Police Academy Training

Dr. Gene Paoline discusses his research into police academy training in the United States.  Using Bureau of Justice Statistics data from their census of police academy’s, Gene and his colleagues identified six basic themes of academy training.  

Main Topics

• Police academy training has not changed substantially in nearly twenty years.
• There is an imbalance in academy training (academy topics vs. what's done on the street; academy topics themselves).
• “More” training is not necessarily the issue, it has more to do with “what topics” are trained.
• More information is needed on the training quality and delivery method.

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Transcript

Welcome to the Police in Service Training Podcast.
This podcast is dedicated to providing research evidence to street-level police officers and
command staff alike.
The program is intended to help the police and law enforcement community create better
programs, understand challenging policies, and dispel the myths of police officer behavior.
I'm your host, Scott Phillips.
Police academy training didn't become a routine part of the field until about the 1950s.
Over several decades, police academies have received a small and possibly deserved amount
of criticism, often because of what police officers did after they graduated from the
academy.
Whenever policing is criticized, there is, sometimes justified and other times not, a
focus on what is being offered in the police academy.
The assumption seems to be that if policing fails in some way, then a good place to eliminate
future failures is with additional academy training.
But before we critique what's missing from police academy training and offer suggestions
about what should be included, we should first understand what is already in the academy
curriculum, as well as the larger contextual environment of the academy.
To help us understand the current state of police academy training, as well as some of
its evolution during the past 25 years or so, I'm happy to be joined by Dr. Jean Pauline.
Jean is a professor of criminal justice and the chair of the Department of Criminal Justice
at the University of Central Florida.
His research interests include police culture, the use of force and criminal justice theory.
Thanks for coming on the podcast.
Thanks, Scott.
So in the past 25 years, I've read a lot of your research and it's typically covered
different aspects of policing, including culture, job satisfaction and, interestingly, less
than lethal police force policies.
Can you give us an overview of why you became interested in academy training?
Yeah, so I'm a police culture researcher at heart.
I have been for well over 25 years now.
And so I look at the causes and consequences of culture in a large part, spent a good
deal of time teasing out what the attitudes, values and norms are that comprise
culture and how officers adapt.
And it's a collective adaptation.
And key to this and what many people confuse is socialization is the way in which culture
is transmitted. And so sometimes they'll use it synonymously.
And socialization includes informal and formal components in the police world.
The first formal socialization stage is the police academy.
So it ties in nicely to how police are taught, at least at a first impression of what
they're going to get into.
OK, so from a broader perspective, why is this area of inquiry of value or relevance
to the police? Why studying policing academies?
Yeah. And so for police practitioners, as we speak, you know, if you say this is the
first stage of socialization to police practitioners, they're going to say, well,
what does that even mean? And why am I that concerned about it?
But this is where, you know, early assumptions of the job are created.
This is where you are molding people on the impressions of what they're about to get
into, as we talked about.
And so this initial molding is important.
And it's vogue to say, you know, forget about what you learned in the academy.
But you talk to 50 police officers and you ask them, tell us some of the people you went
to the academy with. Nobody says, well, I don't remember the academy.
They remember the academy and like any job.
Right. The initial training is like, OK, we're going to move past that.
But we really have to understand what what is forgotten and what is not forgotten in
the academy. You know, when you said that, that just got a flood of forget everything
you learned in the academy. I heard that I heard that from a training officer.
And I thought to myself, like, OK, forget the penal code.
You know, you know, are you out of your mind?
But OK, but you don't ever say that out loud.
You can't voice that when you're on the street with your training officer.
It's not going to end well.
Well, we went the same thing.
Like you go through training academies of sorts in graduate school. Right.
And so you get to the real world job.
And then they're like, OK, that was graduate school.
But your work style is formed there.
Your initial thinking about the academic life is formed there.
And if you just totally not pay attention to it, it's detrimental.
Oh, so I was reading your papers and you actually have two over the past couple of years
looking at police academies.
You provided some historical, I thought, interesting historical information
related to the academy training overall.
