The State Of Police Training In America
Few moments in American history present more of a challenge for law enforcement than the present moment. Are cities doing enough to ensure that police officers are properly trained to protect their own safety and the safety of members of the community? That’s the focus of this week’s Protect and Serve. In short, we:
Explore the rigor, duration, and tone of police training in the United States.
Highlight a paradox: As police leaders vocally call for reform to the substance and style of police training, some of the most popular police trainers in the country offer police officers controversial perspectives that don’t neatly align with these calls for reform.
Examine two recent empirical studies of newly developed training programs that show promise for reducing officer use of force while keeping officers safe. These programs provide city and law enforcement leaders with concrete alternatives to trainings and trainers who undermine the vision of police leaders calling for the modernization of police training.
Meet The Most Prominent Police Trainers in America.
“Be the calmest person in the room, but have a plan to kill everyone.” That’s the wisdom that Tim Kennedy, a retired U.S. Army Green Beret and Ultimate Fighting Champion, recently bestowed upon a crowd of law enforcement officers from across the country.
As the Washington Post’s Robert Klemko reports, Kennedy also said that officers needed to be “more dangerous than the situation” and expounded that “it wasn’t that long ago that we were drinking out of the skulls of our enemies … Like, I’m gonna f---ing murder this guy, take his head, cut his head in half, and then I’m going to boil his skull and then have a drink out of that skull.”
The training, which took place in Atlantic City and attracted over 1,000 officers, was spearheaded by a former New Jersey police officer who resigned from his department just “months before the township settled a lawsuit with three women who were arrested after he leaped onto the hood of their car and pointed a gun at the driver.”
When the lawyer who represented the women heard about the Atlantic City training from Klemko, the Washington Post reporter, she replied: “You say this man, who behaved like he was arresting a serial killer when my clients were only accused of shoplifting, is now training police officers? Lord, Jesus.”
This is far from being an isolated example. And what’s worse is that even after extremely dangerous rhetoric surfaces from a police training, it doesn’t stop the trainer from being invited to new departments to train new officers.
Take Dave Grossman, a retired U.S. Army Ranger, for example. Grossman refers to his training as “Killology.” He’s written books with titles such as “On Killing” and “Why Mommy Owns a Gun.” As journalist Radley Balko observes, “This is the guy who has trained more U.S. police officers than anyone else. The guy who, more than anyone else, has instructed cops on what mind-set they should bring to their jobs.”
And the mentality that he instills in those officers is disturbing. For example, he’s told officers they must be “emotionally, spiritually, psychologically prepared to snuff out a human life” because “only a killer can hunt a killer.” This means, according to Grossman, officers must “fight violence [with] superior violence. Righteous violence.”
Grossman has also trained officers that “killing is not that big a deal.” And he was captured on video saying that “after the bad guy is down” [read: shot dead], police officers say they go home and have “the best sex they’ve had in months … Both partners are very invested in some very intense sex. There’s not a whole lot of perks that come with this job. You find one, relax and enjoy it.”
Once all of these troubling details emerged in the national media, one might hope that Grossman would no longer be invited to train police officers. However, a cursory scan of the internet shows that Grossman has—or will—conduct trainings for law enforcement agencies in California, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Wisconsin in 2023 alone.
“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.”
This is a problem, according to Chuck Wexler, the head of the Police Executive Research Foundation and a former high ranking law enforcement official in both Boston and the federal government. Wexler told ABC News that “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. Communicating, being a good listener, responding, thinking … Those are important skills, to know your limitations, and also to ask the right questions … to be sympathetic, to be guardians, rather than warriors.”
This rigid, fear-based top-down training culture isn’t just dangerous for civilians. It can harm police cadets, too. For example, just last month, in Washington state, “two former cadets at Washington’s police academy filed a lawsuit alleging they and several other female colleagues endured months of sexual harassment by their instructor.” As Mike Carter reports for the Seattle Times, the lawsuit explains that the culture of the academy facilitates abusive behavior:
“The lawsuit describes the academy as operating in a ‘vertical structure,’ like the military, and says recruits are expected to respect their TAC officer, including standing at attention when the officer enters a room. ‘Questioning, responding, or reacting to statements or actions taken by TAC officers could be interpreted as signs of disrespect leading to failing the class and termination from the academy and agency employment[.]’
