“Change is the law of life, and those who look only to the past and present are certain to miss the future.” – JFK
Anytime you change the status quo, there will be a few whose first reaction is to resist. For anyone who’s still not convinced about the change I’m proposing to how we train future deputies of the Volusia Sheriff’s Office, hear me out. What I’m proposing is a better, more efficient and sustainable model of producing the best quality deputies for our community. It’s the same model in place in other major agencies in Florida. It’s the way of the future, if we are willing to look ahead.
Today we rely on the Basic Law Enforcement Academy at Daytona State College to provide our recruits their initial, mandatory, FDLE-certified basic training. To provide that training, the college already uses the Sheriff’s Office firearms range, driving range, and even some of our deputies as instructors. After recruits graduate from the 770 hours of basic training at the DSC academy, that’s when they start training all over again at the Sheriff’s Office. That begins with 240 hours of our introductory New Deputy Training program, and then 560 hours of field training on the road.
The truth is we’re teaching them more at the Sheriff’s Office than they get at the academy, and in some cases we’re re-teaching them differently. While the college says de-escalation, cultural diversity, implicit bias and other topics are “woven in” to their classes, we can do more. There are some great instructors at Daytona State – including my own Sheriff’s Office Training commander and other great leaders from our team. But there are also instructors teaching defensive tactics who have multiple lawsuits over the years. There are instructors who haven’t been on the road in a couple decades. There’s no training whatsoever about body cameras. I just don’t accept that for our deputies. Times have changed.
Some of my critics have called on me to try and negotiate this with Daytona State. The News-Journal said I should “schedule frank, comprehensive discussions with county leaders and college administrators with all viable options on the table.” Well, we’ve been there with Daytona State. We’ve asked for changes to the program. We’ve even offered our own instructors, at no cost, to replace the ones we take issue with, and they declined.
I’m not blind to the fact that for the college, this proposal threatens their cash flow. They bring in tuition money and state grant money for every student who goes through the program – whether that student is qualified for a law enforcement job or not. They get paid by the state at multiple points along the way for every student, even if they never work in law enforcement. For the college, this is about money. For us, it’s bigger than that. I want Daytona State to be successful, but when it comes to training deputies in 2021 and beyond, we can do better.
How many hard-working people out there have an extra $3,500 laying around and can quit their job to go start at the academy, anyway? What if we could hire them at the Sheriff’s Office and start training them in a state-of-the-art academy right away? What if we could attract the best local, state and federal law enforcement officers from all over the country to join us through a streamlined program at no cost to them?
As I write this, the Sheriff’s Office has 56 vacancies. If we sponsored a recruit for every vacancy, paying Daytona State $3,500 for each one of them, that’s close to $200,000. We’ll continue to have vacancies every year as deputies retire or move on to other jobs. Why pay to have them trained elsewhere (and then re-train them when they get here) when we can provide an even higher level of training ourselves, with our own certified instructors and our own existing, certified facilities, at no cost to taxpayers? Our training academy will never be about making money – it will be focused solely on developing the best deputies to lead us into the future, and provide the best level of service to Volusia County. This new model is better for our future deputies, and better for our community. Let’s not get stuck in the past and miss the future.
Source: https://www.facebook.com/sheriffchitwood
