The passing of greatness - Herman Goldstein

Professor Herman Goldstein - photo Improving Police

by Gregory Saville

Today I write about my friend and mentor, retired University of Wisconsin Law School Professor Herman Goldstein. Today, Herman Goldstein died at home. He was 89.

When I first met Herman 25 years ago, I was impressed by how he so seamlessly dissected arguments, one logical piece after the other, and reconstituted them into a much clearer picture. He did this in his scholarship and, when I asked him personal advice, he did the same. It was a clarity I found refreshing in an academic world rife with politics and insecurities. He helped steer me through a sea of misdirection. It was that kind of clarity that led to him winning the Stockholm Prize, criminology's Nobel, in 2018.

Herman Goldstein winning the prestigious Stockholm Prize in 2018

A CAREER ASKING QUESTIONS

Herman’s career goes back to the foundations of modern police reform. In the late 1950s he was a staff investigator for the American Bar Foundation’s 10 year study of criminal justice, where he began riding with and observing police officers. It led to the earliest-known reflections about the nature of police discretion, a seminal finding that influences policing today. In the 1960s he worked on the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice and in the 1970s, the New York City Knapp Commission on Police Corruption, following the Serpico scandals.

Few were more central, and influential, in writing about the police than Herman Goldstein. However, in my mind the single most formative idea by Herman – and one that resonates today more than ever – emerged from his 1977 book Policing a Free Society:

 “The strength of a democracy and the quality of life enjoyed by its citizens are determined in large measure by the ability of the police to discharge their duties.” 

How many other policing scholars have the insight to study the reality of street policing and discover that a healthy democracy lies in the quality of our police?

In 1979, and then in 1990, he wrote about Problem-Oriented Policing (POP) as path to a safer community and a new relationship between police and community. It has dozens of guidebooks, annual conferences, and publications, coordinated today by the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing directed by Mike Scott.

POP Guides on real-life solutions to real-life problems

I recently read Balko’s Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces and Vitale’s The End of Policing. These authors offer salient points about the inherent flaws in policing, but they miss one essential message – they say nothing about what policing does right. They ignored decades of problem-oriented policing that has cut crime and bonded neighborhoods and their cops. They provided not a single reference or hint that problem-oriented policing even existed!

That is irresponsible writing. If they had done their homework, they would know, as Mike Scott once wrote, “that police accountability is intricately linked to society’s understanding of the police function.”

THE BEST IDEA AROUND 

Thirty years after the publication of Herman’s Problem-Oriented Policing, and in spite of the persistent crashing of one trend-wave after another, the POP model still floats atop the ocean of police reform movements. There is simply nothing quite like it and I’m stunned when I teach police academy instructors, field training officers, or police leaders, and they know very little about POP. Shame on them! For goodness sake, get a little Goldstein in your life and wake up!

One elegant message that Herman taught me – and that all crime prevention and policing people should learn – is that if you want to make things better, look to where things are done better.

Problem-Oriented Policing is such a place. Herman Goldstein was the thought-leader who created it. It’s now up to courageous leaders to make problem-oriented policing happen beyond the piecemeal lip service we see today, hidden behind the armored personnel carriers, night vision goggles, and predictive algorithms.

Herman Goldstein showed us how to make policing better. We owe him a debt. I know I certainly do.

The law of the hammer

The Law of the Hammer - photo from Police PBL

by Gregory Saville

In the 1960s, Abraham Maslow, the brilliant psychologist who uncovered the nature of basic human needs, said  “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. In spelling out this law of innate human behavior, he echoed a concept called The Law of the Hammer by an earlier scholar,

"We tend to formulate our problems in such a way as to make it seem that the solutions to those problems demand precisely what we already happen to have at hand."

This afternoon I searched a popular law enforcement website for police training conferences and workshops in June. I counted 193 courses and workshops across the country and that was only June! There is obviously no lack of training opportunities for American police officers.

Digging a bit deeper I discovered that, of those 193 courses, 75 were focused on SWAT-techniques, weapons training, and defensive tactics and another 50 covered investigation methods (interrogation, homicides). The rest included a mix of digital photography, lock picking, and drone usage.

Policing in a new age - photo from Police PBL 

A few seminars included an obsolete, 50-year old recruit field training program called FTO. Another taught how to deploy chemical aerosol projectiles.

In other words, almost 75% of all courses in June dealt with retroactive investigation long after a crime occurs (investigation, after all, requires a crime to have already happened), or they taught techniques in the use of, and response to, force - the bluntest hammer of them all.

WHAT WAS MISSING?

There is no shortage of training opportunities in policing, but the majority use very similar hammers and, I respectfully submit, end up with the same results. We need something different.

