Summary: The Importance Of Sensitivity Training

According to the ACS or American Community Survey, there are roughly 42.4 million immigrants in the United States as of 2014. When this number is combined with their U.S. born children, the number jumps to approximately 81 million people which accounts for roughly 25-26% of the total population in the United States. With immigrants and their children accounting for roughly one fourth of the total population, it only makes sense that our law enforcement officials are trained to properly deal with these many different cultures. This type of training is known as either sensitivity training or cultural diversity training. Sensitivity training focuses on three things which are gaining an understanding of the various cultures in society, learning

This includes whether or not police departments feel that this type of training is necessary. Sometimes police departments will not offer this type of training until and unless they are convinced that it is actually needed. They are sometimes unwilling to make the commitment to spend money, time and personnel to accomplish this. In cases like this, cultural sensitivity training should be made mandatory for every police department that way there is no longer the factor of trying to convince administrators and supervisors of its importance. Another obstacle is gauging how well officers grasped the information and skills during training, and how that will convert into how effective they work out in the field. An easy way to explain this would be to compare it to a college course. Student A gets an A as his overall grade for the course, while student B receives a C as his overall grade for the course. Both students pass the course and seem to have some knowledge about what was taught. If these were officers, both would be allowed to work out in the field, but whether or not the officer that scored higher actually does better than the other officer how scored lower is yet to be found for two reasons. Firstly, being able to pass exams with high scores does not necessarily mean that they comprehend more, it may mean that they are better at memorization and test taking. On the other had

The type of failures to take into consideration would be the ones where citizens are injured or killed by law enforcement officers due to a misunderstanding of their cultural differences. Two cases will be looked at where officers were unprepared for the situations they were in. The first case involves the shooting of a San Francisco resident that went by the name Jose. Officers responded to a report that a homeless man (Jose) was on the sidewalk wielding a large 10-12 inch kitchen knife. Officers reported to the scene where they repeatedly told the man to drop the knife. During this time the man was walking back and forth obviously confused about the situation. When the man refused to follow orders and drop the knife, the police shot beanbags at him in the hopes that he would drop the weapon, but he did not. The officers then opened fire with their guns and shot the man multiple times. He was then rushed to the hospital where he later died. Witnesses said that the man’s first language was Spanish and that he knew very little English which they believed to be the reason why he did not drop the knife because the officer was yelling in English. Officers reported that they only shot the man after he lunged at them with the knife. The question that remains is that could this have turned out differently if these officers were able to communicate with him in Spanish? The second case