Stop Killer Cops? It Can Be Done
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“Let’s go catch some bad guys!” I’ve heard those words, or similar sentiments, many times as I climbed into a police car for a ride-along during nearly three decades of my career as an investigative reporter based in Seattle. My work covering trends in law enforcement and crime took me on such ride-alongs from Cincinnati to San Diego, from Phoenix to Sacramento. And while the geography varied, the police culture was similar from city to city—an “us” versus “them” mentality. This was infused during basic training and ingrained on the job by the fraternal nature of policing, and the militaristic model practiced by most departments.
Most of the officers I encountered seemed like good people with good intentions. And on the face of it, there is nothing wrong with a patrol officer starting his or her shift with a vow to “catch some bad guys.” After all, isn’t that what police do—arrest bad guys who rob and steal and rape and kill? Yes, and I would submit that most citizens want cops to do that. I do.
But in addition to encountering violent criminals, police more frequently deal with innocent citizens, and people in crisis due to addiction, poverty, desperation or mental illness. Labeling people “bad guys” sets up the fundamental orientation of “us versus them”; a soldier mindset where every citizen is seen as a potential enemy.
We’re seeing the devastating results of that play out across the country, as video after video surfaces revealing police assaulting, shooting and killing people they’re sworn to protect. Systemic racism, bias, and a propensity to use force against people of color far more than whites further heightens the atmosphere of fear, anger and distrust that’s fueling demonstrations and riots in American cities.
I believe real change is possible. But it will come only with a cultural shift inside police departments, fueled by better training, recruiting, and real accountability when officers cross the line. That requires other officers to intervene when they witness wrongdoing. While there has been some encouraging movement toward more empathetic, less violent policing by progressive leaders in recent years, much like the fight against COVID-19, it won’t succeed if done in a piecemeal fashion. And we would be wise to look beyond our own borders for answers.
Here’s what can be done:
Recruit the right people
Police departments tend to recruit based on physical skills: How many push-ups can you do? How fast can you run? These skills are increasingly irrelevant to policing in a modern era. In fact, most departments don’t require those same physical standards to be maintained once an officer is hired. What's not emphasized in recruiting is finding people with high emotional and social intelligence.
Dr. Maria Haberfeld is a professor of Police Science in the Department of Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice Administration at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. She’s specialized in police training for 26 years. But during a recent phone interview, she told me that better training is only part of the answer in addressing the endemic racism and excessive force that have tarnished policing. “It’s all about recruiting the right person”, she said. “You can have the best training, but if you offer it to the wrong person it’s going to get the wrong results.”
And Haberfeld believes most police departments are doing it wrong, starting by hiring young people, sometimes still in their teens. “We need to change the age to at least 23, ideally 25, because we know people are not mature until then. And this is a job for mature people.”
A “go to” source of recruits for many police departments is the military. Haberfeld thinks recruiting military veterans is also bad idea because they have been trained to kill…to see everyone as a potential enemy. What police recruiters should focus on is identifying people with high emotional intelligence and social intelligence, because these are the skills that can deescalate situations. Officers don’t use their guns on a daily basis, but they do use communication skills on every shift.
“Policing is the most complicated profession on Earth. You go back and forth from social worker to soldier,” Haberfeld said. “The majority of police officers mean well, but you need to be the right person for the profession.”
And finding anyone who wants to become a police officer is becoming increasingly difficult, with departments struggling to fill open positions. Which makes Haberfeld’s suggestions even more challenging to carry out.
Train For More Heart, Less Fist
In 2013, I visited the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission, where nearly every police recruit in Washington state gets his or her basic law enforcement training. Sue Rahr, former King County Sheriff, had recently taken over as Executive Director and the changes she was implementing were sending shock waves through law enforcement statewide.
The academy Rahr took over was vastly different than the one she went through decades earlier—it was far more militaristic, and she felt its practices and symbols promoted a warrior mentality instead of focusing on the role of police helping people. Recruits were required to snap to attention when a superior walked by. There was heavy focus on use of force, weaponry and hands-on tactics.
