To begin
working in a psychiatric hospital, all new staff is required to take extensive
training on the use nonviolent methods to deescalate potentially dangerous
situations. These trainings include classes, on-line trainings, and simulation
of real life tactics with other staff members to avoid using any physical contact
with a patient. Refresher courses for all employees are required as well. Use
of physical force is only applied if the person is a clear threat to himself or
others. Quantitative evidence provides proof that the use of physical force has
drastically reduced since use of these practices became mandatory for this
national network of psychiatric/rehabilitation hospitals. Similar trainings and
principles are applied when working in a public school system for teachers who
are behavior specialists. Use of these various nonviolent methods to deescalate
behaviors has been shown to be highly effective. Since my experience and
education are in the field of behavior modification, I searched for evidence
that U.S. police departments are requiring similar training for recruits to avoid
physical and lethal force in potentially violent situations.
The need to
rehash the extensive press coverage of excessive use of force by the police in
the United States is unnecessary. The public has perhaps become desensitized to
videos of shooting and killings of unarmed civilians and incidents of police
brutality. To be clear, I am not taking a position that these incidents are
happening throughout the U.S. on a regular basis or that the majority of police
are committing such acts. The press coverage
of these certain incidents has brought the subject to light and there is a call
to look into policing to determine whether the use of lethal force can be
avoided in the future. It has become clear to the public that other tactics
might have been used to prevent such violence and death. There is still public
outcry and ongoing investigations into police corruption and profiling. However the fact remains that the police in
America use physical force to an excessive degree in comparison to other
countries throughout the world.
The death
of a knife-wielding civilian, Kajieme Powell, by a St. Louis policeman was the
starting point in an interview with Maria Haberfeld, professor at the John Jay
College of Criminal Justice and author of books regarding police forces in
multiple countries. The interview centers about the topic of training of police
officers in the United States. When asked, Haberfeld acknowledges that the
distance of 21 feet between Powell and the police permitted lethal force under
department rules. I couldn’t
help but think of a situation in which I was engaged. Though the situation was
clearly very different, I did encounter an individual wielding of a sharp metal
object, comparable to a knife and at a much closer proximity. I was fortunate
to be with a group of trained individuals, though not the police. With the use
of de-escalation methods, the result of the situation required no use of
physical force, and no injuries to the individual or others. Haberfeld asserts
that the way police officers are trained is inadequate; the majority of police
officers’ training focuses on the technical part: the use of force. There is a
dearth of emotional, psychological, and physiological aspects in police
training.
Each state
and each jurisdiction have different training requirements. There is no
standard national curriculum: agencies develop their own programs. Each state
operates under a statewide commission that establishes minimum selection
standards for law enforcement officers, sets minimum education and training
standards. This commission also serves as the certification or licensing
authority. The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) Census of State and Local Law
Enforcement Training Academies provide statistics and percentages that indicate
the average number hours of instruction required per recruit on various
training topics. The specific topics listed are relevant to my inquiries:
defensive tactics (60hrs), firearms skills (71), use of force (21), and use of
non-lethal weapons (16). From this source, I can only compare the area of
Self-Improvement, which training topics include ethics and integrity (8hrs),
health and fitness (49), communications (15), professionalism (11), and stress
prevention/management (6). There is no clear definition of what “defensive
tactics” are in order to gain a better understanding of whether these include
verbal de-escalation and other methods that do not involve physical force. According
to BJS, the median duration of basic recruit training was 21 weeks across all
academies with a range anywhere from four weeks to six months. After basic
training, the median number of hours in the field-training segment was 180
hours or about eight weeks.
How effective
is our method of policing in United States? Traditionally citizens have
believed a centralized, national police force would result in an excessive
concentration of power. There are questions of how local communities could hold
a national police force accountable for abuses of power and whether the
national government could use its police force to hold power illegitimately.
Therefore U.S. police operate largely on a local basis with the ideal that this
decentralization ties the police and the community closer together. However,
there are many drawbacks to decentralized police system: the flow of
intelligence may be delayed or obstructed, a limited relationship between
police and overseers could result in corruption of both parties, and the
variance and disparity of training and education hours.
Handing over
governance of training requirements and educational curriculum and standards to
a local level leaves the community at the mercy of the quality and rigor of
these minimum standards. In order to
have a working relationship between the police and the community, there must
exist an element of social trust. If different elements of society cannot trust
one another, the effectiveness of the unit will suffer.
In 2000, The United States Department of Justice (USDOJ),
Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) Office and the Police Executive
Research Forum (PERF) collaborated to pilot a problem based learning strategy,
titled the Police Training Officer (PTO) Program. The program sets out to create a paradigm
shift from reactive to proactive law enforcement. The program uses training
sets that encourage new officers “to think using a proactive mindset, enabling
the identification of and solution to problems within their communities.” The
PTO model seeks to involve the community as a collaborative partner in determining
solutions to local issues, thus utilizing the principles of community policing
at the very foundation of the post-academy experience.
Could a more
centralized, enforced regimen of training and education create a more effective
type of policing, that is, less use of physical/lethal force? The social
aspects of use of force correlate to how events and incidents affect the
community and how it impacts police-community relations. Would a national
centralization of police training standards be met with disapproval? Could
enforcing minimum selection standards and minimum recruit training and
education standards with the inclusion of the PTO type model on a national
level create a more cohesive national police standard while still keeping the
police power system decentralized? Haberfeld is not reluctant to share
her opinion about the quality of American police education and retraining. “There are a host of variables that go into things. And those
variables, at least in my mind, should be constantly addressed, and not end
with the police officer graduating from police academy, and then the only thing
they have to do is to qualify twice a year whether or not they can still carry
a weapon. But this qualifying twice a year is focused completely on the
technical aspect of use of deadly force. An average police department,
all they care about is whether you have a GED, and you didn't use drugs in the
last three years.” Ouch.
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