Every forty-three minutes a person is killed by a scared or unprepared police officer. Four percent of those officers are officers that have gone through basic training in the military. Eighty-Four percent of the officers than earn purple heart awards have gone through basic training as said in a 3/28/18 Chron article written by Adom Holst “Inside the unprepared minds of an officer”. Now I'm not saying that every police officer that doesn’t go through basic training is a bad officer, but we can see the trend very clearly. More and more every day are Americans seeing police shootings that end up putting the officer in jail because what they did was not the necessary way to go about it. There are three main things an officer need to be successful that basic training gives them without realizing it. Those three include; a prepared mind, a prepared body, and a sense of alertness and readiness. These are all key things to be a successful and responsible officer.

Basic training is said to be one of the hardest things to do mentally. People who join are away from family and friends for ten weeks and the commanders are always on them watching their every move, and if they make a mistake it's the famous saying, “Drop and give me fifty”. What this makes them realize is there proper senses, which makes them wise at whatever age they are. As said in a 10/16/18 Proper Police Edicate article written by Marie Joy “Advantages to a developed mind”, the main thing people need to be a successful officer is a mind that can make decisions based on proper instructions on how to handle a situation. What this means is that they need to make up their mind with caution in order to make the right decision.

Now, this does not mean they have to be hesitant or scared about the situation. A 6/19/18 Police Standard article written by Tom Hefter “No Hesitation needed” says that in basic training is thirty percent physical and the other seventy percent is mental. A quote from Matt Wheely, a

military vet that served for 23 years, says “I've been in the military for over half my life and served in Iraq and Afghanistan and because of the training (basic training) it feels like a mental vacation. It changed my life for the good.” Matt died two years after this due to a default bomb that blew next to his station, killing him and four of his inmates. Matts words were plagued and put in the military headquarters in Virginia.

Not to bash the plain, college offered, officer training at all, but the facts from the MN police reports state that it is struggling to provide officers with potential for what they are doing or have proper training just mentally. Not to mention the “standby” officers in a bad situation rarely do anything to stop the other that is doing the violent act, but properly trained officers are trained to step in and do what is right for the officer and victim. A lot of people ask “Why do basic training for anything but the military?” And there is some truth to that, but there is also truth to what the people who go through it do for our safety without ever being deployed in the military, and one big example is an officer. Now, what about Physical aspects?

Basic training helps officers make better decisions and react better using their head and mental resources, but we all know basic training beefs members up and gets and gets them in shape, yet they teach them how to use it with respect and to others advantages. People admit it, the training beats them up to the point that they want to leave within the first week, in fact according to a 5/10/17 Military website article written by John Defoe “How to survive the basics of military”  on average twenty-six percent of people in that basic training course will quit within the first week, which isn’t even training yet. The things they do will also, like the mental part, prepare us for anything.

Some people abuse a fit and strong body because they use it to their own advantage, but again with the proper training they will learn how to responsibly use it or as some people say, “Use it to someone else's advantage.” Which implies to use it for the good or to help someone other than yourself. We don’t see this as often nowadays sadly because of the abundance of shootings. A prepared body also prepares them for the unexpected. According to a 7/7/18 Balance Careers article written by Paul Kaly “Ways not to abuse strength” and also some common sense, the stronger officers can handle more and provide more defense for the affected.

Now adding to my list of things basic training helps and prepares us for the law enforcement field, alertness and readiness is something that is also stressed in the training. Goarmy, which is a website that covers what is done during the duration of basic training says “They are trained how to react to any given situation properly and execute it with doing the correct and proper procedures.” This implies straight to the law enforcement handbook, and to me that goes hand in hand. Another thing proper alertness and readiness does is it makes them aware of the whole situation and decreases the chances of an officer just seeing one side and having to accuse the person or side of the situation he/she sees.

There have also been many instances where an officer has not been paying attention to what they are doing and accidentally hurt or killed someone. A Police One article says since 2014 there has been a fifty-six percent increase in accidental police accidents either shooting or vehicular harm. In a 3/25/17 graph that showed the increase in accidental deaths related to officers, there were almost as many accidental police accidents than lawful actions. Alertness is very important in this field in the idea of accidental accidents or lawful actions.

In conclusion, a prepared mind helps officers to make proper decisions and execute the situations properly without even having to think about it. Then a prepared body can help by using it the proper way without using it to harm anyone or using it to their advantage. It also increases what an officers limitation is strength wise. Finally, we have alertness and readiness which, without this, could make everything pointless because it is very important. Alertness helps officers see the whole situation and execute it properly, and it also helps with accidental police-involved accidents. Readiness helps us be prepared on how to attack the situation, which should never be with another unneeded shooting.

Nowadays officers can’t get half of this amount of training if they go anywhere other than basic military training, and as we can see, it’s starting to show in the death toll of innocent people killed by poorly trained officers, and I think that is very unnecessary. Yes, basic training is a pain and people are beaten physically and mentally, and they think it’s abuse and it's a living hell, but when it's over they realize what it's done to them. Either they're going into the law enforcement field or not, it is a wake up that changes lives forever. Now with basic training being mandatory for people entering the law enforcement field, as a country, I think we can decrease the unfortunate number of one person killed every forty-three minutes to a hopeful zero innocent people killed every forty-three minutes. I’m not saying this is going to end all unnecessary deaths forever because it won’t, but I do think it will end all unneeded conflicts ending with another innocent man dead.