As a former soldier who has worked with officers they are 100% not trained anything like us.
Your comment is entirely baseless and comes from someone who doesn’t actually understand nor have any experience in either policing or military service.
“Desensitization” is not a specific course offered by either services. The entire point of training in military service is to ‘train how you fight’ there is NO desensitization training, there is training that promotes self control, self discipline and of course trigger discipline, learning when not to shoot is as important as learning when to shoot.
Police are given inadequate training in all avenues and if they had anything remotely resembling military training (especially our de-escalation and negotiation training) they wouldn’t be even a quarter as trigger happy as they are currently.
Shooting a target is not the same as situation control and personal control.
If I was triggered I would be lobbing personal insults at you, I’m trying to make you understand that you are slightly misrepresenting what both services train for and what access each service has to effective training.
Police do not use sims in the same way the military does, and in fact most precincts barely have any de-escalation training when you compare to combat arms trades. (Which I find unbelievably fucking stupid; a major part of RoE training is de-escalation and warnings, depending on the area and scenario of planned engagement [sometimes the rules of engagement note everyone in your area as hostile)
Target practice is maybe 1/100th of what is in military training and maybe 1/10th of what’s in police training (This should be reversed or at least the same). Sims are used to present a wide variety of scenarios to train when and who to shoot during stressful situations, presenting a note that officers have similar access to sims is easily one of the largest misunderstandings I’ve come across online.
We do not use round targets as it is unrealistic when training to fire on humans that either intend to harm others or the operator. That’s why we learn to group shots on human shaped targets, so we can effectively take down aggressors. (these targets neither present a dehumanizing training nor desensitizing training, it simply helps to better aim shots on a human target so those shots don’t hit innocent bystanders). The army then has negotiation and de-escalation training, then mix that in with simulated combat training of hostage situations, patrol situations, non lethal engagement situations while exposed or not exposed to various non lethal riot control measures [cs gas sucks to inhale btw] (usually trying to take a group of high value targets alive), point defense training and a significant amount of drills and stress training between fake and live munitions (which directly contributes to self control and discipline in tandem with a variety of drills). Police don’t get most of this and what they do get is not enough to be considered ‘professional’ in my opinion.
Negotiation and de-escalation training is incredibly important for both services, for when deployed and stationed as defenders in various allied locations, we have to work with local police or act as local police until locals are willing to be trained to police the area, and when trained our military personnel are swapped out over time with the newly trained police force. (because police should and need to be trained to de-escalate and preserve life whereas military members exist to defend and attack land points)
Military can train police members, but it’s not advised because, as you said, we are trained to be lethal, we do train with non lethal munitions but it’s not a primary requirement of our jobs and until I worked with a few precincts I had believed that police got a vastly superior ratio of negotiation and de-escalation training,
I also realize at this point when I am referring to sims you may not understand what I am talking about:
All units I worked with in the army had access to this type of equipment, not a single one of the precincts I visited or worked with had access to it: https://youtu.be/GdqPYYxomVk this is a public example of what I’m describing when I mention sims.
These simulators are extremely important but they are ridiculously expensive and a major reason why combat arms has them and cops tend not to (budget differences). A major oversight in the bill that allows old military equipment be sold to police departments is that these training sims do not appear to be included in the ‘old equipment’ list.
I would also posit the military requires more training overall and is not necessarily as trained as you might believe, they’re just objectively more well trained than police officers and that’s what I’m trying to note.
Police are supposed to be well versed in de-escalation and negotiation but a lot of their training is by incompetent civilian contractors (thanks police unions) who only understand policing (and military) affairs from movies and internet forums whereas military instructors are trained in house and need a wide variety of qualifications before being allowed to instruct others in ‘proper procedure’. In my own training we had about 7 civilian instructors (out of 53) and every instructor was a retired former military member with decades of experience (legit retiree’s that could beat down recruits).
Again, to note, this isn’t to insult or denigrate just explain the core issues I’ve seen from my own perspective both as a grunt by itself and as a military member that had to work with police on a few occasions for work.
As a final note I would posit that the largest issue holding back police from getting the training they require is the police unions that appear to be run by a mix of incompetent former officers and uneducated civilians.
Additional source examples: https://www.police1.com/military-methodologies/articles/how-a-military-approach-to-training-could-improve-police-skills-IlWt9UJET8X7NujR/ (I don’t completely agree with this, I think a lot of it is useful to police but they should prioritize life and liberty over aggressive action)
The following is a perfect example of a journalist misrepresenting reality to push their views rather than an objective view presenting what’s actually going on, however she does have several decent notes, it’s just that she seems to fundamentally miss the point in regards to de-escalation training and stress training to improve self control; additionally the author fundamentally doesn’t understand what a paramilitary organization is or does, and continually makes the case that police are such an organization when it’s either unwarranted or inaccurate but her notes about incompetent instructors following movie gimmicks is ENTIRELY accurate for the problems in police training: https://archive.ph/kZAeG
This is a more comprehensive explanation of simulation training and why it’s useful, I would also posit that how it explains the usefulness of the simulations also explains why current training in police forces (and some mil units) is not adequate: https://whatfix.com/blog/simulation-training/
The following link presents a comprehensive comparison between how a military member might have engaged a situation that police already did, killing the accused rather than engaging from a proper training form to de-escalate and capture: https://archive.attn.com/stories/9720/difference-between-police-and-military-firearm-protocol