User:Reneehobbs/Police academy

Approaches to Police Instruction
Training should prepare police officers with the knowledge and skills to apply contemporary standards of policing. In some countries, police education consists of an extensive process over many years; in other countries, police receive as little as 5 to 8 months of education. Most police education includes some time spent on field training, which is a supervised practicum supported by a field training officer (FTO). Police academies include policies for the selection and recruitment of instructors, stress-management training, community-oriented leadership training, training for community-oriented policing, specialist training, supervisory and management training, and liability issues associated with training.

History of Police Education
From the early 1800s through the early to middle 1900s, policing was conceptualized as a form of physical labor and on-the-job training was the norm. Policing became professionalized in the middle of the 20th century, but this varied greatly depending on national and local culture and politics. The "good government" ethos of the 20th century emphasized that police should be hired competitively based on merit, and entrance tests became standard practice. In some countries, the rights of ‘due process’ advanced to make it necessary for police to have an understanding of law and legal reasoning. After the riots and disturbances of the later 20th century, community policing approaches emerged to emphasize the importance of social skills and social science knowledge. The rise of gun violence also affected police training programs which placed more and more emphasize on the use of weapons and defensive tactics,

The Uses of Video in Police Academies
Video has six functions in police education to support the development of sworn officers who pledge to protect and serve the public. In the context of police academies, video is used to: (1) engage interest and attention; (2) transmit ideas; (3) demonstrate a process; (3) activate feelings; (4) empower voice; and (6) create community. Videos are used as a recruiting tool to engage people to apply for police training, and in attracting interest and attention, they may use action, humor, pathos or other techniques to encourage people's curiosity about policing as a career choice.

Videos may be effective in improving learners' knowledge, developing attention, reflection, and noticing skills, but the educational value of video depends upon the characteristics of the medium, content, and the learner's mental effort and expectations for learning. In the classroom, video viewing and analysis activities may advance people’s ability to discern and focus selective attention on significant moments and aspects of complex situations. It also may sharpen the ability to interpret and reflect on what is noticed based on one’s own professional knowledge and experience using description, explanation, and prediction. In policing, learning from video may cultivate systematic observation procedures that transfer to direct observation in the field. Because video provides a permanent recording that captures the complexity of social interactions, learners can examine an action with multiple objectives and from different perspectives. Learners can also stop the tape and review certain segments, focusing on specific details.

Video viewing and discussion activities cultivates professional vision. a concept used to describe the distinctive ability shared by members of a professional group to see and understand events central to their work. This is because video facilitates a shift from an individual dimension to a collective one in observation, since the same video can be shared by different observers, enabling analysis from multiple perspectives. Because viewers bring a variety of different kinds of life experiences and prior knowledge to the task of viewing video, what they notice and the meanings they infer from video will vary greatly. For this reason, instructional practices that involve viewing and discussion need to elaborate their purposes with clear and concrete task structures and designs.

Body-worn Cameras and Bystander Video
Video has become increasingly important in law enforcement and society has accepted a variety of forms of surveillance because of its value in both increasing accountability and preventing crime. In a study of more than 700 police chiefs, researchers have found that police chiefs with higher levels of trust in their officers were more willing to disclose raw video footage from body-worn cameras to the general public. Cameras can also support officer learning in situations where behaviors fall short of professionalism. But dashcams and body-worn cameras may also inadvertently increase use of force incidents and reduce the time that the police spend on de-escalating a situation.

Demonstrations and How To Videos
Other types of videos can also provide visual and real-life examples of important policing concepts and police instructors often use video for conveying important information and ideas, demonstrating how to use equipment, tactics, and procedures, enhancing situational awareness, and even in understanding the local community. Short clips from news and entertainment programs can help address important cultural and social dimensions of police/citizen encounters, and these videos are easily accessed through social media posts and video-sharing websites. Some of the video training materials that are used in police education are so tedious and boring to watch that officers are tempted to skip out on viewing them, which is a type of cheating.

Controversies about Videos Used in Police Training
Police training videos can reinforce harmful stereotypes. Communities concerned about police abuse of power have examined the content and format of videos used in police academies as part of police reform initiatives. In Austin, as members of the community reviewed videos used for police education, they noticed patterns that troubled them. The videos used for police instruction included many with content that included an “us-versus-them” bias that focused exclusively on officer safety that neglected to consider the safety of the community as a whole. Videos depicted officers as “good guys” and the public they interact with as “bad guys,” offering a view of the profession as primarily concerned with exercising and maintaining control, where officers are agents of control and the public stands in need of being controlled.

Trigger Warnings
Videos used in police education can include distressing classroom material that features violence and emotionally-intense depictions of human behavior under duress. Trigger warnings limit the intensity of emotional arousal for many learners. Providing an advance warning to learners may reduce distress among people with PTSD by allowing exposure to be controlled.