Learning the Skills of Policing

How important is experience in learning to become an effective police officer? Police officers say vehemently that there is no substitute. The training given in police academies is universally regarded as irrelevant to real police work. Policing, it is argued, cannot be learned scientifically, in the sense that if A is done in Y situation and B is done in X situation, then Z will result. The life police officers confront is too diverse and complicated to be reduced to simple principles. As police officers continually say, every situation is different. What is needed, then, is not learning in the book sense but skills derived from handling a multitude of what seem like unique situations over and over again. If this view of policing is correct, then it follows that the best officers are likely to be the most experienced, those who are older and have been in service longer. By extension, the only people fit to judge police activity in encounters with the public are other experienced officers. Certainly civilians could not make fair judgments, but neither could supervisors who had not experienced the peculiarities of a specific situation. In effect, the mysteries of the occupation are so profound that one not immersed repeatedly in police operations could not possibly understand the constraints as well as the possibilities of particular circumstances. Few officers would state the case as baldly as this, but these implications are fairly plain. That this view of policing is self-serving is obvious. More troubling, however, is that it suggests that policing is not amenable to rational analysis and, by extension, to formal learning. Contrary to the pretensions of police professionalism, officers commonly portray policing as being essentially a craft in which learning comes exclusively through experience intuitively processed by individual officers. Admittedly, policing is not yet a science in the sense that a body of principles has been generated that officers may follow with a reasonable probability of achieving successful outcomes. Officers correctly perceive that there is a gap between the operational world and the classroom,