in the United States.

So, there isn't a national standard.

And so, I mean, there are 18,000 police departments and law

enforcement agencies in the United States.

They are all doing drastically different things.

Training requirements for police vary state by state, sometimes even

region to region, municipality to municipality.

But overwhelmingly, officers are being trained locally.

And oftentimes, even though there might be some best standards or

best practices, those aren't required.

One study showed that out of 80 countries, the United States has the

lowest police training requirements by far, excluding Iraq and

Afghanistan. After protesters around the country called for justice

following the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota.

President Trump signed an executive order encouraging police

departments to improve training.

Under the executive order I'm signing today, we will prioritize

federal grants from the Department of Justice to police departments

that seek independent credentialing, certifying that they meet high

standards and in fact, in certain cases, the highest standard.

But critics have said Trump's executive order doesn't do enough to fix

the issues in police training.

It's almost like trying to find a solution how to deal with Covid-19

without including medical doctors.

You want to find a solution for the problems with policing?

Go to social scientists.

Just a few of the issues social scientists point to is how few hours

are required for police training and what exactly officers are being

taught in those few hours.

There's also the controversy over training for a so-called warrior

mentality, over a guardian mindset.

So then, what exactly is police training made up of?

And, where does the money come from to support these trainings?

Here's how police training is funded across the country.

State and local governments spent $115 billion dollars on police in

2017, which is the latest year with comprehensive data available.

Most of that money comes from taxpayers.

Most of police training occurs in state academies run by the state for

different municipalities.

State Academy receives funding from the state but it also receives

funding from the municipality who's sending people to be trained.

It's a financial burden to the state to expand this training because

they themselves are in the business of training.

Though a majority of the funding for police training starts locally,

there's still millions of dollars coming from the federal government.

There's a chunk of federal funds made up of grants.

Those grants funnel money to state and local police organizations.

Here are four of the big ones: COPS, community oriented policing

services, Byrne JAG, the Byrne Justice Assistance Grants, Urban

Security Initiative and the state Homeland Security Program.

Through these programs, at least $54.2 million dollars gets spent on

police training alone, and the rest, which is in the billions, is

used for equipment and salaries and cars.

You get the idea. For example, out of the $590 million dollars

allocated for the Urban Area Security Initiative, funding for the

fiscal year 2019, $30.7 million dollars went to 64 law enforcement

organizations to support training activities for three years.

That $31 million dollars in funding is up from 2016 when UASI

allocated $18.4 dollars million for police training through its grant

program. And the state homeland security program spent approximately

11 million dollars on law enforcement training activities for state,

local and territorial governments through 2019.

Then, there's the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant

program, which provides states, tribes and local governments with

funding to support a range of programs like public defenders, as well

as policing. About 252 million of JAG funding was awarded for fiscal

year 2019.

Those grantees have thus far allocated over 16.5 dollars million of

the 252 million available by February 2020.

And of that 16.5 million, just over 286,000 went towards training.

And through COPS, run out of the Department of Justice, in fiscal

year 2019, at least 9.7 dollars million in grants were awarded for

the development and delivery of training for law enforcement

officers, and over 8.6 million of that went to preparing for active

shooter situation trainings.

And another 2.6 million dollars in grant reimbursements were filed

under the COPS travel training and conferences category.

Many of those grants awarded were meant to last years, so not all the

training is delivered in the year funding is awarded.

Besides government funding and taxpayer money, there's also private

donors putting dollars behind training programs, and private

companies providing their own kind of training.

And at times you can even have private donors or corporations come in

and say, we're just going to pay for this.

There's no real way of knowing how much money private companies put

into these programs.

Shrewsbury says it's largely agreed that police need both more and

better training. But part of that problem means more money needs to

be spent on building that educational infrastructure.

And while stats show how inflated police budgets across America have

gotten over the last 20 years, most of that money isn't going toward

police education.

Part of the problem is, is that while we absolutely support reduction

of police budgeting, the unfortunate side effect very often or maybe

unintended side effect to that is, is that the training divisions

often are the ones who start seeing cuts in their budgets.

And this is at a point for which we need to increase dollars for

training. Some of that can be just reallocation of funding.

Since police training is largely decentralized in the United States,

the process varies from state to state.

Once they've been hired, depending on if the agency itself has its own

academy or whether or not they rely on the state academy.

The officer will be sent, if they're not certified already, be sent

for basic training.

It's important to know that there are thirty seven states for which

the police are allowed to work before they even attend basic

training. One of the biggest issues in police training that experts

point out is the minimum standard hours required to become an

officer. Excluding field training, basic training programs lasted an

average 840 hours.

Dramatically less than other professions such as cosmetology, massage

therapy, electricians, plumbers, many careers that have far less

responsibility and ramifications if something goes wrong.

