I recently served as a panelist on an event for Philadelphia’s National Liberty Museum titled, “Four Paths to Better Policing: An Interactive Virtual Public Dialogue.” The purpose was to outline and debate different paths for American law enforcement moving forward: reinforcing, reforming, reimagining, and removing the police.
I was asked to speak to the “reinforce” perspective - or the idea that American police, generally, have been doing a better job in recent years/decades compared to the flaws in the profession historically. That what police need now is more support and more resources to improve the status quo (i.e., we need to “reinvest” in them).
The “reforming the police” perspective was outlined by current Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison. The “reimagining the police” perspective was provided by The Policing Project at NYU Law’s Chief of Staff Maureen McGough. And the “remove the police” perspective was expressed by Devren Washington, who is a community organizer, Senior Policy Organizer at Movement Alliance Project, and the President of the Community Advisory Committee under MacArthur’s Safety and Justice Challenge.
Here are my thoughts on “reinforcing/reinvesting” in police:
“We’re at a critical inflection point in the history of American policing where what do will have ramifications for crime/public safety and police-minority community relations moving forward. I’ve started to worry whether the narrow window for meaningful, crisis-driven police reform – in the form of political will and bipartisanship has closed – from where we were in the summer/fall of 2020. A rise in crime/violence coupled with a hyper-partisan political environment and candidates for office that pit police accountability and public safety against one another has threatened common sense changes to policing that most reasonable people can agree on. The same debates rage on from district attorney to city council, mayoral and gubernatorial races. These dynamics have played out not only in Philadelphia but in communities across the country.
My central message is 1) there needs to be some acknowledgement that, taken as a whole, progress has been made in American policing in the last few decades, and 2) we need to reinforce/reinvest in police in order to solve some of our biggest crises – namely problematic uses of force, especially as it relates to individuals exhibiting signs of emotional/mental distress. That police need more support and resources in the form of enhanced training, physical tools, and fairer media coverage – to name a few – in order to improve the status quo. More support has the ability to positively impact the day-to-day operations as well as the recruitment and retention of quality front-line officers, supervisors, and leaders.
I’d like to start with the caveat that policing in the 21st century is by no means perfect. Big picture, systematic impediments still exist in the form of blind spots due to the lack national reporting standards and data infrastructure. Select laws and collective bargaining agreements between unions and jurisdictions hide officers’ personnel files from public view. Some allow departments to purge records of citizen complaints and uses of force after a certain amount of time. Across agencies, there is variation in the strength and guidance provided in policy language as it relates to governing the use of force and other discretionary officer behavior. There is evidence that ineffective supervision and disciplinary structures in some departments contribute to poor policing.
Additionally, law enforcement itself needs to do a better job acknowledging that police in America, historically, engaged in over- and as well as under-enforcement of the law against racial/ethnic minorities. They were used as the enforcement arm of discriminatory laws, such as “Black Codes” and “Jim Crow” through the 1960s. Police also failed to protect Black people from generational racial violence and lynchings from the end of Reconstruction through WWII.
POSITIVE CHANGES: However, it’s important to point out policing, in many ways, is a microcosm and reflection of the broader issues in our society: racial and economic strife, transactional police-citizen violence and a high degree of officer-involved shootings that mirrors our extraordinary level of gun violence. Problems of unaddressed and underfunded mental health and substance abuse resources, homelessness, etc. that all set the stage for police-citizen encounters every day on American streets.
If we are going to call attention to its ugly history, then we must also point out how policing has improved over the last few decades. Tremendous progress was made in diversifying law enforcements ranks with racial/ethnic and gender representation – although both have seemed to plateau. There is no question that police use lethal force far less frequently today. Changing departmental and legal standards, from once allowing officers to shoot to prevent the escape of fleeing felons, to restricting firearms in only defense of life scenarios has drastically reduced not only police shootings in general, but also racial disparities in the most controversial types of shootings where citizens were unarmed and running away. Stricter administrative policies have narrowed officer discretion and placed more restrictions on what officers can and cannot do, from use of force to when they can engage in vehicle and foot pursuits. These stricter policies, in conjunction with better monitoring and review structures within agencies, have reigned in problematic uses of firearms, OC/pepper spray, conducted energy devices/TASERS, and non-lethal force in general.
Police are also more effective in addressing crime today than they were in the past. There is plenty of evidence – recently synthesized in a report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine – that select innovative policing strategies – including hot spots policing/ directed patrol, problem-oriented policing, and focused deterrence/pulling levers – reduce crime and disorder. Such strategies work best and minimize harm when employed in surgically precise manners, like focusing on specific, micro-places and high-rate offenders. And because the biggest reductions in crime over the last few decades have been found to occur in economically disadvantaged, minority communities, the police have played an active part in limiting criminal victimization, specifically gun violence, for black and brown people disproportionately.
A number of societal transformations has expanded the role of police and what they are responsible for. Deinstitutionalization and the severe lack of quality mental health services means that it is often the police that must deal with individuals in behavior crisis. The same could be said about substance abuse problems and homelessness, among other issues. Divestment in public education for positions of guidance counselors and other professionals to address students’ social-emotional needs has led to police playing a more active role in our schools.
The model for the last few decades has been to send in the police for all of these other societal failures and problems. It has become an increasingly complex and almost-impossible job for which they are not adequately trained for and not given the appropriate tools to use. And those lack of investments in policing are evident: it’s why where here tonight discussing the role of the police.
