Their presence at the academy’s graduation stirred new questions about the appropriateness of the LAPD’s close relationships with overseas security services, particularly those from countries accused of human rights violations.

While supporters of training Emirati officers at the academy argue that it provides a valuable cultural exchange for all involved, human rights groups have denounced the Persian Gulf nation’s government for its history of quashing dissent and denying the rights of gay and transgender people.

Over the decades, LAPD officials have met representatives from numerous countries, including Russia and Qatar, who sought out the department because they wanted to learn about how it handles large-scale protests or complex criminal investigations.

Top brass from the LAPD have also been visiting law-enforcement agencies overseas for decades.

But concerns about such exchanges have grown since the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza war.

Critics of Israel’s military assaults on the Gaza Strip and its crackdown in the occupied West Bank point out that the LAPD has sent personnel to study and train with Israeli security forces accused of state-sanctioned violence against civilians in the two Palestinian territories.

Israelis stage largest protest against Netanyahu government since war began

The LAPD’s ongoing relationship with Israeli forces – based on what officials have said is a shared goal of fighting extremism inside their borders – has come under scrutiny before, along with other international training efforts.

The agency’s dealings with Israeli forces date back to at least the early 1980s, but ramped up after the September 11 attacks as the LAPD sought to boost its counterterrorism training.

In 2002, the Washington advocacy group Jewish Institute for National Security of America sponsored an LAPD delegation’s weeklong trip to Israel, during which department officials visited police and military outposts and studied Israel’s border patrol operations in the Galilee region and the occupied West Bank.

Around the same time, the department began sending bomb squad technicians to learn from their counterparts in Israel; at least one trip was paid for by an US$18,000 donation from the Los Angeles Police Foundation, a non-profit independent fundraising group.

In the years since, high-ranking officials from Los Angeles and Israel have routinely traded delegations. But critics say that in light of the polarising conflict in Gaza, the LAPD’s ongoing ties to Israeli forces threaten the department’s image of impartiality.

Akhil Gopal, a member of the police abolitionist group Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, said such trips were problematic for a number of reasons.

LAPD officials receive instruction on tactics rooted in flawed theories of radicalisation that unfairly criminalise Muslims, Gopal said.

He argued that such training had helped shape harmful LAPD programmes that have targeted black and brown Angelenos.

In some cases, he said, public records had shown that the department acquired surveillance technology developed by firms with ties to overseas intelligence agencies.

Comment: The Israeli colonial-settler state has been unmasked for what it is

“The LAPD is exchanging tactics, learning from the experience of Israel and essentially being the colonial force in a colonial situation,” Gopal said.

In January, a coalition of advocacy groups including the Council on American-Islamic Relations called on the Los Angeles Police Commission to conduct “a thorough investigation into reports suggesting that LAPD officers may have undergone training programmes in Israel”.

“While we acknowledge the importance of international collaboration and the exchange of knowledge between law enforcement agencies, it is crucial to ensure that such engagements align with principles of human rights, justice, and accountability,” the groups said in a letter.

03:41

UN Security Council demands immediate ceasefire in Gaza, as US abstains from vote

UN Security Council demands immediate ceasefire in Gaza, as US abstains from vote

Although it has a reputation for glittering skyscrapers and safe streets, a 2022 report from the United Nations Committee against Torture, which looked at the country’s involvement in the conflict in Yemen, “expressed concerns over allegations of torture and ill-treatment by the State party’s regular armed forces, state security agencies, and related non-state armed groups”.

The cadre of Emirati officers who graduated from the LAPD’s academy last year were part of a fledgling exchange programme sponsored by the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), and touted as a way to promote better understanding by sending officers from the US and Canada to train in the UAE and vice versa.

But the department had formalised its relationship with UAE law enforcement in 2015, with a delegation from Abu Dhabi visiting LA a few months after the emirate hosted several high-ranking LAPD officials.

According to emails obtained through an open records request, the IACP had assured officials in LA that the UAE would incur all costs associated with the Emirate delegation’s trip.

The officers involved had all studied at colleges in the US, Australia or the UAE and had been cleared by the UAE’s Interior Ministry – although records of its investigations into their backgrounds were not turned over to the LAPD.

A delay in securing the officers’ visas to enter the US postponed their start date by a month. But in early March 2023, the officers boarded an Emirates flight to Los Angeles, and within days of arriving they were attending an orientation for LAPD recruits.

Vince Hawkes, the IACP’s director of global policing, said exchange programmes were focused on providing technical assistance and training at a time when agencies like the LAPD increasingly found themselves facing threats of crimes that transcended borders.

These exchanges, he said, were valuable “not only from a tactical perspective, but [provide] experience dealing with multiple cultures”.

Most officers could benefit from a greater cultural awareness by working overseas, Hawkes said, calling such a perspective a “huge advantage” for a police force in a diverse city like Los Angeles.

“What do we do at prayer time – how do we manage that at the police academy? How do we handle Ramadan, when people are fasting?” he said. “Not only do we have that learning with the training programmes in different countries, but also one of the greatest positive components is that culture piece.”

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In response to an inquiry, the LAPD confirmed that the foreign officers had gone through the department’s basic academy training course, completing 833 of the 912 hours of standard training that recruits go through before graduating.

The state-mandated courses cover “law, academics, report writing, human relations, physical training, arrest and control, law enforcement tactics and defensive tactics”, but the Emirati officers were not certified under the state’s Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training.

“The exchange programme is designed to expose police officers from the UAE to methods of policing the United States,” the LAPD said in a statement. “Additionally, the Los Angeles Police Department strives to strengthen our law enforcement partnerships and be a positive influence within the international community.”

Collaboration between law enforcement agencies from different countries is nothing new, experts say.

Departments are known to swap intelligence, coordinate joint patrols along international borders, and occasionally team up on investigations into sprawling criminal networks that traffic in arms, drugs, sex and labour around the world.

The US has trained police forces around the world, including in Haiti and Hong Kong, whose law enforcement agencies both went on to use tear gas and other aggressive tactics against protesters in recent years, according to Ben Kenzer, a political scientist in Ohio.

With that sort of training, he said, “we’re not really creating an effective police force that is representing the people – we’re creating an effective police force that is effective at repressing dissent”.

Considering the dizzying pace of technological change, police departments feel pressure to “learn from one another on policing issues that are affecting us globally”, said Scott Bradbury, a Toronto police detective sergeant who was part of the first IACP cohort to the UAE.

But “the true value of the exchange programme is the collaboration of the involved people”, he said, adding that he’d received an invaluable education in cultural awareness by training alongside officers from Turkey, Uzbekistan and Nigeria.

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Another expert, Johns Hopkins University professor Stuart Schrader, said foreign police training had continued despite periods of intense public scrutiny of the practice.

“In the past, it was kind of a win-win, and just a PR benefit. And now maybe that assumption cannot be maintained that easily,” said Schrader, author of a book on how international exchange programmes have helped project US power overseas – while at the same time shaping policing on American streets.

Some cities have reconsidered such partnerships in recent years, notably Durham, New Carolina, which in 2018 passed a resolution barring its Police Department from taking part in exchanges where officers receive “military-style training”.

And yet, Schrader said, even many symbolic votes in other cities to denounce Israel’s actions in the latest conflict have been soundly rejected “given the really tense political climate”.

“On some, level the idea that the US has something to teach other countries about how to do law enforcement well is a bit laughable at this point, given what we know about the levels of police violence and human rights abuses that have occurred in this country,” he said.

“That doesn’t mean I’m an isolationist … if there’s a way to look at other best practices, I think that that’s something the US can learn from.”