Their training happens primarily at a police academy, where cadets spend months learning how to be a police officer. I studied this training at four large municipal police departments to gain a better understanding of what kinds of skills cadets learn, how they are evaluated, and why some cadets make it to graduation while others wash out. (As part of my agreement with the departments and my university’s institutional review board, I cannot identify the specific departments.) This was in 2018, just four years after the uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, following the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown and two years before the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for nearly 10 minutes. I, like so many others around the world, wanted to know why the names and stories of Black Americans killed by police just kept coming, and I thought that finding out who was allowed to be an officer and how they were trained to do their job could help answer that question.