This is why we can’t have nice things.

Honestly, I don’t think that’s the problem.  Wherever you are in the world, police training is largely on-the-job, and there’s only so much you can fit into a classroom setting.  Most new recruits are kept on light duties until they’re up to speed, which might take another 9 months. 

The situations where police officers make mistakes aren’t usually the sort of thing where telling someone “Don’t shoot that person” or “Don’t arrest that guy” would help anyway.  The mistakes that are made are almost always things that common sense and experience are the only cures for. 

I mean, really, do you think an extra nine months of sitting someone down and saying “Don’t shoot someone for sassing you” is going to make a difference to someone that’d do that anyway?

The key is higher recruitment standards, but that’ll never happen when every politician is “tough on crime” and promising a police officer on every corner of every street.

In most places, the testing process and the background checks take up a lot of time which makes this ad misleading at best if not an outright lie.  But it really can take as little as ten weeks to become trained to carry a badge and a gun, once someone passes the initial tests and qualifiers.

I’m not convinced that there’s an easy connection between the time spent training to become a police officer and the overuse of tasers and other misuses of power.  Arrogance takes some time to develop to the point where an officer becomes a hazard to us all (or select groups,) and that’s where the front-loaded qualification and probationary periods of some jobs becomes a sort of unintended consequence of an attempt to weed out the bad employees.  Some certainly will wash out for good reason, but those that can keep it together long enough to last six months or a year without a serious screw up can in some ways have a job for life.  And that’s one of those union facts you won’t often hear Republicans screaming about, provided it’s police officers being discussed.

It takes a long time to become well trained with a weapon, to the point that you are not a danger to the public in a potentially confusing situation. The military trains people much more intensely, and that’s just for shipping off to a country full of brown people where civilian casualties are A-OK.

I would be surprised if the ad were from an actual police department.

Well, Andre, part of the reason I identified the ad as a problem was not just the obvious (hence the photoshopping), but the very idea that one should become a cop because the barriers to entry are low.

And you’re right, mythago, the ad is from a “criminal justice careers” website.

The big part is the low pay.  A few months is about right considering cops start out in the 30K range.  You cant expect people to spend years studying to a do a job that involves risking your life daily, then make such a low salary.

I wouldn’t mind paying good cops more if they’d fire the evil ones.

I’ve been in law enforcement for the past 23 years, and that ad gave me pause.  I don’t know of any agency that still takes that small amount of time before turning an officer out onto the street.

Training for current applicants runs about 6 months now, including components on law, procedure, interpersonal skills, customer service, diversity, firearms and defensive tactics.  And even after that amount of training, there’s an additional four weeks of on-the-job training with a trained instructor. 

I just wanted to throw this information out, for what it’s worth.

In Sweden, the police training is currently a two year college education run by the Police College, which is organised under the police as a whole. The current proposition moving through the system will probably make it into a 3 year education and put the Police College under the general college system.
This doesn’t make the education perfect, and it’s the culture within the force that will control police officers’ behaviour. I do like that police students take criminology classes at the university, with all its courses on the meaning of power and such.

You cant expect people to spend years studying to a do a job that involves risking your life daily, then make such a low salary.

It’s been pointed out, right here on this blog, that police work isn’t all that dangerous, statistically.  This whole “risk their lives everyday” thing then becomes an excuse for bad behavior by police officers.  An come on - lots of people spend a lot of time (certainly more than a few months) training for jobs that don’t pay a lot, yet nobody excuses teachers or social workers, or ministers who torture or kill their clients.  (Ok, ok, so some churches do excuse priests who rape children, but even I’ll admit that’s a minority, and I despise organized religion.)

In Sweden, the police training is currently a two year college education run by the Police College, which is organised under the police as a whole. The current proposition moving through the system will probably make it into a 3 year education and put the Police College under the general college system.

Hmm.  Here’s the requirements for NZ.  19 weeks training, followed by 2 years on probation while doing distance learning.

I don’t think training is the problem.  It’s the shift work.

They switch shifts through the same week.  You can be on days one day then nights two days later.  This fucks up your sleep cycle, and you never get back on track, since your schedule is constantly shifting.  Even in hospitals when they put people on night shifts for longer periods (months) before they switch, there is still a sleep deficit.  Damn biology.

Anyway, on top of whatever training and culture problems, I think the main problem is the lack of sleep.  The cops are already on a hair trigger due to it, and then we send them out in public with guns and/or tasers where they attack 90-year-old ladies.  Who might have been wielding a knife, but were noticeably wobbly on their feet and cane.  FFS.  If you watch past the initial take-down, you can see she is lying in a pool of blood.  Honestly.  They couldn’t disarm her without the take-down and possibly breaking her hip?  What is wrong with our cops?

I think the real problem is that bad behavior is generally accepted, or punished lightly with a wink and a nudge.  Both the general public and many people within the police system think that police should be allowed to do whatever they want because they have a stressful, important job.  I just don’t think people take it seriously enough when an officer messes up.  I think that there are enough good police that getting rid of the bad ones wouldn’t be too much of a problem.

PIATOR, “Royal New Zealand Police”?  Isn’t that more like the FBI here than a local police department?

Also, I don’t care if you have 20 years of training, anyone who gets a gun, a badge, and the legal force of the state behind him/her has the potential to go on a RESPECT MY AUTHORI-TAH! power trip at one point or another. It is a hazard of the job.

Basic Combat Training for the United States Army lasts for ten weeks.  Depending upon your MOS, the next phase is Advanced Individual Training, which can last for between four and twenty weeks, depending upon the MOS selected (not including language school, which is more than a year).  After that is two weeks of Battle Focused Training, and the soldier is ready for deployment. 

So, no, that it would take “only a few months’ training” to become a police officer in some places doesn’t seem out of the ordinary to me, or even a problem; it depends upon the training itself.

Back in the 90s in NYC, someone did a survey of attitudes among police cadets at the beginning and end of their training. A the beginning, they found a lot more intention to help the public, a lot less us-vs-them, a lot less tendency to use violence as a solution.

The problem around here is that the “new” cops (sherriff deputies, really) are all assigned to the jail for two years before they hit the street. So they already hate or have a low opinion of every citizen they come in contact with because for two years they haven’t dealt with any “innocent” civilians.

This reminds me of Homer Simpson applying for a job as a prison guard:

Warden (holding out baton towards Homer): Here. This end’s for holdin’, this end’s for beatin’.

Homer: When does training start?

Warden: It just finished.

PIATOR, “Royal New Zealand Police”?  Isn’t that more like the FBI here than a local police department?

Er, Dude - we only have 4 million people.

Er, Dude - we only have 4 million people.

Do you really just have a national police force and that’s it though? There are states here with fewer people than that and they still have local police departments (or at least local Sheriff’s departments) in addition to their State Police.

And state police are much more selective and have longer training than local cops.

As far as I know, it’s just the one force.  Policing is the responsibility of the central government; the local governments in NZ are weak, and concerned with utilities, city and resource planning and the like.  The idea of a fragmented police system seems wierd, although necessary given your size.

We’re essentially a moderate sized city, spread out over a couple of thousand miles.  With it’s own navy.

Ben D. and PiatoR; tangentially, I grew up in a large city in a large (population) province in Canada, meaning that in my home town to be arrested by the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police aka the mounties) I’d pretty much have to kill a diplomat… there’s two other layers of LEO to get through before the national level got involved.

But then I moved to small town Alberta, and the mounties were the ones giving speeding tickets and parking tickets and fines for posession of pot… it literally blew my mind!

So even if there’s multi-level enforcement in some areas of some countries, it doesn’t follow that there always is, no matter the country size.