Examining the DOJ’s National Standards for Law Enforcement De-Escalation Training

Part 2: Now that the standards are set, how will the government implement them?

The first part of this series followed de-escalation on its journey from hospital safety term to bipartisan federal mandate. Now we will look at what the Law Enforcement De-Escalation Training Act (LEDTA) produced. On Aug. 5, 2026, the Department of Justice (DOJ) released Version 1 of its National Standards for Law Enforcement De-escalation Training and opened the certification pilot program.

Reviewed and vetted by police unions and mental health advocates alike, the standards represent solid work built on a review of the research and listening sessions with more than 50 practitioners; however, they also leave some work undone. While they recommend some of the strongest evidence-based practices, they stop short of requiring them. Additionally, the standards apply only to training funded by the DOJ (i.e., state and local departments). The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS), and all other federal forces are currently exempt.

What Do the National Standards for Law Enforcement De-Escalation Training Require?

The DOJ set out 14 standards, split evenly between course curriculum and development/delivery. Each is a checklist of smaller items—64 in all—and the wording matters: Courses that skip one or more of the 35 “musts” cannot be certified, while courses that disregard any of the 29 “shoulds” can still earn certification. The split between “musts” and “shoulds” is responsible for most of the gaps that currently exist.

On the teaching side, the DOJ wants a complete package: lesson plans, qualified instructors, pre- and post-tests, and a way to check whether officers still use what they learned months later. Officers must practice live, with role-players or virtual reality and an instructor coaching them in the moment, which means fully online courses do not qualify for certification. The curriculum must show its sources and name the crisis-response experts who helped build it. (According to the sixth standard, this group may include people living with mental health conditions or disabilities.)

Regarding content, the standards read like a list of what good officers already do: watch and interpret body language, listen, build rapport, talk someone through a crisis, and use time and distance instead of force. At the legal core are Tennessee v. Garner (1984) and Graham v. Connor (1989), along with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Olmstead v. L.C. (1999). Courses should also address Barnes v. Felix (2025). Together, these decisions set the rules officers are trained to meet: Garner and Graham defined when force is lawful, while Barnes told courts to judge it by the totality of the circumstances rather than the final seconds. For its part, the ADA requires officers to make reasonable modifications for people with disabilities, including mental illness—which, in practice, means slowing down and calling in help. Courses must also cover local crisis services, adapting when a first approach fails, the sanctity of human life, and officer wellness.

Two choices give the standards their character: Standard 12b states outright that de-escalation is “not appropriate, feasible, or practical in every situation,” and Standard 13c presents de-escalation as a professional tool that helps officers reduce threats and maintain lawful authority. That framing helps explain how the DOJ was able to get 20 reviewers spanning police unions, sheriffs, tactical officers, training commissions, and mental health and disability advocates to put their names to the review.

How Do the National Standards Line Up With the Research?

As mentioned in Part 1, training programs in Louisville, Kentucky, and Tempe, Arizona, have been shown to cut force or injuries. The standards largely capture what those programs had in common: live scenario practice; instruction tailored to the laws and crisis resources where officers actually work; and testing administered before, after, and well beyond training. The authors of the standards candidly admit to relying on research in adult education, behavioral health, and psychiatry to fill gaps—a sensible enough way to write a first draft, but not quite enough to create a final document.

There are four areas in which the standards could go even further toward improving de-escalation training for police officers:

• Require courses that teach officers to match the tactic to the crisis. Recognizing a crisis and using de-escalation techniques are both mandatory subjects; however, there is no requirement to teach officers how to pick the tactic that best fits the person in front of them. Someone experiencing a psychotic episode warrants a different approach than an angry but clear-headed suspect, and the tactic that settles one could set off the other. A review of more than 1,300 use-of-force reports in Oklahoma City found that officers reported using de-escalation tactics in nearly 90 percent of incidents; however, the same approach was used nearly every time: talking from a safe position and containing the subject. A tactic is only as good as the officer’s read on the situation; therefore, a certified course must teach officers to both assess the situation and choose the tactic that fits it.
• Make refresher training mandatory. One of the most consistent findings is that skills fade when they are not practiced. Officers in Louisville, Indianapolis, and Cincinnati reported that their use of de-escalation skills dropped significantly after training, while Tempe’s program—one of the few with trial results—supplemented its classroom training with five online refresher modules delivered at roll call in the ensuing months. As a result, officers who completed Tempe’s de-escalation training program reported greater use of tactics like compromise and knowing when to walk away.
• Give supervisors a role. One of the strongest predictors of whether a trained officer engages in de-escalation is whether their supervisor expects it. In Indianapolis, officers whose chain of command reinforced the training were 1.7 times more likely to report using it often, yet fewer than a quarter of first-line leaders said they reinforced it regularly. Departments should not look at course certification as proof the job is done.
• Set a minimum number of training hours. The two programs that cut use of force in randomized trials—Louisville and Chicago—each ran 16 hours, while most departments today offer either a few hours or none at all. If a two-hour course and a 16-hour course can carry the same federal seal, then many departments will likely opt for the shorter one. Years of recruitment and retention challenges have left agencies spread thin, and a short-staffed department often cannot spare officers for two full days, however necessary the training.

