Incorporating Higher Education into Initial Police Training: An International Comparison of Practices and Challenges

The need for well-trained and educated police officers is key to the delivery of effective and professional policing services. How “well trained and educated” is defined and accomplished is regularly debated and varies. There are long standing visions of effectively linking training and education for police recruits, but these have yet to be completely achieved. This paper describes the training and education of police recruits in four locations worldwide (California, USA, England and Wales, UK, Ontario, Canada, and Tasmania, Australia), providing an instructive overview of how practical training and higher education are combined and formally recognized. However delivered, there seems to be a consensus on the need for a relatively standardized learning curriculum for recruits. Approaches are tempered with political intervention, available funding, recruitment, retention, and realities of requiring recruits to quickly become operationally competent policing resources.