It’s no secret that law enforcement has been under added scrutiny over the last few years with the many police officer shootings being recorded on video. This is causing police agencies like the Hall County Sheriff’s Office to reevaluate their training methods.
“In today’s world, we have to look at different things,” Sheriff Gerald Couch said to representatives from various Georgia state law enforcement agencies from the North Georgia area during a Q&A session at the Hall County Sheriff’s Office. “I know going through the police academy, I went through in 1982 and then training after that, we never really looked at de-escalation.
“We always met force with a greater force and sometimes that might not be the best course of action.”
The Sheriff’s Office is in the process of building a new training center that will most likely host courses on crisis intervention and dealing with mental health issues, as well as proper use of force.
Couch says that Hall County already teaches all of those courses to their officers, as does the state, but added that there is always room for improvement. He wants to bring other people to the table, experts in the mental health field, to help reexamine the current state of the police training process.
“The new mental health facility in the state of Georgia is our county jails and that’s a huge problem,” Couch said. “A costly problem. One that I don’t know that we’re adequately meeting across the state.
“We have a lot of programs here in Hall County because we’re a larger county, and we can meet those needs. You go in some smaller areas, and I don’t know that they have the resources available that we do and that’s a challenge to the officers that work those areas.”
