Wake Up - History Is Calling

I was recently asked to review some police training that was developed in response to the events that are happening today in policing. When I got a copy of the training material to review, I looked at it and I was bothered and I did not immediately know why. After a couple of days of thinking about the content of the training, I called the person that sent me the training material to talk about the training. Mind you, I had not yet formulated my response to the content because I was still bothered by the content. I had not yet recognized why I was so bothered.

I get on the phone with the person and he asked me, "Well what did you think of the training?" And what I was feeling immediately came out before I realized it. I stated, "This training is out of date, out of time, out of step, out of sync with the current reality of policing; this training is more of the same crap we have been feeding officers for the past thirty years! Please excuse my language."

I continued with, "Today, right now, in real time, if we are not talking about and training police officers on the reality of policing today, what it means to police in a VUCA world, the racist history of policing, the effects and affects of social media and radicalization inside and outside of policing, racism, and doing the tough work required to move the needle on the professionalism of policing RIGHT NOW at the individual officer level, we are simply putting a bandage on a massive sucking chest wound."

I expected the person to be offended by and with my response. This person had asked me to give my opinion and I was not certain if that opinion was supposed to be in support of the training of just to simply say, "Yeah, that training is ok and add this and that and the other thing to it and your good." The fact of the matter was, and this is more than likely what was bothering me so much, the training was simply not ok. The training was some department's weak attempt to, yet again like so many police departments and training departments do, gloss over the real issue for so many reasons I will not go into right now.

WE CAN NO LONGER TAKE THE EASY WAY OUT.

The time has long been here for us to have real conversation and deliver real training to police officer everywhere in America that helps them deal with the myriad of challenges they face right here and right now. Police officers today deserve better training than the plain old training on de-escalation, community policing, customer service, communication, building trust, police legitimacy, procedural justice, or whatever else you want to call the training that is the department or agencies' half hearted attempt to address what a police officer needs to know to protect and serve in a world that has gone completely haywire in just three short years.

No one alive today can honestly deny the chaotic, confusing, and uncertain state of our democracy right now and no one can deny that the police are more important now to our democracy than they have ever been before. But, the reality is the police cannot be who they have been in the past. The police cannot show up claiming to protect and serve in the 21st Century while using tactics from the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and the 1980s with a mindset from the After Reconstruction, Jim Crow, Segregation, Civil Rights, War on Drugs, and Mass Incarceration eras of times long bygone.

Let me be perfectly clear, and I told this to the person I was on the phone with, PUBLIC POLICING IN AMERICA CANNOT AFFORD ANOTHER GEORGE FLOYD OR BREONNA TAYLOR. That community bank is now closed and the check will bounce. This is the reason why the protesting continues night after night after night. The young people of today are not going to back down like the previous generations did (mine included) AND these young people of today are our children, America's children. Just think about that for a moment.

My conversation ended with us agreeing the training was "lacking" and was in need of a reality upgrade. I got off the phone and I wondered, what can I do in these historic times? History is calling. The wake up call is here. The answer has not come to me yet, but I am certain, one day soon I am going to wake up from a restless sleep with an answer.

As always, I appreciate your thoughtful and constructive feedback.

God Bless you all and God Bless America (She needs it now more than ever),

Roy E. Alston, PhD