America's broken system of training cops

The big picture: There are more than 18,000 police departments in the U.S., but no federal standard on how their officers should be trained. And the training that officers do receive has little to no emphasis on empathy, says University of South Carolina criminology professor Geoffrey Alpert.

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“The real issue is not how to use force, it’s when to use it,” Alpert told Axios.

Rashawn Ray of the Brookings Institute and the University of Maryland, who leads implicit bias trainings for police departments and the military, notes that “police departments do a lot of tactical training. They don’t do a lot of training that is focused on social interaction … But nine out of ten times, or even more, their job is simply having a conversation.”

Franklin Zimring, a University of California-Berkeley professor and author of “When Police Kill,” says it’s possible to cut the number of fatal shootings by police in half by creating “don’t shoot and stop shooting rules.”

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