American police require fewer hours of training than American plumbers and cosmetologists, a level of formal instruction for law enforcement that is a fraction of the requirement in many other Western countries.
The relatively low level of training hours needed to qualify to use lethal force in the United States came under intense scrutiny after the fatal beating of Tire Nichols by five police officers in Memphis, Tennessee.
US officers receive an average of 652 hours of training, compared to 3,500 hours to obtain a plumbing license or 3,000 hours to be authorized to provide cosmetic care, professions that do not involve carrying arms and making decisions of life or death.
The United States also requires much lower levels of formal education than Western countries such as Finland, where police officers undergo 5,500 hours of training to qualify, more than eight times the American average.
A recent report by the Police Executive Research Forum, which focuses on researching critical issues in policing, concluded that training standards for more than 18,000 police departments in the United States are outdated, inconsistent and often too brief.
As calls for police reform intensify after 29-year-old Nichols died after being arrested while driving, Financial Times analysis finds fourth leading cause of death in encounters with US police officers occurs after a traffic check.
Of the 6,821 recorded deaths involving US law enforcement between 2017 and 2022, 622, or about one in 10, involved a traffic stop. This figure only includes cases where the person killed was initially stopped for a traffic violation. Another 131 people were killed after being arrested for other offences.
There are no official federal statistics on the number of people killed by police in the United States. The data is compiled by organizations such as Mapping Police Violence, which combine official police statistics in the states where they are published with data collected from other public sources. The organization estimates that its dataset covers more than 90% of US police killings since 2013.
Other police encounters that resulted in a death include allegations of violent crime, which was the most frequently cited type of encounter, other non-violent offences, domestic disturbances, and mental health and well-being checks. be.
In 15% of cases, the person who died following a traffic stop was unarmed, while in the majority of cases the individual was classified as “allegedly armed”.
Of the 93 unarmed people who were killed following a traffic stop between 2017 and 2022, 39% were black, 38% were white, and the rest were from other ethnic groups, such as Hispanics.
In 2022, 86 deaths occurred following the arrest of an individual in a vehicle, a slight decrease from 2021, when 114 people died after being arrested. But the total number of police killings rose in 2022, reaching its highest level since Mapping Police Violence began compiling data in 2013.
Proponents of defunding the police movement argue that the United States is over-policed compared to other countries. However, the most recent data shows that the country has a similar number of law enforcement officers per 100,000 population as other Western countries.
But where the United States stands out is in the lethality of civilian encounters with police. Data collected by the Prison Policy Initiative shows the rate is 33.5 police killings per 10 million people, compared to 9.8 in Canada and 8.5 in Australia, the second and third countries in the ranking.
The five police officers involved in Nichols’ death were part of the so-called elite Scorpion Unit, created in 2021 to deal with a rise in property crime and violent offenders in Memphis. It was disbanded after Nichols’ death. US police are in the midst of a recruiting crisis, and in major cities especially, many vacancies remain unfilled, making it more difficult to replace officers.
According to the Police Executive Research Forum, the direction of American police recruitment and training needs to change. His report said that instead of focusing on weapons and tactics, more attention needed to be paid to “decision-making, communication and other critical skills officers use on a daily basis.”
