NCJ Number
70351
Date Published
1980
Length
28 pages
Annotation
The impact on recruits of a police training program in British Columbia (Canada) on family crisis intervention techniques is explored and the findings compared to the attitudes of experienced officers who had no such training.
Abstract
The 6-day workshop on family crisis intervention skills for police recruits aims at developing skills in safety management, defusing violent people, enhancing communications, and interviewing skills, and developing mediation and referral techniques. The impact of the training was examined by administering an attitude questionnaire to 20 experienced but untrained police officers and to 50 trained recruits. Results showed that trained recruits are more likely to negotiate settlement of the problem or to make referral to an outside agency, are more likely to use long-term conflict reduction strategies rather than short-term strategies, are more satisfied with their family crisis intervention training than experienced officers who received traditional training, and report greater feelings of accomplishment on family crisis calls and greater willingness to get involved in such calls. They are also less likely to hold negative attitudes about social agencies than are untrained officers. None of the findings disappeared with time; 7 months after training, officers' attitudes did not differ significantly from those of recruits who had just completed training. Tabular data and eight references are provided.