DeKalb Residents Get In-Depth Police Training

By Jack Krost

Is crime in DeKalb County increasing or decreasing? How many police officers are fighting it? What special units does the county department have? Is it is hard to recruit police officers these days?

Twenty-four average DeKalb County citizens are learning the answers to such questions as they immerse themselves in a summer-long series of classes offered by the department.

The classes take place every Thursday night – mostly at the department’s training academy in Lithonia. They delve into such subjects as anti-gang efforts, homicide investigations, the court system, 911 operations, firearms safety and traffic enforcement.

The classes are free, but anyone interested must pass a background check. In full disclosure, I am one of the students. This is the fourth year the police department has offered the classes, and the current crop of students is due to graduate August 23.

Some other police departments officer similar classes, including Decatur’s, which has classes beginning September 13.

In one recent DeKalb County class, students participated in video simulations of real situations that are used to train officers, including deciding when to use deadly force. The results were mixed. Some citizens appropriately did not draw their “firearms” when such use of force was unwarranted. Another “shot” a bad guy just as he was about to stab an innocent bystander. And another student “shot” herself in the foot.

Still another class brought members of all the department’s Special Operations Division to class, including the SWAT team, the bomb squad, the K-9 unit, helicopter pilots and a special unit devoted to analyzing accident-prone roadways.

“I was surprised that they got members of all these divisions out here to talk to us,” said student Casandra Light, a Tucker resident who works for a freight company. “I thought we would be getting PR people and maybe the traffic people and the public education people. But instead we got all these officers who do these serious jobs every day.”

According to Captain Curtis Williams, the training academy director, that’s part of the message the department is trying to convey.

“Most citizens see the police cars driving up and down the roadway, and they think that’s pretty much all we do. That’s not the case,” he said.

Williams, a 24-year veteran of the department, oversees the citizen classes as well as all the training that police recruits and current officers go through. Police recruits must undergo six months of training in such areas as firearms, becoming familiar with police cars, report writing, courtroom procedure and federal and state laws. They also must pass psychological and physical exams and a background investigation. Then once in the department, officers must take another 20 hours of training per year.

Currently two classes of recruits are being trained at the academy, one due to graduate in September and another in December.

As of this month, the department has 718 officers and 212 civilians – to police a sprawling county of more than 700,000 people. Uniformed officers are deployed across four precincts.

Williams says finding recruits can be challenging, partly because the department competes for applicants with other law enforcement agencies in the metro-Atlanta area. The intense scrutiny that police officers are under these days is also “a factor,” he said. “But at the end of the day this is still a noble profession, and there’s a lot of people who still want to get into it.”

Overall, crime has tipped downward slightly over the past several years in DeKalb County, according to the department’s annual report. Violent crimes, including homicides, forcible rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults, declined from a total of 3,549 in 2015 to 3,185 in 2017, although there were 91 homicides in 2017 compared to 70 in 2015. Property crimes, including burglaries, larcenies and motor vehicle thefts, declined from 24,747 to 23,111 over the same period.

The report indicates the department’s clearance rate is slightly above the national average in most categories of investigations – despite the eye-opening fact that it takes six to 18 months to get fingerprints back from the lab.

The citizen students have gotten to know about such challenges all too well.

“I wish that everyone could take this class, and see what officers do every day and how they do it,” said Rose Stewart, a retired postal worker from Tucker. “I didn’t expect to be enlightened as much as I have been.”

If you’d like to take the next round of classes next year, contact the department in the spring or look for announcements it posts on its Facebook page or neighborhood chat groups, such as Nextdoor.com.