‘The plaintiffs are strong women who signed up for tough jobs,’ [their lawyer said in a statement] … Nothing prepared them for the shock and trauma of being sexually harassed and demeaned by their Basic Law Enforcement Academy training officer. The system failed to protect or support them.’”
Police training in the U.S. is shorter and less well-rounded than in other countries.
“We have one of the worst police-training academies in comparison to other democratic countries,” Maria Haberfeld, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told The Atlantic’s Olga Khazan.
“Outdated and antiquated” is how Chuck Wexler, the head of the Police Executive Research Foundation and an extremely influential voice among police chiefs, recently described the state of police training in America: “Almost every major aspect of policing has fundamentally changed in recent decades, except for one: how we train officers.”
As Jack Date reports for ABC News, police training deficits fall into two main buckets:
Too Short. “The average length of core basic police training in the U.S. is 833 hours, or less than 22 weeks. 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.” Fox News in Memphis recently examined Tennessee police training requirements and found: “state certification requirements mandate 480 hours of training and schooling at a police academy [compared to] 1,500 hours to become a barber or cosmetologist[.]”
Deprioritizes Crucial Skills. Trainings tend to place “an emphasis on weapons and tactics and too little focus on decision-making, communications and other critical thinking skills that officers use every day.” For example, Olga Khazan reports for The Atlantic that “the median police recruit receives eight hours of de-escalation training, compared with 58 hours of training in firearms … They get just six hours of training in stress management, compared with 25 hours in report-writing…”
The training quality does not improve once a cadet leaves the police academy.
For NBC News and The Marshall Project, Simone Weichselbaum investigated why most police departments have not been able to change their culture despite “mandating programs to teach officers to become more compassionate and less violent” and even “bringing in progressive chiefs.”
The answer, according to interviews with “current and former police leaders, academics and even the U.S. Justice Department,” is that the officers who teach field training—the “nearly universal training approach whereby a recruit is paired with a senior officer for about six months”—are perhaps the major obstacle to culture change.
Jonathan Smith, the former head of special litigation for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division told Weichselbaum that “far too often, field training officers have been in a department with a culture that needed to be reformed, and they are not part of the reform process. They are part of the old guard of the department. They teach the old way of doing things.”
A recent study published in the Russell Sage Foundation Journal illustrates just how much a field training officer’s teachings can influence the use of force behavior of the officers that they train. Researchers leveraged both granular access to seven years of calls for service and near random assignment of recruits to field training officers in a large metropolitan police department and found that “having a more forceful field training officer, results in a recruit who subsequently has a lower threshold for using force on any given call for service.” Indeed, “a one standard deviation increase in a field training officer’s propensity to use force is associated with a 12 percent increase in their recruit’s subsequent propensity to use force.” Strikingly, this effect “persists for as much as two and a half years after the recruit completes training.”
How can police chiefs and local leaders modernize police training in their cities?
The lowest hanging fruit:
Do not invite trainers like David Grossman or Tim Kennedy to train your police officers.
When a police officer has a record of serious misconduct, forbid that officer from serving as a field training mentor to newly minted officers.
More low hanging fruit:
Mandate more hours at the academy and during continuing professional education for crucial skills such as de-escalation and stress management. These topics are every bit as important to training successful police officers as topics like “reporting writing” and “weapons training” that receive vastly more attention.
Adopt a culture of experimentation and testing. As five prominent criminology professors wrote in a recently published paper in Criminology and Public Policy, we “know virtually nothing about the short or long term effects associated with police training of any type.’” Moreover, while researchers have begun conducting more high quality studies in recent years, “each study evaluated a different training program, and no known studies attempt to replicate existing evaluations of police training.”
Two promising police training programs:
1. Situational Decision-Making | Chicago Police Department | 2023.
Researchers from the University of Chicago’s crime lab, business school, and public policy school collaborated on a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper that examines the effect of a novel cognitive skills based training “using a randomized controlled trial with 2,070 officers from the Chicago Police Department—the second largest police department in the U.S..”
