For six months, the Dayton Daily News has chronicled a class of cadets from day one through graduation at Sinclair Police Academy, and analyzed how their training fits into the larger context of societal debate over law enforcement.
This story, the last in the series, looks at the future of police training in Ohio, and how it addresses three key issues:
- Racial disparities in policing
- Officer readiness and safety
- A shortage of police officers
In May, the Ohio Peace Officer Training Commission — which sets standards for police academies statewide — unanimously approved recommendations put forth by the Ohio Attorney General’s Blue Ribbon Task Force on the future of police training.
The move was a “significant step forward in transforming the training of Ohio law enforcement,” the Attorney General’s office said, marked by slightly easing the physical fitness requirements required to graduate the academy, and new courses on active shooter and threat response, critical decision making, crisis mitigation and de-escalation, communications and mediation, and incident debrief.
Much of the recommendations for the new curriculum, per the task force’s report, focus on communication, as well as practical education using virtual reality, after-action debriefs, and scenarios.
The Fall of Minneapolis
There is no issue more politically charged in policing today than law enforcement’s relationship with minority communities. This came to a head locally in 2020 when protests followed the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.
But local community activists take issue with some aspects of how the Sinclair Police Academy addresses this issue, including the airing of a controversial documentary about the Floyd case. Meanwhile planned revisions to the statewide curriculum address racial disparities in policing indirectly.
The Community Diversity and Procedural Justice module at the academy does address types of racism, types of cognitive bias — including the difference between implicit and explicit bias — and recognizing when a person may be more susceptible to bias, including having ambiguous or incomplete information, or time constraints.
“Intention, attention, and time are needed to build new associations well enough for them to compete with a person’s implicit biases,” says the state curriculum that Sinclair uses established by the Ohio Peace Office Training Academy.
Thought not required by OPOTA, cadets at Sinclair were also shown the documentary The Fall of Minneapolis during this class, produced by conservative journalist Liz Collin and Alpha News. The film argues that Chauvin is not responsible for the death of Floyd and that Chauvin’s trial was tainted by perjury and manipulation of evidence.
The film has been widely criticized for omitting facts of the case that were presented to the jury, and certain claims made by Collin have been debunked. Chauvin appealed his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, who upheld his conviction last November. The justices did not comment in leaving in place state court rulings affirming Chauvin’s conviction and 22 1/2-year sentence.
“It is a politically charged issue, and (the film) gave the cadets a different perspective on the events that day,” Police Academy Commander Joe Niehaus said. “As a police officer, you have got to know if your actions are going to be viewed differently by different people, which they are. And I think (the instructor’s) focus was on trying to get the cadets to see that you could maybe do everything right and still be found in the wrong.”
“Looking at it from a training aspect, what else could we have told (Chauvin) to do that would have not resulted in that?” Niehaus said. “All incidents should be reviewed. Even in the Chauvin (case), we’re not saying they did absolutely nothing wrong. We’re saying that according to their procedures they followed, they followed Minneapolis procedures, they did what they were taught and what the department told them to do. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from that.”
The inclusion of the film in academy training is “concerning,” said Jared Grandy, former community relations coordinator for the city of Dayton’s Human Relations Council.
“Younger officers, especially ones who are indoctrinated with videos like The Fall of Minneapolis, are going to come in with a bias and a bent that is going to decrease the quality of the interaction with the citizen,” he said.
David Fox, retired chief of police for Wilberforce University, disagreed with the idea that Chauvin did the best he could in his interactions with George Floyd, pointing out that training on the technique that Chauvin used to restrain Floyd includes moving the suspect into a position that prevents asphyxiation after a certain period of time.
“One of the understandings that one must have when they get ready to use force is whether or not they are capable of using enough force to overcome resistance,“ Fox said. “Once they tried to take control of him, they should have gotten control of him in a way, in a manner, in which that should never happened like that. To hold anybody down on the ground for eight minutes is inexcusable, regardless,” Fox said.
Fox also questioned what the documentary had to do with a community diversity and procedural justice class.
“I don’t have a problem with the film,” Fox said. “I’m an educator. And I believe that that whenever you deal with something you deal with a variety of sources. I have a problem with an instructor showing it and then trying to push for it being the correct thing.”
Situational decision-making
One element of the new OPOTA standards that purports to impact racial disparities in policing is an emphasis on communication and “situational decision making.”
Situational decision-making is a curriculum developed by the University of Chicago that, when tested by the Chicago Police Department, showed a 23% decrease in use of force incidents while maintaining police productivity and increasing officer safety.
Additionally, while the curriculum wasn’t designed to address racial bias or racial disparities in policing, it led to a “reduction in the disproportionately higher number of arrests of Black civilians,” per the Ohio AG’s blue ribbon report.
