Ryan Schwenk

Like, did any of them come to you and say, like, we don't feel prepared enough?

We don't feel ready?

Yes.

Yes, I had cadets say that to us.

I had cadets on multiple occasions say they felt unprepared for the job.

I remember one cadet was talking to us about, like,

We were dealing with kind of the issue of like entry into a yard.

And the cadet was having a lot of difficulty understanding how to apply that set of rules.

We kind of walked him through it a couple of times.

And he was talking about how like everything the academy kind of goes in one ear and out the other because they're rushed from one thing to the next to try to meet that schedule.

Of course, fast training can still be rigorous training, as long as you test people to make sure they got it.

And Ryan says that in this new compressed training, crucial real-world skills were not adequately tested, like using a gun correctly or subduing somebody in the field.

Under the old academy structure, what existed before the surge, these practical exercises were graded.

The students had to pass these exercises to graduate.

If they didn't pass the exercise, if they demonstrated a lack of knowledge of the law or the tactics involved, they had to repeat the class.

And if they failed twice, they were out.

They did not get to graduate.

Meaning they wouldn't become an ICE officer.

But now things were different.

So now no matter what we saw the cadets do in these scenarios, they still graduated.