"I've enjoyed your posts re: police academy. I was wondering, what is covered in the academic portion, the penal code, english, spanish? I mean they have to study something. Right?"

Answer:
They do a ton of academic stuff. They've done laws of arrest, crimes against persons, investigating property crimes, sex crimes, crimes against children, use of force, search and seizure, presentation of evidence, death investigations, victimology and crisis intervention, missing persons, controlled substances, domestic violence, patrol techniques, handling disputes, crowd control, traffic enforcement, weapons violations and juvenile law, just to name a few.

Even on the days like when they got tear-gassed and tasered, there was lecture that accompanied that.

Each week they're tested on the subjects they learned that week. Last Thursday, they took the final exam. Academies across the state take the same POST-certified tests, and the BPD academy as a class received the 5th highest score statewide for the final, out of about 30 recent academies.

So why haven't I written more about the academics?

I try to make it out to the academy about once a week. Sometimes I can go more, some weeks I've had to skip entirely. Usually when I go out, I can only spend an hour or two there. Each week I look at the schedule and talk to the training officers to figure what would be the best two hours to spend out there.

While I have covered some of their academic work -- for example, their Spanish class -- often I don't choose to observe that when I'm making the decision. I need to go out to things that are going to show growth over the course of the academy. I need things that are interesting to watch on video for the multimedia portion of the project. I need things that are going to reveal the individual cadets' personalities. Watching them listen to lecture and take tests doesn't really fit any of those requirements.

Which has meant that I have missed a major portion of academy and something that is going to be hugely important once they're cops -- report writing. I have not gone to a single report writing class, even though they do it all the time.

Part of a cop's job is to make arrests, obviously. But an arrest is meaningless if the DA can't get a conviction. Since the trial can happen months or years after the initial arrest and investigation, well-written reports are crucial. But I'll be honest, as important as it is, I'm not a good enough writer to make a report writing class sound interesting to anyone but the most die-hard cop enthusiasts.

I did spend about four hours in their very last lecture session of the academy. While it really wasn't an academic class as they won't be tested on it, I will write about it in the next story, which will be coming out in a few days.

-- CS