The single best quote I’ve heard over the past year or so that describes this current dilemma comes from David Kennedy – a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. In a recent commentary for The Niskanen Center, Kennedy writes, “Police aren’t first responders. They’re just the last one’s left.”
REINFORCE/REINVEST: As such, we need to reinforce the police and reinvest in the necessary tools and skills that better equip them to do the job. The first general area must be training. Both law enforcement executives and scholars tend to agree that current police training is woefully insufficient with many flaws. 90% of training focuses on honing technical skills, such as firearms, driving, and self-defense tactics, and much of the time is spent in the classroom with lecture-heavy approaches. Officers need to be exposed to more quality, interactive and role-playing-based scenarios in the academy, which must be reinforced through in-service training formats. This can be done with investments in VirTra simulators to practice different types of encounters with citizens, particularly when it comes to people in crisis – whether it be a suicidal or emotionally-disturbed person.
There are newer training curriculum designed to address deficiencies in de-escalation and communications skills and dealing with the mentally ill. They include Crisis Intervention Training or CIT, the Police Executive Research Forum’s Integrating Communications Assessment and Tactics (ICAT), and Polis Solutions T3 social interaction training. However, I’d venture to say that most police departments across the country do not receive these types of trainings, especially the formal de-escalation ones, and the status quo for CIT is to offer the training to a handful of officers in their mental health unit – similar to how a few officers were responsible for the majority of community policing efforts in the 1990s.
We need to move to a model where the majority – if not all – officers in most departments are receiving these types of trainings. And the same can be said for exposing officers to novel trainings like EPIC (Ethical Policing is Courageous) and ABLE (Active Bystandership for Law Enforcement), which are non-punitive peer intervention programs aimed to instill cultures in agencies where officers proactively place a check on their colleagues who are acting aggressively and escalating situations with citizens.
In addition to training, officers do not always have the necessary physical tools to do the job. This is perhaps best highlighted by the fatal police shooting of Walter Wallace, Jr. in Philadelphia last October. The 1-year anniversary of the incident just passed. Officers were dispatched to a disturbance where they were confronted by Wallace who had a knife. As he was told to drop the knife as he was advancing toward officers, police opened fire. They incident was captured on officer body-worn camera video and sparked almost immediate community outrage. One of the criticisms was a question as to why the officers didn’t attempt less-lethal force, such as a CED/TASER. It was later revealed that none of the officers present and not all Philadelphia Police Department officers were equipped with TASERS. This is unacceptable and borders on government negligence.
Officers also don’t receive adequate resources for their mental health and wellness. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, police in the US experience the highest rates of non-fatal assault and the 2nd most workplace homicides. But aside from the physical attacks and threats, officers consistently experience a high degree of secondary/vicarious trauma while performing their job duties. It’s an emotionally taxing profession, and such factors contribute to the deterioration of police officers’ physical and mental well-being. Although there has been some progress made in mental health awareness among law enforcement, police officers are still reluctant to seek help – and perhaps most relevant – most departments and states are deficient in formal officer wellness programs that connect officers with professionally trained clinicians who might help. This neglect leads to adverse health effects, such as decreased life expectancy, an increased risk of sickness and alarming suicide rates. In 2017, 3 times as many officers died of suicide than all other line of duty deaths combined. The lack of officer wellness/safety programs will continue to lead to problems of retention in the future, and research is starting to uncover how exposure to vicarious trauma, such as responding to a high number of suicide calls and domestic violence incidents, is a risk factor for later excessive uses of force and misconduct.
This point here is not to diminish the struggle of minority communities or stymie police reform. We need more accountability, particularly at the front-end before critical incidents take place; however, we also need to reinforce and reinvest in police at the same time. This is even more important in the current political climate that has largely provided negative media commentary on American law enforcement since the summer of 2014 in the wake of Ferguson and certainly since summer 2020.
We need fairer and more balanced coverage of current policing issues. Even the basic framing of fatal officer-involved shootings and deaths in police custody that use blanket terms like “police violence” creates a problem. Classifying all deaths at the hands of police as “police violence” is misleading and potentially divisive. According to data from The Washington Post, approximately 87% of those citizens fatally shot by police from 2015 through mid-2020 were in possession of a deadly weapon – posing a direct and immediate threat to officers. Such framing can cause a further rift between officers and the public, media, and academia. It adds fuel to the “War on Cops” narrative that the media/public/academia is “against us” and seems to be negatively affecting recruitment/hiring efforts among college students who once desired to enter the profession.
In these discussions, there is a difference between police use of force and brutality. The use of coercive force is the most defining feature of the police role. Officers must force compliance and arrest people who do not want to comply. They must defend themselves from people who are threatening and even assaultive. Not all police use of force is problematic, and there is evidence that a growing group of citizens possess unreasonable perceptions of police use of force. Unreasonable because their opinions of the use of force are incompatible with the legal and professional standards that serve as the evaluative tools to determine if force is justified and within the bounds of the law and departmental policy.
Not to mention how, according to Gallup polling, public confidence in law enforcement dipped in June 2020 even further than post-Ferguson levels, with a 27-year record low. These perceptions lead officers to believe that the general public does not understand them or their job, according to surveys from the Pew Research Center, which ultimately is a blow to their perceptions of audience legitimacy. We still don’t fully understand the long-term implications of the negative media attention and officers’ perceptions of audience illegitimacy.
Broad, societal changes are needed to narrow the disconnect and social distance between the law enforcement community and segments of the public, media, and even academia.”