Evidence-Based Police Training

As law enforcement faces scrutiny by the community to improve their social interactions with them, training efforts are being created to transition the negative views of policing to acceptable ones. Strong community-sided training has been implemented based on police involved incidents in which use of force was viewed as the main negative factor where injury or death of a civilian was the outcome. Continuous media and social media output of these incidents have incited outrage in the community who decidedly pushed to produce police training courses to help officers’ professional growth. The issue with these knee-jerk reaction training events is the uncertainty of their effectiveness to solve the problem that the community faces. Evidenced-based policing will solve the issue by providing research tactics to verify if the training works as intended or it should be abandoned as ineffective. By providing the information found to the community, departments would be transparent in their efforts to reform and reinforce trust in the community. However, evidenced-based research takes a long time to develop, and require skilled personnel dedicated to the task. This can be solved if departments are willing to provide training for the specific task or outsource to the appropriate parties, such as university personnel who are educated in research methods. The longevity of the research will be beneficial, no matter how long it takes to gather the information. Officers will also be resistant to any training efforts as the norm, but with supervisory buy-in, the effort will be made resulting in positive feedback of research outcomes. Thus, police departments should incorporate evidence-based research to determine training validity.