Education is woven into the fabric of law enforcement. From weapons training to staying current on the law, police are always taking in new information that will make their jobs better.
In an increasingly complex environment, the need for education is stronger than ever. Continuing education can give officers and prospective agency leaders the tools they need to excel, both as individuals and as a part of a larger whole.
Whether it’s in-person or online, many continuing education institutions share a key common denominator: the curricula are shaped by people with substantial experience in law enforcement.
“We’re not teaching people to shoot well,” said Steve Shelow, director of the Justice and Safety Institute, a collection of law enforcement and other public safety training programs at Penn State University. “We’re teaching leadership and management. It’s critically important for the industry. Leadership is fundamental for folks to be successful. There are enormous pressures on the field. To be successful, you need to be properly equipped. You have to be up to date on how the landscape is changing… If you’re not analyzing those things, you might be behind the eight ball a little bit.”1
Online
Online education is ubiquitous, regardless of the subject matter. It is possible that digital learning is more often associated with other fields, but according to the leader of one such program, the online environment is an effective forum for the law enforcement community.
That begins with the law enforcement backgrounds of program professors. The Law Enforcement and Public Safety Leadership at the University of San Diego, which offers leadership development courses in a fully online environment, takes this into consideration.
“It’s academic at its core but has immediate implications for law enforcement,” said Erik Fritsvold, PhD, the program’s academic director. “Our instructors are accomplished academically, but they’ve had their boots on the ground.”2
As Fritsvold tells it, the program is geared toward “mid-career, fast-trajectory career professionals looking to compete in the long or short run for top-of-the-pyramid leadership positions.” Those who complete the course work earn an MS in Law Enforcement and Public Safety Leadership, with instruction in organizational leadership frameworks, conflict resolution, budget and finance, crime trend analysis, community engagement techniques, and communications skills, among other areas.
In general, students can complete the program in five semesters, or roughly 20 months.
“In my search for a suitable fit, I made a concerted effort to find a program that combined the study of today’s public safety challenges alongside the law enforcement leadership solutions necessary to succeed in a modern-day setting,” said John Myrsiades, who, after earning his degree, went on to become chief of the Plymouth Township Police Department, Pennsylvania, in a testimonial submitted to the school. “The coursework not only challenged my intellectual boundaries, but also provided me with the tools central to leading a law enforcement agency in the 21st century. I am convinced that the skills amassed throughout the program were largely responsible for my appointment to chief of police, [and] I have successfully applied those principles toward the transformation of an agency starved for change.”3
Online learning is easily tailored to the individual and his or her schedule. The nature of online learning helps bring out the best in self-starting, motivated learners.
“It’s designed to adapt to the schedule of law enforcement. That means it’s asynchronous, and that means students need to be diligent,” Fritsvold said. “Online education is not right for everybody. It’s better for hard-working, type A personalities, and that fits the law enforcement community fairly well.”
But that doesn’t mean there is no accountability for completing learning objectives—quite the opposite, in fact.
“Everything online has to be very deliberate,” Fritsvold said. “Unlike in person education, where you learn the bread-and-butter topics and there’s maybe a free-flowing conversation on the issue of the day, online is deliberate and measurable. The course learning outcomes are based on unit learning outcomes.”
The program has been growing by leaps and bounds. Its current class of 235 students almost equals the size of the two previous groups combined, which together totaled 250 students. In 2018, the program was designated a gold level academic ally with the FBI National Academy Associates, a well-known nonprofit law enforcement training and advocacy organization.
A major key to the program’s success, Fritsvold said, is that everyone—including professors and others within the program—understands where they stand.
“There has to be evidence we’re achieving the goals we want to achieve,” Fritsvold said. “Everything is so transparent online. So there are high standards.”
At Louisville University in Kentucky, the Southern Police Institute brings a hybrid approach to continuing education. The institute provides online bachelor’s and master’s degree programs in addition to its in-person courses, including the well-known Administrative Officers Course, a 12-week, 480-hour in-residence executive development program.
In-Person
Plenty of continuing education programs still occur in the classroom. Sometimes, there is simply no substitute for a more hands-on experience.
A leader in law enforcement education, Northwestern University Center for Public Safety, headquartered in Illinois, offers learning opportunities at the university as well as accredited classrooms around the United States. Many of its instructors are current or former law enforcement officers, with guest lecturers from various law enforcement agencies, educational institutions, and national organizations.
“Professional development is more than just training in a given area,” said David Bradford, the center’s executive director. “Professional development is more cognitive. We focus on how things work, and how to move an organization toward its goal or mission statement. We can teach you how to create a report, but that’s different from conducting an effective investigation, which is what we try to do.”4
Interestingly, hands-on learning can be especially important when handling digital evidence, now a common piece of nearly any investigation.
The Digital Forensics Crime Lab at Dixie State University in St. George, Utah, is one institution providing this sort of instruction. Known as chip-off training, the laboratory, which is housed in the university’s college of humanities and social sciences, offers a three-day course covering digital data extraction and analysis, which begins with safely removing flash memory chips from a digital device to obtain valuable information.
“We are strictly digital forensics—computers, phones, PDAs, laptops,” said Mark Spooner, the lab’s director. “If it’s got a chip in it, we look at it.”5
The following topics are covered:
- Phone disassembly and repair
- Removing and repairing BGA chips
- Identifying and reading chips
- Binary image extraction
- Making sense of an unstructured hex dump
- Making sense of a structured hex dump
While these skills and others like them could have practical implications in a number of fields, the Digital Forensics Crime Lab focuses exclusively on law enforcement, providing specialized education informed by decades of police experience among the instructors.
“It’s not just ‘here, take this apart,’” Spooner said. “Ours is based strictly in the law enforcement community. We bring a pure law enforcement viewpoint like legal aspects or chain of custody. We help people learn the entire process in addition to the data extraction, from input to report generation.”
At Penn State, the Justice and Safety Institute trains all sheriffs and deputy sheriffs for the state. But the institution also reaches well beyond state boundaries, offering approximately 10 courses on a variety of law enforcement topics, including effective report writing, managing police conduct, field training, and other topics.
“We make sure our programs have academic rigor for a non-credit environment,” Shelow said. “No credits, but PSU faculty.”
Shelow pointed to the extensive law enforcement experience of program leaders and faculty and said the changing climate in and around police work virtually demands police agencies and their leaders be as educated as possible.
“We teach things like risk management, community engagement, and things that are really at the forefront of the field,” Shelow noted. “We invite people to think about leadership and collaborative problem-solving with organizations and people in their communities.”🛡
Notes:
1 Steve Shelow (director, Justice and Safety Institute, Penn State University), telephone interview, July 11, 2019.
2 Erik Fritsvold (academic director, Law Enforcement and Public Safety Leadership Program, University of San Diego), telephone interview, July 15, 2019.
3 University of San Diego, “Law Enforcement Association Endorsements and Student Testimonials,” student testimonial, John Myrsiades (chief, Plymouth Township Police Department, PA).
4 David Bradford (executive director, Northwestern University Center for Public Safety), telephone interview, July 15, 2019.
5 Mark Spooner (director, Digital Forensics Crime Lab, Dixie State University), telephone interview, July 11, 2019.
Please cite as
Scott Harris, “Law Enforcement Experience Powers Continuing Education,” Product Feature, Police Chief 86, no. 9 (September 2019): 84–86.
