“Because Police Officers hold such a vital and responsible position in our society we, rightly, hold them accountable to higher standards than we do ordinary citizens. Police Officers hold the power to deprive citizens of liberty and even life when the situation demands; and this is not a power our society wishes to grant to anyone less than those who can prove that they will be capable and responsible shepherds of this duty.”
This is how the Milwaukee Police Department describes its own training standards. Of course, tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets of many U.S. cities to loudly disagree with that notion. So, are American police officers truly held to the standards of “capable and responsible shepherds” of their duty?
“The duration of basic education and training programs is enormously different” depending on the country, says a report by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. “Basic training duration varies from six months (in the U.S. and Canada) up to 30 months (Germany).” In Spain, the police academy curriculum lasts a minimum of nine months. In France, mandatory training in police academies lasts 12 to 24 months, and prospective officers need at least a bachelors’ degree to apply. With less than six months of training, the American police has much lower standards than the rest of the Western world.
How to Become a Police Officer in Wisconsin?
“The law enforcement certification program is an 18-week, 720-hour program,” explains Eugene Reyes, director of police training at Milwaukee Area Technical College (MATC). “The same 18-week curriculum is taught by approximately 20 police academies and technical schools in the state of Wisconsin. The standards, the performance assessment tasks and the curriculum are exactly the same; the training to become a police officer is unified throughout the state of Wisconsin.”
Becoming a law enforcement officer requires training that is specific to each state; in Badger State, it is the Law Enforcement Standards Board (LESB) of the Wisconsin Department of Justice that determines how our police officers are trained. Wisconsin requires 720 hours of training, which is less than is required to become a barber in Wisconsin (1,000 hours), but more than is required of police in other states.
|
|
To be admitted in one of Wisconsin’s police academies, a prospective student needs to have 60 credits from an accredited university or an equivalent Associate degree. “We get people who have degrees in business, engineering, anything... But of course, the majority of the students that enroll are in a criminal justice program,” Reyes clarifies. “However, there is no requirement that you have a degree in criminal justice in order to apply to the police academy.”
Other requirements are to be 18 or older, to have completed high school, to have a driver’s license, to not have been convicted of a felony, to be of “good character,” to be physically fit and to pass a drug test. Individual law enforcement agencies can mandate additional requirements.
“There are two ways to get into the police academy,” explains Steven Wagner, director of the Training and Standards Bureau, which sets the training standards for law enforcement in Wisconsin. “You can get hired by a police department, and then they will send you to the police academy, where you obviously will be earning a wage and benefits because you are employed. However, you can also self-sponsor, meaning you’re not employed by a police department, you are actually just going in as a civilian.
“The students that are employed by a police department have been vetted by their department through their human resources and their own hiring process,” Wagner adds. “As for the self-sponsored students, that’s up to each technical college; each technical college has the right to set their own rules about how they accept self-sponsored individuals.”
To become a police officer, self-sponsored students need to be hired by an agency, or else they will not be certified by the state’s Law Enforcement Standards Board (LESB) even after completing the academy. Steven Wagner considers the selection process to be hired by an agency to be “very stiff”: “Prior to [working with the Training and Standards Bureau], in the jurisdiction I was at, we were getting an excess of 700 applicants twice a year. And out of those 700, we would hire maybe 10 a year.”
How Are Wisconsin Police Officers Trained?
“The curriculum for the police academies has to be approved by a curriculum committee and then go before the Law Enforcement Standards Board,” Wagner explains. “The police academy is broken into three different phases. Phase one is an introduction to law enforcement expectations. Phase two is more of an emergency response, hands on, like training with a firearm. Phase three is more about investigations, bringing it all together. Finally, they go through skill scenarios at the end for a week.” The Shepherd Express obtained a copy of that curriculum.
