Cultural Competence: A Critical Skill for Today’s Police Officers

The missions of higher education and policing differ, yet each occupies well-known and established community spaces. Much like higher education, policing nationwide continues to wrestle with unparalleled demographic shifts, persistent public scrutiny, and questionable legitimacy. Together, higher education and policing can be effective partners to frame cultural competence education and training to better serve diverse populations.

Fundamentally, the police are responsible for understanding the culture, history, and issues affecting the communities they serve. Every day new police officers are challenged by interacting with cultures different from their own. As noted by Dennis (2020), community colleges in the U.S. are uniquely positioned to bring about social change, particularly in police reform and race relations, as they are primarily responsible for the police academies that educate and train U.S. police officers.

Dr. Neil D. LingleHigher education and professional policing can be perceived as mutually exclusive endeavors, an odd dichotomy given that police officers are community members and students first. Police academies are the gateway to cultural competence, allowing recruits to gain an understanding of cultural perspectives. Recruits develop cognitive skills that facilitate trust, legitimacy, and policing practices. Cultural competence education and training offered at community colleges’ police academies are essential to prepare new officers to communicate across cultures. However, according to Getty (2014), new police officers also require real-world experience to reinforce academy education and training.

Cultural competence is imperative because some people care more about how they are treated by the police than they do about crime rates. However, values such as cultural appreciation and equity-minded decision-making often elude officers who interact daily with people from diverse backgrounds. The social repercussions of police officers lacking cultural competence are a detriment to effective law enforcement.

Police officer cultural competence

Cultural competence education and training is relatively new to policing. While the early cultural competence research occurred in health and human services, effective policing also necessitates relating to people, earning trust, and being culturally competent. Culture represents the thoughts, beliefs, actions, and values within certain cultural groups. Competence is the ability to effectively deliver services. Cultural competence is attained when an individual or organization effectively delivers culturally competent services to community members (Cross et al., 1989).

Dr. Terry CalawayPrevious research documents various dimensions of police officer performance aligned with cultural competence. However, limited research exists determining what police academy-learned cultural competencies are valued by new officers in the field. Noting that gap, Neil (2024) conducted research into the thoughts, actions, beliefs, values, and experiences of new police officers in the West and Southwest regions of the U.S. Findings from the study support that demographic changes experienced by officers exemplify the value of cultural competence education and training. For example, police officers with less than three years of experience in central Arizona (Southwest) and southern California (West) saw cultural competence education and training as very important organizationally. Additionally, these officers believed that cultural competence was a learned skill that they used every day on the job.