Police Training Thesis

Police Training: How It Could Be Contributed to Less Deaths

How many of you have turned the television on this morning only to find out that another innocent life was taken away from us? How many of you began to rhetorically ask yourself “where were the local law enforcement in this situation”? Now of those who rhetorically asked themselves that question, who was even more shocked to find out that it was one of their own local law enforcement personnel that was behind the gun that took away another innocent life off the face of the earth. More often than any other current political issue, it is becoming very common to learn that cops are killing unarmed innocent citizens in America. If there were more training available to cops to teach them

Police training starts in the academy. Officer safety is very heavily to the point that it almost becomes a religion for Rookie officers. Rookie officers are usually taught what is known to them as the “first rule of law enforcement”: All officer’s most important goal at the end of every day is to go home at the end of their work shift. The sad fact about this is that cops live in a very hostile world. They are taught early on that every encounter, and every individual is likely to become threat for them. They always have to be very alert while on the job because, as cops are often known to say, “complacency kills.” While in the academy, rookie officers aren’t just told about the risks that they face on a daily basis. They are also shown gut wrenching graphic, sad dash-cam footage of officers being assaulted, their weapons being taken away from them, or worse, them being fatally shot or wounded after lack of attention or complacency, as most law enforcement officers like to put it. These rookie cops are taught that the number one perpetrator isn’t the criminal that can be seen on the video, but that it is the officer’s lack of better judgement. While watching these videos, rookie officers are usually thinking to themselves that they can’t let that happen to them while out on the job. They want to be better than the officers that they see during the videos. That is the point of their training and it is the reason as to why a lot of cops are put in to the situations that they’re put in to now. Police training needs to go beyond highlighting the seriousness of the risks that officers face by taking into account the probability of those risks materializing. Policing has risks—serious ones—that we cannot casually dismiss. But for all of its risks, policing is safer now than it has ever been. Violent attacks on officers, particularly those that involve a serious physical threat, are few and far between when you take into account the fact that police officers interact