That got me thinking, is it possible that the early curriculum,
because you're going to tell us about this, I know, but is it possible the early
curriculum set a standard that's simply been stuck in policing?
So essentially, the early training
created the culture of academy training that's now hard to change.
Yeah, and we can't take the context of that time period out of it.
You know, August Vomer going back to wanting to professionalize the police.
One of the major tenants there was, well, what are we going to be professionals of?
And he basically, with others, said, you're going to be professional crime fighters.
You're going to learn about the causes of crime, how to investigate crime,
how to prevent crime.
So you would think by design, anything that went into training
would focus on crime related facets.
And so, yeah, that's where that started.
It wouldn't be, you know, that prudent at the time to say,
let's work on how to develop a relationship with citizens
because this was part of the political reform and getting out of that
to professionalism of more of a detachment and being a true professional.
OK, that's that's pretty good.
Now, this leads me to another point that you made, again,
from a historical perspective, that historically training
included the notion of the siege mentality.
And there's been some fieldwork by he was well, he was a graduate student
when he published it, Michael Branch.
I don't know where he is now.
It was a few years ago and he got into this as well.
Can you discuss this idea of, you know, siege mentality and what that means?
Yeah, so from a police perspective
and when we talk about that and I don't want to make the statement
that you don't want your officers to be warriors in some capacity.
But the siege mentality does have collateral consequences.
And so if you think about parenting, if you're a tough parent
with your kid and you're overly tough, there's going to be negative repercussions.
And so dealing with the detachment and the isolation from citizens
and kind of getting down to the bare bones of crime fighting,
there is this element of a siege mentality in its reciprocal.
Right. Citizens against the police and police against the citizens.
But for many police, that's what they signed up to do in policing
was to catch the bad guys, chase the bad guys, arrest the bad guys,
use force if necessary, all in the name of good things. Right.
Well, we know from some Christopher Commission, post LAPD,
Rodney King time that that siege and warrior mentality
has really negative consequences on how you approach citizens,
not on how you maybe deal with an armed robbery or some big event.
But if I start my interactions with you, Scott, with that siege mentality in mind,
that has collateral consequences.
Yeah, it's I suspect that can also go back
as far as what you were saying with Volmer by by saying that
you're going to be crime fighters, essentially, that that brought forth
fighting crime. People don't like getting caught.
And sometimes we'll fight back.
So then you create that, you know, the siege mentality.
And so when you're running into somebody like yourself, yourself, myself,
who's not in the same uniform, we've never met.
We've never interacted.
So you're going to be possibly off put just having the conversation with me
and kind of weary of that.
So I also want to touch on something that you mentioned about
which I also like the imbalance in academy training.
What were you getting at with the imbalance idea?
So there's two elements of imbalance in the in the work that I've done.
And I have to as we talk about what we were doing in this paper, John Sloan
is a collaborator of mine in this in this work, too.
And we've talked about what you've talked about the siege mentality.
And we talked about the imbalance based on our empirical work.
But the imbalance in general, there's two types.
One is the imbalance between what you learn in the academy
and maybe what you're going to experience on the street in the modal time period.
Right. And so I've always said policing is great
from a research point of view, Scott, because there aren't many occupations
that everybody starts at one unit and moves from that unit.
Everybody starts on patrol and policing and everybody has to go to the academy.
Right. And so that's key.
So what we're looking at is not the imbalance between the investigations
and the crime fighting that you learn and a criminal investigation assignment,
because there may not be much of an imbalance. Right.
But for the patrol officer in most areas and most times,
it's not running around with the Hollywood version of the police officer.
The second imbalance is the relative time spent
training you on all the facets that we're going to train you on in the academy
and how things like weapons and tactics of force
way overbalance the things that are community oriented policing or self
improvement. And that's another type of imbalance. Right.
I used to when I was teaching to tell the students that there's a
a ton of time, I don't remember the exact amount,
but there was a substantial amount of time that was spent on firearms training,
even though it was something that most cops will will just never do.
And the the students were pretty perceptive about it.
