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Chicago Police Department Report Highlights Dismal State Of Police Training

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

When Chicago released a task force report on its Police Department yesterday, the report cited long-standing failings within the department. And one of the failings was in officer training. Among the examples, it said officers slept or checked their smartphones during video-based training sessions. It also said the cramped facilities forced certain classes like Taser training to be held in hallways.

To get some perspective on this, we called upon Maria Haberfeld who's written extensively on police training. She's a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. Welcome to the program.

MARIA HABERFELD: Hello. Thank you for having me.

SIEGEL: You've read the report on Chicago. On the subject of training, would the Chicago police be typical of other big police departments around the country?

HABERFELD: Unfortunately, it is. We devote very little time, energy and resources to training. And in comparison to other democratic countries, we are so far behind that it's really, at least in my mind, irresponsible in a democratic society to have so little training for police officers.

SIEGEL: Police departments will cite funding, but is there actually a will to do this, apart from a financial way to do it?

HABERFELD: It's a combination of lack of will and lack of resources. Police departments around the country have been undertrained for decades. And it's hard to explain and make the correlation to police officers between the level of training and various incidents of misconduct.

SIEGEL: When you have occasion to talk to a police chief and you point out, you know, your officers get no significant training to professionalize them in their work, what do they say to you?

HABERFELD: It depends. Some more progressive one say to me, yes, give me the resources, and I will change my police academy. And some others - and I testified last year at a hearing of a local jurisdiction - there was a call by some community members to make a bachelor's degree mandatory for its police officers because they see very high salaries. And the police chief said, no, we know how to do our job. We've been doing it well for decades, and there's no need.

SIEGEL: I mean, there are lots of other occupations and professions that years ago might have looked askance at midcareer training and thought that the old veterans who've done this job for years can tell you how to do it better. That's not so common anymore. Why - is this really a cultural police opposition to training?

HABERFELD: It's not so much a culture of opposition. I think it's the way people external to police organizations, the community view of policing as some sort of occasional rather than truly professional trade. And then there's just no demand to professionalize policing from the standpoint of better training and education. So it's both internally from within the police organization, but it's also external. There's simply no demand on the part of the public for police officers to have a better training.

SIEGEL: Do you see the report on the Chicago Police Department as in effect a call to professionalize as opposed to seeing the police as more of a vocational trade?

HABERFELD: I think that the report is not here nor there in the sense of how they're referring to police profession in Chicago. It's just, you know, they identify things that I've written about 15 years ago. And it's not that they really discovered something that was not well known. And this is unfortunately what we're seeing over and over in American policing. I call it like, you know, reactive and delayed response to the needs of training. There's a scandal and then there is a commission and then there is a report. And then we go back to doing business the way we've done it, you know, in the previous century. So I don't really see that there will be transformational change, and this is what we need.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

Professor Haberfeld, thank you very much for talking with us.

HABERFELD: You're welcome.

SHAPIRO: Professor Maria Haberfeld of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.