Advies rapport over Politie training

Over politie training wordt verschillend gedacht: trainen we voor de uitzonderingen of voor alledaagse werkzaamheden? Dit rapport doet een pittige goed onderbouwde uitspraak m.b.t. IBT/Politie training: “Allocation of training time and topics should align with actual patterns of police-community violence. Most use of force incidents involve low levels of non-assaultive resistance during arrest and other detention situations. Among other things, this means more hands-on training should be spent on situational awareness and basic control tactics, with relatively less time devoted to striking, kicking, knife defense, and so forth”.

Dit advies wordt in het rapport verder uitgewerkt, bijvoorbeeld hier: “Among other things, our report highlights the need to allocate more training resources to preparing officers for the most commonly occurring use of force events. Although it is a common tendency to fear being injured or killed in rare, spectacular ways, the probability of safety and survival in all aspects of life is best enhanced by consistently preparing for common and predictable perils. Put another way, given scarce resources, it is better to learn how to swim than how to fight off a shark. Unfortunately, too much police use of force training focuses on fear-based, emotionally-driven preparation for rare “shark attack” type events and ignores the less glamorous task of preparing officers for common, well-known situations that frequently spin out of control and lead to needless injury and death for want of basic physical, mental, and emotional skills.?

We can already anticipate the objection to our argument: “learning to swim isn’t enough, you must also be able to fend off sharks!” To be clear, we are not downplaying the need for officers to have the skills to survive rare events such as ambushes. Rather, we are saying that given the perennial scarcity of training time and resources, agencies need to make difficult but rational decisions about the skills that are most likely to pay the highest dividends in both officer and public safety. Such decisions should consider evidence from LEOKA and other studies showing that with few exceptions, lethal and near-lethal confrontations begin at lower levels of violence. Based on all of the data that the ADAPT team reviewed, we think that the most effective way to improve officer and public safety is to give officers the skills and confidence to anticipate and mitigate violence in the early stages of high-frequency encounters before events escalate out of control”.?

En in een ander deel van het rapport lezen we:

” Plainly said, the vast majority of situations in which officers are involved can be resolved by effective talking. Of those situations where physical force is necessary, most can be resolved through the early application of lower levels of control. Situations involving extreme violence and death nearly always result from the failure of earlier situational and threat awareness, communication, and proactive control tactics. While many officers may fear sudden, unprovoked violent attacks, such incidents remain infrequent and rare even taking account of the deeply troubling upward trends in anti-police violence, which are well documented by the FBI’s LEOKA program: (https://crime-data-explorer.fr.cloud.gov/pages/le/leoka).?

En dan:”In deciding how to allocate scarce training resources, police agencies should spend most of their time and money building officers’ holistic capacity to be effective communicators under a wide range of conditions from amicable to hostile; who can detect, mitigate, and control early-stage conflicts and confrontations; and who can deal reliably, safely, and lawfully with less common and extreme forms of violence. All things being equal, agencies are most likely to realize the greatest improvements in officer and public safety through the efficient, regular, and unrelentingly practice of basic skills that prevent the "10 Deadly Errors" of law enforcement”.?

Bronnen

https://www.polis-solutions.net/adapt