If you follow my essays, you might notice that I routinely give a thumbs-up on German police. When you look at the recruitment pattern....the physical and intelligence tests required before you even enter the academy business....they get better personnel, and the quality over the next thirty years makes for a positive feeling among most Germans.
So I pulled up this article from Deutsche Welle....which went over an odd problem brewing with German cops and their initial training at the academy level.
Typically, once you get sent off to the police academy....there is a bit of English-language training. Because of inter-action with tourists.....English is helpful.
Well....the leadership of police have come to this observation of the rookie cops that they are getting out of the academy. These new cops...certified and ready for action.....can't write decent text in their reports....have poor punctuation, and show continual spelling errors. The leadership wants the English classes cut to some degree, and more German language classes to be 'forced' upon the trainees.
Two years ago, I sat in a German language class and the instructor brought up this issue. More and more Germans were recognizing that kids coming out of the basic German school system (grades 1 to 8).....had major problems in writing plain and understandable text. Another instructor got onto the topic of university professors in Germany now in conflict with kids who are supposed to produce written reports for university requirements...and it's all worsening in terms of readability.
From an American perspective.....one might say the same thing about kids and young adults coming out of the school and university program in the US. Text writing and poor grammar is something you have to accept now, and American professors are furious over the quality of work being produced.
The unique thing about police (doesn't matter what country you are discussing)....they have to go and produce reports each and every day. You might be writing sixty lines of text per day, and it has to be readable and make sense. You can imagine some detective doing research over one single criminal, and come to a report that might help to tie the guy to some bigger crime....with the report marginally explaining the troublesome act, and poorly written.
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