MINNEAPOLIS — Even as the Minneapolis Police Department reels in the aftermath of its officers’ involvement in the killing of George Floyd, the department has been recruiting a new crop of trainees who will face the same challenge of every rookie: navigating the dramatic difference between what is preached at the academy and what is practiced on the street.
In the Minneapolis Police Academy, cadets are trained to be mindful of their own biases, to treat the public with respect and to use force only when necessary. But then they enter station houses and squad cars with veteran officers who may view policing differently — as an us-versus-them profession with a potential threat on every street corner.
Since Mr. Floyd’s death, the process of turning civilians into effective officers on the Minneapolis force has taken on added urgency, and raised questions in the mind of one senior officer of how to tell who might be capable of abusive policing, such as pressing a knee into a suspect’s neck, as former Officer Derek Chauvin did on the evening of May 25 as three of his colleagues, two of them rookies, looked on.
“We’re just trying to hire some more right now, and I’m just sitting there, ‘How do I know which one of these guys is going to be the next Derek Chauvin?’” said Cmdr. Charles Adams, a 34-year veteran who recruits new officers and trains them on the necessity of community engagement. “How do you make that determination when their record is clean as heck? We just got to weed out the ones that don’t want to buy into the program.”
The death of Mr. Floyd has led to a national rethinking of police training. Some are urging significant reforms, while others complain that the current system is irredeemably broken, with a long history of policy changes that have failed to stop officers from resorting to violence too often, especially against black residents such as Mr. Floyd.
His killing in police custody made clear the depth of the problem. Mr. Chauvin, who had a string of complaints against him for abusive policing, was training officers assigned to showing new officers the ropes.
Those pushing for fundamental change in policing doubt whether enhanced training alone can overcome an entrenched culture of aggression that they feel is pervasive in the profession. They also question whether the basic requirements for getting a badge and a gun in the United States are sufficient.
It takes more than three years to become a police officer in countries like Finland and Norway, but in some states someone can complete basic training in as little as 11 weeks. Minneapolis is on the higher end of the scale, requiring more than a year of training before swearing in a new officer.
Most states require fewer minimum training hours to become licensed as a police officer than they do for barbers or cosmetologists. New York State law mandates 1,000 hours of training for massage therapists, compared with around 700 for officers. Hawaii has no minimum requirements for police officers, but manicurists must train for 300 hours.
And while many police departments require additional training, 37 states permit untrained officers to work with full authority for months before attending basic training.
“It’s insane that hairstylists need more training than cops in this country,” said Randy Shrewsberry, executive director of the Institute for Criminal Justice Training Reform. “We need police officers to be educated like other professionals who are given the authority of life or death or freedom. And that takes far more than increasing training by a couple of hundred hours.”
Lawmakers in Congress and state capitals have proposed measures for law enforcement training in de-escalation, use of force and dealing with mental health crises, among other situations.
In Minneapolis, Mr. Chauvin was a 19-year veteran whose job included training other officers in the field. Two of the officers he had supervised were only days into the job when they responded to a 911 call accusing Mr. Floyd of using a fake $20 bill at a corner store, a relatively minor offense.
As the two rookies and Mr. Chauvin held Mr. Floyd face down in the street, one of the rookies suggested turning Mr. Floyd on his side, but Mr. Chauvin, the ranking officer at the scene, declined to do so, prosecutors say.
Mr. Chauvin, the two rookies and a fourth officer present were all fired and charged with crimes.
“I saw murder,” Commander Adams said of the video of Mr. Floyd’s arrest, adding that it seemed to be a widespread sentiment within the department, even among officers who usually urge a wait-and-see approach when colleagues are accused of wrongdoing.
One frustration, Commander Adams said, was that Mr. Chauvin’s actions erased strides he believed that the department had made to teach officers to be more accountable to communities like the predominantly black North Side, where he grew up.
Commander Adams leads the department’s procedural justice initiatives, which include training officers on how their interactions with residents can shape public perception and affect public safety.
Implicit bias training, which the department began eight years ago, includes discussions of the aggressive policing tactics of the 1960s that damaged public trust in law enforcement and a simulated video of an officer talking disrespectfully to a black motorist only to learn later that she was the wife of a high-ranking police officer.
But law enforcement officials and experts say de-escalation training is not enough.
“I don’t care how many new policies and laws you pass,” said Sue Rahr, a former sheriff who is the executive director of the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission, which oversees training of all law enforcement officers in the state. “If we don’t address the culture, that behavior is not going to change. Period. End of story.”
