Today’s digital specialisation is tomorrow’s basic knowledge

Police educators are committed to the never-ending quest to find ways to equip the police with the digital skills they need. There have been many successful (and less successful) initiatives to teach employees new skills or to refresh existing ones. But there’s a need for direction. ‘We currently depend heavily on individual pioneers. But when it comes to strategic direction, we still have a long way to go’, in the view of Olivia Kramers, Director of Education at the Netherlands Police Academy. Kramers was one of the speakers at the Police Dialogue about the strategic objectives for digital education, an event held at the Police Academy’s Apeldoorn campus.

A large number of these ‘digital pioneers’ were present for the Dialogue. From all over the country, they shared their experiences with successful and less successful initiatives to improve digital skills in the police organisation. For example, new e-learning courses tend not to be popular with police employees. Gamification and practice-based learning, on the other hand, do seem to appeal.

Within police education too, it’s important to look for creative ways to strengthen students’ digital skills. Olivia comments: ‘Until now we tended to go in search of classical solutions to achieve strategic objectives within education. But actually, by catering more to individuals’ different learning styles we can really give a boost to the digital transformation’.

Patrick Plum is a lecturer at the Police Academy. In addition, his portfolio includes the areas ‘digital fitness’ and ‘digital learning’ within basic police training. He told the audience how they incorporate digital issues into the teaching programme. ‘In the case of a classical offence, we now also try to include digital components, or to replace an example with a digital case study’. He sees that during their on-the-job training, students often come across incidents that involve digital aspects. ‘This is another indication that this is something we really need to address in our education’.

The world and policing are changing at lightning speed. New forms of crime are constantly emerging, and truth-finding becomes increasingly difficult, as it gets harder to distinguish genuine from fake. Patrick cites the example of video footage. As a police officer, you need to assess instantly whether this is genuine or may have been manipulated. ‘Today this is specialised knowledge, but in the future it will be part of the basic requirements for policing’.

Digital knowledge is now still acquired through various modules and ‘digisnacks’. In the future, it will be more a matter of on-demand access – via smart AI applications, for instance. But we do need to make sure the information in these applications is correct and validated. And that’s a pretty substantial challenge.  At the moment, the police obtain their information from about 140 different systems. According to Marjolein Ruppert, knowledge broker with the Police Academy’s Knowledge and Research section, it is high time this was all streamlined: ‘Everyone is all over the place. If you could combine all this information and those systems, that would really be a big leap forward.’