There are no federally mandated training minimums for police officers
in the United States.
So, there isn't a national standard.
And so, I mean, there are 18,000 police departments and law
enforcement agencies in the United States.
They are all doing drastically different things.
Training requirements for police vary state by state, sometimes even
region to region, municipality to municipality.
But overwhelmingly, officers are being trained locally.
And oftentimes, even though there might be some best standards or
best practices, those aren't required.
One study showed that out of 80 countries, the United States has the
lowest police training requirements by far, excluding Iraq and
Afghanistan. After protesters around the country called for justice
following the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota.
President Trump signed an executive order encouraging police
departments to improve training.
Under the executive order I'm signing today, we will prioritize
federal grants from the Department of Justice to police departments
that seek independent credentialing, certifying that they meet high
standards and in fact, in certain cases, the highest standard.
But critics have said Trump's executive order doesn't do enough to fix
the issues in police training.
It's almost like trying to find a solution how to deal with Covid-19
without including medical doctors.
You want to find a solution for the problems with policing?
Go to social scientists.
Just a few of the issues social scientists point to is how few hours
are required for police training and what exactly officers are being
taught in those few hours.
There's also the controversy over training for a so-called warrior
mentality, over a guardian mindset.
So then, what exactly is police training made up of?
And, where does the money come from to support these trainings?
Here's how police training is funded across the country.
State and local governments spent $115 billion dollars on police in
2017, which is the latest year with comprehensive data available.
Most of that money comes from taxpayers.
Most of police training occurs in state academies run by the state for
different municipalities.
State Academy receives funding from the state but it also receives
funding from the municipality who's sending people to be trained.
It's a financial burden to the state to expand this training because
they themselves are in the business of training.
Though a majority of the funding for police training starts locally,
there's still millions of dollars coming from the federal government.
There's a chunk of federal funds made up of grants.
Those grants funnel money to state and local police organizations.
Here are four of the big ones: COPS, community oriented policing
services, Byrne JAG, the Byrne Justice Assistance Grants, Urban
Security Initiative and the state Homeland Security Program.
Through these programs, at least $54.2 million dollars gets spent on
police training alone, and the rest, which is in the billions, is
used for equipment and salaries and cars.
You get the idea. For example, out of the $590 million dollars
allocated for the Urban Area Security Initiative, funding for the
fiscal year 2019, $30.7 million dollars went to 64 law enforcement
organizations to support training activities for three years.
That $31 million dollars in funding is up from 2016 when UASI
allocated $18.4 dollars million for police training through its grant
program. And the state homeland security program spent approximately
11 million dollars on law enforcement training activities for state,
local and territorial governments through 2019.
Then, there's the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant
program, which provides states, tribes and local governments with
funding to support a range of programs like public defenders, as well
as policing. About 252 million of JAG funding was awarded for fiscal
year 2019.
Those grantees have thus far allocated over 16.5 dollars million of
the 252 million available by February 2020.
And of that 16.5 million, just over 286,000 went towards training.
And through COPS, run out of the Department of Justice, in fiscal
year 2019, at least 9.7 dollars million in grants were awarded for
the development and delivery of training for law enforcement
officers, and over 8.6 million of that went to preparing for active
shooter situation trainings.
And another 2.6 million dollars in grant reimbursements were filed
under the COPS travel training and conferences category.
Many of those grants awarded were meant to last years, so not all the
training is delivered in the year funding is awarded.
Besides government funding and taxpayer money, there's also private
donors putting dollars behind training programs, and private
companies providing their own kind of training.
And at times you can even have private donors or corporations come in
and say, we're just going to pay for this.
There's no real way of knowing how much money private companies put
into these programs.
Shrewsbury says it's largely agreed that police need both more and
better training. But part of that problem means more money needs to
be spent on building that educational infrastructure.
And while stats show how inflated police budgets across America have
gotten over the last 20 years, most of that money isn't going toward
police education.
Part of the problem is, is that while we absolutely support reduction
of police budgeting, the unfortunate side effect very often or maybe
unintended side effect to that is, is that the training divisions
often are the ones who start seeing cuts in their budgets.
And this is at a point for which we need to increase dollars for
training. Some of that can be just reallocation of funding.
Since police training is largely decentralized in the United States,
the process varies from state to state.
Once they've been hired, depending on if the agency itself has its own
academy or whether or not they rely on the state academy.
The officer will be sent, if they're not certified already, be sent
for basic training.
