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The vision of a college-educated police profession is a dream almost a century old and, moreover, a dream still unrealized. Both policing and higher education are tradition-bound institutions with divergent interests. The internal concerns of each occupation has had greater immediacy than a discussion of how to build an educational curriculum with common purpose and benefit. Though advancements have been made since the 1960s, the old issues remain salient, even as current events and rapidly evolving technology add new ones.
As new challenges present themselves, policing still is struggling to realize the benefits of older commitments and reforms. It is time for a new dialogue between the law enforcement and academic communities to better integrate education with the training and service needs of agencies. By cooperatively identifying current and future needs, police professionals and academicians may develop tools to address both lingering promises and emerging challenges. To this end, a look at the existing system of criminal justice education, the history of the uneasy alliance of policing and education, the differences between education and training, and the future needs of the law enforcement profession can offer some guidance for creating a stronger link between education, training, and an end result of improved police services.
Over the years, criminal justice education has developed three distinct types of programs, linked in many ways to the entry-level qualifications of policing. The first step on the ladder remains the high school diploma or general equivalency degree (GED), which seems to depict the "industry standard" despite considerable change elsewhere. An improvement over the previous era's lack of educational standards, it, nonetheless, remains a relatively modest criterion. Once hired, the recruit attends a police training academy (ranging from about 400 hours to almost a year, depending upon jurisdiction) to study a wide range of topics, most of which the state Police Officer Standards and Training (POST) Board or equivalent body has mandated. Topics covered include domestic violence, defensive driving, multiculturalism, interpersonal communications, firearms retention, the criminal code, basics of forensics, introduction to weapons of mass destruction, and many others compressed into as short a program as possible.
The associate degree, a 2-year program, constitutes the middle rung on the higher education ladder. Some programs offer purely academic courses; others incorporate basic law enforcement certification into their 2-year curricula. Many states have integrated their mandate-based police training into their 2-year programs on a preservice basis. Students who complete criminal justice programs in those settings often earn both an associate degree and certification necessary for employment.
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It's important that our police men and women are properly trained in order to protect us from any danger. Streets nowadays are getting more and more dangerous that's why we need police officers that are well trained to keep our neighborhood safe.
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