Before the Badge: How Academy Training Shapes Police Violence

“The police are trained to use violence, and civilians are dying as a result,” according to this blistering debut study. University of Arizona sociologist Simon documents the instruction provided at four police training academies in an unnamed Southern state (her access hinged on a confidentiality agreement) and posits that these training programs make police abuse an inevitability. The hiring process privileges pugnacious candidates, Simon reports; she recounts how hiring officers inquired whether applicants had “ever been in a fight” and reviewed positively those who had. During training scenarios, cadets were conditioned to see threats around every corner and use lethal force whenever threatened; those who hesitated were subjected to withering reprimands from instructors. Simon also notes that a class ostensibly on de-escalation mostly consisted of watching “videos of officers being beaten and killed,” which were meant to imply that de-escalation compromises officer safety. Throughout, she’s careful not to “villainize” her subjects (“The arguments I make in this book focus on the way the policing organization sustains itself, regardless of whether individual ‘good’ or ‘bad’ people occupy the positions within it”), but readers will nevertheless come away aghast at the scope of the problem. This trenchant study of the institutional origins of police violence deserves a wide readership. (Mar.)