Police Training and Citizen Security- How to Improve Police Service?
This article examines, from a global perspective, the role of police education in the processes of renewal of police forces in order to respond effectively to the current and future realities of coexistence and citizen security.
The current dynamics of coexistence and citizen security show complex scenarios. Crime and violence are configured in a changing manner and within the framework of a globalized and virtualized social network. These conditions present new realities and challenges to law enforcement agencies, which are required to provide effective, creative, and preventive responses.
Within the framework of the conditions underlying coexistence and citizen security, post-conflict does not represent cessation of violence but tends to lead to its transformation. Hence, the role of the Police acquires a fundamental character in the processes of rebuilding the legitimacy of the State and ensuring the human rights of citizens.
Effectively meeting the demands of citizens in terms of coexistence and citizen security requires an effective and legitimate police force. This requires highly trained professionals specialized in police service, with high ethical standards and moral autonomy.
Thus, professionals with specialized knowledge and specific competencies are required to deal with different police cases and, at the same time, have the autonomy to make the right decisions under high levels of pressure, respecting the law and always protecting human dignity.
Police education is one of the most important axes to articulate processes of change and improvement of the police service. The other processes of organizational change and modernization can be enhanced through professional training processes.
Police education is a process that transcends academic training in schools. Therefore, it should be conceived as a process that extends from the selection, evaluation, and incorporation processes, through formal training by means of academic programs to the learning processes in professional performance and career development.
The selection, evaluation, and incorporation processes must be duly supported by objective and rigorous methods that seek to attract the best human talent in accordance with the profiles defined by the police organization. The support of expert teams from outside the organization is fundamental support in this process.
The training for police in the school must take into account the explicit and implicit dimensions of the curriculum. With regard to the explicit dimension, it is important to review and adjust the contents offered by its academic programs and update them in the framework of current requirements in terms of citizen coexistence and security, and police service.
The main objective of this explicit dimension is to further specialize the police professional in order to make him more effective in the exercise of his work. On the other hand, the implicit dimension refers to the hidden curriculum, which must be analyzed in light of the beliefs, values, attitudes, and tacit behaviors promoted on a daily basis and in the process of police training and the provision of police service.
Police education extends throughout the professional career. Therefore, it is important to also integrate complementary training processes, be it police refresher and retraining courses or personal and psychosocial development processes. To this end, the accompaniment processes have a fundamental role in the training work in the field, to offer counseling and personal/professional orientation, for the evaluation, feedback, and continuous improvement of personnel.