Despite decades of community policing efforts, many of the nation’s police academies and 18,000 departments have long emphasized a warrior mentality, with officers trained for battle and equipped with the gear and weapons of modern warfare, she said.
The warrior culture often begins during basic training in academies modeled on military boot camp. Police academies spend around 168 hours training recruits on firearms, self-defense and use of force, but only nine hours on conflict management and mediation, according to a Justice Department report.
“If you train cops like soldiers, dress them like soldiers and equip them like soldiers, you can’t be surprised that they act like soldiers, and that’s exactly what we’ve done,” said Mr. Shrewsberry, of the Institute for Criminal Justice Training Reform. The training imbalance, he said, reinforces a “thin blue line” police culture perpetuated in many departments by higher-ups and unions. “There’s just this constant reiteration that cops are in constant danger,” he said.
Systemic reform efforts are hindered by a lack of any centralized standards for the nation’s police departments, nearly half of which employ less than 10 officers, according to the Justice Department. Even though many departments provide additional training, those lessons only go so far.
Washington State is widely seen as having some of the country’s highest training standards, but the police force in its largest city, Seattle, has been under federal oversight since 2012 after an investigation found that excessive force was routinely used.
“Every police agency has a mission statement, but the culture is what is accepted by leadership on a day-to-day basis,” said Sean Hendrickson, an instructor at Washington State’s police academy. “That gets backed up by other officers and is extremely deep and very difficult to change.”
Becoming a police officer in Minneapolis requires first getting a peace officer license from the state, which entails as many as 1,050 hours of training.
Once recruits obtain their licenses, they have to go through additional training run by the Minneapolis Police Department that includes 19 weeks in the academy. The department has said it does not employ warrior-style training, and the city banned such training outright last year, but the union has offered to pay for officers to receive it from outside vendors.
After completing the academy, new officers spend five months on the streets with a field training officer, who is supposed to teach recruits how to translate what they learned in the academy to real-life situations. But that is not always the case. Current and former officers pointed to one of the first things that field training officers often say to new recruits:
“Forget everything you learned in the academy.”
Chief Medaria Arradondo, who has been on the Minneapolis force since 1989, said he heard it when he was coming out of the academy. That attitude is much less prevalent now, he said, but is still a concern.
“We have to lay that to rest, that old culture,” he said. “It’s about making sure that there’s ongoing training and the training in the academy just doesn’t become this subculture of a thing that you learn and you disregard.”
A former Minneapolis officer, Andrew Arashiba, said in a lawsuit against the city that during his field training in 2016 and 2017, one of his training officers told him not to activate his body camera at times when it was required unless he had notified other officers first.
The same training officer also once scolded him for not using force against a drunken older man they had encountered, according to the lawsuit. “You missed a free slap,” he recalled the training officer telling him.
“They have a culture and an unwritten practice of putting down anyone who opposes excessive use of force,” said Peter Nickitas, the lawyer for Mr. Arashiba.
Mr. Arashiba is Japanese-American and is suing for racial and age discrimination after being terminated from the department in October 2017.
The emphasis on officer safety in training can make officers feel as though they will constantly be under attack in the streets, and that can be a barrier to developing meaningful relationships with the communities they serve, said Michael Friestleben, a former Minneapolis police inspector who retired three years ago.
“It was very difficult to get many of our officers to realize that the folks outside the building were not our enemies, but actually our friends,” Mr. Friestleben wrote in a blunt Facebook post last month as the streets of Minneapolis erupted in protest.
When he led the Fourth Precinct, on the North Side, Mr. Friestleben said he began requiring officers to attend community events. Many complained. “It’s not our job,” some said. “Everybody hates us here,” others said.
In 2015, when demonstrators set up an encampment outside of the Fourth Precinct station for 18 days to protest the police killing of Jamar Clark, Mr. Friestleben spent hours each day speaking with demonstrators, he said. That elicited snarls from some of his officers.
“Who are you going to choose,” he recalled officers asking, “the police or the community?”
The department’s inability to rid the force of that attitude has brought the city to this moment of upheaval over policing and racism, Mr. Friestleben said.
“Now today we see the results of not getting to know your community,” he wrote on Facebook, “not really serving your community, not caring about your community.”
John Eligon reported from Minneapolis and Dan Levin from New York. Kim Barker contributed reporting from Minneapolis and Conor Dougherty from Oakland, Calif. Susan Beachy contributed research.
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