Additional training of police officers is not the solution to police brutality.
Cruelty and depraved hearts can’t be fixed with training
Some problems can be fixed by training, while others cannot.
A pilot who is unskillful due to a lack of training can have their airmanship improved through additional training. That makes sense, as the pilot desires to do a better and safer job of flying. That is especially true because a pilot (by virtue of their seat at the front of the plane) is actually the first person to arrive at the scene of crash if they make an error. Since the pilot’s doesn’t wish to crash, and does wish to become more skillful, additional training does work to improve pilots. Indeed, it is mainly that additional training – especially crew resource management training – that has led to aviation being so much safer today than it was 50 years ago.
Unfortunately, police brutality is a different story. Police brutality is caused by police officers intentionally setting out to inflict harm upon their victims. Unlike plane crashes that pilots desperately wish to avoid, police brutality is not something that bad cops try to avoid; it is something that those bad cops intentionally do. Unlike plane crashes that are just as bad for the pilots as they are for the passengers, the bad cops who engage in police brutality are not the ones physically hurt. Nor are the cops who engage in brutality generally harmed in other ways, since the legal system protects the overwhelming majority of cops who engage in such misconduct. Taken together, the intentional nature of police brutality and lack of an incentive for police to cease it mean that more training cannot be the solution.
Since a picture is worth a thousand words, and since video has many frames (pictures) per second, the following video clips should help drive home the point that the brutality police officers enthusiastically engage in is intentional cruelty, rather than something that can be fixed by training:
Police training actually makes things worse
It is worth nothing that the training given to police is often a very cause of the brutality that police engage in. The “warrior training” that many cops receive teaches them to see the public as the enemy and only serves to increase brutality on the part of the police. This training teaches police officers to fear the public and to endanger the very people they are sworn to serve and protect by encouraging (often baseless) fear in the minds of cops. More funding for this training would only produce more brutality.
Calls for more training is just a deflection intended to increase police budgets
The calls for additional training are worse than useless, as they really are just attempts to increase police budgets that are already bloated. The $118 billion dollars that was spent on US police in 2018 is astronomical. That is an amount sufficient to exceed MILITARY spending of every country in the world other than the USA and China. With a budget like that, there is no shortage of funds for training.