By

Bill Cottringer

“When you have police officers who abuse citizens, you erode public confidence in law enforcement. That makes the job of good police officers unsafe” ~Mary Frances Berry.

   Right now, police departments are probably taking a bit of a recruiting hit because of all the pervasive bad press about despicable brutality and the widespread protests making them look like villains rather than the heroes they are. Law enforcement is a valuable and honorable profession  that I have been part of directly and indirectly for over 5 decades and I do not feel the profession is getting any fair treatment because of a faulty perspective—that a few bad apples spoil the whole barrel.

     Something Tom Selleck said on the long-running TV show Blue Bloods awhile back, has never left my mind. He said something like, “What people remember most about the police is the last bad thing they did.” What a shame to call for defunding of police departments because of how the media amplified a few gruesome incidents that were one too many. Where are all the good stories about police heroism? Obviously they don’t sell as well, but we will leave the irresponsible media problem for another day.

   Here are seven sensible ways to mitigate this police problem that is going on in our country, as just part of the great divide going on in America. Efforts to heal the police problem may lead to helping heal the bigger divide.

1. Proper Perspective.

     Where in time and place that you look at a thing to determine the best truth, determines most of what you see and think of as the truth. A very simple reality that is often difficult to grasp because we are all too close to our own point of view. Contamination from the wrong perspective about what is or isn’t going on today, that is more prevalent than any other, is what needs to change.

     This needed change involves getting to the middle of an issue so your eyes and mind can go in any direction—left or right, up or down, inside or out. This better, more flexible perspective permits more of the likely truth to enter into your point of view. And, if you don’t like what you are currently seeing, the most sensible cure is to change perspectives to see something different, more to your liking. Probably easier said than done though.

2. Precise Hiring Criteria.

   As a police department psychologist, I once had the welcome experience of reorganizing the hiring process of police officers, after they were all fired for striking by a retiring chief. I surveyed the country for the consensus of the critical success factors in police work and then presented the list of criteria, ordered in their importance and support, to the City Council for approval. Then we established psychological testing and behavioral interviewing to select 12 new officers for the small department.

     The unfortunate part of this “experiment” was that we ended up selecting the crème of the crop and it didn’t take a whole year for them to threaten to strike if the City didn’t double their wages. Of course, that didn’t happen, the program was scrapped, and I was out of a lucrative LEAA grant job. The lesson here is to define the success criteria wide enough to include all potentially successful police officers, even when they may stray slightly from the tight success profile.

3. Improved Screening.

     Generally speaking, police applicant screening is a very vigorous process. But that being said, it is obviously not a perfect process, because a few false positives do manage to get through the net. More intense psychological testing and behavioral interviewing need to be the methods of choice, to eliminate any propensity for violence, brutality, low threshold for stress tolerance, prejudice or any other undesirable behavior.

     Then the object becomes to screen in all the desirable behaviors—fundamental fairness, reasonableness, some degree of open-mindedness, sensitivity to the point where opportunity becomes a danger, attention to details, interpersonal skills, emotional intelligence, common sense and resourcefulness  Finally to improve the screening process, all police officers should be retested annually for continued fitness for duty, to avoid any wrong attitudes and behaviors  sneaking up on officers undetected.

4. Better Training.

    Virtual shooting scenarios have been used in computer training with police for years and some even do arrest and take-down training with difficult suspects. But more of the latter type of training scenarios need to be increased to build more confidence and competence in this type of dangerous engagement that can often go South before the point of no return is detected. I successfully used this type of performance practice in Australian Rules “Footie,” where the difficult playing engagement was around the scoring goal area with intense crowd noise. It worked as intended.

5. Closer Supervision.

     The police probably have more discretion in the performance of their duties than any other part of the criminal justice system and ironically may be at the short end of stick with the education, training and supervision going on in corrections and the courts. Probably the best way to increase police supervision is with intensive before and after shift meetings to set the agenda and measure outcomes. Another method involves closer review and critique of police reports. And of course, active and fair citizen advisory committees can improve police responsibility and accountability, so long as they don’t have a vigilante vendetta perspective.

6.  Zero Tolerance Discipline.

    Illegal brutality by the police must follow the path of employer’s zero tolerance for drug and alcohol abuse in the workplace. Any police officer engaging in this behavior--without clear and compelling evidence that there was no other possibility of an alternative use of lesser force available to avoid a potentially fatal outcome—should no longer be a police officer. And if, any degree of willful negligence is established, then prosecution must be certain and swift. There is absolutely no room for error in the disciplinary process to address these situation.

7. Reinforcement of Good Behavior.

    The reality is that most employers today are more focused on eliminating bad behaviors in applicant screening and later workplace performance. Most disciplinary polices are written to punish misconduct than to reward good conduct. This particular paradigm needs to follow the general evolution of psychology to reach some middle ground and balancing, but through more focus on positive behavior to swing the pendulum back to the middle.

   A review friend pointed out an important point here. This involves what the public learns as "facts" from the body cam footage in these tense situations. But no one can ever get inside a police officer's head to determine the level of danger they sense or how to accurately translate what "reasonable" and "necessary" level of force will be needed for a "safe" and "effective" intervention to apply a resolution with minimal adverse effects. That kind of Sunday armchair quarterbacking is what often distorts what actuall did or didn't happen and always has to be allowed into consideration.

     These seven mitigating strategies can all work together to improve the wrong perspective too many people seem to have about the police today and perhaps even change the source helping to cause that wrong perspective. This approach is much more sensitive that any defunding initiatives, which will just worsen the police problem and the general divide going on in our country today. I will leave you with some profound simplicity that may very well expose the central problem we have, for another article:

“A system cannot fail those it was never built to protect.” ~Vann Newkirk, via Time.