The largest part of the curriculum is traffic-related, clocking in at 152 hours, with courses such as “Traffic crash investigations” (16 hours). Then, the students spend 138 hours on courses to learn how to best react to any situation, such as “Defense and arrest tactics” (60 hours), where they “learn the limitations on the use of force.” The third-longest unit is law and criminal justice, at 102 hours. Units that teach how to use violence and firearms add up to 92 hours. 34 hours are dedicated to physical fitness and 32 hours to medical knowledge. The rest of the curriculum touches on topics such as protocols, learning how to fill a report, as well as tests.
Every six weeks, the students have examinations to test their knowledge of all the courses. “They have to get a 75%, or better, to proceed to the next phase,” Eugene Reyes states. Failing to display proper skills with a firearm or when determining when use of force is reasonable can be an automatic fail. “If a student does not meet those objectives, that's a failure and grounds for termination.”
In “Defense and arrest tactics,” students learn hands-on; “they’re sweating, they’re wrestling to defend each other, they have pads, helmets and protective gear so that we can see that these young people are able to do the job when their life depends on it,” Reyes explains. “It starts with pressure points and then escalates to directing people to the ground. Then, if the assaultive behavior continues or rises, the officers learn how to escalate their response to stop that behavior; that's where you get the pepper spray and the tasers. If it goes to a higher level, then you get to the baton, or you deliver a focus strike with your hands, elbows, knees or feet. And then as a last resort, of course, there is deadly force.”
“We've had a problem with the word deescalation,” Wagner warns. “The word deescalation is only used once in professional communications throughout the entire curriculum, but it is in every one of our classes. The biggest thing in crisis management is deescalation. Even though it doesn't specifically say deescalation in ‘Defense and arrest tactics,’ it is in there. It’s a huge thing in our curriculum.”
“I think that the standards for successfully completing the police academy are extremely high. The standards in Wisconsin, believe it or not, are very high. In my opinion, every student that successfully completes the 720 hours is absolutely, 100% ready for the next phase of their employment, which is field training.” Reyes adds. “You have to make the objective reasonable so that the officers have a baseline knowledge of whatever it is that they need to know for each topic that they test out and they move on to the next topic. Otherwise, law enforcement certification could take years! How much longer can the police academy be?”
“So, right now, we’re at 18 weeks—almost six months—of police academy, and that is simply to prepare that officer for the next step, field training. Field training means getting hired into an agency and riding along with an experienced field training officer, and that alone takes approximately 14 weeks. And then, that officer is on a probationary period for almost another year and a half,” Reyes explains. “That is important, because the dynamics of the job can never really be replicated in a classroom. We try, we do as much training as possible to simulate real world activities, but you cannot cover everything in the classroom when it comes to being a police officer.”
Once this initial training period is complete, police officers still have to go through a mandatory 24 hours of retraining every year. Only two elements of retraining are mandatory, however: four hours of vehicle pursuit every other year and handgun qualification every year. The remaining hours are left entirely to the discretion of each agency. “Not every community has the same training needs for their police department,” Wagner says. “So, we allow departments to come up with their own unique way of training. There are other skills to learn, like CPR every two years, and also taser training.” According to the Wisconsin police procedures manual: “They may complete up to 12 hours maximum of the 24 hours of annual recertification training by viewing training videos or taking part in self-directed online learning.”
Is There a Systemic Police Training Problem?
The reason why protests have erupted all over the United States is because American police officers use deadly force at a staggeringly high rate compared to other countries, in particular against black Americans. From 2013-2019, Wisconsin police killed 111 people, nearly one-third of whom were black. Nearly 1,100 Americans were killed by police nationwide in 2019. The same year, German police only killed 17 people, French police only killed 19, and English police only killed three.
Police training has often been accused of being the root of the horrifying police killings in the U.S., whether it is said to be insufficient or said to be militarized and instilling the idea that American citizens should be treated like an enemy force. Eugene Reyes denies the accusation that police academies teach students to be trigger-happy: “Let’s just make this very clear: We do not teach any philosophy surrounding the use of force. Students have to understand the definition of use of force and the justifications for any type of use of force. Use of force is always going to be situational based on whatever's happening and whatever resistance is being presented to the officer. They learn definitions, not philosophies.”
