For the past 60 years, concerns over U.S. police officers' excessive use of force and race-based targeting of citizens, and deteriorating relations between police and communities of color have spurred calls to change the focus of officers' preservice basic training. Yet research suggests that few of the recommendations proposed have taken root.
In a new panel study, researchers assessed basic training of new police hires in hundreds of U.S. police academies. The study showed continuity over time in total required hours of training and a disproportionate distribution of total training hours for areas central to the crime fighting role of police, highlighting strong intransigence in the field.
The study was conducted by researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and the University of Central Florida (UCF). It is published in Criminology and Public Policy, a publication of the American Society of Criminology.
"We found strong evidence of long-term resistance to change in police basic training given the continuing overemphasis of traditional, crime fighting 'warrior' aspects of basic training over 'guardian' aspects such as community partnerships," explains John Sloan, emeritus professor of criminal justice at UAB, who co-authored the study. "These findings, combined with recent qualitative analyses of police basic training, suggest that decades of efforts to get the occupation to change what new police officers learn during basic training have failed."
Despite concerns by national level commissions, scholars, and practitioners about the substance of police academy basic training, this study is the first since the 1980s to examine the content of basic training at multiple police academies over an extended period that included two eras of policing: community-oriented and post-9/11 or evidence-based. Using secondary data from a census of 421 police academies across the United States that operated continuously between 2002 and 2018, the study assessed continuity and change in six core areas of basic law enforcement training of new police hires:
- Operations: first aid/CPR, computers and information systems, operation of emergency vehicles, investigations, and patrol procedures),
- Weapons/defensive tactics (non-lethal weapons, self-defense tactics, and firearms skills),
- Legal training (juveniles/juvenile justice procedure, criminal law, and constitutional law),
- Self-improvement: stress prevention and management, ethics and integrity, acquisition of a foreign language, and health and fitness,
- Community-oriented policing: mediation and conflict management, and cultural diversity, and
- Special topics: hate crimes and bias crimes, domestic preparedness and terrorism, and domestic violence.
The study showed continuity over time in total required hours of basic law enforcement training, including required hours of core curriculum training, with training averaging roughly 11 weeks of 40-hour weeks. In addition, across the six areas, prioritization of instruction remained relatively unchanged. Finally, within each of the six core training areas, the average amount of time allocated to each of the topics in the core curriculum varied considerably.
Police operations and weapons and defensive tactics received the greatest allotment of academy training time, while time spent on legal training declined. Moreover, training devoted to special topics, which have grown in importance in the last half century, received just over half a week on average. The fewest hours of training were devoted to community-oriented policing.
"Our findings reinforce the idea that the 'warrior content' of academy training takes precedence over training that supports police officers' role as guardians," suggests Eugene Paoline, professor of criminal justice at UCF, who coauthored the study.
"Recruiters, academy administrators and instructors, and agency leaders must take steps toward a complete and comprehensive reorientation of police recruitment and basic training that stresses the importance of new hires acquiring a toolkit that has a guardian-based foundation and emphasis but allows for the far fewer instances when officers need to use warrior tools," adds Matt Nobles, professor of criminal justice at UCF, who coauthored the study.
These goals could be achieved, the authors say, by proportionally reducing the total required hours devoted to training in select operations, weapons and defensive tactics, and related topics, while proportionally increasing total required hours of training in guardian-related topics (e.g., interpersonal communication, conflict management, de-escalation, cultural diversity, community partnerships).
Among the limitations of their study, the authors note that they did not assess the specific content of the training, their data represent self-report surveys, and they did not consider potential sources of variation in training curricula (e.g., academies' affiliation with different law enforcement agencies or educational institutions or regional location).
