With barbers required to complete more training hours than police in Arizona, an expert from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York says law enforcement officers here are missing out on critical training involving stress management and dealing with high-risk situations.
Arizona requires 585 hours of training for a person to become a certified law enforcement officer, according to the Arizona Peace Officer Standards and Training Board.
Law enforcement candidates in Southern Arizona receive about 100 more hours of training to be certified and those hours typically deal with officer safety issues.
But both amounts fall short of many other states, and even what it takes to be certified as a barber, which requires an applicant to complete 1,500 hours of training before he or she can take the exam with the Arizona State Board of Barbers.
The Star contacted law enforcement agencies, training academies and oversight boards in all 50 states to see where Arizona stacked up as far as required hours needed to be a certified law officer.
Required training hours elsewhere ranged from 340 to 1,112, with one state requiring a college degree to become a police officer.
Arizona is near the middle range in the number of hours required, coming in as the 29th lowest number of training hours required to become an officer. With 340 required hours, Indiana was at the bottom of the list of hours required.
Minnesota was the most stringent, requiring that applicants earn an associate’s or bachelor’s degree from a regionally accredited college and complete the professional peace officer education, which is usually included in the degree, said Peggy Strand, education director for the Minnesota Board of Peace Officer Standards and Training.
No national training standards
With no federal agency to regulate training and more than a 700-hour variation in required hours, officers in many states aren’t being fully educated in critical areas, said Maria Haberfeld, chairwoman of John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s department of Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice Administration .
In the 48 states that have peace officer standards and training boards, it’s up to the board to decide the minimum hours of training for the state’s basic curriculum, she said. From there, it’s up to the training academies if they choose to add hours and in what areas they add them.
“We have over 700 police academies and 18,000 police departments,” Haberfeld said. “So basically it’s up to the police chief or commissioner or superintendent to decide what’s good for the agency.”
Another problem is that because academies operate within different training modules, such as legal matters, patrol procedures and proficiency skills, the advancement from one module to another doesn’t always allow officers to progress as efficiently, because there’s no repetition in basic knowledge that’s used along the way.
“Use of force is not separate from ethics training, for example, because it’s all interrelated,” she said. In Arizona’s curriculum, ethics is part of the first module and use of force isn’t discussed until the eighth.
But the most pressing issue in Haberfeld’s eyes is the increasing frequency in high stress situations that officers find themselves in and the immediate and lasting effects.
“Primarily, I think something that needs to be addressed as soon as possible is lack of stress training,” Haberfeld said. “It’s the tools that the officers are not getting, how to deal with the stress that accumulates on the job and how to deal with yourself in certain stressful situation. It’s sort of completely disregarded.”
Local academy requires more hours
But the Tucson area’s training academy has taken action to increase the hours in many of the critical areas discussed.
The Southern Arizona Law Enforcement Training Center requires nearly 100 hours more training than AZPOST requires, said Tucson police Lt. Tim Reese of the department’s training division.
The academy trains officers from agencies all over Southern Arizona, including Pima County and surrounding areas.
The academy also increased training by 40 hours in what Reese calls “high-liability” areas. The current program lasts a total of 17 weeks and provides 680 hours of training in 10 separate areas.
“We do additional hours in things like first aid, firearms and physical fitness because a lot of those are high-liability situations,” Reese said. “Most of the feedback that we’ve gotten is that they would like to see additional training in areas about how to properly defend other people or yourself.”
The local training facility’s focus is de-escalation techniques and giving police the proper tools and techniques to keep that situation from becoming a use-of-force situation, Reese said.
Required training hours at Southern Arizona academy are increased as needed, but the local center does periodic reviews, either two of four times each year, and has an open-door policy with the hiring agencies in Southern Arizona, Reese said.
To maintain their state certification, Arizona police officers are required to complete eight hours of continuing training each year, and most states have the same requirements, although the hours vary.
In addition, the state has committees that address statewide issues, such as defensive tactics and high-risk traffic stops, to make sure that Arizona is on the forefront of any changes in policing.
Reality-based training has proven to be an effective way to address high-liability issues, because recruits learn how to work through the adrenaline that builds up, Reese said.
“They get out on the street and have kind of a memory bank of data on to to handle these situation,” he said. “They’re able to continually think about things like the escalation and use of force, or thinking through problem solving.”
Haberfeld says it’s unlikely that the federal government will take action to regulate police training, as it’s already been a topic of discussion for years.
“I’ve always felt that we need federal standards for law enforcement agencies,” she said. “This should be mandated with set standards, because we’re dealing with people’s lives.”
The President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing was established in 2015, and according to a one-year update from the Task Force, nine states have taken significant steps to implement its suggestions on helping to keep police officers and neighborhoods safe.
For the most part, the task force isn’t moving past reviewing documents and issuing reports, Haberfeld said.
“It’s unfortunate because people die and not just in terms of making the wrong decisions, but from the standpoint that police aren’t given all the tools that they need,” she said.
