Chapter 2 44 they can conduct training. As availability of resources plays a part in the limited level of realism in training, an additional issue might be that instructors lack the knowledge or skill to make training sufficiently realistic with the resources available to them. By relying solely on physical aspects of the training environment, instructors dismiss other opportunities to make training realistic; for instance, designing training tasks that allow for motor, verbal, and cognitive skills to be trained in conjunction (Di Nota & Huhta, 2019). To address the issue of limited realism in training, law enforcement agencies should consider three possible solutions. First, although unlikely in the present economic climate (Cushion, 2020), law enforcement agencies could provide instructors with the resources they need to create realistic training (Di Nota & Huhta, 2019). Second, law enforcement agencies may look for cost-effective innovations such as the use of VR for realistic training (Giessing, 2021; Murtinger et al., 2021). Lastly, law enforcement agencies can strive to elevate the knowledge and skill of instructors to create realistic training with the (limited) resources available to them (see for instance Cushion, 2020 for an alternative approach to reality-based training). The assessment and testing of knowledge and skills of police officers, particularly during the continued professional development, is another common challenge of current practices amongst law enforcement agencies. While law enforcement agencies put assessments into place to ensure that police officers possess a certain standard of skill, our findings showed discrepancies in the consequences for underperformance during those assessments. For instance, when failing the physical competency test, there are no consequences for officers of one law enforcement agency. Further, the assessments in place are rarely representative of the on-duty work that police officers perform (Lonsway, 2003; Tipton et al., 2013; Petersen et al., 2016; Koedijk et al., 2021). Similar to the modular, segmented structure of training components in the training curricula, currently applied assessment and testing methods evaluate isolated skills such as static shooting on the shooting range or self-defense technique evaluations. Law enforcement agencies can aim to improve their assessment practices by implementing common standards for underperformance and by reevaluating the design of their assessment methods to include representative testing environments (Staller et al., 2017; Koedijk et al., 2020).
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