Police Education, Experience And The Use Of Force

Police officers risk their lives every day to ensure the safety and security of the community. Their bravery, integrity and sheer commitment to the duty are unwavering as they serve to create order as well as the protection of lives and properties. They selflessly act in emergency situations, uphold law, respond to crimes and other forms of violence which is why the public continue to have their trust and confidence in them. But as individuals that whose job requires impeccable common sense and critical thinking, we tend to ask; should police officers required to have tertiary qualifications? While it seems obvious that professions like nursing would require a university degree, why it is not required from being a police officer to which the level of job complexity is not as easy as one think, it is a role where the safety of the public is paramount. With this in mind, I believe that a degree must be a requirement to anyone willing to join the police force. Currently in Victoria, the minimum requirement for anyone wishes to join the police force is only to have a Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) or equivalent (Senior Level Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning for candidates under 21 while those above the age can submit under the mature age entry which does not have any Equivalent National Tertiary Entrance Rank (ENTER) requirements. This might have been a move to bolster the needed recruits to fill up positions as Victoria experienced a shortage of staff as reported by Sgt Rod Iddles of Police Association Victoria. According to Iddles, there has be a 30 percent reduction of the frontline officers in the period of four years. In New South Wales, starting 2016 it has developed the program wherein recruits are required to take foundation programs under the partnership with Charles Sturt University. In the past, attempts to create degrees which led police recruits was made by Griffith University through the bachelors in criminology and criminal justice. The program incorporated Advanced Certificate in policing that includes subjects from social and behavioural sciences, communications, accountability and ethics, criminology and law and police competencies. The program was cut 3 years after its implementation but nonetheless has impacted positively, indirectly or not on the image of the …show more content…
One of it shown from results of Terills’ research; “Police Education, Experience and the Use of Force” . In his study, he found out that college educated police are less likely to use force on citizen. He analysed the data he acquired from the Project on Policing Neighbourhoods through systematic social observation (SSO)of patrol officers and interviews of them. They examined policing in Indianapolis, St Petersburg and Florida. According to him , a simple exposure to higher education may offer police officers a greater appreciation or understand the underlying coercive nature of varying forms of verbal force. Furthermore, he then noted that police with some form of college education are less reliant on such coercive action than their high school educated counterparts . In addition to that , officers receiving a 4-year degree were significantly less reliant on the use of physical forms of force when dealing with the public. The same idea was captured by Chapman in 2012 wherein he found that the level of education predicted the less frequent force and lower level of force use. He then believes that education is a correlate of humane and effective