The Criminal Justice program at
ferris provides our students with the
ability to be critical thinkers, problem
solvers, and analyzers. Basically this
program has a great reputation statewide
and nationwide obviously. The criminal
justice program at ferris is a four-year
program where the student receives a
bachelor's degree. It's known to be
number one in the state and the nation
given that Ferris State University is a
thirty five week program versus other
colleges that will be anywhere from
sixteen to eighteen weeks.
Right now our numbers are growing at a
phenomenal rate.
We started with around like 180 and
people weaned off to like the
corrections route and law enforcement
generalist. The students have a wide
variety of courses they take over here
over a thousand hours of different
everything to do that the police officer
has to know criminal investigation,
firearms, handling domestics, physical
fitness, criminal investigation, criminal
law, criminal procedure, and I mean just a
variety of things just required to be a
police officer in the state of Michigan.
With having a 35 week academy you have a
fast-paced sense of it still but you
have enough time to get in all the
information that you need.
We have PT in the mornings and then we
go into depending on the day we'll have
maybe a day of traffic law or a day of
actual criminal and civil law all taught
by great instructors. We can facilitate
it by approximately 45 people in a
classroom especially under a
problem-based learning methodology. You
have firearms shooting and you have
driving which is an added bonus there's
a lot of hands-on activities to do. They
shoot their pistols, they shoot the
revolvers, they shoot the shotguns, they
shoot the high-powered rifles, and they have
to be certified and qualified in all
those driving they go out and actually
drive on the range they have to pass a
course teaching certain techniques.
There's so much hands-on learning
experiences that no other school will
experience. Welcome to the shoot house
this is the simulations room or an
evidence room that we do criminal
investigation in as you can see is tarpped up  and it catches the projectiles and
the marking pellets as we go through
that simunition training. Pretty dynamic
training it's used that usually a higher
level in once you're in service and
police officer but we think it's
important that you get that stress
inoculation right away and we do
probably probably anywhere from seven to
a dozen different kinds of scenarios.
What we have here is an interactive CD
simulator with sense as a laser that
uses on an actual weapon that's been
retrofitted with the laser and what it
provides is an opportunity to deal with
commands and radio and it's non-lethal
it's not dangerous it allows the
recruits to be working in the dark and
then it gives automatic feedback both in
the shot placement as well as the
reaction time. The state of Michigan
requires that you have five hundred and
ninety four hours of training in order
to be a licensed police officer and at
Ferris State we provide the students
with almost 1,100 dollars of training by
the time they're done with our academy
so we're not quite double that amount
but we're pretty close.
The problem-based learning is a big
thing that this academy has incorporated in
and the instructors actually went to
Canada. We looked at the rail
Canadian Mounted Police and we took and
spent up four PhDs went out there and
we looked and evaluated the program
and they had a concept called
problem-based learning. It's the
foundation of our academy and I think
that's what makes us different than any
other Academy in the state. Our entire
foundation is based on problems that we
provide to the students that they have
to solve either by themselves in small
groups or in large groups. We also have
ethics class we work with another one of
our directing professors who's got great
experience in the state troopers and so
the state requires us to do four hours
of ethics training which is kind of
ridiculous as a police officer that the
amount of power that we have and
discretion that we have we should have a
lot more training in ethics and this
academy focuses a lot on that we have I
believe more than 40 plus hours of
training one state only requires four.
The state of michigan has a base
requirement that you have to do certain
amount of exercises or running, jumping
to get into any academy in the State of
Michigan so that's our beginning point
we bring that level up several notches
before they graduate. I was talking to an
individual last night that there's a
detective Sergeant in a 35 person
department he says what are you doing I
said what do you mean
and he said out of the last eight hires
six of the people that we hired are from
Ferris it's unheard of we bring 35 weeks
of training and education so you had not
only your certification ability at the
be a common police officer but you also
receive your bachelor's degree.
 
