Is Police Reform Necessary in the United States?

Many police officers are trained to do everything necessary to deescalate a situation before resorting to weapons. However, that is not the case for a large part of the American police population. Many’s initial reactions are to shoot the civilians or resort to violence. American law enforcement claims to be here to protect and serve, yet their actions send a completely different message.

Police training can be completed within twenty-one weeks in the United States. In those twenty-one weeks, 168 hours are dedicated to teaching recruits the use of force, firearms, and self-defense. That is nearly double of the eighty-nine hours spent on self-improvement and the eighty-six spent on legal education. American police conditioning is formatted in parallel to the country’s military boot camps. This quality and structure of training should prompt people to question whether the recruits are being taught the proper skills to protect an intersectional community. Does their training teach them to recognize the differences between people and know how to treat them with equal respect, or does it do a better job at showing them the best angles at which to fire their gun? Policing in America has become a source where officers are able to abuse their position of power and excuse their biases because there are no proper guidelines around how they should enforce the order. The efforts and focus on police training in America are shaping officers into community penalizers, rather than protectors.  

Instead of focusing the majority of police education on the use of force and firearms, trainees should be taught how to recognize and handle people with special or different needs. Force should almost never be the immediate answer to a situation that involves someone with any form of impairment, yet police have failed to do so. In recent years, the funding for psychiatric training was cut, leaving police with no understanding of how to handle situations with mentally ill civilians, but a clear proficiency in how to fire their gun and pin a person to the ground. Tony Timpa is a devastating example of police incompetence when it comes to handling people with mental illnesses and disabilities. He was experiencing a schizophrenic episode and called 911 for help. They responded by harshly pinning him to the ground and laughing at him. He was writhing in distress and asphyxiating while police officers made jokes about how he looked like a “rolly-polly” and denied the fact that he was mentally ill. Tony died about twenty minutes later in police custody due to physical distress and sudden cardiac arrest on August 10, 2016, in Dallas, Texas. This could have been avoided if the officers had the proper knowledge on how to detect mental illness symptoms and how to treat the person without inflicting fatal harm.

Training should extend beyond mental health and assistance to racial awareness education. With the deeply embedded racism in America’s history and current justice system, it is crucial for police to undergo training that teaches them the importance of upholding their promise of “justice for all”. They should ensure that there is no room for racial prejudice in their service to the people. This is a value that despite being ignored for so long, has and will always be central to the police’s mission of protecting and serving all people. Breonna Taylor. Andre Hill. Manuel Ellis. Atatiana Jefferson. These people, along with hundreds of other victims, were people of color killed by American police officers who resorted to violence as their initial reaction. None of these people were armed or posed any high threat to the officers. The only threat was their skin color. They are not the first nor the last to fall victims to the brutality and biases of the American police system. Police officers in America are drilled to act on protecting their own safety, leaving a clear opportunity for them to hide their biases behind excuses of self-protection. Black people are more than 2.5 times more likely than white people to die at the hands of police. Hispanic people follow with 29% more likely, along with Native Americans exceeding them with being more than three times at risk of police bias and their violence. 

American police make a promise to uphold justice and community peace, yet are trained like combaters. Being a police officer is like being a community worker. How will they protect and serve a community that fears them? Is a GED and twenty-one-week training requirement truly enough to shape the supposed protectors of our communities?