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Gerard Cleveland, a former cop, a lawyer and law lecturer, and I completed a new book that responds to the problem of outdated and improper police training.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.

Building a relationship with law enforcement

Daniel Nicoletta's photo White Night Riots - photo licensed by Wikimedia Commons 

Last week there were more shootings by, and of, police. There were more riots - Baltimore, Seattle. Time Magazine commentators claim “protests and riots - uprisings - could become the new normal. Welcome to the new America.”

It does not need to be the new normal!

This Wednesday I invite you to a webinar on making things better with police and communities.

Over and over in SafeGrowth we discover that we develop the powerful skills of partnering through the very act of organizing together. As McKnight and Kretzman told us long ago in The Careless Society self-help doesn’t just happen in community and professionals like the police can’t do it all.

WEDNESDAY WEBINAR WITH SOLUTIONS

This Wednesday, May 6, the International Downtown Association is sponsoring a webinar Building A Strong Relationship With Law Enforcement. On the webinar I will be exploring new options for partnering with police with Martin Cramer from Downtown Dallas Inc., and Michael Schirling, Police Chief in Burlington, Vermont.

The webinar requires registration (it is a pay-for-service webinar) and you can register at the International Downtown Association webinar page.

The webinar times in different timezones are

• Wed May 6, 3-4PM EST (New York/Toronto)
• Wed May 6, 12-1PM PST (Seattle/Vancouver)
• Wed May 6, midnight - 1AM (London/Amsterdam)
• Thurs May 7, 8-9AM (Sydney/Brisbane)
• Thurs May 7, 10-11AM (Auckland/Christchurch)

Please join us.

Stockholm is burning - back to our future

This past week, following a police shooting, a civilized Sweden erupted into days of rioting from the immigrant suburbs of their capital city. In fact, streets are burning now as I write this.

In 2005 this happened in the underprivileged immigrant suburb of Chichy, Paris. In 2011 it started in Tottenham, the immigrant suburbs of London following (yet again) a police shooting. In every case a police related death of a local resident sparked the riots.

Is the European experiment unravelling when it's immigrant suburbs live such a fragile thread away from chaos. Is European immigration really that different from the US and Canada?

Canada has immigration rates higher than European cities. Yet Canada's occasional hockey riots or student tuition protests seem petty by comparison and - forgive my petulance - more the stuff of privileged millennials. Recent Canadian First Nations native protests have far more legitimacy in my biased view (though native people are neither immigrants nor suburban).

Swedish cops in Husby, Stockholm. Photo by Johan Nilsson, Getty Images

Richard Florida has been prophesizing about new urban geographies following the Great Recession - especially the suburban poor. I don't think he expected the explosion to start in Europe, and certainly not in peaceful Sweden.

The European conflagrations are not your typical Mayday riots spawned by rabble-rousing anarchist-communist radicals. Suburban immigrant riots, police shootings, and race issues are a very different thing. In so many ways it reminds me of the urban American riots during the turbulent 1960s, except this time it is suburban and immigrant-based.

I wonder if suburban poverty and crime in North America will take us back to that future?