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ABSTRACT
The preparation of police officers for work in a multicultural society has become a major concern for police departments, local governments, and the general community. This article provides a critique of the methods used in cultural diversity training and suggests a number of principles and strategies for conducting this training. Rather than a standardized training format, the article proposes that diversity training provide participants with skills to develop and maintain cultural competence. This application suggests that successful cultural diversity training is didactic and experiential, encouraging officers to "connect" with the communities they seek to understand.
INTRODUCTION
The production, distribution, and marketing of cultural diversity awareness training programs for police officers has become a profit-oriented business. Frequently this training is done in a routinized manner that results in "canned" programs. It is the contention of the authors that when these so-called "canned" programs attempt to transfer "known" blocks of information about specific groups or present standardized communication formats for selected populations, the meaningful purpose of the training is lost. That purpose is to create a culturally competent police force, one that is simultaneously more effective, safer, and responsive to the needs of the community. The authors contend that to avoid the pitfalls of the "canned" program, it is necessary to develop a dynamic training that focuses on process and not content. The purpose of this paper is to explore the development of cultural diversity awareness training for police officers in the United States and provide guidelines for a process-oriented approach to cultural diversity training.
BACKGROUND
In various forms, cultural diversity awareness training for police officers has been around since at least the 1960s (Barlow and Barlow, 1994). The relations between the police and African-Americans, as well as white college students, reached catastrophic proportions as a result of police efforts to constrain the Civil Rights and Anti-War Movements of the 1960s (Goldstein, 1990; Walker, 1980). As reflected in the 1968 Kerner's Commission Report, the police received intense criticism for both their role in antagonizing police-community relations and their inability to control the social unrest (Harris and Wicker, 1988). Not only were the police unsuccessful at reducing social disorder, their actions often ignited or aggravated conflict. As in similar periods within U.S. history, a number...