Chapter 2 30 the continued professional development of officers. At the law enforcement agencies that have been interviewed, the basic formation of cadets ranges from one to three and a half years depending on the requirements of the agency and consists of obtaining theoretical knowledge, practical knowledge, and internship-type on-duty experiences. Once graduated from the police academy, police officers continue to receive training on a yearly basis. During this continued professional development, the frequency and duration of the training is dependent on the law enforcement agencies requirements. For five of the interviewed agencies, the duration of training that patrol officers receive ranges from 16 to 48 h per year, organized into three to six training days per year. One law enforcement agency organizes their training on a weekly basis, where 2 h of training are carried out each week. A minimum of 6 h per month needs to be spent on practical training activities. Although duration and frequency of the training differ across law enforcement agencies, similarities exist as well. All interviewed law enforcement agencies have a higher entity such as a (national) police board or (governmental) interior ministry that determines or approves training curricula. For instance, on a yearly basis the governing entity for police education provides a training focus that determines the contents that this particular law enforcement agency has to provide in their training for a particular year: “Every year we get [guidelines] from the national leader for practicing policy. And that’s tactics, firearms, and self-defense. And every year we get the information on what the year’s focus is going to be, for instance, terrorism, deadly violence or to increase the knowledge about psychological differences. So, we’ll get a document describing what kind of focus we should have during our practice for the year.” (TC4) When we asked training coordinators to reflect on their training curricula, the development thereof, and the delivery of amount and content of training to trainees, the responses across all six interviewed law enforcement agencies were remarkably similar. Training coordinators stated that the training curricula set the framework in which training delivery can take place. This framework consists of two factors; first, the frequency, duration, and components of the training curricula that are largely determined by the responsible external entities; secondly, the availability of resources to conduct the training prescribed in the training curricula. Training coordinators claim that what makes their training sufficient is not the development or state of the curriculum itself but what the instructors are able to achieve within the framework of the curriculum and with the resources available to them (see also training delivery):
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