Behavior: How to Train Cops

Presumably because police officers represent authority and often have to exercise it, there has been a tradition in some quarters that they should be trained by rigid, authoritarian methods. Such was the notion in the academy for rookie policemen in the Los Angeles county sheriff’s department. “We had been committed to a high-stress program,” says Assistant Sheriff Howard H. Earle, “a Pavlov’s-dog style of conditioning the trainee by stress so that he would not panic when he got into a stressful situation on the job.” But as social attitudes changed during the mid-’60s, Earle wanted scientific evidence to determine whether this kind of training was indeed desirable. He persuaded Sheriff Peter Pitchess to let him conduct a controlled experiment.

The academy took 74 candidates at the start of the 16-week course and divided them into pairs—matched by age, marital status, race, education, whether they had had prior police or military experience—and picked one member of each pair for stressful and the other for non-stressful training.

The courses for both halves of the class were the same. But for the stress half, Earle explains, “we created a strict military atmosphere, with double-time marching between classes, the philosophy that no matter how hard they tried they could never do it right, and extra punishments. For the non-stress group, we tried to create a college-campus atmosphere.” The supervisors and trainees in both groups filled out questionnaires to aid in evaluation of the effectiveness of the two methods. After the training was over, the opinions of members of the public who came in contact with both stress and non-stress officers were compiled.

Says Earle: “We had expected the stress group to do better, but after about a year it was reasonably apparent that we were wrong. The non-stressed outdid the stressed in everything. Their job knowledge was better, they were better marksmen, more adaptable, more responsible, got along better with other officers and their superiors and felt the public placed a higher value on their work. They even wore their uniforms better.” A second group of 100 rookies was later similarly divided and trained, with the same results.

The consequences of the experiments: 1) Earle won a doctorate in public administration from the University of Southern California and a promotion to assistant sheriff; 2) most of the stress has been eliminated from the training of recruits in Los Angeles, and courses have been added in sociology, the philosophy of law and human behavior.