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Critical Thinking for Law Enforcement
Better Thinking leads to Better Decisions leads to Better Public Service
Course Overview
How do we think? How do we make decisions? are two important questions for law enforcement personnel and analysts. The process by which LE professionals make decisions can impact and affect scores of lives, both internal to our departments and the public at large. In a concise two-day course, personnel are active in discussing and applying the concepts by which we make our decisions. Case studies and small groups activities transform a potentially “dry subject”, into what many LE professional indicate was “one of the most important courses of their careers”.
DAY 1
- Define Critical Thinking
- Relevance to LE/Analysis
- Common Intellectual Principles
- Critically Reading/Writing
- Claims/Arguments
- Analyze
- Construct
- Fallacies
- Hypotheses
- Thinking
- How do we think?
- Bias
- Asking the right questions
- Where do we get our information (Data)?
- Sources
- Primary/Secondary
- How to distinguish “good data”
DAY 2
- Allowing the data/evidence to lead
- 5W’s & How
- Inferences / theories
- What is evidence?
- Problem Identification
- Research questions
- Decision Making
- Systems/Processes/Procedures
- Problems
- Recognition vs. solve
- Impact of Technology
- Creating Intelligence Products using Critical Thinking
- Speaking Truth to Power
- Informing decision makers
- Dispelling misconceptions/conventional wisdom
- Maintaining professional integrity