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Police Training Products. From InVeris Training Solutions. For this reason, law enforcement agencies are obligated to hire, train, and retain a cadre of the most psychologically fit police officers. In the category of self-improvement, more than half of the curriculum focuses on health and fitness. However, police academy training is not standardized across the United States.
The curricula in academies vary by state and often even by academy within a state. Police training is responsible for preparing new hires for this difficult career. Officers attend a relatively brief police academy, which is followed by training in the field. The U. There are various academy formats, including full-time training for six months, part-time training for 12 months, and residential academies, which are quite similar to military boot camps.
Although academy training varies greatly state to state, the average length of such training programs in the United States is h [ 2 ]. According to the US Bureau of Justice, quasi-military or stress-based training involving intense psychological and physical demands are still implemented in almost half of police academies nationally [ 2 ]. Successful completion of the academy certifies officers with police powers in the given jurisdiction. Police academy training has two general aspects.
In California, for example, recruits spend a minimum of h learning content from 42 separate learning domains [ 3 ]. This is done in a didactic format and involves formal testing in which recruits must pass each exam with a certain minimum score. The other component of the police academy involves hands-on training and includes rehearsal and scenario-based, performance appraisals in areas, which include arrest and control, defensive tactics, use of weapons, and driving.
Some of these skills, such as driving, tactical firearms, and arrest and control, are considered perishable and require incumbent officers to receive periodic refresher training throughout their careers e. Similar to the academic portion, recruits must demonstrate proficiency in these skills or fail that learning domain. Most academies allow recruits to fail a certain number of domains and to remediate. If any domain is not satisfactorily passed, the recruit is terminated from the academy.
For instance, such training programs were developed for experienced police trainers to help them incorporate resilience promotion techniques in their police training curricula with police trainees [ 5 , 6 ]. Analogously, effective results have been found in previous studies with special weapons and tactics SWAT teams where SWAT officers were taught about resilience promotion in both a classroom learning environment and a simulated reality training environment; to this end, SWAT officers who incorporated the learning materials into both classroom and simulated reality environments showed a substantially improved capacity to manage challenges on both realistic training environment as well as real life police work [ 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 ].
Traditionally, police academies have been conducted in a paramilitary fashion. Often, academy training staff would be indistinguishable from military drill sergeants, who verbally harass and, even demean recruits who are not measuring up. Pushups, extra running, and writing reports are used as punishment.
This is not a new concern. For over 30 years, there has been a steady stream of criticism, which underscores deficiencies in police academy training when it comes to adequately preparing recruits for the actual demands of the job e. Much of this criticism has come from officers themselves when asked to reflect on the relevance of their academy experience e. The general disconnect between academy training and job preparation tends to revolve around two interrelated issues concerning the content and the delivery of the academy curriculum.
The typical paramilitary format fails to prepare recruits to work in a manner consistent with the community-oriented police services model COPS and neglects basic principles of adult-learning theory.
Essentially, in order to produce officers who are able to successfully perform community-oriented policing techniques e. Past literature has discussed the importance for police academies to adopt an adult-learning theory model e.
Fundamentally, beyond the issues surrounding the best training techniques to prepare recruits to work within a community-oriented policing model, law enforcement agencies are faced with the broader question of what type of police officers are they training?
Recruits who are trained in a manner that is consistent with adult-learning theory are encouraged to develop critical thinking skills, effective communication, and better emotional intelligence. However, this is generally not how police recruits are trained in practice e. Moreover, academies that embrace an adult-learning model recognize the significance of how training is delivered. Keeping pace with the changing demands of contemporary policing, academy training has had to evolve.
It is no longer sufficient for training to teach just the law or to focus only on the perishable skills mentioned above. It is extremely counterproductive to train recruits in an authoritarian, pedagogical format.
Nevertheless, the voices calling for change in police academy practices tend to lack prescriptive details on how to accomplish this change and, more precisely, how to teach, strengthen, reinforce, and support the skills needed to graduate officers who are psychologically prepared to competently perform in the field.
For example, although the Law Enforcement Foundation in Ohio identified twelve job competencies in , police academies appear to have made little real progress in training recruits in many of these important skills:. Similarly, in , the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training identified ten psychological screening dimensions for agencies to consider when hiring police officers.
For convenience and clarity, these skills will be separated into four groups: cognitive, emotional, social, and moral. In addition to defining the skills, attention is paid to the ways in which specific academy experiences can teach and strengthen each skill. Police work is mentally challenging. This has led to a somewhat longstanding debate about the extent to which law enforcement agencies should set minimum education requirements for their new hires.
The research findings, however, have been somewhat mixed. The general argument is that formal education and the experience of attending college instills in future police officers a level of mental flexibility and other psychological skills, which are not found in their peers who have only completed high school e. More specifically, Paoline and Terrill found that, although officers with any college experience tended to use less verbal force, it was only officers who completed four years of college who used less physical force than their less educated peers [ 29 ] p.
The discussion of formal education is contrasted with the role of experience and where that experience can be attained. For example, officers without formal education, but who have more job experience showed less use of verbal and physical force than newer officers [ 29 ] p.
However, not all who attend college acquire these skills, and college is not the only way for individuals to obtain them. Furthermore, leaving such important skill acquisition to chance is unnecessary when police agencies can ensure that all recruits develop these skills during academy training.
Police academies can seamlessly integrate essential cognitive skill training into current academy curricula.
Although current practices tend to do a better job addressing these cognitive skills than, say, the emotional skills, this is usually done indirectly. Their performance may lead to inferred conclusions about decision-making, judgment, and impulse control.
There are two problems when staff make such conclusions. Second, training staff members are not basing such conclusions on a direct assessment of decision-making. The importance of these cognitive skills for effective police performance dictates a need for standardized and specific measurements of the cognitive skills themselves.