And one of them said that, well,
maybe it's because of the devastating impact of actually firing your weapon,
which I thought was, you know, pretty thoughtful on the part of the student.
Yeah, this is something that's got a huge implication.
If you do it, which you might never do, but because you might do it,
the training is there's that balances towards the idea of, you know,
much more training because of the devastating impact of having a of
shooting. You also, you also mentioned something in there.
It reminded me of the role conflict that, you know,
some people want to get into policing because they want to, it's a noble cause.
We want to arrest the bad guy, which is of course, you know, honorable,
but the role conflict is that sometimes you get into these jobs and, you know,
I've written about this in other locations, other venues.
It can be remarkably boring Mondays and Tuesday evenings and night shift.
There's nothing going on. I had a partner that said, even the bad guys go to sleep.
So there's nothing to do. And I can't, I'm antsy to go out there and do something.
There is a role conflict between what I've been taught in the Academy,
what my perception perception was before even joining and what I'm actually doing
on the street. So it's just.
Yeah. And pre-employment socialization creates that too.
Nobody's going to go to a movie called order maintenance, right?
And it's all about, so, so essentially if you, and it's not,
you know, and it's not all fictitious,
but there's a lot of it that's built up and the Academy does infuse also
informal elements of war stories and the time that I was shot at and the person
that fell out of the ceiling during a domestic violence incident and these types
of things that kind of gets you charged up. And then, you know,
the great John Van Maan is writing,
which was always kind of an equalizer for me in the classroom with people
that have police experience, whether current police officers or former,
when they read John Van Maan and socialization article,
they would come up to me like almost apologizing for their impressions of me as
a professor with no police experience saying, this is real.
That process that you go through where you have to realize that this is
just a job and it's not filled with excitement.
It has sprinkling of excitement, but if you can get past that,
what you would call boredom, right? You can survive. If you can't,
you get out and you're like, this is not, I'm really conflicted.
This is not what I signed up for, what I was trained for and what I was expected.
Right. And that's, you know, that's one of those things that if you're training
the person that way, you know, which relates to the idea of a retention.
Now, if you're training them that way,
but then you're not giving that to them in the job, you just said to yourself,
they're likely to leave. Okay. So when it came to the study you did,
can you give us an overview of the basic research question?
What were you studying and tell the listeners how you went about doing the
research?
Yeah. So both of the articles,
both of the research pieces that you talked about are related.
The former one was basically setting up with a very similar idea of what we're
doing in this paper that you're referencing now.
But we just put more of the data points together. And so the data,
the first, the research questions were basically built around what is the
structure and content of Academy training.
And it was born out of first seeing that the data were available,
like in what we saw from the Bureau of Justice Statistics was they
had Academy level data on the entire population of training academies
across the United States.
So it is a census that an hour and a half to two hours survey to
complete gathering all types of data. But what we were concerned with,
you know, in John Sloan and I initially was, well,
what are they being trained in in terms of time? Like how much time are they,
are we not training enough? And what's this content of training look,
look like in the second article, we did a very similar approach,
but we were able to take four waves of data, all the 20,
16 plus years of data. And this is where a colleague, Matt Nobles,
a really sophisticated data person said,
I can help put this data together because one of the deficiencies we found in the
data was there wasn't a unique identifier for every Academy.
So the academies were there in the waves,
but they didn't have a number for each Academy like other data sets did,
because they weren't thinking of it longitudinally, even though it was wave data.
So Matt was able to put these these sites together and we had a
16 year snapshot.
But a lot of it goes back to the initial paper of what does the structure
and content of academies look like in terms of the training that they're
offering. Okay. So trust me, I'm not sure if you did it because the same reason
I would do it. I'm not great at statistics, but what were the findings?
Yeah. So, and there's good news and then there's different news.
I don't want to call it bad news,
but one of the things that struck us initially was how
much training police receive free service.
And when we compare this to other occupations,
it's remarkable that on average nationally officers are
receiving about 837 hours of training.
