Encyclopedia of Psychology and Law

from their own, which leads to uncertainty and inter-

cultural conflicts. When police officers make hitherto

unknown cultures familiar, understand individuals and

families from cultures different from their own, and

understand the cultural meaning of their own behav-

iors, they broaden their cultural problem-solving

strategies. All these behaviors are a part of training

that helps the police develop cross-cultural compe-

tence to manage intercultural differences.

Profiling.Profiling is a long-standing policing method

by which officers measure criminal suspicion. Police

officers make decisions of criminal suspicion under

probable or uncertain conditions and with limited infor-

mation that is sometimes imperfect, and thus, their

decisions to act may be wrong. Informing police offi-

cers about how mental processes—heuristics, subjec-

tive reality, confirmation bias, intuition, common sense,

forming impressions, overconfidence, and response

bias—may wrongly influence their decisions of crimi-

nal suspicion is a part of training on police profiling.

Conducting Criminal Investigations.Conducting eye-

witness identification procedures, interrogating sus-

pects, and using lie detection equipment are crucial

activities in criminal investigations. Information and

skills training, in which police trainers use pyscholog-

ical knowledge of best investigative practices,

includes teaching police officers that showing eyewit-

nesses photos sequentially rather than simultaneously

reduces the chances of misidentification, that threat-

ening punishment during custodial interrogations

sometimes causes suspects to confess falsely, and that

using the control question technique in concert with

the polygraph device is preferable.

Other Information and Skills Training Topics.

Managing interactions with mentally ill individuals,

making use-of-force decisions, and handling barri-

caded suspect/hostage situations are all job-related

events for the police. Police trainers may present such

topics as a part of information and skills training.

Supervisory and Management Training

Supervisory and management training is an essential

part of organizational health. It focuses on police

managers (or supervisors) developing skills so that

they can effectively and efficiently influence, lead,

and supervise police personnel to meet agency needs

and carry out agency objectives. Managers need

cognitive skills to diagnose personnel problems,

behavioral skills to help personnel modify problem

behaviors, and communication skills to communicate

desired behaviors to accomplish organizational goals.

Training associated with such skills has its roots in

psychology, which has helped the police develop a

rudimentary understanding of the workings of police

behavior in the organizational setting. These skills are

a part of advanced police-training programs that law

enforcement, academic institutions, and private orga-

nizations offer. For example, the Federal Bureau of

Investigation National Academy offers a course to

develop managers of police organizations. Particular

training areas, which constitute the course curriculum

and have psychological knowledge richly embedded

in them, are leadership development and behavioral

science. Diagnosing, managing, and changing behav-

ioral problems in the police setting are a part of the

leadership development component. A part of the

behavioral science unit of training is the psychology

of stress.

Evaluation Methods

Evaluation of police performance and training curric-

ula occurs at the individual officer and training pro-

gram levels, respectively. At the individual officer

level, police trainers use informal and formal evalua-

tion methods. Informal evaluation of police perfor-

mance occurs during teaching activities. Trainers

consider officers’ learning and memory differences

and monitor their performance in these terms: knowl-

edge, capacity, strategic, retrieval, and gender. For

example, police trainers recognize that officers have

different learning styles: visual, auditory, reading,

writing, and tactile-kinesthetic. They present course

material in a visual and written format; they encour-

age officers to take notes, ask questions, and be active

in classroom dialogues; they lecture; and they have

officers participate in hands-on tasks.

Formal evaluation methods take the form of written

tests or practical examinations. Written tests rely on

content validity. Police trainers achieve content valid-

ity by using only material that they present during

training to construct written tests. To make sure that

written tests are representative of the training mater-

ial, trainers sometimes construct a complete list of the

training material and select questions randomly from

it. The purpose of using written tests to evaluate police

personnel is to determine whether they have mastered

the content of the training program.

592 ———Police Training and Evaluation

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