To impart and strengthen the four cognitive skills, academies need to find a way to reduce the didactic, micromanagement of recruits i. This can be done in various learning domains as a normal course of action.
This should also be done, after each practical exercise where recruits are required to discuss why they chose to do what they did. By hearing the rationale of peers, rather than the wrath of instructors, they will develop better critical thinking skills and improve their impulse control and decision-making.
Conscientiousness and Adaptability are not cultivated in a traditional paramilitary police academy. When the academy shifts to an adult learning model, recruits are confronted through scenarios associated with various learning domains with a requirement to be more flexible, to think on their feet, and to demonstrate conscientious work behavior. Punishment is replaced with logical consequences. For example, being late or forgetting a piece of equipment is not met with extra push-ups or having to write a report.
Instead, these behaviors will result in the same outcomes a recruits will experience when such behavior happens on the job i. In other words, the traditional academy model does not teach recruits the importance of dependability and flexibility; it just reinforces compliance. Therefore, to build these cognitive skills, academies should mirror the supervision and discipline model of the agencies where their recruits will soon work.
Police work is emotionally challenging. In terms of longevity, much has been written about the emotional toll that police work takes on officers, which can lead to, among other consequences, debilitating levels of burnout e. A contributing factor, beyond the routine exposure to trauma and human suffering, was found to be the emotional exhaustion officers experience from constantly showing the public emotions other than what they actually feel, e.
However, a recent study found that newer officers who had not yet been exposed to on-duty traumatic incidents were less emotionally well-adjusted than trauma-exposed senior officers [ 36 ], who have developed more resiliency. Emotional skills can improve the extent to which police officers successfully manage the emotional challenges of the job. On a very promising and apropos note, research has demonstrated that police officers can be taught to improve their emotion regulation skills e.
Another important skill is emotional intelligence, which, in most definitions, also involves emotion regulation. Individuals with higher EI tend to handle stress better than those with lower EI, and EI has been correlated with police performance [ 41 ].
Moreover, there have been promising findings that training can improve emotional intelligence e. Academy training is crucial to properly prepare recruits to successfully cope with the emotional challenges of police work.
Integrally linked to this, law enforcement agencies must ensure that academy training teaches recruits evidence-based techniques to successfully manage routine and traumatic stressors. A recent publication from the U. The first step is to instill a culture of wellness.
This begins by structuring the academy to include regular, formal debriefings, which include recruits, veteran officers, and academy staff. The debriefings establish a pattern for recruits to talk about their reactions i. Academies should encourage, if not require, recruits to keep a journal. For example, in one study, nurses who wrote freely in a journal each day had less compassion fatigue and more compassion satisfaction than those who did not keep a journal [ 48 ].
If academies establish this as a mandatory activity, recruits would not have to share the content of their journals, but would be required to verify that they write each day. The hope is that, once the habit is established, the recruits will continue the practice of journaling even electronically, e.
Fundamental to successful emotional regulation and stress tolerance is learning performance enhancement techniques, which keep recruits operating at peak performance levels. Much like athletes who have to learn to control the intensity of emotions in order to compete at their highest level, police officers need to understand the role that their emotions can play in the performance of their duties.
The police academy is where this training should begin. In addition to the previously mentioned development of emotional intelligence skills, recruits should be taught skills to reduce acute levels of anxiety e. Rather than training rote repetition of, for example, arrest and control techniques, recruits need more time rehearsing these techniques in highly stressful conditions where they can develop confidence and competence in their ability to manage their own level of internal distress.
In addition to remaining calm enough to properly escalate contacts according to the use of force continuum, it is imperative for academies to train recruits how to manage their emotions in order to properly deescalate volatile situations. This chronic stress leads to many negative health outcomes [ 49 ], which contribute to numerous work-related difficulties.
For example, one study showed that recruits experienced less stress and reported better mood after participation in a yoga program that was given during the academy [ 50 ].
Fitness, nutrition, sleep hygiene, avoidance of self-medication e. The goal is for the recruits to establish a commitment to their personal wellness during the academy and to maintain these good health practices throughout their careers. Police work is socially challenging. In addition to the skills necessary to effectively navigate the difficulties often encountered when interacting with members of the community, police officers are faced with significant obstacles coping with the strain that police work places on their friendships and their relationships with loved ones.
This pressure is especially difficult for female police officers and, even more so, for married female officers with children [ 51 ]. Police officers often struggle to maintain a healthy work-life balance and may bring their work demeanor home with them, which can negatively impact their family members and, especially, their marriages e. Readers are referred to Kirschman [] for an excellent discussion of the stressors experienced by police families [ 55 ]. For example, after graduating the police academy and beginning patrol work often on the weekends and on nightshift , many officers begin to hear grumblings from their spouse and children about never being home and about missing important family functions.
These complaints can grow into direct pressure on officers to quit their job. Fundamentally, much of the family-related consternation stems from a lack of preparation and support. The transactional nature and complexity of police-family stress dictates that law enforcement agencies take steps to address the needs of police families.
This can be done in several ways. First, mental health resources should be readily available for officers, their spouses, and their children.
Second, agencies can do a better job training their officers to prepare for this source of distress. This training should focus both on detection of early warning signs of family stress and on ways to prevent many common sources of it.
Third, agencies can directly engage spouses and family members of their officers. This can be done through peer-support programs e. Sponsored By Sponsored By.
Criminal M. Removing handcuffs to deliver aid. Action Target joins forces with VirTra, forming global teaming agreement. InVeris Training Solutions releases 2 new target systems. New bills aim to clarify police UOF reforms in Wash. Police Training Products. From Ultimate Training Munitions.
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