The brand new programme focusses on how to de-escalate situations, and a pilot has shown the training could reduce both the number of times officers use force and how often they face assaults.
“You’ve got shortness of breath, lack of communication; there may be a change in the colour of their skin.”
PC In Hendon, which is located in the northwest of London, Rob Green is presenting a group of serving Metropolitan Police officers with a list of some of the dangerous symptoms of asphyxiation being present.
He is presenting a brand-new training curriculum that the College of Policing developed. The programme teaches officers how to use force in a safe manner against those who are resisting arrest or fighting an officer.
Sky News has been given unique access to the training, which is designed to familiarise officers with de-escalation techniques, the use of restraints, and the application of force through the use of role play and the acting out of scenarios.
To begin, the police portray a scenario in which they are confronted with ‘abuse’ while performing their duties. One of the officers plays the role of a vulnerable member of the public.
After that, a different officer offers to be “arrested” for affraying another officer. In response to his cries that he “won’t go into a cell,” he is restrained by being pinned to the ground, shackled, and fastened into leg and ankle restraints before being transported into a “cell.”
The training is called Public and Personal Safety Training (PPST) and was developed alongside Avon and Somerset Police and with Professor Chris Cushion from Loughborough University.
It’s been introduced in England and Wales and has to be repeated for two days every year by all serving officers.
Andy Marsh, head of the College of Policing, tells Sky News the training was driven by a “number of reports about preventable harm, even deaths from people being arrested by the police. And secondly, also about a very worrying increase in assaults on police officers.”.
He stresses that it’s all about the “idea of de-escalation.”.
“We don’t want to use force. We want to avoid it if at all possible. And actually, what we have seen is a very significant reduction in the use of force by officers who’ve been trained with this new PPST.”
According to the College of Policing, a pilot programme of training decreased the number of events involving the use of force by 1,200 over the course of a year.
The typical Avon and Somerset police officer would have “used force” in the course of their duties six times a year prior to the implementation of the training. This has now decreased to five occasions, which is an eleven percent decrease.
They also claim that there was a decrease in the number of assaults committed against officers.
Hendon is providing officers with the opportunity to drill skills that they may employ on a regular basis as part of their training experiences.
The police officer Ugurcan Dayan believes that “doing more scenario-based training does help you to retain those useful tactics to go out there and make sure people stay safe” .
According to Sergeant Harjot Sehmi, his supervisor, it safeguards officers by ensuring that they are always up-to-date with the most recent regulatory and legislative requirements.
As a result of the fact that the majority of encounters are only a few seconds away from being filmed on a smartphone and then scattered across the internet, policing is becoming an increasingly contentious and controversial field.
As recently as one month ago, a film surfaced showing a police officer appearing to stamp on the skull of a guy while he was being arrested at Manchester airport. This footage caused significant demonstrations.
Mr. Marsh says that in addition to implementing this new training, leaders of the police department should be more proactive in disclosing film from body cameras following controversial arrests or instances that quickly become viral.
I won’t comment on that particular case, but I did write guidance in 2020 that was distributed to all chief constables. This guidance actually advised the kinds of situations in which body-worn video should be released and certainly should be considered being released, even when criminal proceedings were in progress. I wrote this guidance.
“And some of the circumstances that amount to that are where there’s a huge public and press interest, particularly where the release of the body-worn video footage may actually help prevent serious violence or serious disorder.”
The riots that occurred this summer have brought to light the danger that police officers confront from members of the general population, who are the individuals that they are obligated to protect. We have high hopes that this new training will make that challenging task a little bit less tough.