Police futures - A PBL conference in Madison

Madison, Wisconsin is one of those rare gems - a small city, a university town, nestled on northern lakes. Famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s Monona Terrace graces the waterfront. Designed by Wright in 1938, it met opposition until final construction in 1997. A good idea, it seems, persists.

The University of Wisconsin in Madison was the perfect location for the annual Police Society for Problem Based Learning (PBL) conference where I attended this week.

Police PBL conference venue - the University of Wisconsin South Union 

I was impressed by this year’s amazing group of future-thinking police instructors at the conference. They explored PBL and showed how to keep the community at the core of training.

21ST CENTURY POLICING

President Obama’s recent Task Force Report on 21st Century Policing makes that very point when it claims PBL “encourages new officers to think with a proactive mindset, enabling the identification of and solutions to problems within their communities.”

Given the depressing police news of late, this message was elixir for the soul.

We heard from one police agency implementing the PTO 2.0 street training program, a PBL replacement for obsolete field training known as FTO.

We heard from keynote speaker Michael Scott, director of the Center for Problem Oriented Policing, who connected some PBL dots. Mike is a long-time supporter of the police PBL movement and he drew a line connecting Herman Goldstein’s problem-oriented policing method and the PBL style of learning.

HERMAN GOLDSTEIN 

Professor Herman Goldstein also attended the conference and mingled with attendees throughout, offering participants golden opportunities to rub shoulders with a giant in the world of police scholarship. Few have contributed as much to great policing as Herman Goldstein.

Afternoon walk along Monona Terrace waterfront

I came to Madison after co-teaching emotional intelligence with Gerry Cleveland to the staff of the Law Enforcement Training academy in South Dakota. In You In Blue Gerry and I write about the impressive gains in South Dakota with their academy staff and curricula.

From this latest PSPBL conference and its problem-solving POP cousin, and from the South Dakota academy, I hope we are finally glimpsing the rebirth of American police training.  A good idea, it seems, persists.

Police Corps futures - a chance missed

A quiet Italian dinner at Thats-a-some Italian ristorante

Aged wine barrels for decor and fresh linguini smells embrace patrons in an ambience that anticipates a great meal in a quaint Italian restaurant, this one nestled beside a bay in Puget Sound.

What I didn't expect was the polished glass plaque about John Kennedy Jr. mounted innocuously beside the table and buffed for clarity both optical and sentimental. He and his wife Caroline, apparently, sat at this very table long ago no doubt enjoying the same ambience.

For me it was an irony. Over a decade ago I arrived in the United States, drawn by an idea hatched in the heady days of Kennedy’s Camelot, maybe even while toddler John Jr. hid under his father's desk in the Oval Office.

Memories from another time

I heard of the National Police Corps program for the first time in 1997. They needed an associate director for their program at Florida State University. It was a chance to modernize the stale world of academy training. It was a chance to educate cops in more advanced, community-based methods (like POP and CPTED) and fund their university education at the same time. It was a dream come true! I moved to Florida.

A NEW KIND OF ACADEMY 

Instigator of the Police Corps program was Adam Walinsky, former aid to Robert F. Kennedy. The goal: Create an intense liberal arts degree hinging on civil rights, critical thinking, and social justice. A year after we started, our Florida team designed just that. Then we added rigorous, hands-on academy curricula with an advanced educational method called problem-based learning. It was a leading-edge and integrated curricula unmatched in academies even today!

Unfortunately the program was later starved to death by underfunding. Two steps forward, three steps back. An opinion piece in Time Magazine recently said something similar.

Fortunately lessons did survive. The seed for problem-based learning in American law enforcement grew out of that era. The Police Society for Problem Based Learning proves the persistence of a good idea.

As I read of the latest federal task force to tackle police shootings I wonder; What if there had been some way to overcome the implementation obstacles and funding hurdles of the early Police Corps? What would policing look like today?