Rethinking The Police Academy: Why are many departments still using military-style training when research suggests it’s not the best option?

Recent shootings and killings by police have raised questions about how officers are trained. But those conversations have mostly focused on the classes recruits take, not the environment in which they learn.

Research suggests the atmosphere at the police academy can affect how officers do their jobs, and who makes it from the classroom to the beat.

Marita Granberry would eventually become a sergeant and spend three decades with Nashville’s police department. But she almost quit on her first day of training in 1985.

“It was terrifying,” she says with a laugh. “It was awful.”

Granberry did not like the running and the burpees and the constant unknown.

“I remember thinking to myself, ‘If I can just make it through this day, I am not coming back,'” she says.

Granberry had been looking forward to that day for years. She had decided she wanted to be a police officer when she was just 8.

“But I really wanted to quit,” Granberry remembers. “And as I was leaving out the door that evening on the first day, there was this instructor at the training academy — big, tall guy.”

She remembers him leaning back and looking down at her.

“And he said, ‘Granberry, you better not quit.'”

Those words stuck with her. She didn’t want to disappoint the instructor. And she didn’t want to let down her dad, either.

When the Metro Nashville Police Department hired her, Granberry’s dad had bragged to all his friends. His daughter was going to the police academy. He was so proud.

Granberry, who is Black, graduated and rose through the ranks. But over the years, she watched countless others drop out. In fact, about a thousand recruits failed to graduate from Nashville’s police academy between 2011 and 2020. Women and people of color dropped out at the highest rates.

Dueling philosophies on police training

A report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics found those gender and racial gaps exist on a national level, too.

And there may be a link between those gaps and the amount of stress at police academies. Data show that graduation rates were highest at academies with a less stressful training environment.

“It just seemed to me that the stress academy approach was the wrong way to go,” says Karl Bickel, a former officer who spent 16 years as a policy analyst at the U.S. Department of Justice. During his time there, he researched two approaches to police training.

Samantha Max WPLN News

Recruits learn about use-of-force during a lecture at the Nashville Police Academy in April 2021.

There are stress academies, which are like a military boot camp — imagine yelling, pushups, bear crawls. Then there are non-stress academies, with a more relaxed, academic atmosphere — think slide shows, lectures and study groups. Many academies use a combination of the two training styles.

Nearly all programs include at least some stress training, according the BJS. But Bickel thinks that approach reinforces the worst aspects of police culture: “the us versus them attitude toward the public, an overemphasis on officer safety, an overemphasis on the dangers of the job.”

The paramilitary approach is rarely questioned in the world of policing. Many academies take pride in it.

Bickel says not much research has been done on the environment within police academies, and how that environment affects police culture. But one study, by an assistant sheriff in Los Angeles, has stuck with him.

Samantha Max WPLN News

Howard Earle’s 1973 book “Police Recruit Training: Stress vs. Non-stress” details his research on different modes of police training.

Half a century ago, Howard Earle decided to study his own department’s training academy, to see if it was turning out the most qualified officers it could.

The assistant sheriff set up two academy classes: one with the old school, stress-based model and another that was calmer and more casual. He then conducted repeated assessments of the cadets in each group for about three years, from August 1968 to June 1971.

Earle evaluated the participants’ performance in the field, their level of job satisfaction and their relationships with community members. He found the old way of training officers just wasn’t working as well. For almost every category he measured, those who went through the non-stress experience scored better.

However, even after his research found that a new approach to training could lead to better policing, Earle worried his findings would face resistance.

“The culture of stress training is well entrenched and redirection takes time, patience and planning. Explicit plans must be thought out to enlighten the hardliners, some of whom continue to cling with almost impenetrable loyalty to their own emotional inclinations,” he wrote in his 1973 book, “Police Recruit Training: Stress vs. Non-stress.” “If we must sunder part of the past and our own proclivities to better meet our mission, let the changes spring from scientific research and evaluation.”

Courtesy California State University, Los Angeles archives

News clippings and other documents from California State University, Los Angeles, where Howard Earle once chaired the criminal justice department.

Early on, Earle’s research received some attention. He was writing textbooks and sharing his findings on the lecture circuit, according to an obituary in the Los Angeles Times.

But then his boss accused him of focusing more on his textbooks than his day job and of misusing a department helicopter. So, Earle resigned. About 50 years later, his research has been all but forgotten. He died in 1995.

Bickel wishes more academies would take Earle’s advice, instead of clinging to their old ways.

“You are creating somebody that is less likely to be what I consider a good police officer, that’s going to be able to be more comfortable with the public and less authoritarian,” he says.

Bickel says departments should be training officers who want to work with community members — not who see them as the enemy. But he worries boot camp-style academies often weed those people out.

Marita Granberry, the retired police sergeant, says not everyone is cut out for that environment.

“You’re always going to have people to fall by the wayside,” she says. “Everybody is not into all of the exercise and everybody’s not into the psychological things.”

Making diversity a priority

But Granberry didn’t want good candidates to get discouraged just because they didn’t fit the traditional mold. She was one of the few Black women to be promoted out of patrol, and she wanted more women and people of color to rise through the ranks. As head of recruitment in the early 2000s, she helped to hire a class that was hailed as the most diverse in MNPD’s history.

Courtesy Monica Blake-Beasley

The 2005 academy class that Granberry helped to recruit was touted at the time as the most diverse in MNPD’s history.

“We had so many females. We had people from all ethnicities,” Granberry says. “We had some of everything. I mean it was, it was awesome.”

It took hard work and creativity to reach different communities. She and her team visited barbershops and restaurants. They spoke at colleges and at Fort Campbell and posted ads in the Hispanic Yellow Pages.

“We were trying to work outside of the box,” Granberry says.

The results have been mixed, though. One of the Black men she hired helped to recruit more women and people of color. Another cadet became the first Black woman to teach at the academy. But some of her recruits struggled as minorities in a predominantly white, male department. Two have sued MNPD for discrimination.

Granberry says her team recruited a diverse group because they had buy-in from the chief at the time. But she thinks that goal faded for a while, and she wishes the department had made it more of an ongoing priority.

“If you are satisfied with graduating classes that are all white or all male or one or two of something other, that is not diversity. And no one should have to come to you and say, ‘You know, I think we need to focus on diversity,'” she says. “You should be able to see that you need to do some things to make the police department look similar to Nashville-Davidson County.”

MNPD’s sworn staff is currently 82% white and 89% male, while the county is about 66% white and 48% male, according to census data.

Granberry is disappointed with the department’s past attempts to embrace diversity. But she’s optimistic that the new chief who took the helm in 2020 will make more of an effort to hire and hold onto police who reflect the communities they serve.

This is the second story in a three-part series WPLN News is publishing this week about racial and gender disparities in the Nashville police academy. It was produced in partnership with APM Reports. Curtis Gilbert, Will Craft and José Martínez contributed reporting.

This story was produced as part of APM Reports’ public media accountability initiative, which supports investigative reporting at local media outlets around the country. Support also came from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.