Busting the Blue Babble - police myths preventing reform

 

Doing it right! Residents and police work together in Ottawa
to create crime-solving plans

by Gerard Cleveland and Gregory Saville

NOTE: My colleague Gerard Cleveland and I co-wrote this second part of last week's blog on “Defund the Police”. Gerry is a frequent contributor to the SafeGrowth blog. He is an attorney, a specialist in school violence, and the co-chair of the Police Society for Problem-Based Learning.

Occasionally, SafeGrowth programmers benefit from exceptional problem-solving police officers. Other times they get little help from the police. When that happens, residents ask questions such as: Where are the police? Why are we spending so much on policing services? What is wrong?

Why does a disconnect exist between what works to make communities safe and what currently occurs within policing? In our view, the systemic blockages first emerge within the academy. And since training serves as the entry point to police subculture, we must start reforms at that early stage if we hope to create a different style of police service. 

Fear of crime is a major problem in many cities. Police can work
with residents and other professionals to improve the quality of life
... but this depends on proper police training. 

THE ROLE OF TRAINING

Over the past twenty-five years, we have taught thousands of police, federal agents, military units, and security personnel from across the globe. We find a disturbing commonality exists among most police training academies from places as diverse as the United States, Canada, Australia, Mozambique, Papua New Guinea or Qatar.

Why disturbing? Because most policing academies today hold four prevalent and dangerous myths. Police leaders and academy directors think these myths are unassailable truths. They are wrong.

POLICE TRAINING MYTH #1 

Academy instructors have no choice but to lecture to ensure that they get as much information to the recruits as possible. They do not have time to do otherwise. They must follow legally prescribed, State and Federal regulations and therefore lecturing serves as the most expedient method to get all the required information to the recruits. They assure everyone that they would like to do more adult learning and problem-solving in the classroom, but such efforts “take too much time.”

REALITY

This “no time to train properly” mantra undermines the long-term success of new employees. If the objectives of the academy genuinely state a clear intention to focus on student learning, then agency and academy leaders must abandon their ineffective instructor-focused lessons and institute problem solving and adult learning strategies.

We described antidotes to this absurd “no time” mantra in our book You In Blue and in our work on National programs that we wrote such as Police Training Officer and Police PBL: Blueprint for The 21st Century.

Resident/police collaborative research into night crime
- the hallmark of Police Problem-Based Learning methods

POLICE TRAINING MYTH #2

Defensive tactics and weapons training necessarily fill a substantial portion of the academy agenda because of the inherent dangers on the street that officers will face from day 1 of their careers.

REALITY

Defensive tactics (DT) and firearms instructors have hijacked police training schedules and are responsible for much of the fear that exists both within the force and throughout the community. The DT and firearms instructors may have good intentions, but they are doing serious damage to the profession and to police-community relations.

We must stop allowing tactical or firearms instructors to “call the shots” when it comes to crisis training. These instructors are important and they provide a necessary skill, but their mandate must include broad-spectrum problem-solving options, coupled with a focus on working collaboratively with community crisis providers (such as mental health professionals) prior to, during and after violent escalation. Firearms and DT instructors should be trained extensively on the impacts that shootings, violence and vehicle accidents involving police have on the officers as well as the community.

POLICE TRAINING MYTH #3

Discipline and adherence to a para-military code of behavior in the academy builds character, cohesion, respect for agency hierarchy and fosters professional pride among the recruits.

REALITY

This is blue babble!

The concept that we must break down and then build up a new employee makes little sense when recruiters claim they hire only the best candidates. Boot camp may work for soldiers, but police must work within communities, engage intelligently and problem-solve cooperatively.

Yelling and shouting at new employees and telling them they know nothing achieves little except to waste precious training time and stoke the egos of the instructors doing the yelling. Further, we argue it creates an unhealthy role model in the minds of the recruits as to how they should treat people over whom they have power.

 

Addressing gang and violence problems requires a trusting partnership
between officers and residents

POLICE TRAINING MYTH #4

Police trainers should discourage recruits from questioning orders, engaging in divergent thinking and challenging up the chain of command. Those practices increase dangers to officers because they may not, at critical times, follow orders when required to do so.

Discipline within the ranks serves as a safety mechanism for agencies and instilling that obligation to authority must begin at the academy. 

REALITY

No one doubts the need for discipline and following orders. These requirements exist in all professions and occupations. Numerous professionals learn to respect authority while engaging with each other to solve problems and employing problem-solving/adult learning methods in their training. Why then do police academies spend so much time on artificial discipline when there are much better techniques to enable self-controlled and socially motivated police officers who think critically?

 

REPLACING BLUE BABBLE MYTHS WITH TRUTHS

Public safety agencies need to work as part of the communities they serve, not apart from them. They must do more than spout community problem-solving catchwords in their mission statements and public speeches. Agencies must adopt those methods as their primary style of policing. For decades this has been the central goal of the Problem-Oriented Policing movement and the Police Society for Problem-Based Learning.

Those are the movements that police leaders, political representatives and particularly police trainers need to support.

On many police vehicles it reads “to serve and protect.” The logical question arises, “how can the police serve and protect the public from a distance with officers clad in camo clothing, carrying tactical gear and framing interactions with the public as perilous to the officer’s survival?” The incessant high alert, ‘fear factor’ that has crept into police work – again perpetuated at the academy – has led officers to spend far too little time working directly with residents on local crime and violence concerns.

