Race, Ethnicity and Basic Law Enforcement Training Non-Completion: A National-Level Examination of Police Academies

• Published date: 01 June 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10986111231188429
• Author: Eugene A. Paoline,John J. Sloan
• Date: 01 June 2024

Article

Police Quarterly

2024, Vol. 27(2) 158–186

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/10986111231188429

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Race, Ethnicity and Basic Law

Enforcement Training

Non-Completion: A

National-Level Examination of

Police Academies

Eugene A. PaolineIII

1

and John J. Sloan III

2



Abstract

Calls for the diversif‌ication of policing to better mirror communities served date to

1960s-era national commissions and continue to the present. Largely ignored in efforts

to diversify policing is the role of race/ethnicity and completion of academy-based

training of police recruits. This study used data collected from 615 U.S. basic law

enforcement training (BLET) academies during 2018 to examine the correlates of BLET

non-completion, including academy-level counts of racial/ethnic group membership of

recruits, academy regional location, aff‌iliation, stress of the training model used, and

required weeks of BLET for state-level certif‌ication. Multivariate negative binomial

regression modeling indicated that compared to non-completion counts of White non-

Hispanic recruits, except for Asian non-Hispanic group members, the expected change

in non-completion counts for members of all other racial/ethnic groups signif‌icantly

increased holding all other variables in the model constant at their means. Implications

for diversifying policing are discussed and recommendations made for further research.

Keywords

police training, police academy, police off‌icer race/ethnicity

1

Department of Criminal Justice, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA

2

Department of Criminal Justice and Institute for Human Rights, The University of Alabama at Birmingham,

Birmingham, AL, USA

Corresponding Author:

Eugene A. Paoline, Department of Criminal Justice, University of Central Florida, 12805 Pegasus Drive,

Orlando, FL 32816-1600, USA.

Email: eugene.paoline@ucf.edu

Calls for increased/equal representation of racial and ethnic minorities in policing to

better mirror the communities being served date to 1960s-era, national-level exami-

nations of the racial/ethnic composition of the occupation (Kerner Commission, 1968;

President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, 1967)

and continue to the present (Ba et al., 2021). Yet the latest Law Enforcement Man-

agement and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) survey of state and local general-

purpose law enforcement agencies found that in 2016, just 27.5% of local police

off‌icers, were non-White (Hyland & Davis, 2019).

1

Concerns over the lack of diversity in policing led the U.S. Department of Justice

and the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in 2015 to launch

an interagency initiative called “Advancing Diversity in Law Enforcement,”with the

goal being to enhance national-level conversations about the need for diversity in law

enforcement, identify barriers undermining equal employment opportunity in policing,

and present promising practices that reduce the barriers and promote workforce di-

versity

2

(U.S. Department of Justice and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,

2016).

Many police departments answered the call to diversify their workforce and un-

dertook enhanced recruitment efforts that target racialized minorities (e.g., Jordan et al.,

2009;Paoline & Terrill, 2014;President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, 2015).

Activists and researchers have contributed to these efforts by showing tangible benef‌its

to departments that diversify their sworn personnel. For example, Bailey et al. (2022,

p. 4) noted that “[h]iring individuals from the community will lead to police [off‌icers]

who have a greater understanding of the strengths and challenges of the neighborhood.”

Further, in a series of experiments pairing citizens with police off‌icers in Yonkers, New

York,a racia lly diverse city whose police force is primarily White,

3

Peyton et al. (2022,

p. 7) reported “both current off‌icers and community residents prefer hiring new off‌icers

from under-represented groups, independent of civil service exam performance and

other criteria.”

While diversif‌ication efforts have concentrated heavily on recruiting police to the

profession, largely overlooked during efforts to diversify American police forces has

been pre-service, basic law enforcement training (hereafter, BLET), that comes be-

tween recruitment and full-time employment as a sworn off‌icer. Basic law enforcement

training serves not only as another screening mechanism for new (and potential) hires,

but constitutes their f‌irst level of technical training as well as their f‌irst level of formal

and informal socialization into the policing occupation (e.g., Van Maanen, 1974).

4

It

could well be that nationally, compared to their White counterparts, non-White recruits

are proportionately represented in BLET at the onset of training but are then dis-

proportionately “weeded-out.”In this sense, racialized minority representation in

policing may not be as much a failure in recruiting but more a function of academy-

based dynamics that adversely impact the success of non-White recruits. Along similar

lines, empirical evidence has revealed disparity in BLET non-completion for women,

another underrepresented group among a white male dominated police occupation.

Specif‌ically, Paoline & Sloan’s (2022, p. 9) analyses of data from the Bureau of Justice

Paoline and Sloan159