Heartbreaking. Devastating. That’s how Tanya Gladney described her reaction to the news of George Floyd being killed by a Minneapolis police officer in May.
“I was sad for days and it took me awhile to refocus. It took me so many places and caused me to question why a human being would do that to another human being,” said Gladney, an associate professor of sociology at the University of St. Thomas, in Saint Paul, Minn.
Floyd’s death, after a police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes, resonated with Gladney on several levels. She is a Black woman in an academic field that studies the violence that results from racism and inequity. She is also a former police officer and the person who oversees the law-enforcement degree program at her institution — one of 30 across Minnesota that offer either the two- or four-year degree required to become a police officer in the state.
All four of the officers involved in Floyd’s death had such degrees. Now, Gladney and her peers across the country are re-examining what kinds of coursework and content students should have before they earn that credential. Yet, one question hangs over the reckoning: Does any of it make a difference? Can a more comprehensive curriculum do anything to undo centuries of entrenched racism and violence?
Academics, like Gladney, think that the current crisis over policing makes clear why such courses are necessary, but they are also realistic about overcoming the challenges. “We’re going to look at the content of these courses so that we continue to make sure that the topic of systemic racism is clearly connected,” Gladney said.
James Densley, a professor of law enforcement and criminal justice at Metropolitan State University, in Minnesota,, says the system of educating police officers in Minnesota has deeper flaws. The variability of how colleges meet the state’s requirements, faculty members who only reflect the views of police departments, and the timing and structure of the skills training all undermine colleges’ efforts to help students become well-educated and empathetic, he said.
Deborah Eckberg, a professor of criminal justice at Metropolitan State, says a degree focusing on criminal justice is still not enough to overcome the cultural and systemic barriers that exist in police departments and society in general. Students leave the university showing they understand the issues of racial injustice and “saying exactly the right things you want to hear from a future officer.”
But all that can change when police recruits join the force, said Eckberg, where they are sometimes told to forget what they learned in college. “A lot of police misconduct is a result of the socialization that happens to officers when they join a department,” she said.
Education or Training?
Minnesota is not the only state considering changes to its police-education requirements, but it’s one of the few where higher education plays such a central role. The state was the first and remains among the few that require a college credential, said Gary Cordner, a former police chief and dean of the College of Justice & Safety at Eastern Kentucky University.
In some cases, police recruits attend only an academy run by the state or county, while other states require some college credits in addition to the academy training, but not a degree, he said. Large metropolitan police departments often run their own academies, he said, and many may be offered on the campus of a community or technical college.
“There’s a huge amount of variation around the country; it’s hard to make any generalizations,” he said.
Nearly 82 percent of agencies require only a high-school diploma for new recruits, according to a 2017 survey of nearly 1,000 police departments by Christine L. Gardiner, a professor of criminal justice at California State University at Fullerton. Fewer than 12 percent required either a two- or four-year degree to be hired, according to Gardiner’s study.
Most agencies, however, do encourage officers to get a degree in order to be eligible for promotions, Gardiner found. In all, more than half of all officers had earned an associate degree or higher credential. More than 30 percent had at least a bachelor’s degree, she found.
By comparison to most states, Minnesota’s requirements for police education are robust. Unlike many states and agencies, police departments in Minnesota do not hire officers until they complete all the educational requirements and pass the licensing exam.
The state’s Peace Officer Standards and Training Board has set more than 300 learning objectives that the colleges and skills-training programs must fulfill. The courses at the college campuses include topics that cover issues of cultural and racial diversity, implicit bias, and ethics, along with general-education courses.
But Densley, at Metropolitan State, said there are still inherent flaws in the state’s approach. For example, by requiring students to pay for their own tuition and thousands of dollars for skills training, the program may exclude low-income students, he said.
There is also a wide variation across the state in how colleges meet the learning objectives, he said. Many courses are often taught by adjunct faculty who are long-time or retired police officers who may only have a bachelor’s degree, he said.
The biggest problem, Densley said, is the structure of the program that puts the potential police officer into the paramilitary-style skills training only after all the college courses are complete. In that way, the academy becomes a place to erase the things they learned in the classroom.
In all, a system that is meant to inject a heavy dose of higher education ends up reverting to training for a single job, Densley said.
But changing the system in Minnesota is also likely to raise concerns from both police departments and some two-year colleges.
Increasing the academic requirements — by requiring a four-year degree or having faculty members with advanced degrees — could mean a loss of students and tuition dollars at community and technical colleges, said Eckberg at Metropolitan State.
Joel Powell, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at Minnesota State University at Moorhead, says police chiefs in the state also resist increasing educational standards.
They “argue that educational standards work against diversifying their departments,” said Powell, who is a member of the police-standards board. “They want to be able to hire and train whomever they judge to be fit material for policing.”
Will Education Matter?
Even in states where a college degree isn’t required to become a police officer, some systems are reconsidering the role they play in preparing students for careers in law enforcement.
In Virginia, the chancellor of the community-college system is calling for a task force to examine the police-training programs that occur on the system’s 23 campuses. The goal of the committee is to make sure that police officers have communication skills and the ability to engage the diverse population that they serve across the state, said Quentin R. Johnson, president of Southside Virginia Community College, who has been named chairman of the task force.
In California, the chancellor of the state’s community-college system is also calling for a review of the curriculum that is used to train a large majority of the police that serve in the state, according to a news report from Cal Matters.
But a thorny question remains for many who study policing: Does having a college degree actually improve the behavior and performance of police officers?
Cordner, the former dean at Eastern Kentucky University, said the typical criminal-justice degree has “little impact on police behavior,” because they are too broad and meant to appeal to a wide range of career interests. Instead, Cordner said, college programs for law enforcement should be structured more like the military academies and focus heavily on the decades of research into policing.
“If you ask me, philosophically, would I prefer to have learned people making decisions about whether and how much force to use, my answer would be heck yeah,” Cordner said. “Those are the people you want exercising power: learned, reflective, thoughtful people. It’s hard to describe what we saw in Minneapolis as a reflection of that.”
Gladney, at the University of St. Thomas, who will join the state’s police-standards board later this year, also won’t argue against more higher education for police officers. “Higher education serves one of the critical roles in becoming a police officer,” she said. “It sets the foundation for officers having a comprehensive, detailed knowledge of the communities they will serve.”
But real change will have to come from within law-enforcement agencies, where the culture still emphasizes becoming a warrior rather than a guardian, Gladney said. “It’s well-documented that corrupt behavior is a departmental learned behavior,” she said.
