![]() Training problems have continued despite nationwide protests against police brutality, especially against Black people. Since 2011, the Justice Department has ordered at least five major cities to revamp how they run field training. Becoming a field trainer is seen as a mark of prestige and seniority, rather than a serious and challenging job, law enforcement officials said.Ĭritics say the low standards create poisonous field training programs that fuel a toxic street-cop culture, marked by too much aggression and too little accountability. ![]() The trainers get little formal instruction in how to mold young officers' behavior. It's not uncommon for trainers, known as FTOs in cop-speak, to have histories of misconduct and citizen complaints, according to a Marshall Project review of 10 big-city departments. Black people, Latinos, military veterans and individuals suffering from mental illness are most likely to face lethal force, federal research shows.įield training officers are a big reason problems persist, according to current and former police leaders, academics and even the U.S. More than a thousand people a year have died at the hands of the police since 2013. But a jury believed him, and in October it awarded him $8.1 million for workplace harassment.įor decades, cities have tried to change the cultures of their police departments, bringing in progressive chiefs and mandating programs to teach officers to become more compassionate and less violent.įor the most part, it hasn't worked. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department denied Rodriguez's claims. When he wouldn't go along, Rodriguez said, the trainers bullied him.įield trainers "serve as gatekeepers for this fraternity where lying and illegal stops are encouraged and rewarded," said Alan Romero, a civil rights lawyer who represented Rodriguez. Andrew Rodriguez was just out of patrol school, eager to learn how to use his academy training in the real world, from real sheriff's deputies in Los Angeles County.īut what his field trainers tried to teach him, he testified in September, was how to be a bad cop: to lie that he had found a meth pipe in a suspect's pocket, to harass Black people for no reason, to threaten women into giving up information.
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