7 News Belize

Training Day for Cops
posted (May 19, 2015)
Last week Thursday, the latest crop of police recruits passed out of the police training academy to become fully fledged officers. They have the training, but no work experience as police officers.

Due to a newly finished program in which the Police Department collaborated with the Us Embassy in Belize, these new recruits will enjoy the benefit of a streamlined and standardized training while on the job. That will come from senior officers who graduated from a specialized Field Training Officer program which Senior American Cops developed and instructed them in.

The graduates of that program got their certificates today, and 7News was there for the ceremony. Here's what the instructor told us about how it will help the new recruits:

Lt. Kevin O'Brien, Training Instructor
"Well we were contacted about a month ago back home in West Palm Beach Florida and asked to come down and do a field training program. Field training program, as I teach, is a 40 hour block of instruction. And it teaches every police officer that wants to be a field training officer, how to deal with training an adult. Taking them out of the academy, the basic training of the academy and then putting that to work in the field. So we came down a week before the class started so that we could go around actually drive with the people in the Belize Police Department. To get a feel in what they're doing out there and what the work challenges are and then we use that information that we obtained while we did the class last week, did a 40 hour class, trained 27 members of the Belize Police Department, and how to do 'policing' and how to do training, I should say, as the recruits as they are coming out of the academy. It was extremely important and very successful. So it started with the history of the San Jose model which is the FTO program that we utilize and then went into how to teach adults. Because adults are much different learners than as children are. And then from there it also went into the legal issues that you could run into as a FTO. it also taught the potential FTO's or the future FTO's how to put a lesson plan together and use the calls that they will encounter in the field as lesson plans to teach the new recruits how to do their job better in the field. The main goal here is to put standardization into the training, so whilst before they didn't have a standardize training they would bring people out of the academy and set it up over four phases; the patrol phase; the traffic phase; the criminal investigation phase and also the court phase. And by having somebody that is subject matter of expert in each one of those phases, each new recruit that comes out of the academy, if their assigned to a field training officer, is going to be given the chance to be trained as everybody else is going to be trained. So the key here is that it's going to be standardized. If you and I were training officers, you can train your way, I can train my way. Now with the program, we're both going to teach the same way and teach them the same exact things that need to be taught so that everybody gets the same benefit."

Allen Whylie, Commissioner of Police
"Today we had a first graduation ceremony for the field training officer program. It's a new initiative within the Belize Police Department where we've identified a number of senior constables as well as NCO and one senior officer who has received specialized training. The purpose basically is to provide mentorship, evaluation, guidance on the job to the recent recruits who have passed out. So as I said it's an initiative, we recognize that the four months basic program may not be sufficient to have the best officers on the street. And so we hope that with such a program will be able to do the daily supervision and guidance that they require to allow them to be very successful police officers."

The class lasted for 2 and a half weeks.

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