None of this means the DOJ should have waited to develop and release standards, as some researchers argue. The better approach is to call this version a pilot and put these four gaps at the top of the list for the next iteration.

What Must the DOJ Consider When Implementing the National Standards?

Washington has spent money on de-escalation before, with discouraging results. Whether this round turns out differently comes down to three things:

• The catalog must fill up before the money stalls. Certification is free, voluntary, and good for three years, and federal training dollars can now go only to certified courses. Yet the official catalog still reads, “The training certification pilot is now open. Please check back soon for updates.” Departments holding the roughly $31 million in Safer Outcomes grants awarded in 2024 and 2025 need something they are allowed to buy, and the Police Executive Research Forum has not publicly acknowledged intent to seek certification for its well-studied ICAT program. The first decisions under the 60-business-day review window are due about now; if they do not come, Congress has an oversight role to play.
• Small departments must not be priced out. The places that most need federal training money are often the places least able to get it. Live scenarios with trained role-players are routine for big-city departments; however, most U.S. police departments are much smaller and lack the resources needed to conduct live role-play. The DOJ allows for hybrid delivery of this training via virtual reality, which one study found works just as well. Another option is to run certification through state training boards, which already set minimums for every department in their state. Certification should not become an insurmountable barrier that leaves a few large vendors with a captive market.
• Results must count. Certification reviews a curriculum; it cannot say whether force, injuries, or complaints went down afterward. The law already requires the tests and follow-up checks that would answer that question. The DOJ should gather that data, publish it, and let it decide which courses are recertified when their three years run out.

Are Federal Agencies Required to Meet the Same Standards for De-Escalation Training?

LEDTA grants go only to states and local governments—nothing in the legislation, nor in the standards, applies to federal agencies. Washington has defined what good de-escalation training looks like for state troopers, city police, and sheriff’s deputies while making no equivalent commitment for its own agents. Because the 2022 executive order that pushed federal agencies toward de-escalation training was rescinded in January 2025, no statute, regulation, or executive order currently requires any federal agent to complete training that meets these standards. 

That gap has already shown up in practice. Federal agencies that deployed personnel to Washington, D.C. and Portland, Oregon in 2020 reported more than 800 uses of less-lethal force—many with basic facts missing. In 2025, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) more than doubled its officers and agents, it cut basic training for new agents by about 240 hours, cutting firearms training in half and dropping driving tests and skills assessments. ICE ran its 42-day accelerated course for the better part of a year before reverting back to the 72-day program on July 1, 2026. When local officers and federal agents work the same streets with different training and different rules for reporting less-lethal force, residents cannot tell whose rules apply.

Fixing this requires no new laws. The Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers participated in the review panel for these standards. The centers, which train most Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents, can submit their courses for certification like any other developer, as can the FBI and the USMS. The DOJ should tell its components to apply and press DHS to do the same. It is hard to ask a county sheriff to adopt federally certified training when the federal government’s own agencies have not sought certification themselves.

Conclusion

Congress agreed, across party lines, to support de-escalation training for police officers. The national standards honor the bipartisan deal behind them by requiring the features common to successful trials and attaching conditions to federal money without interfering in local decisions. De-escalation training is now a core part of modern policing, and because officers are often the first to arrive at a mental health crisis, they deserve training with evidence behind it.

Yet they will get it only if the DOJ treats Version 1 as a starting point. Police run toward the worst moments of other people’s lives with less training than the job demands. The officers and deputies who carry this training into those moments deserve proof that it works and a federal government willing to hold its own agents to the standards it now asks of them.

Read Part 1: What is law enforcement de-escalation training, and why did Congress agree to fund it?