December 2015 Warning Bells article

Just checking another box?

Last month I wrote a Warning Bells article on the recent training all of the officers on the Department went through officially entitled, “A National Discussion on Public Trust and the Preservation of Life.” This was the warrior versus guardian training, or “Operation Stand Down/Hug a Thug,” depending on your view. Every offcer was put through somewhere between four and six hours of training. Two or three hours of the training were on Mental Evaluation Unit techniques and Use of Force policy. The training was given to officers assembled in division or larger groups. As discussed in last month’s article, the philosophy was based on President Obama’s study entitled, “The President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing.”
“OK, Mr. President, mission accomplished,” the Chief can say. “We trained them all.” Box checked.
More ominously, you can be held to a standard for disciplinary purposes, promotion purposes and coveted position purposes, based on that checked box.  Was the training thorough enough that you understand what the new philosophy was all about?
Last week, I attended the International Association of Chiefs of Police Annual Conference in Chicago, in an undercover capacity, I suppose, since I am not anyone’s chief. Even President Obama was there and spoke to the assembly on police training and dropped Chief Beck’s name during his speech.
One of the classes I attended was packed to standing room only. It was given by Chicago Police Officers Al Farara and Dina Patterson. They called their course Police Legitimacy, but it was based on the 21st century policing philosophy. They started doing their training in 2009 and have repeated it across the nation. What struck me was that Chicago PD was doing “training,” not “box checking.”
They developed their training by meeting and being trained by “Yale eggheads” where they developed a three-phase program for police officers and a curriculum for training community groups.  They started with a control group by training 50 percent of their recruits and not training the other 50 percent. The results were positive, complaints and uses of force went down for the trained group. They then extended the training to patrol officers and finally all 12,000 officers on the department.
The difference in how they train and how LAPD trained is striking. All of their officers will be put through three phases of training. The Chicago PD data shows that effect of the training will last for only about six months. Exposure needs to be repeated to be effective, thus the three levels of training. Essentially, a 101-type course, an advanced-level course and a college-level course, spread out over a period of time.
They limit their class size to about 25 offcers for each phase of the training and it is highly interactive. Each group of 25 is a mixture of ranks. All of the students come in plain clothes and the class is rank neutral, meaning rank doesn’t count while in this class. The size of the class is critical for the training to be effective.
The eight-hour class is broken into five modules. They start out with a discussion of police nobility and goals.  Why are we cops? What are we trying to accomplish? Why are you here? Then they address cynicism and legitimacy in the field. They explore how officers see things and how this impacts how they act.  Then it’s into the Procedural Justice concept, both internal within the department and external with the public. Why is it important? The see-do-get paradigm is discussed. What we see motivates what we do. And what we do dictates the consequences, or what we get. After that, the history leading to community distrust is discussed and the aspects of generational effects.  Understanding that baby boomers and millennials see the world through different lenses is important. The final module is Procedural Justice in Action.  Applying the principles in the real world. How treating people fairly and respectful as human beings results in a public perception that police are entitled to exercise authority.
The training is intense and personal.  Emotions sometimes run high, but in the end class evaluations are 95 percent favorable. The training results have been
found to be good for the officer, good for the officer’s family, good for the department, good as a leadership tool and good for the community. However, officer
field contacts and arrests will go down.  CompStat beware. Despite that, there was increased officer safety, lower officer stress, fewer personnel complaints, more voluntary compliance from citizens and crime was reduced.
An Oakland PD assistant chief spoke about his experience in applying the Chicago training to his department. He also found a 95 percent class approval rating, but he explained that it was critical to have officers doing the training who had credibility with the troops.  He stated that the California attorney general is rolling out a statewide version of the training, so it is going to be the coming thing. Each department must modify it to their own use. One size does not fit all.
Phase two of the Chicago training concentrates more on demonstration of the techniques. The four basic principles are reinforced with practical application. The principles are voice (listening), neutrality (fairness), respectful treatment (the golden rule) and trustworthiness (fair and transparent process). There is also an emphasis during this phase on the department’s internal discipline process and how these principles apply to officer treatment by the department.
Phase three concentrates on how stereotyping and implicit bias affects Procedural Justice and how to neutralize, or at least lessen their effects.  Another class given by Dr. Lorie Fridell addressed this issue. The bottom line is that we are all biased. It is the human condition and it does not matter what color you are. You are biased.  Period. It might be by race, gender, weight, social status, religion, profession, sexual orientation, age, or different degrees of all of the above. Group stereotyping is the basis of bias and even the best intentioned people do it, consciously and unconsciously, explicitly or implicitly. Human beings prejudge what they don’t know. It is called the Blink Response. The trick is to recognize it and not allow it to have an effect on our decisions, especially as law enforcement officers. The cure seems to be to have positive contacts with groups that are different from you.
The bottom line of all this research and theorizing is finding out what good and effective cops have known since badges were invented. Treat people respectfully
and fair. Good and effective supervisors know the same thing. Treat subordinates respectfully and fair. But everyone is not always as good and effective as they can be, so training is a good thing. Box checking isn’t.
Be legally careful out there.