A National Comparison of Police Academies Operated by Academic Institutions and by Law Enforcement Agencies: Different Strokes for Different Folks?

Challenges and opportunities for minority students at police academies: A national sample

“…The preference of a non-stress educational environment by female and minority individuals is also well documented in the literature (Bowers et al, 2023;Sloan and Paoline, 2021b). We can logically assume that police academies affiliated with academic institutions might have higher educational requirements for faculty and fewer sworn police officers as instructors.…”

Race, Ethnicity and Basic Law Enforcement Training Non-Completion: A National-Level Examination of Police Academies

“…We then assigned to each academy a code representing the Census region to which it belonged where 1 = Northeast, 2 = Midwest, 3 = South, and 4 = West. In the multivariate analyses, South was the reference category against which the other regions were compared because the region contained 296 (48.1%) of the academies and prior research has identified significant differences in various characteristics of academies found in the South compared to those operating in other regions (Paoline & Sloan, 2022; Sloan & Paoline, 2021b, 2021a).…”

“…Training environment represented the training “model” for BLET used at the academies, measured by the survey item “Which of the following best describes the training environment of your academy’s 2018 BASIC training program?” Responses included “All or mostly stress model,” “More stress than non-stress model,” “Equal balance of stress and non-stress model,” “More non-stress than stress model,” and “All or mostly non-stress model.” We collapsed the two responses for the non-stress-based model into the category “stress deemphasized model” (coded “1,”) coded the “balanced” model as “2,” and collapsed the two stress-related responses into the category “stress emphasized model” and coded it “3.” In the multivariate analyses, “stress emphasized” was the reference category as prior research has revealed differences in BLET completion based on the presence of stress-based, quasi-military (traditional) bootcamp style training models (Paoline & Sloan, 2022; Sloan & Paoline, 2021a, b).…”

“…Unfortunately, not only have few studies empirically examined BLET in broad terms (e.g., examining its core curriculum and the component parts being emphasized – see Sloan & Paoline, 2021b), even fewer have examined the relevance of race/ethnicity in completing BLET. As discussed below, the handful of studies that have been conducted on BLET completion by race/ethnicity of recruits report mixed, if not conflicting results, across a single academy.…”

“…12.Academies establish training time requirements based on state-POST established minimum requirements (Institute for Criminal Justice Training Reform, 2022). We also note regardless of substantive length of their training or state in which the academy was located, all recruits received training based on a common core curriculum (Sloan & Paoline, 2021b). …”