Andragogical Instruction for Effective Police Training By Robert ...

“was produced by thousands of local departments pursuing their own visions and responding to local conditions” (p. 5). Fosdick (1972), commenting on the tumultuous evolution of America's police, suggested that many factors have contributed to what he described as “fundamental divergences in national conditions,” some of which include a heterogeneous population, ambiguous and unenforceable criminal laws, “faulty personnel,” anomalies in the “machinery of justice,” politics, public attitudes, and what he characterized as a “preponderance of crime” (pp. 3–57). Despite its fragmented past, however, these authors suggested that a historical analysis of America's police can lend itself to an objective analysis and interpretation of its growth and maturation. While some historians have categorized the history of America's police into four or five periods, Kelling and Moore (1998) indicated that they “found it useful to divide the history of policing into three eras”: (1) the political era, (2) the reform era, and (3) the community policing era. It is during this last period, the community policing era, when the need to examine the efficacy of traditionally embraced methods for training America's modern police arises (Kelling & Moore, 1998, cited in Brandl & Barlow, 2004, pp. 5–25).

Notwithstanding popular acceptance of Kelling and Moore's historical divisions (Gaines & Miller, 2006; Stevens, 2003), there are other academicians that not only “take issue” with their account¹ but also provide a more expansive chronicling of America's police to include the period of the 1600s through the early 1800s, commonly referred to as America's colonial period of policing (see, among others, Champion & Hooper, 2003; Dempsey & Forst, 2005; Purpura, 2001). Given that this period serves as an important backdrop to the three eras of policing outlined by Kelling and Moore, the following synopsis begins by examining this period of time. By way of preface, it is important to note that this brief review is merely intended to provide a historical backdrop to illustrate the parallels in the growth and development of American's police with that of society at-large and how those parallels affected police training; the issue of police training will be chronicled in the section following this review.