Police academies spend about 110 hours training their recruits on firearms skills and self-defense — but just eight hours on conflict management and mediation.
This is according to a 2006 report from the Department of Justice, which looked at the median time state and local academies spent on various law enforcement skills.
The report is a decade old, but it’s the most recent data we have on how much time is usually spent training police officers to diffuse tense situations. This is especially important to know after the police shooting deaths of Philando Castile in Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Louisiana. In both cases, officers killed the men even though there appeared to be no immediate threat.
The chart below shows that as far as time goes, deescalation and mediation are not priorities in police training programs:
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The police academies have also skimped on community policing, which the Department of Justice made a priority more than 20 years ago.
Since 1994, the DOJ has given more than $14 billion to state and local agencies to hire community police officers. The hope was to move away from the traditional reactionary model of policing, but criminologist Dennis P. Rosenbaum says many police departments have "lost sight of the importance." In fact, a 2014 review of the initiative found that many departments treated community policing as a "buzzword" rather than an actionable strategy.
