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Posts tagged as “police training”

HBCU Lincoln University Now Offers Law Enforcement Training Academy With Goal of Community-Based Policing

HBCU Lincoln University Now Offers Law Enforcement Training Academy With Goal of Community-Based Policing

By goodblacknews on April 25, 2021

Lincoln University in Missouri has become the first Historically Black College and University (HBCU) to train police recruits on campus at the Lincoln University Law Enforcement Training Academy (LULET) established earlier this year.

Led by Lincoln University police chief Gary Hill, the program allows its students to spend their final semester at the university doing full-time police training, in addition to viewing and analyzing bodycam and cellphone footage of incidents as part of the curriculum.

According to time.com, the program runs for 22 weeks on evenings and Saturdays. Students learn how to shoot a firearm and when to use force, as well as how to respond to domestic-violence and child-abuse calls and how to deal with death encountered on the job.

Hill says the academy steers away from the military-style teaching methods that traditional police academies have been criticized for using. He says a chunk of the curriculum focuses on de-escalation strategies and that he has personally vetted the instructors, who are all local law-enforcement officers.

A new study published this February in the journal Science found that Black and Hispanic officers use force less frequently than white officers, especially against Black people, evidence that diversity can improve police treatment of communities of color.

To watch an MSNBC segment on the academy, click below:

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New Rules Adopted by the Los Angeles Police Commission Make Fewer Shootings by LAPD the Goal

By goodblacknews on April 18, 2017

LAPD (photo via latimes.com)

article by Kate Mather via latimes.com
The Los Angeles Police Commission voted Tuesday to require officers to try, whenever possible, to defuse tense encounters before firing their guns — a policy shift that marks a significant milestone in the board’s attempts to curb shootings by police.
The new rules formally incorporate a decades-old concept called “de-escalation” into the Los Angeles Police Department’s policy outlining how and when officers can use deadly force. As a result, officers can now be judged specifically on whether they did all they could to reduce tensions before resorting to their firearms.
Tuesday’s unanimous vote caps a 13-month effort by the Police Commission to revise the policy. Two sentences will be added to the department’s manual, the first of which tells officers they must try to de-escalate a situation — “whenever it is safe and reasonable to do so” — by taking more time to let it unfold, moving away from the person and trying to talk to him or her, and calling in other resources.Not everyone supported the new policy, however.
The American Civil Liberties Union sent the commission a letter before Tuesday’s meeting expressing concern the revisions did not go far enough to explicitly state that de-escalation would be considered when determining whether an officer’s use of force was reasonable. Without such language, the letter said, the ACLU urged commissioners to “refuse to accept the proposed revisions as complete.”
At Tuesday’s meeting, the commission’s inspector general said because commissioners can consider whether an officer’s actions before a shooting contributed to that shooting, the revisions do allow the panel to consider an officer’s de-escalation efforts — or lack of them — when deciding if a shooting was justified or not.
New training and directives from the LAPD reinforce the importance of de-escalation and the policy change, the inspector general, Alex Bustamante, added. LAPD officers expected to face more scrutiny over shootings with new rulesThe revamped policy is the latest in a series of changes the five-person Police Commission has made in hopes of reducing shootings by officers. For almost two years, the civilian panel has pushed LAPD brass for more training and to provide officers with less-lethal devices, as well as a stronger emphasis on avoiding deadly force whenever possible.
To read full article, go to: Fewer shootings by police — that’s the goal of new rules adopted by the L.A. Police Commission – LA Times