Police Training Is Seriously Lacking in Actual Science

08/17/2015 News Insights

By Sarah Zhang & Campaign Zero

Insight: MICHAEL BROWN WAS, at best, stopped by police for stealing cigarillos. Sandra Bland for failing to signal a lane change. Freddie Gray for carrying a switchblade. Yet these encounters all ended with them dead. Distrust running both ways between police and the communities they’re supposed to protect have sparked cries for reform to prevent rapid escalation of police violence. What’s missing in the conversation, though, is science. That’s because the science often doesn’t exist. Police rarely cooperate with outside researchers, especially those perceived as reformers. “In New York where I’ve done a lot of my work, I can’t get anyone to talk to me,” says Alex Vitale, a sociologist at Brooklyn College who has studied how police respond to protests. And even when social science research points to a need for reform, getting new ideas into police academy training and thousands of local police departments fractured all over the country is, put charitably, a slow endeavor.