Police academy training: Why hasn’t it kept up with practice? Police Quarterly

The movement toward community-oriented policing and problem-solving policing has required the development of new police officer competencies. However, police academy training has changed very little in the past 20 years. The authors recommend that police academies move beyond task anal-yses and the traditional components and include training in the skills neces-sary to be effective community-oriented and problem-solving police officers. Increased time should be spent on police recruits developing problem-solv-ing, interpersonal, and decision-making skills. The authors encourage the readers to provide some additional training and curriculum suggestions. Since 1986, community-oriented policing and problem-solving policing (COPS) initiatives were under way in more than 200 communities (Trajano-wicz, Steele, & Trajanowicz, 1986). Since that time, more than 10,000 law enforcement agencies have received grants from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Community Oriented Policing Services Office (COPS) to fund more than 71,000 additional police officers and sheriff’s deputies across the country (U.S. Department of Justice, 1999). As defined by the Community Policing Consortium (1999), community policing consists of three essential and complementary core components: community partnership, problem solving, and change management. Despite the emphasis of the core compo-nents and the pervasiveness of COPS monies flowing to law enforcement agencies, there have been very few changes to most entry-level law enforce