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

Ya, right

[Anonymous Coward]

Most cops have a highschool education why do you expect them to read or even cate about scientific papers?
Why assume the average cop is even interested in deescalation?

actually there is a manual.

[nimbius]

As a valued member of the law enforcement community it pains me to see the lack of independent investigation into our scientific process. Several books have been published in the past 30 years including such titles as 'fundamentals of systemic mass incarceration' and 'scientific process for falsifying evidence during a confrontation in which an overwhelming disproportionate level of force was applied.' These titles are all extremely technical...quite academic you see. So perhaps I shall refer the layman to such titles as 'metal batons, the musical!' and 'chokeholds, the happy urban handshake.' My personal favourite is 'civil forfeiture and the vacation to maui'