Tag: Police Training

Detroit Area Police Department Used Images of Black Men for Shooting Target Practice

If the police still use those targets there should have been an explanation about the targets and its purpose or how there are used. Those targets have been in use for as long as I can remember. This could mean for 30 years. I would like to know the origin on how they were designed and why many police departments used them. They may have been free through the federal or state government. There was a dog, female hostage, and a white male with a chain or a knife

My PD adapted the targets by covering the weapon with other objects like a phone, wallet, other weapon, or non-weapon object. This way when the target would present you never new if it was a threat. The officer would have to scan to see if the target had a weapon. This made officers constantly disregard any stereotypes and focus on hands and if the target was armed with a weapon. This improved training. This should have been explained to the boy scout group.

Boy Scouts discovered the targets, some of them pierced with bullet holes, while touring a police department headquarters just outside Detroit.
— Read on www.vice.com/en/article/4axdp9/detroit-police-black-men-shooting-range-targets

Law Enforcement Training: Identifying What Works for Officers and Communities

California must assess and improve training for its nearly 700 law enforcement agencies and more than 87,000 full-time sworn and reserve peace officers. Such action would be an essential step toward meaningful law enforcement reform. In the wake of deadly police encounters involving Black Americans and excessive use of force, lawmakers have looked to police training as one means to implement reform. In Fall 2020, the Little Hoover Commission launched a study to examine the role of the Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) in shaping law enforcement training standards for California’s peace officers.  As part of its review, the Commission issued a series of Issue Briefs that provide critical context and insight into law enforcement training in California without making policy recommendations. The first, California Law Enforcement Survey, details findings from the Commission’s anonymous survey of active-duty California peace officers about the training they receive. The second, Comparing Law Enforcement Basic Training Academies, reviews various models for law enforcement basic training academies across the nation and within California. In this report, the Commission identifies ways in which the state can address current training deficiencies and enhance the training that officers receive.

Access the report HERE

Effectiveness of Police Training

Police training, particularly that which is delivered to recruits, is designed to impart the knowledge and skills officers require to adhere to departmental procedures, policies, and practices. As such, basic training is a fundamental component of efforts to reduce excessive use of force and racially biased policing, ensure respectful and constitutional behaviors on the part of officers, and build community trust and police legitimacy. Yet far too often decisions about whether and when to invest in certain trainings are guided by the latest trends and premised on assumptions that training will be effective. It is crucial that research on the content, duration, and modality of both basic and in-service trainings guides police departments’ decisions about their allocation of scarce training resources.
READ more ……. here

Get the publication HERE

Biden wants to “reinvigorate” funding for the COPS office.

The COPS office produced some of the best publications in policing. There was a time that every month there was an exciting publication released by the COPS office. You could even receive a hard copy of the publication. With the right leadership and if it returns to producing material that is beneficial to policing the COPS office can return as a great resource.

He wants to give yet more money to a federal office that has helped facilitate abuses in policing.
— Read on slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/biden-cops-office-funding-police-history.html

The National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice

This is an interesting website that has a lot of resources. The home page can be accessed here: https://trustandjustice.org/about/mission
Below are two very useful topics available on the website.

Procedural Justice

Procedural justice focuses on the way police and other legal authorities interact with the public, and how the characteristics of those interactions shape the public’s views of the police, their willingness to obey the law, and actual crime rates. Mounting evidence shows that community perceptions of procedural justice can have a significant impact on public safety.
There are Articles, PowerPoint presentations, Guides, and Tools available for training. See here: https://trustandjustice.org/resources/intervention/procedural-justice

Implicit Bias

Implicit bias describes the automatic association people make between groups of people and stereotypes about those groups. Under certain conditions, those automatic associations can influence behavior—making people respond in biased ways even when they are not explicitly prejudiced. More than thirty years of research in neurology and social and cognitive psychology has shown that people hold implicit biases even in the absence of heartfelt bigotry, simply by paying attention to the social world around them. Implicit racial bias has given rise to a phenomenon known as “racism without racists,” which can cause institutions or individuals to act on racial prejudices, even in spite of good intentions and nondiscriminatory policies or standards.
There are Articles, PowerPoint presentations, Guides, and Tools available for training. See here: https://trustandjustice.org/resources/intervention/implicit-bias

New Jersey’s Cutting Edge Use of Force Police

This LINK is to the Use of Force policy page that has the Policy, Additional Documents, and other Related Content. The NJ Use of Force police is supposed to be the most comprehensive policy in the nation.

For comparison this is the 2001 Use of Force policy. As of 12-23-2020 it can be accessed HERE.

Five years. 72,677 documents. Every local police department in N.J. We built the most comprehensive statewide database of police use of force in the U.S.