The latest trend in the press thinking that they are experts in all things, is the claim that US police training needs to be more like police training in Europe. They claim that police in other countries receive more training than the 6 months that is typical in the US.
police recruits in Japan get between 15 and 21 months of training. Police in Germany get 2.5 years of training. And in Finland, police education takes three years to complete.
So they want to make police training a 4 year degree? What will that cost? I do agree with them that police training is too much like military boot camp. If you train your police like soldiers, you can expect that your police will act like soldiers. I don’t think that the problem is in how long the training is, I think the problem is in the institutional mindset- “War on crime,” the “War on drugs,” that sort of thing. When you think of criminal justice as warfare, you get police who act as if they are on a battlefield.
That’s where my agreement with them ends. The next claim simply tells me that they have never dealt with someone who needs to be taken somewhere, but isn’t going to go. You are assuming that the people who police contact are rational.
As a street medic, and even in the ED, we encounter people who can’t be reasoned with, yet still need to go somewhere or do something. Whether it’s due to mental illness or simply because they are assholes, some people just need to be forced into compliance. Talking only works on people who are rational.
Imagine negotiating with a spree shooter. Someone who believes in what they are doing so strongly that they are willing to gun down a dozen or more people isn’t going to be negotiated out of their act.
You can tell that some people have juts never had to deal with those kinds of people.
11 Comments
Bad Dancer · February 10, 2023 at 6:58 am
I agree with you about the mindset but its baffling on why the police reform and ACAB folks rarely direct their anger and desire for reform at the city who sets the standards and goals for the PD.
I’ve said it before but I remember at the academy being told “Everyone outside these walls is your enemy now” about how we couldn’t trust anyone and were at war (theres that word again). Community service and spirit was rarely discussed.
You hear the folks who say it takes longer to get a certificate to cut hair than be a cop and instead of asking why is that certificate necessary and takes so long just go after the hot topic issue instead.
Skeptic · February 10, 2023 at 8:59 am
Japan and Finland don’t have the vibrants that we do. I have talked to many cops and they will, to a man, tell you that arresting a black person is different and far more challenging than a white. As far as Germany, see how well those highly trained cops are doing with containing their influx of criminal Middle Easterners.
I do agree with the “war” mindset, though.
joe · February 10, 2023 at 6:41 pm
we didn’t train with that mindset… the way we trained is no matter what happens to me I’m going home… fight through it… in almost 30 years I never had to shoot anyone but came close many times…I never once abused anyone but I body slammed my fair share of people… my philosophy was to treat others as I would want to be treated and if they didn’t want to listen I have them 2 alternatives… you can do what I ask and it will be the easy way… you don’t want the alternative… some instructors believe it’s us against them… why some of these officers act the way they do…
EN2 SS · February 10, 2023 at 9:00 am
“they have never dealt with someone who needs to be taken somewhere, but isn’t going to go.”
Back when I worked for a living, a couple of the bosses were wannabe cops, ride around and act like the assholes they were, and frequently talked about crap they’d been involved with. One of my co-workers was a Army Special Forces Vet (Iraq war). We were discussing the assholes one day and I told him that the people they dealt with just wanted to get away and would just fight to accomplish that, that they had never dealt with someone that wanted them dead. He agreed that it’s a new world coming and they would have a rude awakening someday. More frequently by the day, the cops are being attacked as if they are in a real war. Hell, all of us have to keep our heads on swivels just to try to keep out of the shit going on, cops have to go to the insanity. We all, cops and normal people better get ready for the shitstorm that is escalating daily, I think things will soon erupt into open warfare shithole countries.
Aesop · February 10, 2023 at 10:39 am
Police training will always expand to fill all available space, for any variable you plug in.
Character should be primary, and non-negotiable.
After that, the first thing police training should be, is only for people smart enough to be cops. Instead of taking the barely-70th-percentile-IQ Diversity Beans who can barely read, let alone grasp, the penal codes and Constitution, they should be taking the most intelligent graduates totally regardless of whatever identity group boxes they check. They won’t get a lot of Mensa members, but they certainly shouldn’t be picking preferentially from the bottom of the barrel, either.
A lot of the current problems with the police are because they’re deliberately hiring the stupid bunch who punch quota tickets, rather than finding adaptive problem-solvers who can think outside the box, find 57 ways to skin a given cat, and more importantly, to not shoot the dog.
The second thing they should be is big enough to kick the @$$#$ of anybody who won’t color in between civilization’s lines.
Hiring badge-heavy half-witted scrawny little f**ks is what encourages the miscreants to first lip off to the cops when told to cease and desist, and then follow up by physically resisting.
