Educating and training the future police officer.

The vision of a college-educated police profession is a dream almost a century old and, moreover, a dream still unrealized. Both policing and higher education are tradition-bound institutions with divergent interests. The internal concerns of each occupation has had greater immediacy than a discussion of how to build an educational curriculum with common purpose and benefit. Though advancements have been made since the 1960s, the old issues remain salient, even as current events and rapidly evolving technology add new ones.

As new challenges present themselves, policing still is struggling to realize the benefits of older commitments and reforms. It is time for a new dialogue between the law enforcement and academic communities to better integrate education with the training and service needs of agencies. By cooperatively identifying current and future needs, police professionals and academicians may develop tools to address both lingering promises and emerging challenges. To this end, a look at the existing system of criminal justice education, the history of the uneasy alliance of policing and education, the differences between education and training, and the future needs of the law enforcement profession can offer some guidance for creating a stronger link between education, training, and an end result of improved police services. (1)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

A THREE-TIERED SYSTEM

Over the years, criminal justice education has developed three distinct types of programs, linked in many ways to the entry-level qualifications of policing. The first step on the ladder remains the high school diploma or general equivalency degree (GED), which seems to depict the "industry standard" despite considerable change elsewhere. An improvement over the previous era's lack of educational standards, it, nonetheless, remains a relatively modest criterion. Once hired, the recruit attends a police training academy (ranging from about 400 hours to almost a year, depending upon jurisdiction) to study a wide range of topics, most of which the state Police Officer Standards and Training (POST) Board or equivalent body has mandated. Topics covered include domestic violence, defensive driving, multiculturalism, interpersonal communications, firearms retention, the criminal code, basics of forensics, introduction to weapons of mass destruction, and many others compressed into as short a program as possible.

The associate degree, a 2-year program, constitutes the middle rung on the higher education ladder. Some programs offer purely academic courses; others incorporate basic law enforcement certification into their 2-year curricula. Many states have integrated their mandate-based police training into their 2-year programs on a preservice basis. Students who complete criminal justice programs in those settings often earn both an associate degree and certification necessary for employment.

At the third level, an increasing number of police agencies now require the 4-year bachelor's degree as a hiring credential. Generally regarded as part of the social sciences, 4-year criminal justice programs focus more on research than on skills training, in accordance with long-standing dictates of the disciplines. Students learn criminal justice from a systems perspective and generally are taught skills in research methods and statistics, rather than interviewing or managing problem individuals. Bachelor of arts and bachelor of science degrees are awarded either by an independent criminal justice department or from programs within another discipline, typically sociology, public affairs, or political science. The 4-year programs continue to follow the social science model, offering knowledge about the system and developing skills to study the system. Training academies instill the skills to function adequately within the field as currently constituted (and hopefully lay the ground-work for successfully coping with changes in the social and legal environments).

Speaking broadly, the law enforcement profession apparently has not known what to do with a college education. Although college-educated persons have succeeded in policing, "education" seems to remain tied in an abstract way to professionalization and more optional than necessary. For example, the degree from the substandard institution can carry as much weight as that from a flagship university; professional development through additional training can count as much or more in promotional processes than mere education; and training itself still begins at the level of the least skilled, rather than the more educated. In addition, the assertion that the credential indicates a more rounded person, of broader vision, who can be molded into a superior police officer remains difficult to prove in more than anecdotal terms. Nor has the criminal justice degree necessarily proven itself valuable as a preparation credential; after all, many of today's college-educated officers hold degrees from other disciplines, ranging from English literature to chemical engineering.

On the other hand, higher education has taken great pains to distinguish itself from "training," even though a portion of police academy training already falls under the guise of the liberal arts discipline in some states. Many programs rightfully boast of widening their students' perceptions and ability to think critically about topics, but most criminal justice curricula focus on understanding criminal justice theory and practice through the lens of social science research. In turn, the best students possibly may leave educational institutions with well-honed skills of analysis more suited for academia than for their chosen occupation. If they present themselves for employment with abilities that their employers will never ask them to use but without those with direct application to their professional lives, then the net result is the "educated individual" whose professional development begins only after being hired.

In the end, though, both training and education compete with a cultural view that experiential learning constitutes the only real preparation for police work. The platitude of "Listen, kid, forget all that stuff you learned in college or at the academy" still can be heard in some quarters. Experience even has a toehold in the hiring queue, as many agencies accept 2 years of military service in lieu of 2 years of college, apparently on the grounds that the experience is somehow equivalent to a formal education. (2)

A SHORT HISTORY

The awkward marriage of policing and education is a legacy of the 1967 Report of the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, which forced a formerly insular profession to confront the weaknesses in its structure. In the wake of wide-spread dissatisfaction over crime rates, police relations with minority citizens, and police handling of civil rights and antiwar protests, the report proffered "better-educated police officers" as a vehicle for change.

Criminal justice education grew out of the handful of police science programs that existed at the time. It expanded rapidly with the availability of Law Enforcement Education Program (LEEP) funds from the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968. The creation and rapid expansion of those programs proved erratic, as practitioners often were thrust into faculty roles to meet demand. This led to criticisms that the educational component was weak, with credit given for training (or, worse, for "war stories") containing no thinking component comparable to the established collegiate majors.

