Police Training
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Police training academies have recently been beset by a host of problems that have undermined the effectiveness of their training regimens. Many academies have been subjected to a constant stream of turnover in the leadership cadres of their program. This has been exacerbated by a lack of focus in their missions and compounded by the lack of systematic and rigorous evaluation process. The result is that police academies have been slow to react to the changes in policing on the ground, and especially to the proliferation of community-oriented policing (COPS). These various and interrelated problems have contributed to the erosion of the effectiveness of police training programs. The only way to change this reality is to reduce the turnover among the leadership of police academies and to institute a systematic evaluation process whereby the curriculum and techniques of police training programs are compared to the skills and knowledge required to be an effective police officer on the streets. It is vitally important to our nation's safety to field motivated, skilled, and educated police officers. Without a comprehensive and well evaluated training system that fosters these values in police recruits, police training programs are really just a stab in the dark. Before analyzing police training today, it may be valuable to take a brief look at the evolution of policing in the United States over the past hundred years. By looking at the evolving nature of policing, w
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adership have had an adverse impact on the continuity of the training practices within police academies as well.
Stable leadership is particularly important for police academies because their mission can be opaque at times. The reason for this is that police training has to serve two sometimes conflicting purposes. On the one hand, police training courses need to impart specific skills, such high-speed pursuit driving, handgun use and safety, personal defense tactics, and arrest techniques. On the other hand, police training courses also need to expand the knowledge base of their recruits by providing high-level instruction in areas such as the law, interpersonal communication, community awareness and race relations, and problem solving skills (Marion, 1998). In other words, there is a fundamental tension between the need to train and educate police officers. Some states, such as Pennsylvania and Oklahoma, have addressed this tension through statutes that include the word education along with training in naming police officer training commissions. This tension is also key in that it affects the length and content of police training. That is precisely where stable leadership and clear identification of missions make a
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Approximate Word count = 3380
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)
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