BartW
Gold Member
- Joined
- Nov 30, 2008
- Messages
- 2,987
- Likes
- 2,051
No Experience, No Problem: In Arkansas and Indiana, you can become a police officer without any formal training
You get these rural departments, and theyre scrambling for manpower, so they do the best they can, he said. Police officers arent easy to come by. You sort of get what you can get and train them whenever you get the chance.
Sometimes the delay in training is the result of all the slots in the police academy being booked. Our next class starts in July, said Younce in Indiana. Its capped out at 150, and we have people on a waiting list, so some agencies have to wait a little bit before they can get their people in here. And that ends up being something [the officers] have to work through.
A comprehensive picture of law enforcement hiring practices in all 50 states is hard to come by, so its unclear how widespread policies like those in Arkansas and Indiana are. If you know of another state where people can work as police officers before theyve received training and state certification, email me and Ill update this post.
As weve been reminded too often of late, even when police do receive training in the proper use of deadly force, they dont always apply that training in the field. In light of that, its sobering to think that there are states where police officers can spend up to a year on the job without first receiving instruction in the life-and-death work of law enforcement.
