Police Training in Practice: Organization and Delivery According to European Law Enforcement Agencies 2 41 placed a particular focus on training of physical skills such as shooting, arresting, self-defense, and tactical procedures. The structuring of these skills into segmented training components (e.g., a training segment of the curriculum focusing only on learning to shoot, a different segment focusing only on learning self-defense skills) is a common principle in the organization of training. This finding is consistent with training practices of other European law enforcement agencies who also train particular components such as self-defense and arrest training, firearms training, and tactical training in isolated training segments (Staller et al., 2022). Similarly, the common principle in teaching of these components holds that training should be structured in a linear fashion moving from simple to complex, learning about the skill in a lecture-based setting, practicing the skill in a controlled setting such as the shooting range or the dojo, and then applying the skill in scenario-based role-plays (Renden, Nieuwenhuys, et al., 2015). Taken together, the common principles law enforcement agencies share in the organization and delivery of training is the linear approach to learning. The described overview of European police training practices represents the current state of training according to those who conceptualize and deliver it. Based on this current state of training, we discuss strengths and challenges of European police training with the aim to provide law enforcement agencies with examples of good practices, possible improvements, and solutions to challenges they may experience, as well as provide researchers with shortcomings in training that would benefit from further investigation. Strengths of Current Training Practices Five of the six interviewed law enforcement agencies structure their training content of the continued professional development of police officers on the basis of a yearly training focus determined by an administrative police board for decisions on training curricula. Having a yearly content-specific training focus provides training coordinators and police instructors with current and realistic contexts in which they can structure and deliver the training of skills and procedures. Next to providing realistic and current training contexts, a yearly training focus determined by a national or regional advisory board is assumed to reflect the specific needs of each law enforcement agency’s region of operation, highlighting the necessity of training skills and procedures in the context of what has previously been an area of attention in that region. For instance, a multitude of police encounters with people with mental illnesses revealed that officers had difficulties recognizing, addressing, and interacting with people with mental illnesses (see Morabito, 2007; Livingston, 2016). A large number of these incidents may call a national or regional police board to decide to place a yearly training focus on interaction with people with mental illnesses — as has been the case for one of the interviewed law enforcement
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw