Policing is essential to protect citizens, families, and their country from various affairs and crimes. It requires special training, therefore, not every volunteer is in the needed physical condition and has the appropriate level of knowledge to fulfill this job. Future policemen are trained by means of special education methods that are developed over time. Although those methods are mostly not new, some of them are implemented under the affection of modern crime trends.
Future policemen must possess skills in problem-solving, critical thinking, and written communication to effectively perform in their working position. However, the US policing educational system is not perfect for rising future professionals as the studying process consists of lecture-styled classes and machine-gradable testing that do not correlate with high productivity. Police training in the United States is more teacher-focused than learner-oriented, priority is given to research instead of teaching, therefore, police educational programs are weak.
Although studying methods do not change often, some new subjects or exercises are included in the training process influenced by modern criminal trends of cybercrimes, migration, and demographic change. One of the most important directions of police development is terrorism and migration terrorism as well. Organized criminal online groups pose one more major challenge for law enforcement as a source of drug smuggling, blackmail, money launderers, and fraud. Therefore, the most important modern trend for police is training IT specialists with knowledge of Big Data, various programming languages, hacking, e-commerce, and mobile tracing. Cooperation with foreign countries through Interpol, which aims to facilitate specialized training for law enforcement in all member countries, is a common trend as well. Police education involves some new methods of training specialists, but the structure of the system has not changed much, although nowadays, the notion of “policeman” implies more functions than it was before.
References
Eldefonso, E., Coffey, A. R., & Grace, R. C. (1974). Principles of law enforcement: An overview of the justice system. Wiley.