Police Training in Practice: Organization and Delivery According to European Law Enforcement Agencies 2 27 Interview Guides Based on the initial review of the training documents from law enforcement agencies, we developed two separate interview guides: one for interviews with police training coordinators with conceptual training tasks and one for interviews with police instructors. The interview guide for training coordinators consisted of discussion topics regarding the frequency, duration, and components of training, assessment and evaluation of officers, training for stressful situations and decision-making, an evaluation of the current training curriculum, and effective and innovative training practices. The interview guide for police instructors consisted of opinion inquiries regarding the overall experience as an instructor, their favorite parts of training, training methods they commonly implement in their training, and their views on what constitutes effective training. The interview guides can be requested from the first author. Procedure To capture diverse perspectives of European police training, the first author visited the locations of six European law enforcement agencies in five different countries. To recruit participants for the interviews, we utilized purposive sampling where contact persons at each law enforcement agency referred us to key informants who further helped us recruit potential participants for the current study (Smith et al., 2009). All interviews were conducted by the first author, whose native language is German and who is fully proficient in English. To participate in the study, participants had to be (a) proficient in English or German, (b) provide operational police training as an instructor, or have a role in the conceptualization and organization of operational police training. Prior to visiting the location of the law enforcement agencies, our contact person ensured that at least one participant was in a position to be interviewed as training coordinator. Additional interviews with instructors were conducted based on the availability of instructors on location. We conducted all interviews face-to-face at the locations of the law enforcement agencies. Prior to conducting the interviews, we informed participants about the content and purpose of the study and asked for permission to audio-record the interview. All participants signed informed consent agreements prior to being interviewed. Due to time constraints of participants at one law enforcement agency, one of the interviews was conducted in a focus group setting with three participants (one training coordinator, two instructors) at the same time. For this interview, the interview guide for training coordinators was used. Analysis We conducted an inductive thematic analysis following the steps described by Braun and Clarke (2006): familiarizing with the data, generating codes, constructing themes, reviewing potential
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