It's important to know that there are thirty seven states for which
the police are allowed to work before they even attend basic
training. One of the biggest issues in police training that experts
point out is the minimum standard hours required to become an
officer. Excluding field training, basic training programs lasted an
average 840 hours.
Dramatically less than other professions such as cosmetology, massage
therapy, electricians, plumbers, many careers that have far less
responsibility and ramifications if something goes wrong.
During basic training, officers are taught about a variety of skills.
On average, recruits are taught 213 hours of operations, 168 hours of
firearms, self-defense and use of force, self-improvement for 89
hours and legal education for 86 hours.
They also learn about domestic violence for about an average of 13
hours and receive an average of 10 hours training and mental health
issues. When we look at like officer safety as an example, when
officers spend about a third of their training to protect themselves
against homicide, they're about as equally likely to die in a traffic
crash, which they only get about a little bit over a week of
training there. They're nearly three times as likely to kill
themselves than ever to be killed by someone else, yet they're
receiving maybe a day of training on mental health awareness.
We're applying very kind of simple ideas across to how to handle a
litany of very complex situations.
Another big part of the police training industry is what comes after
an officer completes basic training.
There is continued education, also known as in-service training.
There's in-service training, which is not regulated by anybody.
This is also where private companies may step in.
And from here, the police training industry kind of falls into murky
waters. But oftentimes private companies, many of whom were former
law enforcement themselves, started these training units to do
specialty type of things, whether it be with shooting, with driving,
dealing with alcoholism, substance abuse, mental health.
I mean, you name it, there are a series of these private companies.
Anybody basically can create a company and offer training to various
police departments. Of course, it will differ by state in terms of
certain accreditations.
I think there are a lot of training programs that law enforcement goes
through that hasn't been approved at the state level.
There could be some really good reasons for that happening.
All of that makes sense.
I think part of the problem is when you couple that with at times
very little oversight at this level with all the agencies across the
country doing different things, it leads to a lot of differences that
isn't standardized for from a person who is a police officer in
Washington, D.C.
compared to Los Angeles, California.
Most police practices are not systematically evaluated, and we still
know too little about what works under what conditions in policing.
One critical issue in police training that Shrewsberry's Institute of
Criminal Justice Training Reform points to is junk science, which
means that the science behind what's being taught in some training
programs or courses doesn't add up to the reality of what actually
works. Shrewsbury says, too often, training programs rely on
assumptions and traditional approaches that have either been
disproven or the validity of which cannot be verified.
This is Dave Grossman, he's the founder and director of the Kludgy
Research Group, and he's trained thousands of officers across the
U.S.. His work has faced a ton of scrutiny in light of police
brutality. We are always trying to save lives.
We are using deadly force because we sincerely believe it's the only
option in the face of imminent threat.
The moment that person is no longer a threat, we try to save their
life like any other life on the planet.
On the one that we got to respond to the same thing in military does
overseas. On the other hand, we got to we got to protect lives.
And our goal is never to kill.
Lieutenant Dave Grossman, who runs the Killology group, calls himself
the 'killologist,' does this heavy promotion of act first kind of
approach, especially to use of force.
I find a lot of his training, if not all of it, very egregious.
When we talk about kind of junk science, we have to go back again to
look at how much time are officers spending on learning these very,
very nuanced topics.
Grossman is part of the controversy facing the militarization of U.S.
police departments.
He's a former Army Ranger and West Point professor and has been
training police officers for over 20 years.
And, his books on killing and on combat are on the U.S.
Marine Commandant's required reading list.
And if people have any questions, go to Amazon, look at the reviews,
look at what's being said there.
Look at the people who say over and over again, this book saved my
life. This book changed my world.
Look over, and over a thousand reviews On Killing over 800 reviews
for On Combat under four and a half stars.
Grossman got into the training business after he retired from the army
in 1998.
And I retired from the army and I was being asked to come and speak to
law enforcement because they're always grasping for something that
will help, something that will push the envelope a little bit
further. Something will keep our cops alive this year.
Grossman said he's on the road for his job about 200 days of the year,
but he's run into some police departments trying to stay away from
warrior training.
The mayor of Minneapolis, a while back, said nobody can go to warrior
training. I don't call myself warrior training.
When the citizen review board actually sees my presentation.
They said, this is great stuff. And they said, well, why do you use
the word warrior? I said, I don't use that word.
That's a word somebody else hung on it.
It frustrates people they can't shut me down.
And people out there, oh we're going to shut this guy down.
