A National Police Academy? How? Why? Who?

The Pro American Party strongly advocates creating a National Police Academy (NPA). Such an academy is in the best interests of all Americans and provides us with an opportunity to greatly improve the collective training of police officers throughout our nation. In our view sending officers to this academy should be voluntary on the part of each department, as should accepting officers from this academy. We believe the training and results will speak for themselves and that departments will naturally gravitate to the NPA because they will see it is in their own best interests to do so.

So how does one start an Academy? When beginning from scratch the best place to start is by talking with the stakeholders. The first group should be comprised of current law enforcement professionals. In our view this group is further broken down into executive, management and line officer sub-groups. The executive level group would be comprised of those personnel who have leadership and vision functions within departments. The management group would be comprised of different levels of supervisors who are responsible to translate the vision of leadership personnel into operational reality. The line officers are those who work the streets and have a direct connection with citizens.

Each of these groups, within their communities, function in their own way and face different pressures, from both inside and outside their departments. Thus they each have a unique contribution to make to the design of the NPA.

The second group of stakeholders is the general public. This group should be representative of our country…meaning that we will need persons from each of the races and cultures that can be found within our nation. We also need to represent different socioeconomic groups, because each group has different types of interactions with the police and therefore unique viewpoints.

The last group of stakeholders is ‘infrastructure’. It should be comprised of representatives of other government agencies (at local, state and federal levels) and the business community.

Once representatives of each of these groups is selected their mandate will be to determine the types of training and skills today’s police need to function properly within their communities, from each group’s individual point of view. It will then be the job of the leadership of the NPA to design the program so that it merges the requirements of this combined group into a cohesive and comprehensive training program.

Note: The stakeholder group should meet once a year to discuss if/how training needs have changed based on the events that have taken place in our country in the past year.

Next Post: Why do we need the NPA, what are its advantages and where will these officers come from?