During basic training, officers are taught about a variety of skills.

On average, recruits are taught 213 hours of operations, 168 hours of

firearms, self-defense and use of force, self-improvement for 89

hours and legal education for 86 hours.

They also learn about domestic violence for about an average of 13

hours and receive an average of 10 hours training and mental health

issues. When we look at like officer safety as an example, when

officers spend about a third of their training to protect themselves

against homicide, they're about as equally likely to die in a traffic

crash, which they only get about a little bit over a week of

training there. They're nearly three times as likely to kill

themselves than ever to be killed by someone else, yet they're

receiving maybe a day of training on mental health awareness.

We're applying very kind of simple ideas across to how to handle a

litany of very complex situations.

Another big part of the police training industry is what comes after

an officer completes basic training.

There is continued education, also known as in-service training.

There's in-service training, which is not regulated by anybody.

This is also where private companies may step in.

And from here, the police training industry kind of falls into murky

waters. But oftentimes private companies, many of whom were former

law enforcement themselves, started these training units to do

specialty type of things, whether it be with shooting, with driving,

dealing with alcoholism, substance abuse, mental health.

I mean, you name it, there are a series of these private companies.

Anybody basically can create a company and offer training to various

police departments. Of course, it will differ by state in terms of

certain accreditations.

I think there are a lot of training programs that law enforcement goes

through that hasn't been approved at the state level.

There could be some really good reasons for that happening.

All of that makes sense.

I think part of the problem is when you couple that with at times

very little oversight at this level with all the agencies across the

country doing different things, it leads to a lot of differences that

isn't standardized for from a person who is a police officer in

Washington, D.C.

compared to Los Angeles, California.

Most police practices are not systematically evaluated, and we still

know too little about what works under what conditions in policing.

One critical issue in police training that Shrewsberry's Institute of

Criminal Justice Training Reform points to is junk science, which

means that the science behind what's being taught in some training

programs or courses doesn't add up to the reality of what actually

works. Shrewsbury says, too often, training programs rely on

assumptions and traditional approaches that have either been

disproven or the validity of which cannot be verified.

This is Dave Grossman, he's the founder and director of the Kludgy

Research Group, and he's trained thousands of officers across the

U.S.. His work has faced a ton of scrutiny in light of police

brutality. We are always trying to save lives.

We are using deadly force because we sincerely believe it's the only

option in the face of imminent threat.

The moment that person is no longer a threat, we try to save their

life like any other life on the planet.

On the one that we got to respond to the same thing in military does

overseas. On the other hand, we got to we got to protect lives.

And our goal is never to kill.

Lieutenant Dave Grossman, who runs the Killology group, calls himself

the 'killologist,' does this heavy promotion of act first kind of

approach, especially to use of force.

I find a lot of his training, if not all of it, very egregious.

When we talk about kind of junk science, we have to go back again to

look at how much time are officers spending on learning these very,

very nuanced topics.

Grossman is part of the controversy facing the militarization of U.S.

police departments.

He's a former Army Ranger and West Point professor and has been

training police officers for over 20 years.

And, his books on killing and on combat are on the U.S.

Marine Commandant's required reading list.

And if people have any questions, go to Amazon, look at the reviews,

look at what's being said there.

Look at the people who say over and over again, this book saved my

life. This book changed my world.

Look over, and over a thousand reviews On Killing over 800 reviews

for On Combat under four and a half stars.

Grossman got into the training business after he retired from the army

in 1998.

And I retired from the army and I was being asked to come and speak to

law enforcement because they're always grasping for something that

will help, something that will push the envelope a little bit

further. Something will keep our cops alive this year.

Grossman said he's on the road for his job about 200 days of the year,

but he's run into some police departments trying to stay away from

warrior training.

The mayor of Minneapolis, a while back, said nobody can go to warrior

training. I don't call myself warrior training.

When the citizen review board actually sees my presentation.

They said, this is great stuff. And they said, well, why do you use

the word warrior? I said, I don't use that word.

That's a word somebody else hung on it.

It frustrates people they can't shut me down.

And people out there, oh we're going to shut this guy down.

You don't have the authority. You don't have that power.

You shut down one agency, there's 100 others that want what I got to

give and the reality is that if it was stupid stuff, if was bad

stuff, we'd be hearing about it.

Another such private training company, the Force Science Institute,

and its founder, Dr Bill Lewinski, have also faced scrutiny for its

brand of officer training.

In an email, Lewinski told CNBC that both he and the Force Science

Institute do not teach pseudo science.

He points to his credentials, saying Force Science has at least two

dozen scientific journal articles published and that Force Science's

research can pass tests of scientific credibility and stand in court.