A Day at the Academy

You can "absorb" it all in 6 hours!

• Participants in a media training day Tuesday at the Chicago Police Academy learned that it takes a lot of training and hard work for police recruits to become Chicago police officers.

  Every weekday, as the sun and the flag rise at the Chicago Police Academy training headquarters, about 90 recruits hear a name of a fallen officer - a reminder of what is at stake. Most of the men and women will pass their 1,000 hours of training but it's not easy.

  "It's a rigorous training we go through, everything from physical fitness to education, training us to what life's like when we hit the streets," said Fred Coletta, Chicago Police Department recruit.

  Coletta left looming layoffs in corporate America to become an officer. And what he will learn in 30 weeks, participants in a media training day Tuesday tried to absorb in six hours.

While this may have noble intentions, we've always thought of it as a "gimmick." It's a fluff piece. The fact is police work isn't, and shouldn't be, explainable in 6 hours. Stuff like this convinces many people that police work isn't difficult and enables hundreds of Monday morning quarterbacks to second guess what we do with the tiniest frame of reference.

And it's more than a little disturbing to see reporters get blasted by AirSoft wielding bad guys and them laughing it off, completely forgetting that these "real-life scenarios" are reenactments of coppers getting killed in the line of duty.