For Reyes, the explanation isn’t systemic but individual. “I know that the training that we have right now is good. What the officers do at that moment [when they kill someone], we just don't know, they’re human beings.” He insists that putting a knee to the neck, which is what killed George Floyd, goes against police training. “The technique where we have somebody prone on their stomach on the ground to take control of them is called three-point ground stabilization. When someone in prone on the ground, the officer is taught to sweep their arm to the small of the back at a 45-degree angle. The officer can place their knee over the back until the subject is stabilized or handcuffed, then the officer must help them up. When we teach that technique, we absolutely, 100% identify the danger zone for that subject as being the neck; at no time in training do we tell them that it is appropriate to put your knee over that subject’s neck. That could be fatal.”
Americans who have been on the receiving end of tear gas and violent tactics from police officers in riot gear might be interested to learn that absolutely nothing is taught about handling protests in police academies. “There isn’t a word in the curriculum about responding to riots. The type of training that is done for crowd control and riot control is agency-specific; I don’t know where these guidelines come from,” Reyes says.
While the explanation that the system in place is good with only a few “bad apples” is appealing and comforting, one cannot ignore the fact that American cops kill American citizens at dozens or hundreds of times the rate seen in comparable countries. As we’ve seen, even in Wisconsin, where training standards are higher than in some states, the training given to prospective police officers is short compared to European equivalents. Other explanations, such as the qualified immunity of the police and the culture in police departments, come into play; even the best training cannot counteract a toxic culture in a profession that cannot be held liable for the crimes of its members. To address this, new initiatives, like a sweeping police reform bill recently signed into law in Colorado, aim to end the qualified immunity of the police.
In Milwaukee, “we’re relatively consistent with other American cities. But obviously, the only thing we’re consistent with other American cities is that we have a high number of police killings, and you don't have that in other countries,” Milwaukee Alderman Nik Kovac deplores. “I think we should look at the European models. Perhaps one of the reasons is our lack of training, or maybe it’s the kind of training we’re doing, or more likely it’s our inability or unwillingness to discipline officers and change the culture within the department.”
He continues: “In Milwaukee and the rest of United States, we have defunded so many of our other basic social services, but we haven’t defunded the police so far. The police have kind of been protected in our budget and most other budgets—I’ve been against that for years,” Kovac adds. “But if you cut the funding of every other department until you only have police left, then police will be asked to do things they had never been trained to do; for instance, like intervening with drug addictions and mental health episodes or trying to deescalate domestic violence situations. That may be touched on in police academies, but I don't think in the 18 weeks of training they get they can achieve anything near expertise in those kinds of incidents.”
To see real change, a step that can be taken is to change the curriculum that the state’s police academies must follow. “Changes are constantly being suggested to the curriculum,” Reyes says. “The program that is currently implemented is 18 weeks and 720 hours, but five to seven years ago, it was only 13 weeks and 520 hours. And 10 or 15 years before that, it was only 400 hours. So, the state Department of Justice has made adjustments to extend the training based on the needs and the pressures of the job. I think that the people in power will look at police training and will change the training if it's deemed necessary.”
“In years past, the roadblocks to reform were my colleagues,” Kovac claims. “I had an amendment back in 2014 [to reform the police budget] that failed on a 6-to-9 vote. Now, I have more than double the amount of colleagues asking for an even bigger cut than what I was asking for six years ago. We had a 13-to-2 vote on Tuesday, [June 16]. To be honest, what's finally changed is the political will, and that changed because people went to the streets.
“If you want real change, make your voice heard and take to the streets to help convince your neighbors,” Kovac advises. “Emailing elected officials leaves a record. That would include emailing Common Council members, the mayor and the Fire and Police Commission, who have the most direct control over the Milwaukee Police Department. Also email your congressperson, email your state legislators, because frankly we're going to need help from the federal and state governments for a lot of this reform.”