As a result, the criminal justice discipline continues to fight a battle for legitimacy within the educational community, seeking to shed the early stigma of "Handcuffing 101." The antidote within higher education has involved replicating the methods and standards of criminal justice's parent disciplines--sociology, psychology, and political science--emphasizing research methods and statistical analysis as a way of understanding system outcomes. Except in rare cases, the 4-year programs have not developed personal skills components comparable to the clinical portion of medical training. Overall, graduates may appear better prepared to become social scientists, rather than police officers, although exceptions to such a sweeping statement certainly could exist. (3)

Since the 1970s, economic forces have altered the framework. As legislative mandates have added to the skills core of traditional training curricula, employer-sponsored training has become more expensive. To compensate, mechanisms for preservice certification, which places the financial burden for training on the prospective employee, have created training programs in academic settings. As a result, despite misgivings, 4-year programs end up giving academic credit for completing police academy training in some systems under the transfer rules that carry 2-year students into the 4-year institutions (even though the actual number of credit hours tends to be limited).

DIFFERENT GOALS

Education and training are fundamentally different tasks, though in an ideal world they should complement each other. Education should prepare students to succeed in any training regimen or philosophy or in any occupation, regardless of their academic major. The process of education is less a transfer of fact or philosophy than that of obtaining the skills of learning how to learn. A college education is designed to build within each student the ability to critically assess new situations, undertake new learning as needed, and even to question the "facts" and underlying assumptions of existing canons of knowledge, when necessary. Educated individuals who graduate from college or university possess abilities that transcend even the most specific vocational aspirations (e.g., singular areas of study, such as premed and prelaw), as well as multiple changes in career trajectory.

By comparison, training systematically builds particular skills to achieve certain ends. The oft-expressed idea that a person "falls back on training" in high-stress situations embodies one aspect of training goals, the repeated achievement of a desired action (and result) in a variety of contexts. Although the "Handcuffing 101" pejorative of higher education implied that skills training is physical (and education, therefore, mental), police academy training curricula also contain a growing number of topics that embody a learning component quite different from the strictly tactical mastery of wrist locks and Weaver stances, such as the nuances of domestic violence and child abuse, multicultural issues, and legal rights of the accused. Moreover, several dimensions distinguish criminal justice education from police academy training, including the amount of time spent on material, the different educational and experiential credentials of the instructors, the nature of testing and grading, and the scope of application beyond a particular vocational setting.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

While the course title "Criminal Law" may appear the same, a university may feel that the "cookbook" approach of some police academy training courses--learning the material elements of each category of offenses in the criminal code--does not compare to the broader approach that examines the underlying philosophy of law, the nature of legal reasoning that informs U.S. Supreme Court opinions, and other similar issues. By the same token, though, law enforcement agencies need someone who can write a report that materially supports an affidavit and court complaint for robbery or burglary. Therefore, in a well-developed system, the collegiate process would feed well-prepared individuals into a police training process that capitalizes on their education, thus creating a complementary approach to improving police services.

DIFFERENT STRENGTHS, DIFFERENT WEAKNESSES

The future will create new training needs not currently standard in either college programs or police training academies. New developments in technology will create a need for investigators who can cope with the criminal uses of those technologies. The sheer volume of financial crimes perpetrated via computer hacking and identity theft will exceed the capacity of federal agencies to investigate. If local police do not adapt to the need, private resources likely will fill the gap or leave local jurisdictions and their constituents without legal recourse.

Most police training curricula and most traditional social science-based criminal justice programs lack the ability to prepare students to deal with technology-based crime or with financial crime. Those skills are taught in business and computer science programs in universities and elsewhere. Originally promoted as an interdisciplinary field of study, criminal justice has narrowed. The struggle of criminal justice programs for legitimacy within the higher education sphere has forced them to hew close to the doctrinal requirements of the parent disciplines: sociology, psychology, and public administration. Doctoral-level faculty come from those disciplines and may model their programs on their own courses of study.

The social scientists who teach how to draw valid conclusions by analyzing databases do not have the skills to teach students to deal with distraught, intoxicated, scared and aggressive, or deceitful individuals. Nor are they necessarily the best persons to teach students how to recognize behavioral manifestations of mental illness or emotional disturbance; those clinical skills are taught by nursing or social work programs.

It also may be that police instructors do not have those skills either, preferring norm-driven instruction that focuses on officer safety. Historically, few practitioner instructors met (or even understood) the levels of scholarship demanded by colleges and universities, though that has changed dramatically in recent years. Practitioners able to integrate macro-level social science knowledge with street-level experiential learning remain a scarce commodity.

That said, there should be no reason that a preferred college education cannot be an interdisciplinary course of study that encompasses both understanding and a usable skill set that undergirds subsequent training. A variety of baccalaureate programs have a clinical component that involves developing skills with direct application to the job market under the tutelage of seasoned practitioners. The medical and psychological sciences have such a mix, as do accredited programs in social work. Many criminal justice programs allow or require internship or practicum experiences, providing a framework to develop a comparable "clinical" aspect to criminal justice education.

