Chapter 2 24 skills such as situational awareness and decision-making. Similarly, integrating elements of anxiety and stress into training — akin to what police officers would experience in high-risk onduty situations — has shown to improve use of force performance under stressful conditions and paved the path for police training to become more realistic (Oudejans, 2008; Nieuwenhuys & Oudejans, 2011; Andersen et al., 2016). Furthermore, police instructors are called to create learner-centered training environments that foster the “exploration and learning of functional solutions” to reduce the gap between police training and police work on duty (Koerner & Staller, 2021, p. 10; White & Escobar, 2008). This means moving away from traditional classroom-based, trainer-centered teaching to enhance performance, skill transfer, and retention. While research has contributed immensely to the quality of police training, current literature is yet to provide a comprehensive overview of police training across law enforcement agencies. Two reasons, in particular, might explain the lack of a cross-cultural overview of police training. First, almost every law enforcement agency organizes the frequency, duration, and content of their training differently (Marenin, 2004). This is due to many factors. The availability of resources and budget for training may determine how much and how often training can be conducted (White & Escobar, 2008), while the content of training will vary as it is tailored to particular needs of the region of operation. For instance, urban and rural environments pose different sets of challenges to police work which should be reflected in the training of police officers (Crank, 1990; Huey & Ricciardelli, 2015). Second, societal or situational influences (e.g., occurence of a terror attack, see Henry, 2002), changing policies (e.g., implementation of COVID-19 measures, see Laufs & Waseem, 2020; Frenkel et al., 2021), and technological advances (e.g., the integration of the body cam, see Koen et al., 2018; development of VR training, see Giessing, 2021) may call for specific adjustments in structure and content of police training. The concurrence of organizational, situational, and technological influences is what makes training practices unique to each law enforcement agency. As a consequence, the landscape of police training across law enforcement agencies is extremely diverse. Although the diversity of training practices across European law enforcement agencies may explain why thus far no cross-cultural overviews of police training are collated, this does not mean that such an overview would be of no use. An overview featuring the commonalities and differences of European training practices highlights the diverse contexts in which law enforcement agencies educate and train police officers. This will, due to the variety in training practices, encompass a broad range of solutions law enforcement agencies have found for a broad range of issues with training. This may allow law enforcement agencies to learn from good practices in the training of other agencies and may help them to identify their own strengths and challenges in training more clearly. At the very least, law enforcement agencies may learn
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