Police Training In America: How Can We Fix A Broken System?

After all 36,000 New York Police Department officers took required training in recognizing implicit racial bias, more officers understood how racism may increase officers' aggressiveness but there was no evidence that this awareness translated into a less racially disparate outcome in the numbers of people stopped and frisked. Since the protests of police bias that started in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, most states have imposed mandatory implicit-bias training on police. NYPD's study is a rare measurement of the effects such training can have.

Implicit racial bias has solid scientific grounding, and training programs to make police officers aware of it and overcome its effects in their work have been widely embraced. But it is hard to measure whether such training reduces police brutality and racially disparate law enforcement. And there are many ways in which such programs fail, in part by force-feeding entire police departments a message they resist. There are ways to cure these flaws, including by making it voluntary and letting its lessons ripple out more organically in a police department.

More than a year after taking effect, California's law restricting when police can use deadly force has had some effects on police accountability and training, but a number of flaws illustrate how long and difficult the process of change will be. The Act to Save Lives, which limits the use of deadly force to cases when it is needed to defend a life, has been cited by prosecutors in two homicide prosecutions. A number of police departments have followed the law's training dictates. But many others have been slow to roll out the training, and the state is not requiring officers to take it to stay certified.

Crisis intervention training for Kansas City police officers does not reach the majority of the department and can fail to address a critical reason that police might use excessive force on people with disabilities. Although the 40-hour training includes a segment on dealing with people with autism and developmental disabilities, the combination of racial bias and some people's eccentric behavior can cause officers' "compliance culture" to kick in and make them overreact to perceived threats. Training without culture change, advocates say, is doomed to have short-lived effects.

Teaching police de-escalation tactics to avoid the use of force in a crisis is a popular suggestion in the police-reform debate, but a number of structural deficits make success a great unknown. Before police departments embrace the concept, they must first realize there has been no rigorous testing of any particular training regimen for effectiveness, nor do any national standards on use of force exist. Police training and the definition of de-escalation tactics are both highly fractured, lacking common definitions based on proven effectiveness.

When St. Paul police studied controversial cases in which officers used physical force, they found troubling examples that were products of the training given to officers. So they began training new and veteran officers to use tactics inspired by the Brazilian martial art jiu-jitsu, which prizes teamwork by two officers to use leverage to restrain resistant people rather than using brute force, weapons, or chemicals. In the six years after the training began, St. Paul officers used force far less often, injured far fewer people, and cost the city much less money in settlements payments.

In 2020, six years after the Justice Department imposed a series of reforms on the Newark Police Department, Newark police officers have reduced their use of force so much that they didn't fire their guns at all in 2020, nor did the city pay any brutality-lawsuit settlements. Reforms in training, including de-escalation tactics, all backed by supportive leadership and extensive community outreach, turned a "rogue department" of brutality and racism into a more trusted, effective force.

In 2000, Missouri passed one of the nation's first and most comprehensive laws aimed at ending racial profiling by police in traffic stops. But racial disparities have grown worse since then, with Black drivers far more likely than white drivers to be stopped and searched. The law relies on data collection to air the problem, which in turn was supposed to spur more reforms. But the state's lackluster efforts to enforce the law and lack of follow through on other reforms has turned the annual data gathering into "little more than exercises in futility."

New Hampshire's official response to nationwide protests of racial bias in policing lacks a critical element: a statewide database showing the race of drivers and passengers in police stops and arrests. Unlike neighboring Vermont, which since 2014 has kept a data-informed eye on racial disparities in policing, New Hampshire officials say they cannot afford to integrate such data from local agencies. Instead, those local agencies are now under a legislative mandate to report what they track to their communities. Advocates say statewide analysis would better inform police training and policies.

In the wake of George Floyd's killing by police in Minneapolis, where several officers failed to prevent one officer's actions, New Orleans police have been besieged by requests from police nationwide to export their method of training officers to intervene to prevent misconduct by fellow officers. New Orleans' reputation for police brutality and corruption has improved, in part because of its "active bystander" training. Complaints are down and public support is up. Now its internal EPIC training course is available free to other departments as ABLE: Active Bystandership for Law Enforcement.