| By
Wally Gonzalez
You’ve
seen them stopping traffic to do the ritual raising of the flag by the
Arts Building. You’ve spotted them vigorously running laps around
the campus track or merely marching around school. At one point or another,
you’ve seem them, and they’ve seen you too.
Outside
some of these men and women might be the long arm of the law, serving
and protecting, but here at the police academy just students, learning
as you and I do.
The academy
hasn’t always been at Raritan Valley. In 1987 it met at Washington
Elementary School on First Ave. in Raritan. The elementary school allowed
for only thirty students to fit in each classroom, while at the same time
the building was being occupied by adults and elderly for night classes
and such. This was a problem, because of the noise the recruits made and
the unavailability of a location with proper training facilities. The
academy needed a new location.
They
found it in a warehouse in Hillsborough in 1992. The warehouse was ideal
because it could accommodate larger classes, allowing for three times
more recruits, at about 100 students, to join as well as providing a more
open range for physical training, as well as a lunch room.
Sometime
in 2001, Wayne Forrest, a county prosecutor and professor at Raritan Valley,
realized that the college would be a perfect place for integration of
criminal-justice students and recruits. The college would offer facilities
large enough for training, with classrooms adequate to teach different
courses, while offering the students and recruits a library, too. And
so the academy joined the college; it began being held here almost four
years ago.
The academy
itself is part of the Police Training Commission, which answers to the
Division of Criminal Justice; however the students still attend the college,
only they attend a different branch.
Dr. Richard
Celeste, whose Ph.D. is in adult education, is the head of the academy.
He answers to a couple of bosses, the obvious being his superiors in the
judicial system and also to the college’s president, Jerry Ryan.
Most of the professors who report to Dr. Celeste are also part of the
judicial system, some being prosecutors and officers of the law themselves.
About
150 instructors train about 2,000 students a calendar year, not a college
year (which is broken down into semesters).
Not all
these students are training to become police officers; some are already
part of a law-enforcement agency. This is because of the academy’s
two-program system. The system consists of the academy that teaches cadets
to become officers, as well as the academy that assists in continuing
education of officers already involved with criminal justice from other
municipalities. These are the men you normally see at the Arts Building,
which is the reason parking is always taken up by police cars. Continuing-education
students meet to further their knowledge of the justice system. Some might
be taking classes in generic law, while others might be taking courses
in forensics or crime-scene investigation. The continuing-education program
allows officrs to study such areas of law enforcement in much greater
detail.
The cadets
have it a little more difficult. The recruits, which are the ones you
see in uniforms with a shaved head or short hair for the women, account
for 15%-20% of the students. They have two options for entering the academy.
The first
is by being sent by a police precinct. The way this happens is that a
potential recruit goes to the precinct that is offering a job and fills
out an application for the position of an officer. If the cadet passes
the requirements of that precinct and is accepted, the precinct sends
him or her to Raritan Valley to commence the training.
However,
if a cadet wishes to become an officer without having to go through the
precinct they can take the alternate route program.
This
route allows the cadet to enlist in the program at Raritan Valley by paying
$3,700. Not too high a price considering this covers the registration
fee, background investigation fee, medical, stress, and psychological
examinations, insurance, and a uniform. The cadet must attend a mandatory
orientation meeting and undergo interviews.
Asked
about the physical demands which you would assume would be intense, Dr.
Celeste responded: “It’s only a mile and a half run, push-ups
and sit-ups.”
However,
the basic training is 23 weeks long with more than 120 academic subjects
that are taught and is described by the academy’s Web site as “a
blend of military and college training.” If that weren’t enough,
the students take about 25 exams during the course of their training,
and answer about 3,000 questions. Makes you wonder how most students complain
about having to a physical education class.
They
might be rugged, they might be able to bench-press twice your weight,
they might be incredibly intimidating, but they’re also just students
attending school, trying to make it through another day amid of the pressures
of schoolwork, homework, and gun-range training.
So next
time you see an academy student, don’t be afraid to extend a hand,
just make sure you’re ready, I hear they have a mean grip.
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