Partnering together to solve crime and violence. We must transform
police training and how police work with the community

We will not achieve different responses from our police agencies so long as police leaders allocate inordinate amounts of resources to security and suppression equipment as well as tactical training and so little time to community engagement initiatives. We propose that diverting funds to problem-solving training in cooperation with the community will not only garner better crime reduction, but it will enhance police and community cooperation, trust and positive engagement.

If city managers and police leaders fail to act, the noise from the activist groups calling to Defund the Police will grow louder and soon begin to resonate with more and more reasonable, pro-police members of the community. The time for the combat cop has ended. We should reinvent the age when officers and the community work together to make neighborhoods safe for both the police and the public.

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. 

Emotionally intelligent-led classrooms

Students of policing need skills to better communicate with
those in need, such as the homeless 

by Tarah Hodgkinson

"As I watched my class struggle, I came to realize that conversational competence might be the single-most overlooked skill we fail to teach students!" – Paul Barnswell

This quote was an accurate description of my experience teaching at a university over the last several years. Students entered the classroom, sat down, not even acknowledging the person sitting beside them and began immediately looking at their phones until the class started. Sometimes even after the class started!

When asked questions, they looked shocked they were not getting a lecture for two straight hours. When asked to get into groups, they would awkwardly look around, uncomfortable that they might have to engage with others in their class.

There are a lot of articles and stories about millennials and their lack of social skills. But I don’t just see this in millennials. I see this in meetings I have with adults from all age groups as they quickly rely more on their phones for connection than each other.

Book learning is important, but it is not enough. 

The extent of the problem wasn’t evident until I taught a class of 25, fourth-year students. Using problem-based learning methods (PBL), the same approach we use in SafeGrowth, students were constantly talking to each other, working on group projects, participating in activities, coming up with ideas and creating solutions in teams.

CONNECTING WITH OTHERS

In their feedback at the end of the semester they said something surprising – they made friends! For the first time in university they felt that they knew people and could connect. This was the moment I realized that conversational competence, listening skills, conflict management, and emotional intelligence were more important than any of the content I had been teaching. They had learned how to talk to each other!

It is the same success emerging from a field training program for police recruits that also employs PBL and emotional intelligence – the Police Training Officer program – and it was recently adopted as PBL/emotional intelligence curricula upgrades into the teaching at a small number of leading police academies.

Academy-based PBL is new in policing

In an article entitled The Age of Loneliness is Killing Us, George Monbiot described how youth are lonelier than ever and the dramatic effects on our health and communities.

After witnessing media reports of incident after incident of excessive force and mistreatment, and a lack of police communication skills to prevent those incidents, I decided to broaden this style of teaching beyond just a fourth-year class.

A NEW WAY TO TEACH POLICING

Thus, this year, I introduced PBL into an introductory policing course in which many of the 70 students planned to become police officers. Did they learn the structure of policing in Canada and about different types of policing strategies and issues nationally and internationally? Of course! But they also learned how to talk to each other.

They were tested on their listening skills and then practiced those skills with a partner. They reflected on conflicts in their own lives, how they managed it and how to manage it more appropriately. They read You in Blue: Guide for the New Cop and learned how to improve their self-awareness and emotional intelligence. They explored mental health, work-life balance, and poor management in policing. We discussed how to have better conversations by acknowledging the speaker's position and listening with the intent to understand, not just to reply.

Policing texts need material on emotional intelligence
and critical thinking skills

Consider that most police training includes only a few hours of verbal judo, this course provided far more time to work on the most important skills in policing – social interaction and listening.

Equally important, when we reflected on the class in the last day, over 90% of the students responded they had made new friends in the class. Maybe the “Age of Loneliness” is not killing us. Maybe we just need to help our students (and new police officers), learn how to better connect with others in their classes and in their communities!

You In Blue – Guidebook for the new cop

A new book on policing by Gerry Cleveland and Gregory Saville

As I write, citizens in Cleveland are protesting yet another police shooting.

Sadly, the wrong members of the community receive the brunt of the blame. Vandals and troublemakers cause the problems, yet many in America are prepared to lay the blame at the feet of African American citizens.  That blame is both misplaced and unfair.

Irresponsible media fan the flames. They mix editorial opinions and ideological pundits into their news coverage, a cheap parlor trick guaranteed to boost their revenues. They ignore root causes. Fed up with the nonsense, one Baltimore resident confronted an on-the-street Fox reporter on national television during a protest (which that network censored).

Without doubt the media, vandals, and a minority of cops all carry an equal share of blame in what is happening in our cites. So does racism, poverty, corruption and criminal behavior. But there is another culprit looming large.

A different kind of policing for the 21st Century city

President Obama’s recent Task Force and their report into 21st Century Policing point to one of the root causes of what we are seeing on our streets.

That culprit is police training.

A GUIDEBOOK FOR NEW COPS

Today my colleague, Gerard Cleveland, a former cop, a lawyer and law lecturer, and I completed a new book that responds to the problem of outdated and improper police training. It is called You In Blue – A Guidebook for New Cops.  We wrote it as a guidebook for rookie cops and for those who train them.

The book includes chapters on academy life, street realities, intelligent tactical response, arming oneself with emotional training and the destructive issues arising from a warrior agenda.

We describe a method that academy directors and police leaders should have adopted long ago. We will be launching the book at the upcoming annual conference of the Police Society of Problem Based Learning in Madison, June 1-3.

Now is the ideal time to reconsider our broken training system.

Stay tuned.

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?