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.

Comments

Re:Ya, right

[Firethorn]

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.