One of the fastest growing areas of law enforcement in the state of Texas today is school district policing, with many of the Independent School District (ISD) departments having been formed within the past 10-12 years. Without a formal structured plan of its own, training programs for the school district police officer have often followed the template of other local and state policing organizations to determine their own in-service training curriculum. Unfortunately, following the guidelines and programs set up by these outside policing organizations has led to training that is not indicative of the school district police officers bona fide training needs. This research first focused on identifying the internal and external constraints that are operating from within the school district, along with influences from outside the organization that are hindering ISD police officer training. The results found budgetary issues, time issues, perceived lack of training support from the school district administration, a lack of a training needs analysis to identify training needs, and other outside constraints (such as legislative training mandates), were hindering ISD police in-service training. Recommendations were made to seek outside assistance (grants), combined regional training efforts, organizing to seek changes in required state training mandates, educating administration in ISD policing needs, and performing a training needs analysis to identify training needs. The second focus identified the unique tasks of the school district police officer in order to provide the school district policing organizations with specific task information regarding the daily tasks of the school district police officer. Twenty eight unique police officer tasks were then identified through group sessions held with several ISD policing organizations. The tasks were then listed in order of criticality and frequency, and two lists were made from the returns. One related to overall task importance and the second list was ordered by agency size, as it was believed that the agencies may differ in focus and responsibilities by departmental size. This combination of an organizational analysis and a task analysis is expected to provide the ISD policing organizations with the information from which a sound training program may be designed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/402 |
| Date | 30 September 2004 |
| Creators | Walker, James Richard |
| Contributors | Stenning, Walter F. |
| Publisher | Texas A&M University |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Dissertation, text |
| Format | 1078218 bytes, 256839 bytes, electronic, application/pdf, text/plain, born digital |
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