Guardians, Not Warriors: A New Era of Police Training After Ferguson

After the high-profile killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, and subsequent high-profile police shootings started to be covered extensively by American media outlets, more attention has been focused on police militarization and the warrior mindset among officers. Many training academies now adopt a guardian approach instead of a warrior mentality approach for their trainees’ socialization and culture. While the warrior cop versus guardian police debate continues, evidence has begun to emerge indicating that police executives and training academy directors have made a shift from high-stress military training to a lower-stress training environment since these shootings occurred. Recent research focuses on the root causes of racial tensions, police use of force, and racial profiling. In contrast, the current study sought to fill the gap in the literature by uncovering whether the police have made positive changes in response to these shootings. The United States Bureau of Justice Statistics disseminated self-report questionnaires to police academies in 2011 and then again in 2022 using the same questionnaire. These data are used to develop an explanation of the culture surrounding police training and to examine the shift in the prevalence of academies abandoning the high-stress militarized training approach following the 2014 shooting.