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Generally, training is a heart topic of development in any field, as it brings to practice most recent successful methodologies of doing things, and it also relates practices to theories in a homogenous way, it goes beyond doubt that training has  a similar importance  to bring both legal & human-rights imperativeness knowledge to law enforcement officers( later cited as LEOs), training here is a multi-layer process of upgrading the awareness and enriching performance methodologies mainly at the police level, it helps a lot when the personnel are of common understanding of their obligations in terms of the service delivery to the society they serve.

Training LEOs  in a Human Rights setting:

On the ground, training should be addressing prioritized line of issues that form the essence work of the police; but to keep to the our dialogue thematic orientation, I will stick to the sort of training that relates more to law  enforcing within human rights setting, which  can be crystallized under the following  topics:

• Setting training initiative for a legally –informed police officers.
• Teach LEOs the basic legal standards that form their human rights knowledge base.
• Training on best practices of other countries in law enforcement work.
• Training initiatives that combine LEOs with civil society representatives to produce a joint vision of performance between the two entities.
• Including LEOs in specialized training activities ( such as  training on psychological treatment to victims),  delivered to psychiatrists or social workers), to put LEOs in a position of practical recognition of human rights abuse consequences.

Human Rights for all:

From the other hand, still law enforcement officers are human beings and have their own sufferings that naturally affect their way of performing their duties. In many occasions of my international work with UN peacekeeping missions, adds to African numerous training experiences, I witnessed heavily loaded officers, who perform their work in an extremely difficult circumstances, talking about the available tools, and also the professional work environment, that deeply affect the way they perform their work. To be realistic, in a situation when law enforcement officer him/her self is suffering from many rights violations, don’t expect much of him/her in terms of  abiding by human rights norms while doing his/her job.

That takes us to another issue, raised by question: What does a normal citizen have to do if law enforcement officers them selves are targeted by violations from within the official setting of work?

Although it is a complicated issue and entangled, but it looks inevitable, it has to be addressed, and any community should get the idea of having their LEOs in a nicely positioned standard of performance before aspiring to get a super service from them, here are some challenges that curb the potentials of LEOs in terms of adherence to human rights standards:

• Individually, if a police officer is suffering from unmoral work conditions, it can be impossible for him/her to abide by law or human rights norms(in some countries officers work for over 15 hours a day and don’t get paid well. Added to this deprivation of many social life aspects such as having holidays and vacations like normal people, to spend with their families, etc.
• Lack of education, especially legal basis.
• Poor quality of tools that facilitate police work (vehicles, radios, telephones, labs, high tech items, etc).
• Isolation of LEOs from their communities while performing their work (lack of community policing tactics).
• Difficult work environment sometimes makes it impossible to perform the work naturally when the LEOs are being used as tools to curb public resentment towards other official authority performance.
• Politicizing the police work is a great hurdle in the face of  LEOs, as they are considered tools of the ruling systems, which makes them vulnerable to political variables, and takes them away from the normal course of keeping security and tranquility into a tool for  achieving political interests.

Law enforcing is a corner stone of stability:

In any civilized setting, law plays a  vital role of stability and prosperity in the community, vice versa, one of the major symptoms of chaos in a community is the absence of the rule of law, so it is clear that law alone wouldn’t do a community any good if there is no serious enforcing it, to embody that, all constrictions of today’s world countries are including wonderful varsities of human rights guarantees, but eloquent  theoretical repository of guarantees didn’t spill over to reality in terms of human rights respect in many countries, because of the gap between the theoretic and practical lines, simply because LEOs are very short of a satisfactory performance level (for different reasons according to every individual country situation). So it is of initial significance to have police entities well shaped and positioned to undertake their duties in such a way that a community would really aspire to get.(noticeable here is the community role in shaping LEOs roles).

Conclusion:

If  a particular development is perused  within a LEOs setting, it has to respond to the various aspects of LEOs community, to build a realistic initiatives that can be productive , instructive, and informative as well.