Sinclair’s current curriculum focuses less on addressing specific racial disparities and more on character education of the officers.
“We are law enforcers. That’s what the cadets are learning to do. You treat everybody, every citizen, the same, no matter what their background is,” Niehaus said. “One of our instructors teaches: be firm, be fair, be nice. That’s the core of what being an officer is, because you are a public servant…you’re there as a peace officer. You’re there to maintain the peace, offer support, and help, no matter who the person is.”
However, others argue that in addition to character education, debiasing training and similar racial sensitivity training should be emphasized.
“The reason why racial intelligence training is important, the reason why implicit bias training is important, is because the engagement that the officers have when they come in contact with someone determines the outcome that’s going to occur,” said Fox. “The citizen has to look at what the police (officer) is doing as legitimate, acting in a legitimate manner.”
For example, Fox said, one of the simplest ways to accomplish this as an individual officer is to explain — or even over-explain — their actions at a traffic stop.
“In other words, the person needs to have an understanding of why you’re stopping them. But the vast majority of Black men that are stopped by police are never told why they’d be stopped… and that escalates problems, too,” Fox said.
Additionally, biased encounters or profiling by police officers can directly erode the positive relationships officers are trying to build with their communities, Grandy said, citing his experience both handling complaints about the police from community members, and fostering dialogue between the two.
“In those interactions, people will complain that they were treated disrespectfully, unfairly, sometimes searched, and it may have been legal, if we’re using the letter of the law. However, it was discriminatory, because...the interaction itself was predicated upon a pretext. People still are too often profiled based on the color of their skin, the car they they drive, and this goes back to implicit bias.”
Officer readiness
The new state standards will supplant 72 hours of what the Ohio Attorney General’s office calls “outdated curriculum,” including Blue Courage, a police-focused leadership development course, basic first aid, and a portion of Radar and LiDAR traffic enforcement training. These would be conducted outside the formal academy, per the task force report.
However, Sinclair will likely keep several of the cut classes in their academy as, particularly with traffic enforcement, local departments still use these tools and require their officers to train on their use, Sinclair leadership said.
“The old way used to be…we never trained them how to do radar and Lidar in the academy classes, and then you went back for another week of training,” Sinclair Police Academy instructor Bill Peck said. “So we’re just going to have a better, well-rounded officer.”
“We’ll try and keep as much as we can, obviously because departments around here find it valuable,” said Academy Commander Joe Niehaus. “It depends on how much they take away.”
The courses that will replace these 72 hours include 44 hours of basic and interpersonal communications and mediation, four hours of incident debrief, eight hours of active shooter threat response, and 16 hours of “critical decision making, tactical breathing, crisis mitigation and de-escalation, and managing cognitive demand.”
Several of these initiatives aim to increase the safety of officers as well as those they interact with. Reducing use of force incidents through communication and situational decision-making reduces the odds of officers getting hurt. And increasing hands-on training using tools like virtual reality better prepares cadets for stressful situations.
The implementation of virtual reality is easier said than done, however, as a single helmet pre-loaded with police-specific training and scenarios costs a whopping $80,000, Sinclair Police Academy leadership said.
“What you have to remember is those programs are showing downtown Dayton,” said Peck. “You can literally program it to show Third and Main, and Third and Main comes up. That’s the advantage of those programs, as opposed to your $300 Oculus.”
Staffing, perception
An effort to help cadets pass the police academy, and thus get more officers on the street, is the lowering of fitness standards needed to graduate.
Changes to the new fitness standards have already been implemented at Sinclair and at other academies, mandating that cadets fully meet two out of the three physical fitness requirements, and meet 75% of the third.
“The one that (cadets) fail most of the time is the PT. It’s the run. So by doing this, I think it will probably have a few more that might pass. I don’t think there’s going to be all that drastic of a difference, myself,” Peck said.
Asked what the community can do to support law enforcement, Sinclair Police Academy leaders said improving the perception of police — which supports recruitment and police outcomes — involves presentation of the facts of certain incidents without bias from the media and other institutions.
“Words matter,” Peck said. “I think all law enforcement is trying to improve their image with the communities. None of us want to go out and be negative. I don’t know of anybody that says ‘I want to go kill somebody today.’ That’s not what happens.”
Police training does not end with the academy. Continuing education, not to mention learning from one’s interactions on the street, is a career-long endeavor for police officers. However, Fox added that fostering a culture of open-mindedness and lifelong learning comes from the top.
“There is no one training that fits all,” Fox said. “Training should be ongoing, should be continuous, picked up by the supervisors, and continuously reviewing it with their employees. It shows a sense of accountability, it communicates workplace culture, sets expectations and communicates how leadership cultivates the development of their employees.”
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