Untrained, Unprepared and Unleashed?

 

Officials "need to clean the department of bad apples…

They need to get intensive training and make sure de-escalation comes first."

Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen to CNN responding to the death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of the Memphis police.

Isn’t that the way it always it is? A few “bad apples” and send the rest back to the classroom for sensitivity training? We’ve had riots over blue-on-black killings. Really costly riots. In lives and property. With the advent of body cams and ubiquitous smart phone footage, we’ve even got few, very few, criminal convictions over cops deploying excessive violence, often resulting in the death of a suspect who may have committed a relatively minor crime or infraction. There are rightwing MAGA officials who want to return to our police practices of yesteryear, where cops had fairly free rein without much in the way of personal risk. And we have municipalities writing multimillion dollar settlements to victims of success excess. Why?

Is the United States different from the rest of the developed world? Do we need to supply local police departments with surplus military armored personnel carriers, weapons and technology – adding training in military assault tactics – because we live in a nation where there are as many civilian guns as there are people, including well over 20 million military grade semiautomatic assault rifles? Is it really an “armed us” vs an “armed them”? Do cops who hang together after work really scan the rest of us looking for perps? Is it a more generic “us” vs “them”? That well-trained tactical unit in Memphis – called “Scorpion” – was home to the five cops who have been charged with second-degree murder in Nichols’ death. The unit was immediately disbanded.

What’s the problem? First, take a good look at the above set of photographs. Could be what you might expect in an Army or Marine boot camp regimen, soldiers training for combat against trained enemy soldiers, but all of the above pictures are of various American police training facilities. We just keep talking about fixing the system, adding sensitivity and de-escalation training classes to our nation’s police force. Our nation’s police do place themselves in harms way every day. Their personal risks are increasingly dangerous, as technology and a gun-loving Supreme Court ensure that countless numbers of guns are kept in civilian hands with few if any meaningful restrictions. Is that why it seems we are training our cops for war? Barking sergeants with most of the training focused on military discipline and tactical weapons proficiency?

Jack Date, writing for the January 30th ABC News, presents an entirely different take: “A recent report by the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), an independent research organization that focuses on critical issues in policing, shows significant gaps in how police in the U.S. are trained when compared to their international counterparts…

“‘Almost every major aspect of policing has fundamentally changed in recent decades, except for one: how we train officers,’ the report states… Police training in the U.S. is most often measured in weeks, while in many other countries it is measured in months or years… ‘Our training is outdated, antiquated, and is trying to do on the cheap what other places have done in a comprehensive way,’ PERF Executive Director Chuck Wexler told ABC News.

“A 2018 Justice Department study of state and local law enforcement training academies found that the average length of core basic police training in the U.S. is 833 hours, or less than 22 weeks. A more recent survey by PERF found a similar result, with responding agencies reporting an average of 20 weeks of basic police training… In comparison, 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…

“Many police academies in the U.S. still resemble military boot camps, with cadets in buzz cuts and hair buns getting yelled at by drill instructors… ‘Barking orders and giving commands and sort of a military kind of thinking — it's not a problem-solving approach. It's not critical thinking,’ Wexler said… Much of the training in American police academies emphasizes skills like marksmanship and defensive tactics, with less focus on so-called ‘soft skills’ like communication and crisis intervention… ‘People call those soft skills — those are not soft skills, those are hard,’ Wexler says. ‘Communicating, being a good listener, responding, thinking, and sometimes saying, 'You know what, we need to step back, we're not the right ones here. For this we need to bring someone else in.' Those are important skills, to know your limitations, and also to ask the right questions.’…

“Meanwhile, police departments across the country continue to struggle with staffing shortages. Qualified new recruits are in short supply, and many departments are not keeping pace with the number of police retiring or leaving the profession… Expanding police training is costly and could have the undesirable effect of slowing down the pipeline of new officers at a time when law enforcement agencies can't get new police online fast enough. According to a 2020 PERF survey, 71% of police agencies spend less than 5% of their budgets on recruit training.”

The police mantra, often posted on police cars in many cities, to protect and serve, gets lost in building a team esprit de corps that substitutes an “us vs them” police code that serves officers but not the public they are sworn to protect. We need to stop training our cops, many of whom have served in our armed forces, as if they were in a military function. They are supposed to be peacekeepers and public servants. The gun and the baton should not be a first line in our police world, but cops do face rough streets, piled with illicit drugs and well-armed gangs. So…

Start with better focus on the obligation to understand, deescalate, protect and serve. Spend the extra time and money in training… or be prepared to watch municipalities’ continue to write big settlement checks, watch angry mobs feeling helpless against blue-prone-violent-“solutions” riot because nothing else seems to work… as citizens place unchecked crime as one of our nation’s biggest issues. Emphasize that cops are not soldiers, and any violence or threat of violence needs to be viewed as a last resort, not an easy solution to an immediate problem. Remember, every Supreme Court decision supporting civilian gun ownership will kill more cops… and put more guns in the hands of those who should never have them. Our average police recruit training regimen does not prepare these officers sufficiently to protect themselves or the public. We must do better!

I’m Peter Dekom, and we can better serve both the public and our police force by a ground-up new approach to training the next generation of police officers.