With few exceptions, new law enforcement officers in North Carolina are required to complete a course called Basic Law Enforcement Training, or BLET. The curriculum for the course is established by the North Carolina Justice Academy, but the training is typically delivered at dozens of community colleges and through recruit academies run by some of the larger law enforcement agencies in the state. The curriculum has been significantly revised over the past few years, and I thought readers might be interested in a summary of the major changes. The previous version of BLET. The general structure of the old, or legacy, BLET currently appears in the North Carolina Administrative Code at 12 NCAC 09B .0205. The rule calls for 640 hours of instruction. That’s slightly below the national average, which the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics reported in 2018 was 833 hours. (I’ve seen other attempts to compile and calculate averages that yield somewhat different results, but in general, North Carolina appears to have been slightly below the mean.) The legacy curriculum organized the course content into six major units: legal; patrol duties; law enforcement communication; investigation; practical application; and “sheriff-specific,” which covers service of civil process and detention and court services. The sheriff-specific unit must be completed by all trainees regardless of whether they intend to work in a sheriff’s office, with the idea being that an officer who starts off with a police department but later moves to a sheriff’s office will have all the necessary training already in [...]
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