So that's five and a quarter months or 21 weeks. And you say, well,
you know, it's a really important job.
There are other really important jobs that you may not get that much training
for. So when we say, Hey,
police need more free service training,
myself and John Sloan would probably say, not really. I mean,
that's an extensive amount of training that you're offering somebody before
they're even formally assigned. Like they may not make it through.
It was the content of the training that we had some question marks about and
not whether it should be administered, but just time allocation.
And that was one of the imbalance mechanisms that we talked about.
Sure. Yeah. It was interesting when I was preparing for this,
I went and grabbed the, I still have my Academy, you know,
notes from many, many years ago. And I had about 700,
750, 756. So it's grown somewhat,
but not the national average. When you give me 837, it's grown somewhat,
but not huge amounts.
And was listening to a different podcast just the other day.
And they were talking about this Academy worth 10 months. So, yeah.
So, so different places are going to have different amounts,
but when it comes to the average, you know, 800, you know, as you say, 37,
21 weeks, one of the themes you uncovered is, well,
you mentioned different themes. What were the different themes that you found?
So the themes are based on content areas or what they call core areas.
And getting back to your notion of the hours,
if you go back in time and you talk to August Vomer and you say, Hey,
nationally, roughly 830 hours, he would say,
finally something I said, people listen to.
So it was always about from those initial talks all the way through the
fifties, beyond the fifties, more, more, more.
Around the sixties, where we saw some of the civil rights issues,
people said different, different, different. Okay.
And it's taken longer times in it. And since the eighties,
when you were in the Academy, I don't doubt that there was more added here and
there, but we looked at the core areas that have been part of over 16 to
20 years of training in this data.
And these data were operations,
which is basically the core functions of patrolling tactics,
investigations, right? Then you have weapons and tactics,
what your student was talking about.
There's a lot of use of force elements there.
And that is a second core area. There are special topics.
And this is, this can differ by Academy.
This can differ by need.
This is similar to what they do to in-service training for many people say,
like, what would you like to be trading on? You know, we just have tasers,
give us some taser training. We just have procedural justice issues.
Give us some of that.
And so this can include anything from domestic violence to how to deal with
victims to terrorism. Interestingly,
there's also a use of force component of special topics in
case you didn't get enough in the weapons and tactics.
So that's added in there too.
So in addition to operations and weapons and special topics,
there's self-improvement, which includes health and fitness,
which is a big part of the Academy.
Also maybe a little imbalance in terms of how much time we're spending on
fitness components to being able to run a mile or being able to do 50 push-ups,
those types of things. Right. That also includes professionalism, ethics,
stress management. So that's another core area of self-improvement.
Then there's the needed legal core area, right? To tell about, you know,
different types of criminal laws, traffic laws.
And then there's community oriented policing,
which has been around for all the years that the Bureau of Justice Statistics
has collected these data, which includes cultural diversity,
conflict management, and problem solving type
topics.
Again, getting back to the imbalance,
if I remember correctly of those different, six different themes,
the community policing, again, understanding that, yes, weapons, you know,
these are serious issues and understanding the operations of the patrol officer,
their job on the street. Obviously those are going to, you know,
take up a large amount of time, but more frequently, I shouldn't say frequently,
but more recently, as you say, there's community policing,
which has actually been around for 25 or 30 years easily, but that was only,
what was it, six or 8% of the total time in the Academy?
Yeah. So community oriented policing of the roughly 837
hours was only 42 hours. Now that's a week, but within that,
you have something like,
cultural diversity is 12 hours, conflict management,
nine hours.
And going back to over half of all the hours
reside in operations and weapons and defensive tactics,
that use of force. That's even without including the other 22 hours that are
part of special topics in use of force.
So those are pretty traditional ideas. Now, I don't want to say they're not important.
I'm not saying that at all. They're needed,
but we just don't know how much of that is needed if we're going to divide those
837 hours to other topics.
Yeah. Something that I was looking,
when I was looking at the subcategories of those, those six different themes,
community policing, I was looking for evidence-based policing,
which has been around for a while now. And I didn't see that in there.
