The Advancing 21st Century Policing Community Report 2017 The Advancing 21st Century Policing Community Repo | Page 12

Advancing 21 st Century Policing: The Arlington Police Department Report to the Community
PILLAR 5: TRAINING AND EDUCATION
As the scope of law enforcement roles and responsibilities continue to
expand, the need for more training throughout an officer’s career is
critical. Today’s officers must be prepared to meet a wide variety of
challenges including a growing mental health crisis, terrorism, evolving
technologies and changing laws. The skills and knowledge required to
effectively deal with these issues require continuous training and education.
PILLAR
5
Examples of training and education:
A focus on reality-based training
Reality-based training highlights the importance of critical
thinking. This training is allowing officers to prepare for
situations they don’t frequently encounter in their day to
day assignments and is helping to improve decision making
in critical incidents.
The officer’s ability to make sound decisions under stress is
an important element of our training. This underscores all
of the important areas that challenge us in modern policing.
We know that acute stress is present in almost every
important decision an officer makes. As part of the training
curriculum, the department is following a neuroscience-
based roadmap to enhance the officer’s ability to
overcome the effects that acute stress can have on the pre-
frontal cortex. The pre-frontal cortex is the part of the
human brain that is necessary for making good decisions.
This includes tactical decisions as well as legal and
procedural decisions. Acute stress can severely impair and
shut down functions of the pre-frontal cortex.
Training is helping to enhance the officer’s ability
to make sound decisions under stress.
Integrated and cohesive training
At the Training Academy, instructors work together to
ensure that every lesson is carefully constructed to conform
with the department’s overall mission, goals and values.
T raining is integrated and cohesive and includes procedural
justice and police legitimacy, LGBT, crisis intervention, de-
escalation and cultural diversity. Scenario training is
integrated and involves police volunteers from the Citizens
Police Academy and Hispanic Citizens Police Academy.
Preparing leaders for success
Additional training is offered to supervisors through
partnerships with entities such as the ILEA School of Police
Supervision, ILEA Command College, Leadership Arlington,
the FBI National Academy, Leadership Command College
and Senior Management Institute for Policing.
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Reality-based training at the Arlington Police
Academy Training Center.