POLICE EDUCATIONAL MODELS

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POLICE EDUCATIONAL MODELS PUBLIC DISSENT
Luis Alberto DElíaUniversity of Alberta, AB,
CANADA

• CESE CONFERENCE 2006 Granada

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• DEDICATION
• To my lovely and supportive wife and children.
• To those who have been tortured and killed for
  peacefully protesting.

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• INTRODUCTION
• Context
• Police and the global narrative of security
• My research question
• appropriateness of public police educational
  programs to respond to the protesting public.
• How prepared are police officers to police
  public demonstrations?

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• Paradox keeping the peace enforcing the law
• Police powers police discretion relevance of
  police education

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Police Training in Canada

• common teaching and program-planning approaches
• guided by a traditional, classical and
  structuralist theory of education (Wotherspoon,
  1998)
• planning approach follows hierarchical, rigid,
  less-democratic models more so than designs
  adopted in Europe (DElia, 2002).
• Stansfields finding (Stansfield, 1996) for the
  Ontario Police College (OPC) recruit-training
  program old education paradigm rigid,
  hierarchical, authoritatian, and content-oriented
  structure (ibid).

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Use of police power in public demonstrations
(some cases from Canada)

• APEC in Vancouver
• Summit of the Americas in Quebec
• G8 meeting in Kananaskis

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Police education officers decision-making

• Canadian police excesses gtgt human rights
  violations
• political interference factor
• police management or rank officers decisions
  based on their TRAINING (Canadian, Dutch, German)

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The Canadian Programs

• The Ax Police Service
• All police instructors take a university
  curriculum design course
• Important pedagogical value
• Planning model Knowles
• Linear, sequential, constrained needs-assessment,
  limited or no consideration of players power
  interests, socio-cultural context, institut.
  constraints etc
• Evaluation 1.instructors, 2. team-mates
  supervisors, 3. self-eval, 4. occasional
  community survey
• Budgetary allocations Chief (assisted by
  Deputy-Chiefs)
• Program power characteristics
• mandated - the audience (trainee group) is
  prescribed (Cervero Wilson) little room for
  planner to make decisions
• negotiating interests through networking (among
  training staff) and bargaining (with management)
• Planner is internal in a hierarchical work
  structure
• power relationships reflect hierarchical
  differences division of labor.

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Most Recent Data

• Confirmation of Inadequacies
• Positive developments on policy
• Ax Police planners answerable ultimately to the
  Chief. Yet, at a lower level, to the main
  stakeholders. Nevertheless, ultimate decisions gtgt
  chief committee
• How these inadequacies can be resolved?
• The AxPS management argument
• the decision-making on training program planning
  gtgtgood educational will or empathy of chief?
• the decision-making on training program planning
  could not be left to the existence or not of good
  will or empathy of chief committee members
  towards professional, sound educational decisions
• A more democratic process gtgt autonomy of educator
  managers

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educational models and theory of Canadian
police training-program planning

• achievement of professed goal Respond to
  community needs?
• quality pedagogical values in experiential
  cultural sensitivity programming
• structural constraints and power asymmetries
  inherent in the institution likely thwart the
  educators' efforts to respond to the philosophy
  of the police institution
• Inadequate, rigid, sequential, authoritative
  program-planning model further limits the ability
  to attain ultimate aim of responding to community
  needs.
• A general lack of a participatory, experiential
  and comprehensive human rights education before
  or after graduation puts officers at a
  disadvantage vis-avis community advocacy and
  understanding of dissent.