Police Field Training Educates Young, Veteran Officers

There are a lot of laws and regulations guiding the protection and safety of our community – and some police officers will admit that they can’t always remember every detail about every statute off the top of their heads. Officers are always learning along the way – figuring out what specific laws and policies allow or prohibit. 

Officer Erik Foster says the field training program is a vital piece of teaching new officers the ropes, but “you learn the most when you teach, and that’s what field training does for those officers. So they end up becoming like the experts at the department when it comes to ‘can you, can’t you’-type of thing. When you have questions, you go to those FTO’s, run it past them like ‘what do you think about this?’ And they tend to have that refreshed knowledge of it or have dug into stuff a little bit more.”

Field training typically lasts a few weeks to get officers on their feet before sending them out alone. Foster says it’s a stressful but rewarding program for both the new officer and the training officer.