“If our officers were trained as extensively as police in Norway, they would be less reliant on deadly force,” says Hirschfield. You need time.” Even once students have graduated, they are required to complete fifty hours of operational training per year. “Police are a very special role in society and you can’t just train them for a few weeks. “I think that the United States must learn that it takes time to educate people,” says Rune Glomseth, a professor at Norweigan police university college. Norwegian student officers must complete a three-year bachelor’s degree where they spend one year studying society and ethics, another shadowing officers, and a final year focusing on investigations and completing a thesis (In the United States, officers spend only on average 21 weeks in training which are modelled on military bootcamps). Once admitted, prospective officers receive more extensive training than officers in the United States. In 2015, only 14% of candidates who applied to police schools were accepted. In Norway, for example, policing is an elite occupation, where only the most qualified candidates are selected. In many countries where police are unarmed, governments invest in advanced level of training for law enforcement. This model of policing maintains that uses of force should be restrained and success is measured not in how many arrests officers have made but rather, by the absence of crime itself. “What we can identify in these countries is that people have a tradition-and an expectation-that officers will police by consent rather than with the threat of force,” says Guðmundur Ævar Oddsson, associate professor of sociology at Iceland’s University of Akureyri who specializes in class inequality and forms of social control such as policing.Ĭountries with a philosophy of policing by consent, such as the United Kingdom, believe that police should not gain their power by instilling fear in the population but rather, should gain legitimacy and authority by maintaining the respect and approval of the public. While the 19 nations in the world that do not arm officers vary greatly in their approach to policing, they share a common thread. Here’s how officers keep law and order without carrying firearms: Policing By Consent model of policing - led by the Minneapolis City Council, which on June 12 voted “to create a transformative new model for cultivating safety” after the death of George Floyd by a city officer. “It is likely that if police in Norway encountered the same levels of poverty and homelessness, crime, gun prevalence, untreated mental illness, and racial tensions and discrimination as American police do that their policing policies and practices would be different,” Hirschfield says.īut pressure is growing to change the U.S.
with a country like Norway - they have vastly different economies, crime rates, historic cultures of gun ownership, population sizes, and social problems. In some ways, it’s not fair to compare the U.S.