Slashdot Mirror
Police Training Lacks Scientific Input
An anonymous reader writes: Police have been under a microscope over the past year for their involvement in some high-profile shootings. We've heard over and over that police need more and better training to keep these incidents from happening, but the truth is that there's no good framework within law enforcement to base their training on actual science. Officers tend to teach from their own experience, and research into techniques for dealing with unpredictable people goes widely unnoticed. "Carl Bell, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has done key work on de-escalation with the mentally ill, said his attempts to introduce techniques to the Chicago police never got anywhere. 'There's no systematic incorporation of research.'" Nobody expects officers to consult an academic journal when they're facing down a hostile suspect, but science needs to be part of conversation we're having.
I am willing to agree that what you say about LEOs having no extra power should be the law every but it is not. No state has a problem issuing LEOs with very effective tools for inflicting deadly force. Only 32 of those states are willing to allow all non-felons to exercise that same right. Two of them (including DC) are unwilling to allow any non-LEO the ability to lawfully exercise that right. So, no, in practice, there is a huge divide between LEO and non-LEO in regards to the use of deadly force.