A good friend of mine is a retired Army Green Beret. After retirement he went to the police academy and got a part time policing job more or less “for kicks”.

A good friend of mine is a retired Army Green Beret. After retirement he went to the police academy and got a part time policing job more or less “for kicks”. He was absolutely horrified at what constituted “training” at the academy. An interesting thing about the Green Berets - while they’re certainly very capable with weaponry there’s a lot of “finesse” that goes into their role (to the point he called SEALs, Delta, etc “door kickers”). At the academy the training on everything from de-escalation to weapons and tactics ranged from completely wrong to outdated, dangerous, etc. Granted this is through the lens of someone the US government easily spent millions of dollars training but in discussing this extensively with him he offered several suggestions in the training regimen that seemed very simple, obvious, and likely of little increase in cost/time. He's described several occasions from his (11!) combat tours when they had to be very strategic and calculating in "going to guns". Given the training and experience they would be relatively calm, capable, and measured regardless compared to (as one example) lesser trained units that hammer and nail. He's alive in large part to being able to talk/persuade his way out of things. It's not a stretch to imagine a lot of the most serious issues with policing in the US (police shootings) come from very poor training all around, putting themselves in disadvantaged positions, and escalating to the point of "go to guns".