Police training officer

The Police Training Officer program (PTO) is a post-academy training program created from the educational approach known as problem-based learning. It was developed by the United States Department of Justice Office of Community Oriented Policing Services [http://www.cops.usdoj.gov/Default.asp?Item=461] to train police recruits once they graduate from the police academy. It was initially developed to replace the 30-year old Field Training Officer (FTO) program, which research surveys indicated had become incompatible with community based policing and problem solving. Research and implementation was funded by the COPS office of the U.S. Department of Justice.

The program runs over 16 weeks once recruits complete academy training. It is broken into four three week phases including non-emergency, emergency, patrol, and criminal investigation. Each phase of training is accompanied by a learning exercise which the recruit must resolve using daily calls for service and community partnerships. It also includes a neighborhood familiarization project to teach new recruits how to partner with community residents to effectively deal with crime and neighborhood problems. Independent evaluators assess the recruits progress throughout.

The PTO Program was created by a team of police experts from the United States and Canada. The team was led by Reno Police Chief Jerry Hoover and included Deputy Chief Ron Glensor, Commander Steve Pitts, Officer Dave Ponte (Reno P.D.) and Gerry Cleveland and Gregory Saville, former Canadian police officers. The program was field tested for the first time in 2000 in the Reno Police Department, Reno, Nevada. It was later expanded into five other pilot police academies, through assistance of the Police Executive Research Forum and the COPS Office. Those agencies include Charlotte-Mecklenberg (North Carolina), Colorado Springs (Colorado), Richmond (California), Lowell (Massachusetts), and Savannah (Georgia). As of 2007 more than 100 police agencies have now successfully adopted the PTO program using problem based learning as the basis of recruit training, and the State of California has begun adopting across that state [http://www.post.ca.gov/training/bt_bureau/manual/ftg/MSword%20files/FTG-appendices/FTG-A13-faqs.doc] .

The PTO Program was reworked in 2003 by practitioners from Reno and organizations across the United States to better reflect the use of the model by some organizations. This modification has been called the Reno Model to differentiate it from the original COPS product and the earlier San Jose Model FTO Program. The program has also been reworked by other agencies since the original PTO model by the COPS office was designed to allow flexible tailoring by each agency. For example, this is the case in the Charlotte-Mecklenberg police, NC, the Folsom police, CA., and the Edmonton police, Alberta, Canada. Each year a number of these models are brought to the conference of the Police Society for Problem Based Learning and fine tuned by educational experts, police practitioners and agencies from across North America.

Other examples of PTO around the world include: Jerry Hoover, while working for the United Nations in Sudan and the US State Department in Iraq, modified the PTO model so that it could be applied to foreign post-conflict police organizations; in 2003 Gerry Cleveland and Gregory Saville, while working for the US Department of Justice, brought versions of the PTO and Police Problem-Based Learning model to the national police academy of Mozambique, Africa, in an effort to tailor it to developing countries.

Due to success of the program, a subsequent certification process was developed for police instructors called Police Problem Based Learning (PBL) for Instructor Development. Also funded by the COPS Office, the program led to the creation of the non-profit, non-affiliated Police Society for Problem Based Learning, an international organization of police instuctors interested in improving all aspects of police education [http://www.pspbl.com/pto.htm] .

ee also

* Police academy
* Field Training Officer
* Problem Based Learning

External links and references

*Hoover, Jerry, Gerard Cleveland and Greg Saville, “A New Generation of Field Training: The Reno PTO Model,” in Melissa Reuland, Corina Sole Brito and Lisa Carroll, eds., Solving Crime and Disorder Problems. Washington, DC: Police Executive Research Forum, 2001, pp. 175-189.
*Cleveland, Gerard. "Using Problem Based Learning in Police Training", Police Chief Magazine, Volume 74 (November, 2006).
*Saville, Gregory. "Emotional Intelligence in Policing", Police Chief Magazine, Volume 74 (November, 2006)