Free Republic

When 61 law enforcement trainees graduated last month from Fairfax County’s Criminal Justice Training Academy, including county police officers and some from smaller departments in Fairfax, each received a certificate signed by the academy’s director, county police Maj. Wilson Lee, who is Chinese American. Lee, whose given name is Lee Wai-Shun, signed the certificates in Chinese, as he typically does. Among those who received certificates March 7 were three new officers from the Herndon town police force — the first trainees from that department to attend the academy since Lee took command more than a year ago. When Herndon Police...

Throughout the United States, it takes three times as many hours of training to become a nail technician, a barber, or a plumber as it does to become a police officer. Finland, Australia, Denmark, and Germany – countries with far less crime and a fraction of American gun violence – spend dramatically more to prepare officers before sending them off into the streets. Finland, for instance, provides police cadets with 5,500 hours of training, nearly 14 times the minimum 408 training hours required by the state police board in Georgia. Highly trained law enforcement officers, studies consistently show, are better...

The State Department so badly managed a $1.2 billion contract for Iraqi police training that it can't tell what it got for the money spent, a new report says. Because of disarray in invoices and records on the project — and because the government is trying to recoup money paid inappropriately to contractor DynCorp International, LLC — auditors have temporarily suspended their effort to review the contract's implementation, said Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Stuart W. Bowen Jr. Bowen had been trying to review a February 2004 contract to DynCorp awarded by the State Department's Bureau for International Narcotics...

Sunday, February 8, 2009 11:08 PM ESTHe's back from Iraq -- again I'm back. And understandably, everyone has questions. Most often asked is, "How was it?" Long, hot, hard and sometimes dangerous. Once again, I am greeted by countless people who tell me that they have read my articles and got a real feel for what is happening in Iraq. One older gentleman said that he was reminded of Ernie Pyle writing during World War II. I'm humbled by the comparison. I hope, as Pyle did, to have been able to bring the experiences of our soldiers home to you....

Wanted: police for Iraqi force State Department to recruit U.S. officers who would provide training04/11/2003 By TODD BENSMAN / The Dallas Morning News Amid widespread looting and growing pressure to bring order to liberated parts of Iraq, the U.S. State Department has begun laying the groundwork for American police officers to help train and equip a new Iraqi civilian police force. The State Department-sponsored program would be funded with $25 million of the $80 billion reconstruction package pending before Congress. "We are reaching out to law enforcement agencies nationwide to let them know what we're doing," said Steve Otto, a...