The Premise Behind The Training: “Police work often involves making complex decisions in situations that produce stress, trigger many emotions, and require officers to act quickly … Unless officers are prepared for these [cognitive] demands, they may jump to conclusions too quickly without fully considering alternative ways of seeing a situation.”
How The Training Works: “The training first teaches officers to recognize the kinds of situations that might cause stress and impose cognitive demands. It then teaches officers about specific cognitive biases they may experience in these situations, such as catastrophizing, personalizing, or engaging in confirmation bias. Finally, [this training] teaches strategies to reduce these biases by developing alternative interpretations that might disprove their assumptions.”
Findings: The training led to officers considering a wider range of explanations for subject behavior. The training also resulted in significant decreases in use of force (23% ), discretionary arrests (23% ), and racial disparities (11% ). Meanwhile, officer activity overall did not decrease. In fact, officers who received the training took fewer days off due to injury.
2. Active Bystandership for Law Enforcement (ABLE)
This training, created by Georgetown Law School and the law firm Sheppard Mullin, “prepares officers to successfully intervene to prevent harm and to create a law enforcement culture that supports peer intervention.” The aim of peer intervention is to “prevent misconduct, avoid police mistakes, and promote officer health and wellness.” A newly minted sheriff’s deputy in North Carolina captures the importance of bystander training: “This class allowed me to know that it’s not about rank, it’s not about stripes … you just need to know that when the time comes and you need to intervene … you need to do that.”
The Premise Behind The Training: Peer intervention “training equips, encourages, and supports officers to intervene and prevent their colleagues from committing acts of serious misconduct and criminal behavior, particularly those directed against citizens. The basic premise is that police officers themselves, properly trained in ethical decision making and tactics of peer intervention, are an essential and too often overlooked resource in the effort to prevent misconduct by fellow officers.” | Christy Lopez, Georgetown Law School and Jonathan Aronie, Sheppard Mullins.
How The Training Works: “ABLE trains officers on more than simply how to intervene, it also teaches how to be the recipient of an intervention, and how to follow-up regarding the intervention thus creating a culture of active bystandership. As such, ABLE requires a robust commitment from agencies adopting this type of training and is poised to become the gold standard in bystander intervention nationwide.”
Findings: There are no empirical studies of ABLE yet. However, ABLE training is an evolution of an earlier peer intervention training known as EPIC—Ethical Policing Is Courageous—which started in New Orleans and is the subject of a recently published study. The EPIC training involved “scenario-based role-playing exercises” including around issues of excessive force. Officers then answered a battery of questions, including on their “willingness to report (ethical action), and willingness to intervene (ethical action).” The bystander training resulted in small, but significant differences in officer “willingness to intervene and willingness to report” excessive force.
Takeaway: Both the Situational Decision-Making Training and the Active Bystandership For Law Enforcement Training are examples of evidence-based training that local leaders could bring to their police departments as part of an effort to reduce excessive force, protect officer safety, and restore community trust. These trainings stand in stark contrast to the teachings of David Grossman, Tim Kennedy, and other “star” police trainings who glorify excessive violence and instill a culture of fear in police officers.
Finally, a note on tempering expectations: Police training is important, and police departments across the United States are in desperate need of top to bottom revamps. Yet, training is only one piece of a much larger puzzle for addressing police use of excessive force and other misconduct.
The temperament of the officers hired into the academy; the written policies and informal culture within the police department; and the decisions about which calls for service the police should handle relative to other first responders (for example, mental health crisis calls) are all pieces, too.
Perhaps nothing makes the point that effective police training isn’t a panacea better than the contrast between these two reports on the Louisville Metropolitan Police Department:
A 2020 study which provided “one of the first large-scale, methodologically rigorous evaluations of a well-known de-escalation training for police,” finding that the Louisville Metro Police Department saw a “significant reduction in officer use of force following de-escalation training implementation.”
A 2023 report from the U.S. Department of Justice finding that the LMPD “engage[s] in a pattern or practice of conduct that violates the constitutional rights of the residents of Louisville — including by using excessive force, unlawfully discriminating against Black people, [and] conducting searches based on invalid warrants.”
In other words, police training matters a great deal, but it's not the only thing—or even the most important thing—for police departments to address when aiming to stamp out excessive force and other forms of police misconduct.