You don't have the authority. You don't have that power.
You shut down one agency, there's 100 others that want what I got to
give and the reality is that if it was stupid stuff, if was bad
stuff, we'd be hearing about it.
Another such private training company, the Force Science Institute,
and its founder, Dr Bill Lewinski, have also faced scrutiny for its
brand of officer training.
In an email, Lewinski told CNBC that both he and the Force Science
Institute do not teach pseudo science.
He points to his credentials, saying Force Science has at least two
dozen scientific journal articles published and that Force Science's
research can pass tests of scientific credibility and stand in court.
He also recognizes that there are issues in the training business,
saying that's why police training must be science-based.
We need to make sure that our training is clinically based and is
founded on science, scientific principles for what and how we're
teaching, so their skills are useful after.
We need to change the number of hours and we also need to change the
type of training we do after.
Use of force can simply start with the police officer in uniform
because a uniform inherently represents the power of the state,
according to Maria Haberfeld.
But when it comes to the specifics, the formal definition of use of
force varies.
The use of force training defined by the commission.
So it is mandated by the state.
She says use of force typically starts as this: An officer issues a
voice command like stop or don't move or show me your hands.
The vocal commands continue to express urgency until physical use of
force, which can then lead to potential use of the less lethal
weapons like pepper spray or a baton.
Use of force can then escalate to deadly use of force.
What law enforcement uses is what's called a de-escalation continuum.
It ranges from verbal commands to creating time in space or distance.
Can you back out of the situation?
Can you get cover? Can you wait for backup?
Use of force training can go hand in hand with the warrior mentality
that police departments are now increasingly trying to turn away
from. Instead, police reform proponents have been advocating a shift
towards the guardian mentality.
They are trained as military and then they're asked to do social
services and they just don't have those tools and the communication
skills. Soldiers don't need to communicate that much.
Police officers do.
And that so-called militarization starts during training.
Right when they walk in the door, begin inundated with this kind of
militaristic command structure, right?
You know, they may have to march or stand at attention, polish their
boots, all the things that you would see in a, you know, in a
military boot camp.
There are two types of police training models, stress and non stress.
Stress based training is based on the military model and involved
intensive physical demands and psychological pressure.
So most academies have at least some militarized element.
While non stress training environments emphasize academic achievement,
physical training and a more relaxed instructor trainee relationship.
Nearly half of recruits were trained by academies that relied more on
stress training than non stress training, while 34 percent of
recruits were trained in academies balancing both approaches.
Then, 18 percent of recruits were trained by academies using more of a
non stress environment.
99 percent of recruits received reality based use of force training,
and 74 percent of recruits received this type of training on the use
of non-lethal weapons.
If we train the officers like soldiers.
We dress them like soldiers.
We equip them like soldiers, then we can't be surprised if they
behave like soldiers.
As some look to what the police training industry could look like in
the 21st century, many are calling for the reshaping of the police
officer role. Collecting more comprehensive data, which was part of
President Trump's executive order on police reform, is also essential
in moving the police training industry forward.
Comprehensive data reporting actually reduces officer involved
killings by 25 percent.
Because police officers want to know best practices, they want data.
The problem is that we oftentimes don't have enough data, like we
know in the United States how many people are killed by jellyfish
every year, the CDC collects it.
But we don't collect how many people are killed by the police?
Part of a better police education may also include more implicit bias
training. That's training that specifically targets and officers
biases, a preconceived notion about how certain groups of people
behave that can be based on things like race, gender and sexual
orientation. Part of the problem is they apply their training
differently based on who they see.
If they encounter a black person, they apply it one way.
When they encounter a white person, they apply it another way.
And I think part of what decision making and implicit bias training
does is deal with that gap.
But studies have shown these training sessions may not be all that
effective. One exploration concluded, while people are easily taught
how to respond correctly to a questionnaire about bias, soon they
forget the right answers.
It's a very complex and complicated profession.
It absolutely requires a college degree.
Police training should be, at minimum, an associate's degree, but
optimally a bachelor's.
However, that's a hard sell because we are now asking for the state
to pick up the tab on not only this expansion of training, but also
the expansion of instructors, the expansion of facilities, the
expansion of utilities, of equipment.
If we have the influence we would like to have on the federal level,
we're going to mandate a different type of training where
communication matches and is trained equally and integrated with
whatever use of force.
That's a totally different curriculum and federal dollars will need
to go with that. So will there be a change?
Will there be federal funding?
It depends on what the federal initiative is.