Then it’s a rodeo.
Get that right, and whatever training you throw at your people will get the job done, and they’ll grasp it faster, and perform it better.
Next door neighbor threw in his retirement papers from LAPD, shortly after the Rodney King Discount Televisions And Sneakers Festival, but also because the department policy required supervisors to proofread and re-write all reports from primary officers, after one young Diversity Hire lad described an accident, including summoning a “toe truck”.
No word on how they hauled the rest of the anatomy away.
Once the city jumped that shark, he could see it was time to go.
It’s the same reason I don’t care what’s hanging inside a firefighter’s underpants either. I just want them to be capable of placing a ladder against a building without calling for 5 people for backup, climbing it with a 50′ hosepack, blowing out the fire, chopping down a door, and carrying the average-sized person’s passed-out @$$ back to the ground.
If they can’t do that, they’re not qualified, and in the wrong line of work, because gravity and fires don’t give a sh*t what EEOC boxes you check.
At the rate the nonsense is going we’ll be hiring blind people to be airline pilots and air traffic controllers, and mandating deaf people get a shot at becoming recording engineers.
Divemedic · February 10, 2023 at 7:37 pm
When I was an EMS supervisor, the stuff I had to read when I did QA on reports was incredible. One of them read:
“Folks be cooking a pizza and it caught fire. While we be putting it out, man had smoke in hailation. We took him to the hospital.”
I wasn’t allowed to do anything more than remediate his diversity hired ass.
Non-Conformist · February 10, 2023 at 11:18 am
Marxist EDU indoctrination guarantees the hive borg will all have the right thoughts.
The college credits and credentials chickenshit conformists will fight tooth and nail for their long leash slave chains because licking bankster boots is a feature to the dull.
Some debate about the Werner Herzog quote about we get to be the Germans now with 1/3 watches while 1/3 kills and 1/3 does nothing.
Even if he didn’t say it that is where we are.
Beans · February 10, 2023 at 1:19 pm
If they’d spend 2 years going to Police and Procedures training, basically boot camp, intermediate and then advanced training, with electives at the end, maybe, then the Police would be better trained and more knowledgeable.
My experience with 4 year degree cops is… they suck. And Public Safety degree is only slightly harder to get than a Phys Ed degree. Still harder to get than an Education degree or a Social Work degree, but not by much.
Make Police and Prison training into basically trade-school training.
Aesop · February 10, 2023 at 5:46 pm
Hereabouts, that’s exactly what it is. Multiple state-run non-affiliated academies exist, usually 1 per county or region; you put yourself through like JC/vocational ed, and interested departments interview graduates like college draft picks. The instructors are all experienced LEOs from a variety of local departments, which tends to even out the wrinkles. They’re probably also talent scouting.
Only L.A. and a couple of other major-city departments can afford a full-time dedicated department academy.
The biggest problems with the para-militaristic policing model is twofold:
a) it doesn’t work, and never has
b) it’s always spearheaded by never-served wannabes like LAPD Chief Daryl Gates (who pioneered SWAT teams, and presided over the Rodkey King fiasco and riots), who stated he wanted the LAPD to be like the US Marines, based on his fund of experience gained while serving solely in the Merchant Marine. Srsly. You could look it up.
The last police administrator who instilled any good military values in his department was probably Teddy Roosevelt.
And Peel’s Principles should be the bedrock of policing in America, not Chesty Puller nor MCRD.
When armed mobs in human waves are attacking police stations like it was Bloody Ridge on Guadalcanal, I’ll reconsider that opinion. Or, if we stipulate that henceforth, only former military MPs and MAs will be eligible for hiring, who’ve been through years of actual military training and discipline, not the candy-ass shake-and-bake civvie ersatz version. Not before.
Divemedic · February 10, 2023 at 7:39 pm
It isn’t just the cops. Paramedic and nursing school instruction is horrible.
Any nurse who would accept what they are paying instructors in lieu of what they could make as a nurse tells you all you need to know about their bedside skills.
Aesop · February 13, 2023 at 11:52 am
Don’t get me started. 🙂
No one should be eligible to become an instructor of nursing with less than 20 years of bedside clinical experience. That would end the b.s. and weed out the idiots overnight.
I could have trained my entire nursing class in one 12-month program, which was instead stretched out over 4 years to validate the degree, milk the students, and keep the instructors from having to actually, y’know, work.
Which compelled applicants to take 4 times as long to learn the same material they could have absorbed in a single year, and delay their paid employment as long.
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