Calls for major police reform are nothing new.

From Theodore Roosevelt’s efforts to reform the New York City Police Department in the late 1890’s, to President Lyndon Johnson’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice in the 1960’s, to President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21^st Century Policing in 2014-2015, efforts to improve police professionalism, root out corruption, and improve police performance have been a  constant feature of American law enforcement for more than a century.

But such efforts have always faced opposition, and while many police departments today are far more professional, diverse, responsive, and community-focused than in the past, problems remain.

Reform advocates and law enforcement leaders together recognize problem areas where reform is most needed, including accountability and transparency, excessive use of force, discriminatory stop-and-frisk practices, inadequate training, and police militarization. They also agree that significant police reform will require a community-wide effort. Law enforcement agencies will not be able to do it on their own, and community organizations will not be able to force change. Only a cooperative effort will result in sustainable and effective reform.

But today there is no national consensus on the need for reform, let alone for its direction. American law enforcement is highly decentralized – there are more than 18,000 separate police agencies in the United States – and many, if not most Americans believe their local police departments are effective.

Often, of course, this is the case. But many of the ills of modern American policing are hidden from view of most citizens. Americans in general – exposed to many decades of TV and movie cops, but almost totally unfamiliar with real police – have little understanding of how police in this country actually perform their jobs.

Police themselves are not much help. Law enforcement culture highly values secrecy, autonomy, forcefulness, and an us-versus-them worldview, hardly conducive to open discussion of police performance.  Individual officers and their departments are loath to discuss the way they actually operate and the underlying beliefs that drive their behavior.

So, while many Americans seem to agree on the necessity for some police reform – The George Floyd video has had an enormous impact – there is much less understanding of what types of reform are really needed.

“I don’t think most people have any sort of fundamental connectedness to law enforcement, and I think we are at a place now where we are talking about making changes, but the average citizen has no clue of the foundation of how law enforcement works and what should be changed,” said Sophia Hall, Supervising Attorney at Lawyers for Civil Rights.

Hall was a panelist on a recent WGBH virtual forum on Police Reform, part of that station’s series of discussions on ‘The State of Race.’

A better understanding of law enforcement is necessary for an informed communitywide discussion of police reform, said fellow panelist Dominique Johnson, Senior Director of Community Engagement at the Center for Policing Equity. The conversation we need to have is about how do police departments work, said Johnson.  “How do you engage people to understand and educate them around the systems of public safety so that they can make informed decisions.”

Calls for defunding the police are misleading and counter-productive, said panelist Milton Valencia, political reporter for the Boston Globe. “It’s not so much getting rid of police, it’s not so much getting rid of the police budget, its more reimagining what we do with our resources and where they’re devoted to,” said Valencia.

“Instead of 911 calls being automatically diverted to police systems… especially mental health cases, we need to look at other ways to redirect community social service programs so that it’s not always the police responding,” said Valencia.

Boston City Councilor Andrea Campbell said that ‘defunding’ the police does not mean abolishing police departments. “But it does involve reallocating a significant amount of resources from our police departments to programs, issues, and initiatives and individuals that are doing the work on the root causes of violence,” she said. “We have to focus on eradicating poverty, mental health, trauma support, jobs, economic opportunity, and there are a lot of programs and individuals doing this work who are struggling right now to find resources to do that work, and that’s just unacceptable when you think about our police department is over $400 million in terms of their budget and an overtime budget that’s over $70 million, and it keeps going up and you ask why?”

Police are called on to replace gaps in the nation’s social services safety net. But they are untrained and ill-equipped to provide the services that people need.  The results can be disastrous, for citizens and the police. “Most Americans do not realize that nearly fifty percent of fatal police encounters involve a victim who is living with a mental health issue, with a disability,” said Hall.

It is important to remember that law enforcement problems are structural and systemic, said Hall. The blame for many problems with police performance cannot be laid at the feet of individual officers.

Ronald L. Davis, former Director of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) in the Department of Justice, believes that reform efforts must focus on the operational systems that guide law enforcement. “Rank-and-file officers do not decide organizational policies and practices,” Davis wrote in 2016. “Nor do officers establish hiring standards or have the power to administer discipline. They also do not decide whether an agency embraces crime-reduction strategies that result in racial disparities. Yet when disparities or other systemic problems do occur, rank-and-file officers are quickly demonized and blamed for those outcomes. There is no question that rank-and-file officers must be held accountable for their actions. However, if the systems in which they operate are flawed, even good officers can have bad outcomes.”

“If we are to achieve real and sustainable reform in law enforcement,” continued Davis. “Our focus must shift from the police (those individuals sworn to uphold the law) to policing systems (the policies, practices, and culture of police organizations).”

Despite difficulties, efforts at police reform are continuing. Voters in at least six states approved police reform measures in the election earlier this month.

November 23, 2020

Sustainable police reform won’t be easy and it won’t happen by cutting funding for police departments, says the former chief of the San Diego Police Department.

“It’s not about defunding the police,” said retired chief Shelley Zimmerman. “It’s about refunding the community.”

Police have become the last resort for handling many social problems that have nothing to do with criminal behavior, said Zimmerman. But society has so far failed to provide the resources to deal with problems like addiction, homelessness, and mental illness. As a result, these problems land on the shoulders of the police.

“It’s not a crime to be homeless,” she said. “But how do we help? Regrettably, jail is sometimes the only provider. That’s wrong.”

“We need to focus on repairing or rebuilding our social safety net,” she said, “to allow for intervention long before a person is in crisis and turns to the police.” This is not a problem that can be solved by law enforcement, she said. “The solution has to come from all parts of society.”  

