Louisiana. Less than 48 hours later, police shot and killed 32-year-old Philando Castile

in St. Paul, Minnesota. Many have voiced their opinions that with better police training,

these deaths could have been avoided. It’s a concern that has been brought up many times

over the past few decades. So how are officers being trained? And has anything changed?

Well, to start, there is actually no federal standard for how police are trained. The specific

disciplines taught and the amount of time officers spend on each one varies from department

to department. But according to the most recent data from the Department of Justice, more

than half of police training is spent on hard skills, like firearm use and self defense,

leaving little time for soft skills, like de-escalation, communication and “community

policing”. Community Policing is the idea that officers who build close ties with the

community are better able to promote safety and order, as they understand the unique issues

of their beat.

The distinction between these two types of law enforcement has garnered attention in

recent years, with many experts saying that police academies should allot more time to

soft skills. We reached out to the Director of Police Training in Washington State, Former

Sheriff Sue Rahr, who told us that the emphasis on hard skills is more of a time factor than

an intentional priority.

when you’re training a physical skill, it takes a lot more time just because we spend

80-some hours on defense tactics and 8 hours on dealing with people with mental illness,

it doesn't mean that defensive tactics are more important, it just the nature of skills

based training.’”

The problem with police training may not be how time is distributed, but instead lie in

the nature of the training.  A 2015 Harvard study Rahr co-authored found that many police

are trained as warriors, rather than as community guardians. According to this idea, police

who only respond in a time of crisis, instead of regularly interacting with their community,

only have a linear understanding of their beat. This issue is only made worse by a police

academy’s “warrior culture” which has its foundations in military training. For

instance, the officer who shot Castile had allegedly attended a police-organized “bulletproof

warrior” seminar, which stressed fast reactions and a preparedness for combat-like situations.

Although there is a renewed push for community policing in recent years, it has actually

been a part of police training for decades. In 1994 President Bill Clinton signed the

Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which, among other things, led to the

allocation of $14 billion dollars to community policing initiatives. But a review of the

policy 20 years later showed that while many departments have adopted such tactics on paper,

few have actually incorporated it into their training and field work.  

Even for the departments that have heavily incorporated community policing strategies,

the results have been mixed. For instance in Camden, New Jersey, which is considered

one of the most dangerous cities in America, city officials disbanded the police force,

rebuilding one that is heavily focused on community policing. Although in two years,

shootings fell by 43 percent and murders by more than half, the tactics used to achieve

those results have led to significant tension. A greater police presence has culminated in

an increase in stop-and-frisk and surveillance tactics, which has only heightened tensions

between the community and police force.

But while de-escalation training and community policing are a step in the right direction,

many have argued that they fail to address the larger problem, which is explicit or unconscious

racial bias on the part of law enforcement. According to a report by the Washington Post,

nearly 1000 people were shot and killed by police in 2015, more than a quarter of whom

were African-American, although they make up a much smaller proportion of the US population.

A number of departments have adopted training programs that aim to suppress any implicit

racial bias officers may have. However the effectiveness of these initiatives has yet

to be studied. As the number of people killed by police in 2016 is well on its way to exceeding

that of the year before, law enforcement is under more pressure than ever to get to

the root of the problem.