Do you, do you remember if it just didn't make the cut,
if it's not part of the study or if, or if it's just, you know,
something that's a subtle that would have been in the survey,
but we just didn't see it.
I don't know that it's in the survey. Yeah.
Okay.
It may be something that's not across the vast majority,
or maybe they didn't ask about it.
But even if they included it in kind of the other components,
it's still, it's just a week of the 21 weeks.
Yeah. And you also, and again, these are, these are, I don't want to say, again,
not popular, but these are current issues that are, are larger in the
field. So evidence-based policing, which if it's, if it's not being offered,
maybe probably should. And you helped mentioned health and wellness.
There was a big push in a lot of agencies for mental health of the officers.
I just received an announcement for a, how,
how a police agency can develop their, their own wellness program in their agency.
So the fact that it's in there now, at least that that's,
that's a good start that it's part of the academy training.
Yeah. And if you, if you think about it your way, I like,
if you think about it from an analytical perspective or an impact factor,
so like, not a journal impact factor, but impact on recruits.
So we used to do like,
what's on the front page of a newspaper versus page 500.
If you're in the academy and you get five hours or six hours of stress
management in your self-improvement versus 22
hours of special topics use of force,
which one are you going to pull away and say, wow,
this is really important in this field.
And stress management is professionalism about 10 hours of
professionalism, ethics, about nine hours of 837.
And that's where we started like looking kind of with our head tilted saying,
you know, this does send a message that you're all right.
You're covering various arenas of what police are going to experience,
but they're going to leave there with 145 hours of weapons and defensive
tactics training versus nine hours of ethics and integrity training.
And that's, that's a, that's a big eyebrow razor for me.
And I bet it would be an eyebrow razor for police administrators and trainers.
Yeah, no doubt when they see,
we see those kinds of numbers and hopefully some of them are listening to
this and they're going to be considering it.
So that I guess that's a good way to lead into this question.
What are some two or three implications for the police,
the practice personnel, police leaders from, from your research?
Well, one is the imbalance and time allocated and, and, you know,
it's less important to quote each hour versus another hour,
but just the relative proportion.
But also recognizing that the academy is a key socializing stage
where you're developmentally forming the initial impression
and that initial impression, if it's delivered by the right people,
it's going to really work well for you.
If it's delivered by maybe ineffective training trainers,
which we can't attest to that's going to be an issue as well.
But for us, it's, it's that when you look at this and you say,
okay, if I had to allocate this time to a vacation,
or if I had to allocate this time to my work week,
how would I want my work week to look in terms of allocation?
Something else to consider, and we've done it with the papers
that we worked on with women in the academy,
is looking at something like fitness and how important fitness is.
It's a part of self-improvement for sure.
Right.
But we don't know if those hours should be part of formal criteria
or it's something that you work on as part of less.
So, if you're not in the academy because you're, you know,
you're dismissed because of the inability to run a mile
for whatever reason, or whatever the physical requirements are,
how important are those for the daily operations?
Now, we don't want unfit people working there, right?
In any job, in any occupation, because they're a risk.
But, you know, like I read in one,
one forum of police practitioners, a female administrator said,
you know, I've made thousands of arrests in my lifetime,
and I never had to run a mile and a half after I made that arrest.
And so, those are things that are salient.
And I would hope that when we start digging a little bit deeper
into training academy time allocation,
that we'll consider those things.
And so, those are probably some takeaways for police practitioners.
You know, it's funny, something that just now struck me,
talking about evidence-based policing, should it be in the academy?
And somebody said to me, I'm not going to name who it was,
because he might have just been, you know, making this up.
And I don't think he was. He doesn't seem that kind.
I don't know where he got it from.
But he was suggesting that some police academies
are going to start shifting in a direction of evidence-based policing.
What are we teaching them?
Why is it important? Does it actually help them?
So, if we're going to, like you just said,
if we're going to have people run a mile and a half in the academy,
does anybody ever, now, again, it's part of fitness.
You can be fit in other ways without running a mile.
