Why Police Academy Directors should focus on Five Simple Questions?
The formal training of cops in America usually begins in police academies. Typically lasting 3-6 months, academies are frequently policing’s equivalent to military boot camps. In fact, many of them (like mine) employed former drill instructors as “tac officers”. Their job it seemed to be to convince trainees they were not worthy of working in police work and should bail out before they get themselves or someone else killed. That was my academy experience in the late 1970’s in Los Angeles County.
As I pulled into the academy parking lot on my first day, I was met my a big muscular guy wearing a tan uniform and a smokey bear hat yelling at me as I parked. I stumbled, fumbled and panicked while desperately trying to get my equipment out of my car and run as fast as I could to the safety of a nearby classroom. He followed me to the front door, reminding me that I was already proving myself useless and should just get back in my car and leave! Within three days of this “stress academy” fully a third of the class had quit. And almost everyone was employed by an agency.
I’ve no doubt that police academies have changed dramatically since I went through mine. But there are still those that embrace a culture of elimination as a key indicator of success. This is problematic on so many levels it’s hard to know where to begin.
The cops of my generation were different from those entering policing today on a multitude of levels. And they require a different style of teaching to have a successful academy experience. Using training methods and instructor selection criteria from the “old days” is a recipe for inefficiency at best. If what we need today are cops whose core competencies are consistent with organizational values and contemporary views of the true purpose of policing, then trying to run people out of the business their agencies already deemed them adequate makes no sense.
FPI Fellow Bob Rossi has written a compelling article in which he suggests academy directors should ask themselves five questions about their training operations. While these questions may, at first blush, appear simple, they address the core of the foundational training experience of American police officers. Drawing from decades of experience in higher education, Rossi poses questions that will help policing leaders determine whether the academy programs they use are in alignment with the need to train cops to best serve the communities they will be protecting in the future.
