LAPD Seeking to Improve Rookies’ Training : Police: The common advice from field officers to ‘forget everything you learned at the academy’ is subverting teaching on restraint in the use of force, administrators say.

Stung by disclosures that four training officers were at the scene of the Rodney King beating, top Los Angeles Police Department officials are now considering ways to bridge the chasm between what recruits are taught at the Police Academy about the proper use of force and what they learn from training officers in the field.

At the academy, recruits are taught to operate by the book. But when they graduate and go out into the field, they are commonly told by their training supervisors to throw the book away and “forget everything you learned at the academy.”

The department’s proposed solution is teaming training officers with recruits while recruits are still at the academy.

The idea is an outgrowth of criticisms by the Christopher Commission, a citizens panel appointed to investigate the department after the King beating last March. It is expected to be submitted for approval this week to Police Chief Daryl F. Gates, along with a series of other proposals for changes in department training.

In its report, the Christopher Commission praised the academy for teaching recruits restraint in their use of force. But the commission found that many field training officers subverted that teaching by setting an example of unnecessarily aggressive behavior.

As part of an effort to cut down on excessive use of force by police officers, the commission recommended that “an ongoing relationship should be created between academy training and field training.”

The commission also urged that more care go into the selection of field training officers, who have enormous influence in shaping the attitudes and behavior of the recruits they supervise for a year. The commission noted that a sampling of training officers showed that 48% had disciplinary problems.

Police officials acknowledge problems with field training, but say they are recent. The officials attribute most of the problems to hurry-up hiring in 1989 and 1990, when the department, now 8,300 strong, recruited, trained and put on the streets more than 1,600 new patrol officers.

In a typical two-year period, the department hires and trains only about 700 new officers to account for attrition.

But when additional growth is approved by the mayor and City Council, the department must get new officers on the streets within the same fiscal year or lose the appropriated funds.

“There is a downside to accelerated hiring,” said Capt. Tim King, who heads the department’s personnel division.

The department needed so many field training officers to handle recruits that it pressed inexperienced and unqualified officers into service in a new classification: “temporary field training officers.”

They appear to have accounted for between one-third and one-half of all training officers in 1990.

“These were normal, everyday street police officers with no training in how to train, period,” said Police Cmdr. Michael J. Bostic, head of a committee appointed by Gates after the King beating to conduct a comprehensive review of training.

Training officers once had eight or more years of experience on patrol, officers said. Recently they have had as little as one year.

“You really don’t learn this job for about three or four years,” Assistant Chief Robert Vernon testified before the Christopher Commission. “We have the blind leading the blind in some cases.”

Vernon said that inexperienced officers tend to use force in situations that veterans have learned to handle with words.

The Christopher Commission, whose staff interviewed 227 field training officers in four of the city’s 18 divisions, found that 93 were promoted to training officers after personnel complaints were sustained against them. Nineteen were promoted despite sustained complaints for having been too violent; and some others were promoted despite subscription to an informal code of silence to cover up wrongdoing by colleagues.

The Christopher Commission found that many of the field training officers were plagued by high levels of fear and openly promoted a “we/they” attitude about the public.

“One . . . stated that he routinely draws his gun whenever he approaches ‘suspicious’ people, even though LAPD policy states that a gun should not be drawn unless the officer anticipates an imminent need to use deadly force,” the commission reported.

“Other(s) . . . noted that they routinely search or handcuff citizens, even absent reasonable suspicion of criminal activity or danger, in order to increase their own ‘comfort’ level.”

The heart of the corrective plan the department is formulating would require prospective field training officers to return to the academy for a five-day refresher course in treating people with dignity and for lessons in how to train recruits, officials said.

In addition, training officers would then be paired with recruits for perhaps a month to handle simulated police calls at the academy. The academy training now is six months long.

Then the training officers and recruits would be sent to the field to handle real calls together for another month.

Finally, training officers and recruits would return to the academy for debriefings.

Bostic said he believes this approach will help reduce frustration among field training officers--manifested in their oft-repeated advice to “forget everything” the academy taught.

That phrase has become a cliche in the department, several officers said.

Bostic said many veteran field training officers use the phrase defensively because they are no longer aware of what the academy teaches recruits and choose to pretend it is not important.

Police officers are eligible to become field training officers when they reach the rank of patrol officer 3, which they can reach as soon as they complete their own one-year probationary periods and pass a written exam on general department procedures. An officer with more than 10 years of experience can skip the exam.

The rank carries with it a 5% bonus and the option of attending a three-day field training officer school at the academy--expanded to five days after the King beating--but sometimes skipped altogether in the press of other business.

The Christopher Commission also criticized what it called the lackluster quality of the continuing education patrol officers receive at daily roll calls. “Many watch commanders simply read the department’s policy on a given topic without any discussion of the practical application of that policy in the field,” the commission said.

Bostic testified before the commission that his own investigation had convinced him that roll call training was “a disaster.”

The department is now considering taking responsibility for continuing education away from watch commanders and placing it under the control of the academy, Bostic said.

The commission praised the academy as a generally high-quality educational institution.

Bostic’s training review committee is expected to call for expansion of the six-month academy curriculum, to seven or eight months, and creation of a separate “leadership institute,” where outside experts such as university professors would be brought in to teach leadership skills. This would require more money, although how much is not yet clear.

Some academy staff members are advocating adding a class to teach recruits practical ways to resist getting drawn into wrongdoing by their field training officers--whether it is the penny-ante acceptance of free food or participation in cover-ups of excessive force.

It is difficult for recruits to resist the importunings of field training officers. There are social pressures to conform, and field training officers regularly evaluate the recruits’ performance to determine if they are fit to move from the status of probationers to permanent employees.

But as the academy’s first class since the King beating began its training last week by jogging everywhere they went, its 74 members were being exposed to little new material, said Lt. Ron Seban, who supervises training.

RELATED STORIES: B4.