Center for Mindfulness and Justice

Training For Police Officers

Philosophy

We believe that the role of the police and other public safety professionals is to provide protection, safety, and equal access to justice for all persons residing, working, and visiting in our communities. We believe this requires a multi-faceted approach, for which we provide training. With some initial consultation, the following training components can be designed specifically for your department.

Available Training for Police Departments

Health & Wellness Training

This centers on the emotional health and wellness of the police officers engaged in providing public safety services, whether in urban areas, county jails, or rural settings. This includes training on how to be aware of - and prevent - the dysfunctional effects of the job on employees and their families, including secondary trauma.

Community-Oriented Policing

We teach how to build neighborhood and community capacities – especially in challenged urban neighborhoods and rural settings – that decrease isolation and foster relationships and networks that reduce calls for service. This is achieved by training police departments in tools that enable residents to enforce positive norms, provide their own informal safety nets, and depend less on police presence for public safety.

Building Community Capacity as a Public Safety Strategy

Even those police departments committed to community-oriented and problem-oriented policing often fall back on simple arrest-and-suppress tactics to eliminate problems. Public safety goals are much more effective by involving challenged neighborhoods in building the neighborhood capacity required to enforce their own desires to be safe and protected. We create blueprints to help police officers and departments increase their effectiveness in this important area.

Problem-Oriented Policing

We design problem-oriented strategies and training for police officers, supervisors, and managers that get to the root of various community problems that lead to disorder and violence, transcending the traditional arrest-and-suppress strategies. These proven strategies are appropriate whether dealing with drug and alcohol problems, gang and youth violence, property crimes, or other crime and disorder issues.

Establishing Youth Courts as Gang Prevention & School Safety Tools

This is a “how to” for establishing and providing training for youth courts in your community, which serve as gang and violence prevention strategies in the schools and the larger community.

Ethics Training

Much of what goes on at work is not in the departmental policies and procedures manual. We offer an organizational understanding of the importance of ethics training to address the unspoken and unwritten norms to which officers are socialized.

Diversity Training

Unconscious bias can enter into various individual and organizational decision-making points, which is crucial to recognize and understand. This unconscious bias can create disturbing racial disparities and community resentment that diminishes departmental credibility and officer safety, even within departments committed to diversity and the elimination of such disparities.

Field Officer Training

We provide effective training in the form of do's and don'ts for Field Training Officers once recruit officers leave the academy for the important on-the-job training. A particular emphasis is on proper and ethical socialization of recruits within the larger police culture.

Leadership Training

The skills required for true leadership go beyond simple technical competence in the supervisory or managerial roles. This training is designed to help people learn the art of coaching and inspiring people on their teams.

To schedule a training

Please contact Maureen Brady: info@mindfulnessandjustice.org