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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.
Years back there was a spat of hidden cam whistle blowers going through the police academies. There is a huge emphasis on how to escalate a situation. The rationale is that too many perps get off on technicalities and such, but stuff like assaulting / threatening an officer and resisting arrest charges stick and make the DA reluctant to work out plea deals.
You would also need good cops running the training program, and you are more likely to get the opposite. The men and women I have known in law enforcement who are good people either get out of the field within a handful of years, or change post to constable / sheriff work because they get ostracized in municipal police forces for calling out bad cops.
They'll shout "stop resisting" as they de-escalate the situation with violence.
Indeed. They've been caught, on video, tasering a non-responsive person in a diabetic coma for 'resisting', yelling all the while. Note, it's not just about 'resistance' today, it's about 'compliance'. IE you not only have to avoid resisting an officer, you have to be following their orders, sometimes beyond the best of your ability.
Another officer, female in this case, tasered a person into being a corpse, then shocked the corpse over a hundred times by the estimate of the coroner. When her training was examined, it was discovered that she had ZERO deescalation techniques, and no techniques OTHER than the taser to seek 'compliance'.
She was on video - "Put your hands behind your back" - Pause - SHOCK - "Put your hands behind your back".
Keep in mind that after about the third shock he wasn't resisting, he was non-responsive. He wasn't capable of complying.
I don't read AC A human right
No, he's absolutely right.
The FBI firearm instruction used to always insist agents picked up their brass on the range. Until several agents got shot during actual fire fights because after unloading they stopped and bent over to pick up their brass before reloading and continuing *exactly as they had done during training*. They have since changed their training to completely ignore their expended brass--just reload and keep shooting.
A similar thing happened in the military. The US military discovered years ago (by counting enemy casualties and ammo expended) that soldiers weren't firing at enemies--because they had trained to shoot at bullseye targets. After changing to train to shoot against silhouettes both their engagement and accuracy during combat increased. This was simply a psychological aspect to their training that needed to be adjusted.
When adrenaline hits, higher thought processes shut down and the only thing left is motor memory. This is why training is so important to not only do a *lot*, but to also do *right*. When in such situations you only do what you've trained to do--and if you haven't trained at all, the only thing left is either flight or freeze, fail, and lose which may mean death.
Except 99% of the time it's not the cop that starts off being confrontational, it's some idiot wailing about their right to speed...
I'm sure you're right about that, but officers are supposed to keep their cool and de-escalate the situation.
Here is something to think about: US police officers typically have 3-4 months training, police officers in Norway and Denmark have ~3 years training.
Sure, crime rates and access to guns have a major effect on police shootings, but training is a major part of what enables officers to remain calm and polite in the midst of a struggle.
Here is a video of off-duty Swedish police officers breaking up a fight on the NY subway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...