You can have, you know, a good diet regimen, those kinds of things.
The question would be then, does running a mile and a half,
is there any evidence to suggest this makes a good cop?
And so there are obviously there are some that are just going to be
practical kinds of tools.
You're going to have to understand the penal code and learn those kinds of things,
which obviously makes sense.
But for some of the other other topics, it's going to be OK.
Is there evidence to suggest this actually is important
to what the cops going to do on the street?
Especially on that initial assignment,
you can guarantee that initial assignment is patrol dealing with people.
If if we instead took people from the academy
and spread them all across the police agencies of varying ranks,
then you might say, hey, if I am
a narcotics investigator and there's a lot of warrants and chasing and bad guys,
that's a different training expectation
than you're assigned to patrol in neighborhood Z at neighborhood time.
And that's where everybody's going.
And so that's the key part.
I do want to have a disclaimer here.
And if you're if people are listening and saying, well,
but this doesn't say anything about the content of what they're learning
or how it's delivered.
And I would say you're exactly right.
And so that's that's something that John Sloan and I have talked about.
The next stage of this is getting into academies
and seeing how that time allocation is happening, because perhaps
maybe the nine hours that you get in ethics and integrity
are the best nine hours I've ever seen in my life.
You just never know.
You know, something somebody was talking about this.
And again, just having these conversations that different kinds of training
and we just broke it down during our conversation
that I was having with this friend.
There can be like an online one hour.
I had a job before where you had to take yearly a one hour online video,
watch the video and take the quiz regarding sexual harassment.
And whether the training was good or bad, it seems
it seems like that was an acceptable method of giving me that information.
Watching an online video, then you could be in the classroom,
lectures, PowerPoints, you know, some videos in the room.
That's a different approach.
And again, the quality of the person delivering it.
We all know some good professors and we all know some bad professors
when it comes to delivering, delivering lecture information and how they do it.
Then there's also then the field training, getting your getting your hands
on these things, you're driving your car, you're in the pistol range.
And now we've got the video simulators, the room simulators
and virtual reality.
So, yeah, those are the kinds of things that
I've never seen anybody take a look at that.
Right, right.
And we do know, I mean, from my own training with police talking about some,
you know, in class procedural justice type training.
And I didn't think that they would want this, but they consistently said,
give us some role play stuff, give us some things where we can scenario based
and one person will be the good guy, one person will be the bad guy.
And then there'll be a third party here.
And they really want to get into those those facets.
And similar to the procedural justice training.
You know, what we're talking about here, about the imbalance in time
and what we're doing with the use of force and operations and siege mentality.
Do not mistake this to mean that they do not need that training.
There are aspects, including our own personal lives, where we would say,
give us the warrior right now.
But it's not the daily
modal event that's going to be part of policing
and how people and the police relate to one another.
Well, Gene, I really appreciate you coming on the podcast.
This has been very enlightening.
And I think it's going to be helpful, helpful for a lot of people to listen to.
I appreciate it. I appreciate you doing this.
There's some folks in written form to have started
ways we can translate our research to the practicing community.
But I think this is a this is a great thing to do
because we do sometimes speak different languages. Right.
And so we're dealing more with with more of the statistical analysis
and inference building.
And police departments are saying, well, I'm here.
What does this mean for my department or my officers?
But I will say this in all the work that I've done with police
administrators and police trainers and police supervisors,
they're always interested in what other people are doing.
And so when you bring to light research from multiple agencies,
it's going to be consumed by police leaders, administrators, trainers,
because it tells you what other departments are doing.
Well, that's exactly what I'm hoping to do is get these these different topics
in a form that's just listen to while you're in a patrol car,
while they're driving to work, if they're a chief or command staff.
So I appreciate the kudos.
Thanks again, Gene. You have a great day.
OK, Scott, thank you.
That's it for this episode of the Police in Service Training Podcast.
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feel free to send me an email, which you can find in the show notes
or you can find me on Blue Sky using the handle at policeinservice.bsky.social.
Thanks very much and have a great day.