Reform policing education and training standards

Educated officers are less likely to use force

Despite decades of advocacy, we have yet to see broad reaching and sustainable changes within law enforcement in America.

We’ve seen another cycle of profound protest against police misconduct. We’ve observed the appointments of multiple task forces – each providing research and recommendations. We’ve witnessed calls for accountability and better police training, as well as exhaustive lists of antidotes to police brutality. Some cities have made significant cuts in police budgets to dramatically shift funding to social services.

Many of these ad hoc changes were warranted, but alone they are insufficient to deliver the needed transformation. America remains in critical need of an overhaul to our methods of educating and developing our police officers.

Accountability and evidence

Like many of their predecessors, 21st century police reform advocates are emotionally intelligent, data driven, socially aware and relentless in the pursuit of justice for all – especially those historically and disproportionately impacted by police brutality.

Accountability is their armor, and evidence is their driver.

For generations, advocates, scholars and lawmakers have tried to reform a policing system deeply mired in the structure of unbalanced and unchecked power, only to be thwarted by those unwilling to yield force, listen to facts or share convenience. We’ve been here before – multiple times:

In 1929, President Herbert Hoover and former Attorney General George Wickersham convened the first major investigation of police misconduct. The 11 members found major corruption in police culture, brutal interrogation tactics and communities discontent in cities that enforced prohibition.

Lyndon Johnson created the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice. The commission issued its final report in 1967, and it has been described as “the most comprehensive evaluation of crime and crime control in the United States at the time,” with recommendations that led to sweeping reforms.

The Knapp Commission of 1970, a five-member task force investigating the New York Police Department, uncovered widespread corruption, resulting in more recommendations.

Forty years ago, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights recommended police departments create and enforce early intervention that would identify risky behavior and the officers who exhibit it in order to reduce police harm.

The Obama administration launched the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, resulting in a 2015 report that made 156 recommendations.

Half a decade later, we are still working to reinvent public safety. After the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis officer, calls to “defund the police” have shed light on our greatest problems in policing – a lack of structural uniformity in the policies and pedagogy that govern public safety.

Organizations like MEASURE and the American Society of EvidenceBased Policing have called for a scientific approach to police reform for years.

The opportunity to do a deep dive into the perpetual issues around American policing has led to a key conclusion: Smarter police reform must include smarter police. The Prison Policy Initiative compared the killing of civilians by law enforcement officers across several countries, and here are two of their findings:

U.S. police officers kill approximately three times more people per 10 million citizens than Canadian or Australian law enforcement and between approximately 15 and 165 times more than in Japan, England and Wales, Germany, New Zealand or the Netherlands.

Iceland and Norway see zero deaths by police.

While the statistics can only account for the number of police killings and not explain them, we must critically examine the difference in the pathways to becoming a law enforcement officer globally.

Like Renee Mitchell, co-founder of the American Society of EvidenceBased Policing, several researchers have called for a transformation of police education and the development of an American college of policing, similar to the British approach.

Maria Haberfeld, a professor of police science at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, has also suggested we develop national standards and pointed to the three-year preliminary policing educational requirements in countries like Norway and Finland.

Dr. Obed Magny’s research and evidence have led him on a path to our need to prioritize emotional intelligence in the field.

Jim Bueermann, a retired police chief and former president of the National Police Foundation, has spent years calling for scientific evidence to be translated into policy practice.

In the United States, officer training includes carrying a firearm, a taser, a baton and other tools that can inflict harm in vulnerable communities, and training can range from as little as 10 weeks to just more than a year. This is in stark contrast to the years required in most European countries, and there is no lack of research establishing the benefit of these practices.

Numerous studies have shown that an officer’s wellness, safety and professional standards increase with a bachelor’s degree.

Pubic safety academy

A 2010 study showed that educated officers are less likely to use force. It also found evidence that educated officers had the potential for more creativity in approaches to dealing with the surrounding community.

The United States has military academies like West Point, The Citadel and the U.S. Naval Academy to train the very best to protect our nation’s interests around the world. What’s keeping us from creating the same kinds of four-year institutions to train the very best to protect human rights and public safety in America?

The country lacks a national set of police education standards. The nearly 18,000 law enforcement departments nationwide operate under vastly different policies, enforcement goals and interpretations of justice – which has led to a discombobulated understanding of police legitimacy and accountability. The gross lack of data and research to inform policy, tactics and procedures has consequently dug us into a hole of public safety complacency and disparity.

Enough is enough.

Today is the best day to brainstorm a new standard backed by the available evidence of what works internationally. Let the transformation begin.

Meme Styles is the president and founder of the award-winning nonprofit MEASURE, a public education and advocacy organization that empowers people to use data to tell their own story.