Reform will cost more money, not less money, said Zimmerman. “Don’t take away funding for the police, but provide funding for other critical services.”

Zimmerman delivered her remarks remotely as part of Case Western Reserve University’s Siegal Lifelong Learning program. A former Clevelander, she served as the first woman police chief of a major American city from 2014-2018. Zimmerman had served more than 30 years as a San Diego police officer when she was tapped to become the department’s chief in 2014. Her instructions from the mayor were explicit: ‘Turn the department around.’

At the time, the San Diego department was reeling from a series of sexual misconduct scandals involving officers. Zimmerman immediately pledged to instill a culture of excellence, down from the top and up from the bottom.

One of her first actions was to invite the U.S. Department of Justice to conduct an independent assessment of the SDPD to identify critical issues and begin the process of restoring community trust in the department.

Zimmerman knew that real change would take time and would need to be continually refreshed. It would also require the active support of the various factions within the police department – police officers, supervisors, civilian employees, union officials – as well as the community at large. “The more people you bring to the table, the better the outcome,” she said.

She wasted no time getting to work. Within a year she had terminated 11 officers and many others had resigned or retired under threat of termination. It was perhaps a testament to the dire straits the department found itself in that the union did not resist her efforts. “All they insisted was that each officer receive due process,” said Zimmerman.

Enforcing standards of conduct and performance was critical, she said.  “It does no good to have high standards if you do not enforce those standards.”

Though police departments everywhere – including San Diego – are facing questions and criticism over their use of force, Zimmerman said the use of force by police is much less common than most people think. In 2016, less than 1 percent of all San Diego police calls (0.9 percent) resulted in police use of force, she said.

She believes that continuous improvement should be the goal of all police departments. Police today must be adaptive, willing and able to learn and re-learn constantly, community-focused and global in their thinking, she said.

Most importantly, police must see themselves as part of the community.  At San Diego’s police academy, she said, “We teach community policing philosophy. We are not an occupying force. We need the support and cooperation of our community.”

November 21, 2020

Completed my virtual presentation for the annual conference of the International Association of Emergency Managers on Wednesday. The talk went pretty well, though doing it virtually was a little strange. Apparently, the internet service we have at home provides us with fairly low bandwidth and we were operating right on the edge of connectivity. But we shut off everything else in the house that was drawing bandwidth – plus all the lights and the washing machine, just to be sure – and we managed to squeak by.

The conference was supposed to be in Long Beach, CA, but was conducted virtually as a result of the ongoing pandemic. When it was originally scheduled, I seriously considered taking the train from Ohio to California, just to do it. I am not afraid of flying – though no power on Earth could have gotten me into a Coast Guard helicopter back in those golden days when I served in that perpetually cash-strapped organization – but a couple of days on a train, with nothing to do but sit around, read, and watch America’s post-industrial landscape roll by through the large unwashed windows, sounded pretty good.

The title of my talk was ‘Same Planet, Different Worlds: Bridging the Gap Between Law Enforcement and Emergency Management.’  Since I have worked in both fields, it was a topic that I was quite familiar with. The main point of the talk was that although law enforcement and emergency management may seem similar, they are in fact virtually opposites in several fundamental ways.

Except for the handful of people who actually do it, no one in this country knows anything at all about emergency management, but most people – having seen a million episodes of ‘Cops’ – think they understand American law enforcement. Most people, of course, are mistaken.

Here’s a quick introduction to law enforcement in America:

American police departments use an organizational model and administrative practices developed in the period just after the civil war. That is, the Abraham Lincoln/Robert E. Lee civil war, not the impending civil war that will be starting any day now. If you look at the organization chart from virtually any large police department from 1930 and compare it to the same department’s organization chart today, you will not see a significant difference. You might not see any difference at all. The highly bureaucratic and severely hierarchical organization of police agencies makes them virtually impervious to innovation.  Good thing the nation hasn’t changed much since 1870.

The last great technological innovation in American law enforcement was when they put two-way radios in police cars – around 1935.  If you need a police officer today, the process is exactly the same as it was during Franklin Roosevelt’s first term. You call a central dispatch center on a telephone, someone answers, and they use a radio to send a police officer to your location.  There have been lots of technological advances since then – computer-assisted dispatch, DNA analysis, COMPSTAT, automated license plate readers, and so on – but these are process improvements on the margins. The fundamental concept of operations of American law enforcement hasn’t changed in nearly a century.

Police are the only government employees – you know, deep state bureaucrats – who are empowered to kill Americans, with the possible exception of executioners at state and federal prisons. Of course, since most states refuse to reveal who actually performs lethal injections, we don’t really know who most executioners are.  But, in any case, executions are rare – 22 in 2019 – while police kill about 1,000 of their neighbors and fellow citizens each year. That might not sound like many, and in a country of 330 million maybe it isn’t, but every police extrajudicial killing is a failure of the criminal justice system. And American police kill far more citizens than do police in any other modern industrialized nation. American police have a lot of assigned responsibilities, but they are not supposed to be juries, judges, and executioners. But while police are empowered to take your life – and their actions may or may not be seriously reviewed if they do – entry requirements for law enforcement jobs in America are frequently the same as entry requirements for minimum wage retail or food service jobs. Given the enormous authority and discretion we bestow on police, you might be pleased to know that in Ohio police officers must complete 737 hours of state-mandated training to be certified. That might sound impressive, until you learn that barbers in Ohio must complete 1,800 hours of training to be certified, and cosmetologists must complete 1,500 hours. But that’s probably not something they mentioned on ‘Cops.’

November 20, 2020