About VALOR
The goal of the Initiative is to increase officer safety and resilience and strengthen officer wellness by improving the quality of officer safety training resources and opportunities available to the law enforcement community in the United States. Since the creation of the Initiative, more than 123,000 law enforcement personnel have received some form of VALOR-related training.
National Survey on Officer Safety
The Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) created the Preventing Violence Against Law Enforcement and Ensuring Officer Resilience and Survivability (VALOR) Initiative to improve officer safety training resources and opportunities available to the law enforcement community in the United States. A critical piece of the VALOR Initiative is to understand the future officer safety training needs of the law enforcement community to continue efforts to provide effective behavior-changing training and resources. To support this effort, a national survey of law enforcement agencies was conducted to examine these needs. Four general questions were examined to obtain some understanding of the landscape of law enforcement training:
What are the relative impacts of different officer safety threats facing officers?
What types of officer safety and related training are agencies providing officers?
What types of officer safety and related training do agencies view as a critical need in the near future?
What do agencies currently view as constraints to providing officer safety and related training to their officers?
A survey based on these questions was developed and administered to a stratified random sample of 1,514 state and local law enforcement agencies, which represents approximately 10% of the law enforcement agencies in the United States. A total of 652 agencies completed and returned the survey, representing a 43% response rate. The survey asked that the chief executive (e.g. chief or sheriff) complete the survey, or a designee that can speak to their perspective on the issues in the survey. The responding agencies are diverse in size (small to large agencies), region in the United States, and type (municipal, county, and state police). An overview of the findings is provided on the subsequent pages.
This project was supported by Grant No. 2016-VI-BX-K001 awarded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance. The Bureau of Justice Assistance is a component of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs, which also includes the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Institute of Justice, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, the Office for Victims of Crime, and the Office of Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering, and Tracking (SMART). Points of view or opinions in this document are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.