Law Enforcement Courses

What Would I Study in a Law Enforcement Degree Program?

The depth and breath of law enforcement courses covered in major law enforcement degree programs is vast and quite impressive. If you have a specialization in mind or if you are not sure what you want to pursue, you are bound to find something of interest among the many course to choose from.

Law Enforcement Curriculum

Law enforcement courses will prepare you for a number of exciting careers. But what will you study during your training? What types of topic are most often covered in law enforcement degree programs? It’s good to survey program curriculum prior to committing to a degree program.

While you may like the career, you may find that the required training is more then you bargained for. Research your options and make sure you chose a program that has the focus and the law enforcement courses you will enjoy.

Given that the number of courses offered by law enforcement programs is quite extensive, we will cover only the most common course offerings. Please note that we have barely touched the surface here. You should contact your school of interest and request detailed program information, with course and curriculum outlines. Consider contacting one of the faculty members to discuss particular course offerings and the program focus.

This course will cover topics related to courts security, such as critical incidents and emergency planning for courts. Most often studied are typical profiles of those involved in court building incidents, types of weapons used, keys to court security vulnerability as well as how to deal with hostage situations in courtroom incidences. Discussion often focuses on extending your understating of regular court security procedures, normal jury procedures as well as prisoner/defendant security and sequestering juries. Issue related to high risk trials, special courtroom procedures, emergency procedures and on-site examination are usually explored.

This course will focus on providing practical approaches to responding to death scenes and homicide. You will learn about the duties and responsibilities of the first responders and investigators in the initial inspection of the scene. Courses within this area cover proper procedure for ensuring the crime scene is properly processed and documented as well as how to compile written reports, photographs and measurements as well as crime scene reconstruction, bloodstain and bullet pattern analysis.

This course covers topics such as burglary and robbery investigations, detective training, rape and sex crime investigations, child death and homicide, crimes against the elderly, forensic death investigation as well as practical surveillance techniques, identity theft and violet crimes and criminal profiling investigative analysis. An important component of a course covering criminal investigations is management. A criminal investigation is successful if the case is well organized, no leads are missed and no duplicate service is rendered. You will become familiar with conducting a criminal case analysis from an incidents report, preparing case assignments, identifying solvable factors from information that is known, preparing policies for proper case management as well as media relations.

This course will help you better understand and focus on drug identification, types of informants, search warrant execution as well as undercover operations. Courses in this area focus on drug cartels, money laundering and wiretap cases. Additional topics include drug and narcotic investigations beyond the street level dealer, tactics and techniques in use of informants, surveillance techniques in criminal investigations, undercover drug investigations as well as asset forfeiture procedures in drug and criminal investigations.

Police and society law enforcement courses focus on various response methodologies available to the patrol officer and usually cover topics in the area of traffic enforcement, traffic accident investigations, proper police procedures and the relationship between police and the citizens requesting police service.

This course will provide an introduction to the use of computers in the law enforcement agencies. The implications of the use of computers as both storage and information gathering instruments is explored as well as the numerous benefits of using computers in research and investigations. The goal of courses such as this one is to raise student’s ability and awareness of the importance of computers in crime mapping, administration, traffic analysis and accident plotting.

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