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Seeking standards
US Senators Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) introduced the Law Enforcement Scenario-Based Training for Safety and De-Escalation Act of 2023 on 9 September 2023, in an effort to reduce threats to police and citizens alike:
The curriculum would focus on improving community-police relations; officer and community safety; de-escalation and use of force; situational awareness; physical and emotional responses to stress; critical decision-making and problem-solving; and crisis intervention. The bill would also create a grant program to support public and private entities that train law enforcement officers using immersive curriculum that meets the same standards. All law enforcement officers—in departments large and small, rural and urban—should have access to the state-of-the-art, scenario-based training that saves lives and rebuilds trust. Trust and safety are the foundation of the relationship between our law enforcement and the communities they serve - this bill is an important step toward strengthening law enforcement and community relationships.
The Fraternal Order of Police and Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association have endorsed the legislation.
The R Street Institute is a right-of-center Washington DC nonprofit. They seem to pass independent scrutiny[1] as both factual and generally free from loaded or dog-whistle language, and are deemed conservative by themselves as well as others, primarily for their libertarian orientation toward free-market capitalism, though they publish findings in their reports that do call for government regulation or intervention to solve or prevent certain societal harms. In July of 2024 they published a report on the condition of police deëscalation training. Their findings include:
In recent years, law enforcement agencies have learned from crisis intervention teams and conflict resolution practitioners and created trainings for individual officers. Effective de-escalation training is a long-term investment in reducing the costs of the policing system and limiting government size and impact in the communities that law enforcement serves.[2]
Of course those who teach, research, and professionally practice conflict transformation (the increasingly preferred term, rather than conflict resolution, in the discipline) have been hoping to help with this challenge for many years, and are now hoping to influence police deëscalation training and practice in more and more jurisdictions.
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