Please note - this is NOT a humor article. It's a piece from the latest Economist about what the supposedly 150,000 supposedly trained Iraqi police have supposedly been supposedly learning. Very promising :(
http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=3968529
What they need is gender sensitivity
May 12th 2005 | ZUBAYR
From The Economist print edition
Police cadets learn human-rights law, but not how to deal with suicide bombers
IN LESSON 29 of Iraq's police training manual, entitled "Women in Law Enforcement", are some arresting details. According to the Cincinnati police department, between 1999 and 2000 "male officers cost two and a half times more than female officers in terms of excessive force payments, accounting for 92.3% of the dollars spent when payments from wrongful death are examined as a sub-category of excessive force." Iraqi police are not known to make such payments, and include almost no women. But should this change, the lesson will no doubt be invaluable.
That Iraqi police need training, no one doubts. Over the past year, about 100 have been murdered each month. Many more have fled their posts--including, last November, almost Mosul's entire force of 8,000, some of whom joined the insurgents. While Iraq's nascent army is being guided through similar problems by a multitude of American "advisers", the police, corrupt, incompetent and under-equipped, are largely going it alone.
Yet some of their foreign trainers--including American and British coppers--question the usefulness of the current scheme. An eight-week training course is taught at seven academies in Iraq and nearby Jordan, and is supposed to include an array of basic police skills. In reality, according to British policemen manning an academy at Zubayr, in southern Iraq, the course consists of one week of target practice (at which the average cadet performs execrably), one week of unarmed combat (including with batons, which Iraqi police do not use), and six weeks of absurdly complex instruction--through translation--on human rights.
"Less than 1% of the course is relevant," says a British instructor. The training manual offers no advice on dealing with car bombs, grenade attacks or Muslim fanatics. And what practical tips it does offer may be misplaced. In lesson 11, "Trafficking in Persons", Iraqi recruits are told to "encourage the [trafficked] woman to talk about how this has made her feel about herself and reassure her that she is still worth as much as any other person." Yet there is no such trafficking in Iraq. The passage has been lifted from a manual for the Balkans, where many Iraqi policemen would no doubt rather be.