. Course objectives must be identifiable and measurable. To be identifiable and measurable, course content must be fact-based.
This reliance on science, research, and data in developing curriculum is often absent from the emotionally laden demands for more police training. Police leaders are very open to additional training, but their main mission of public safety must not be compromised. I know of a mayoral candidate in a city with 700 police officers who was incensed because the department’s administration would not commit to an additional forty hours of training in dealing with the emotionally disturbed. Was there research showing that this training was needed based on outcomes of current encounters? Was there research to say that there is a curriculum that would improve outcomes if implemented? What specific behavioral and knowledge outcomes have been shown to validate the training? Is forty hours a magic number worth taking police officers off the street for a total of 28,000 manhours and the logistical nightmare of scheduling and overtime costs? Could objectives be achieved by a training memo, a squad briefing, or computer-based modules?
Police leaders and community members should welcome new training mandates only if those kinds of questions are answered with facts and logic.