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Steinman for Governor:
Part 008, The Academy:
By William E. Steinman:
Last week I began a discussion of my proposal for
a four year police academy to train
Academy graduates must be
trained in deductive and inductive logic. Deductive logic is a process
of reasoning in which a conclusion follows necessarily from the stated
premises. It is inference by reasoning from the general to the specific.
Inductive logic is a process of deriving general principles from particular
facts or instances. These two processes are the basics of logical analysis. We
cannot make people good guessers, but we can train them to be methodically
systematic. Systematic procedure is important in many areas. It is the proper
scientific approach for all police work. It applies to surveillance, and
interrogation, as well as prison and prisoner control.
Police are required to deal with all kinds of
people and many of them are beyond dangerous. Understanding human psychology is
a must for police work. A large part of this is in
learning to read body language. There are two extremes we want
to avoid. One is where the police officer is killed
because he was taken by surprise. The other is where the officer kills someone
because he acted in panic. We may never avoid all of these incidents, but
through training we can minimize them.
In addition, police officers must be proactive in
building partnerships. Police work is no place for the noble loner. With the
possible exception of undercover work, an officer should never be operating
alone. There should always be a partner along. As to that, I believe we should
have a lot more well trained police dogs than we do. A dog is not a substitute
for a human partner, but is an excellent complement to a two
man team. If I were voting, there would be one dog for every two cops.
In the area of human psychology, two very
dangerous types the police must deal with are sociopaths and psychopaths.
Police officers must be trained to detect these
behavior patterns and be prepared to deal with the tricks and cons people like
this are likely to run. This goes along with understanding the criminal
profiles of all kinds along with mob and gang profiling and control. To control
these crooks we must understand them.
As to control, police are often
called on for crowd control. This is not just in demonstrations, but in actual riot situations. Along with this comes some
responsibility for civil rights sensitivity and race relations training. Too often we have seen the inept heavy handed behavior of law
officers being the cause of riots and deteriorating race relations rather than
a stabilizing influence.
One thing we cannot overlook is physical fitness.
A police office should be as well condition as any professional athlete. A
large part of this conditioning has to do with diet. We must get beyond the era
of the donut munching, pot-bellied cop on the beat. To do the job well, a cop
must be in top physical shape.
I have covered just a few of the areas of
training which would be essential to produce truly professional cops. A few
other areas in no particular order are firearms safety, disaster response, bomb
detection and defusing, handwriting analysis, and ballistics. The creation of
the complete and proper curriculum would be the task of the school
administration. For that, they would consult some of the most successful policemen and police administrators from the entire world.
Now, I would want to make a degree from this
academy a requirement for employment in police work of any kind anywhere in
I would strongly encourage any state to have a
school like this. I consider it to be as important as
our national military academies. This academy will cost a
great deal of money, but it is an investment rather than a piss-away
pork-barrel tax sink. I will contend that if all of our police came
from an academy like this we would not need half of the cops we have. We could
have less than half the cops at twice the pay and get better law enforcement.
Think about it!
I have discussed prevention of crime, including police
training. Let us now look at the causes of crime. I contend that the major
cause of crime in
For example, if you want to get drugs off the street, give the kids a reason to hope and a meaningful path to achieve that hope. When more than half of our intercity kids never finish high school, we are obviously not doing that. We must make education fun. Once we give the kids a real opportunity, we must also deal vigorously with the pushers and the users. We cannot pretend the users are victims. They are part of the problem and they must be vigorously prosecuted.
There are people in the suburbs who call themselves casual
users and they pretend that’s okay. There is no
such thing as a casual user when the money they contribute goes to support
crime. Users are not victims, they
are criminals. They made a choice. If we had no users, we could have no
drug trade. So, we must vigorously prosecute all
people involved in the drug trade. This goes back to proper law enforcement. We
cannot make exceptions just because a particular criminal wears a suit to work.
Next time I will get into the fourth of my issues. That is education and
nurturing of children. That is the long term solution
to all of
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Governor.