With all of these factors in mind, what can the law enforcement and academic communities do to improve the balance between educating and training future police officers? Three main models--creating a new model of interdisciplinary criminal justice degree; modifying the existing social science curricula to similar effect; and placing greater emphasis at the point of hiring upon the course of study, rather than on mere possession of a degree--demonstrate some possible approaches.

Model 1: A New Interdisciplinary Approach

The faculty of the top academic criminal justice programs came from a wide range of fields, such as sociology, psychology, urban planning, political science, and public affairs. They applied the tools of those disciplines to the study of the criminal justice system, offering different perspectives and raising different questions. In the more than 30 years since that time, the field has become homogenized, with a fairly standard set of curricular offerings common to most programs, built upon an ever-expanding body of research findings.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In a newly multidisciplinary approach, criminal justice programs might require a specified number of hours in accounting, computer science, and ethnic studies, in addition to the social science core of criminal justice. If the old concern that "the new kids don't know how to talk with people" remains, then the programs might consider including drama classes, public speaking, or even courses in the great antithesis of policing, social work, that require students to interact in person with people. The whole idea is to use the academic environment to teach the thornier social lessons so difficult to approach in police training settings. The academic atmosphere is different, less politically or emotionally charged, and the venue allows for a more pluralistic (i.e., not "all cops") exploration of the issues raised.

Teaching "multiculturalism" or "cultural sensitivity" in a police training environment often results in an awkward experience for instructor and attendees alike. Exposure to different cultures through educational study may be a better, more results-oriented approach. The exploration of new ideas occurs over a longer time and requires a different level of engagement than an 8-hour in-service training session. Using literature and a variety of media, educators can present and discuss related issues in a manner that police training typically does not accommodate. Understanding of other cultures becomes a foundation--even if a fairly narrow one--upon which police training can build, as opposed to a bolton module that flies in the face of police cultural norms and becomes something to be endured, rather than adopted.

Model 2: Adapting Existing Programs

Creating new programs represents a visionary approach that may be possible in institutions that do not have a criminal justice program. The larger reality is that the institutions with existing criminal justice programs are unlikely to make radical changes without cause. Issues of academic tenure and contractual matters are as real as their counterparts in policing. The study of criminal justice will continue as a social science pursuit, with the programs serving those who aspire to the professoriat, as well as those with ambitions toward becoming police officers, detectives, or federal agents.

Change in academia will not come about without a strong signal from the receiving professions, those who ultimately will hire the products of academic endeavors. If the field speaks with a concerted voice about the need for certain skills and emphasizes hiring individuals with those skills, then academia will move to provide them. For example, it is gratifying--if a bit surprising--to have police agencies complain about the lack of writing skills of some college graduates and interns. Given the competitive marketplace of higher education, "employability of graduates" remains a selling point for many institutions.

Model 3: Course of Study, Not Major

The third option does not require institutional change on the part of academia. Instead, it places the onus on the aspiring police professional. If the field signals that it considers proof of certain skills, acquired in an academic setting, as a bona fide occupational qualification, the existing programs will make the recommendation, and the students will seek the courses themselves. Academia already gives such direction concerning second languages and accounting skills (for those who aspire to be federal investigators); it easily could do the same for clinical skills. Students will have to surmount institutional barriers, such as the unavailability of pre-requisite courses and those requiring academic major status. Nevertheless, if the field provides the signal, an impetus exists for institutional adaptation, and it well may be that this third model might ultimately turn into the first, a third-generation criminal justice major that is multidimensional.

CONCLUSION

During a coffee-break conversation at a training session, a police officer said to the author, "No offense, Doc, but I could teach the useful parts of your 4-year program in a day." His point was essentially correct if the only things that counted were the factoids students could recall 3 years after graduation. The author countered with the observation that he could fill the 4-year curriculum with war stories and the students would leave the program as ignorant as the day they arrived.

Both points were equally valid and equally off the mark. Without integration, neither formal study nor secondhand experience is an adequate preparation for the demanding tasks of police work. Experience is an important teacher, to be sure, but the old adage remains that fools can learn from their own mistakes. Wise individuals minimize their mistakes by learning from the mistakes and successes of others. Both training and education share the mandate to make such learning possible. A future in which the two endeavors complement each other can occur, but appears unlikely to happen of its own accord. A dialogue that explores the needs of the law enforcement profession and the capacities and possibilities of the academic field is needed to fuel such change; the challenges of the future should create the spark.

Endnotes

(1) The author based this article on his experiences as a police officer and academician, as well as his close association with numerous law enforcement professionals.

(2) Such a view is anathema in academic circles. Instead, the value of military service is recognized as a complementary process and as a maturing influence, but not as comparable to formal education.

(3) The author acknowledges the probability of local exceptions. It is not possible, however, to know the offerings of every program in the United States without an extensive research effort far beyond the scope of this article.

By MICHAEL BUERGER, Ph.D.

Dr. Buerger, a former police officer, is an associate professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.