Initial Training

[USMC Chuter]

Newly hired law enforcement officers are required to undergo months of training before they are considered to be basically trained. New officers employed by local, county, and state agencies must successfully complete a basic academy and field training. Additionally, some agencies require a secondary or "follow-on" academy between basic academy training and field training.

Many large agencies attract enough recruits to justify running their own academy. These academies train recruits for their particular agency, as well as recruits from smaller area agencies that contract with the larger agency for use of the academy. In other instances, the state Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) council, or similar entity, administers a basic police academy where recruits from agencies around the state undergo their basic academy training together.

Basic police academy training is as short as six weeks in some states and as long as six months in others. The length of the training largely depends on the size of the agency, the agency's available training resources, and the perceived need for extensive training in a given jurisdiction. The trend is for academy sessions to get lengthened, with average sessions in the US lasting 2-4 months. Some basic academies are run in a paramilitary, pseudo-boot camp fashion while others are more akin to a structured college environment.

Upon completion of basic academy training, new officers will spend between 14 weeks and a year in field training. During field training, the new officer is partnered with an experienced training officer for on-the-job training. In addition to the mentoring relationship, the training officer evaluates the new officer's abilities and progress on a daily basis. Only after both academy training and field training are completed will a new officer be considered eligible to work independently as a member of a patrol team.

Most agencies require ongoing in-service training throughout an officers career in order to hone parishable skills and learn specialties.