Missing from this buffet of training courses:

• Prevention of crime before deadly situations arise, such as neighborhood strategies like SafeGrowth
• How to help officers problem-solve with residents to build bridges and community support 
• How to work with the disenfranchised, the poor, and the mentally ill (the very people who get interrogated, get photographed after they become homicide victims, or get arrested following moments of illness or intoxication).

To a person with a hammer…

SOMETHING DIFFERENT

This year two upcoming conferences provide a different set of tools into the hands of officers and community members seeking a different way forward. These conferences are rooted in long-proven police methods and educational strategies that create a more comprehensive set of problem-solving skills. None of those 193 training courses cover these themes.

THE POLICE PBL CONFERENCE

• The Annual Conference of the Police Society for Problem-Based Learning is called “Training for Resiliency: The Role of Emotional Intelligence in Policing”. It is in Madison, Wisconsin, June 5-7th and features exceptional guest speakers including behavioral scientist, Kevin Gilmartin. 

For 15 years the Police Society for Problem-Based Learning has offered education, certification, and skills-training for instructors, academy educators, and field trainers in modern education methods and mental tools for intelligent problem-solving.

THE POP CONFERENCE

• The 29th Annual Problem-Oriented Policing Conference in Santa Cruz, CA., Nov 11-13.  Each year this conference is run by the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing. 

The Problem-Oriented Policing Conference features projects from around the world where officers partner with communities to resolve difficult crime and disorder issues. Fellow officers show how to  tackle, (and more importantly, prevent), gang violence, shootings, neighborhood disorder, sexual assaults, robberies, and many others. 

Back to the future - POP in 2014?

Photo from 2013 Goldstein Award Winners, Enfield school robbery POP project report -  Sandeep Broca and Ian Agar, London UK

This week I attended the 24th annual International Problem Oriented Policing (POP) conference in Dayton, Ohio run by the POP Center. After depressing news last blog about funding cuts in UK crime prevention there is good news from London.

The POP conference is flagship for the best community policing in the world. It features finalists in the Goldstein POP Award program. I've blogged on previous winners. This year the slate was impressive:

• Citrus Heights police in California helped trigger revitalization of a crime-ridden street
• Houston police cut robberies in convenience stores
• Dayton and Milwaukee police reduced prostitution and help get streetwalkers off the street; 
• New Zealand police reduced youth crime, and 
• Hamilton police in Canada cooled violent hotspots downtown.

The 2013 winner of the International Herman Goldstein POP award was from police in the London UK borough of Enfield. Their community safety partnership tackled a worrisome increase in youth robberies around schools.

Enfield crime map on robbery hotspots around 3 schools helped target efforts - Sandeep Broca and Iain Agar, Enfield POP Project report

The Enfield team worked in schools (mentoring, anti-bullying), applied CPTED (after-class dispersal zones, staggered school closing times) and used enforcement (disrupting stolen goods markets, targeted patrols). Their efforts reduced street crime, increased drug treatment access for offenders, and cut robberies in half.

I watched as Enfield and the other finalists received their well-deserved awards. I was impressed with them and all the exceptional project teams. It's heartening to see police and community partners using  POP and CPTED as paths to a better future.

Then it dawned on me - last year the COPS Office at the US Department of Justice de-funded the POP Center. Efforts are now underway to avoid shutdown, but the POP Center and POP conference may be history. I wonder if this forebodes more combat policing and crime prevention defunding?

After decades of documented police innovation carrying us forward into the 21st Century are we now de-evolving back to the 20th?

Winnipeg auto theft solutions

Image via Wikipedia

I've covered Winnipeg's innovative efforts to tackle crime in earlier blogs.

Here is the latest.

Far too rarely we celebrate crime prevention success stories. I remember reading an article a decade ago in a Canadian criminology journal claiming good news prevention stories make it into papers less than 1% of the time. Given the info-tainment that passes as news, that's no surprise.

For a decade Winnipeg Canada has been the auto theft capital of North America. The headlines said it all: Too many stolen cars; Police chases of stolen cars; Too many victims.

No more.

An award finalist at this year's International Problem Oriented Policing conference was the Winnipeg Auto Theft Suppression Strategy. It's not really SafeGrowth. It's more targeted policing and design out crime. Yet those are great tools in the SafeGrowth toolbox and this project shows the excellent work they have done to tackle crime that can be adopted by a full SafeGrowth community. And it looks like that's exactly where they are headed. Read their latest report on crime prevention planning.

When you've done that, check out their auto theft program.

Even the CBC is getting in on the action and telling some good news on crime.