Rahr set the tone of her administration by removing a large trophy case of weapons that greeted visitors and recruits when they entered—replacing it with a mural of the Constitution. I watched as she personally greeted a class of new trainees, encouraging them to think of themselves not as “warrior cops” but as “guardians of democracy.” Then she handed out pocket copies of the Constitution.
Under Rahr, recruits still learned to make arrests, handle weapons, and employ defensive tactics. But they were also taught empathy and de-escalation techniques. Rahr said it was time to move to a more humane, less violent approach for gaining compliance. She incorporated a program she’d started at the sheriff’s office called “L.E.E.D.”—an acronym for “Listen and Explain, with Equity and Dignity.” Rahr believed that many people police encounter are in crisis and just need to tell their side of the story. Rahr was quick to say that doesn’t mean officers will never use force, including deadly force. But they can often avoid having an encounter go sideways if they listen and empathize, then respectfully explain what they’re doing and why.
Rahr encountered some resistance from police agencies skeptical of her decision to drop military protocols; but also found many supporters, from new recruits to veteran officers leading police departments across the state.
Lasting results depend on everyone in the organization supporting change. Many police departments have revamped training to include de-escalation tactics and implicit bias awareness. But it’s not enough unless that training is woven throughout the entire program. Often it amounts to just a few hours spent on diversity, equity, and bias training, versus hundreds of hours spent on weapons and force training.
Officers are taught to fall back on their training when in dangerous situations. Understandably, what they’ve been taught the most is what they will use the most.
Furthermore, the typical cop in America gets about 17 weeks of training. Compare that to countries like Norway and Finland where recruits train and study for three years, and spend another year shadowing an officer before being sent out on the streets alone.
If we want police officers who are skilled in using communication skills, empathy and respect to deescalate situations--only turning to force as a last resort--we need to require those skills and put their importance on par with weapons proficiency.
Our current system puts police in a catch 22—they're trained to use force, then often condemned when they do so.
Provide for Federal Intervention
There are some 18,000 police departments in our country, each with its own rules, regulations and codes of conduct; there are no national standards. Haberfeld says, “it’s all about centralizing policing in America. We can’t effect real change when we have 18,000 police departments. There will be a lot of resistance, but we’ve reached a point where we can create this transformation.”
The federal government has the power to effect sweeping change. We’ve seen it happen. For example, at the same time progressives like Rahr were promoting a cultural shift in policing a decade ago, the Department of Justice was demanding it under President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder.
Seattle was one of many cities to find itself under the microscope for its policing practices. A DOJ “pattern and practice investigation” in 2011 concluded that Seattle Police used excessive force far too often in its encounters with citizens. It determined that SPD exhibited bias against marginalized communities, such as people of color and the mentally ill. In 2012, Seattle entered a Consent Decree with the federal government--essentially a settlement agreement--that required radical new changes in training and tactics. Seattle is still operating under the oversight of a monitor and federal judge who are tasked with ensuring the changes are sweeping and long-lasting. Use of force by Seattle police has fallen dramatically. According to a department report in 2019, officers used force at a rate of less than one quarter of one percent out of nearly 400,000 incidents.
Under Holder, the D.O.J. wasn’t just investigating individual high-profile incidents, but entire departments. When police shot and killed an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, Holder initiated an investigation of the entire city and its police department. The results were scathing—concluding that Ferguson exhibited deep racism and targeted black residents, arresting and punishing them disproportionately to whites.
However, things shifted radically in 2016 after Donald Trump was elected. The Trump administration abandoned broad police reforms. For example, the Department of Justice initiated a Civil Rights investigation into the recent murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police, but has resisted exploring a more sweeping pattern and practice investigation. That could have prompted court- enforced reforms.
As protests swept the country, the Trump administration’s response has been increasingly deferential to police, and tone deaf to the deep-seated anger that is fueling the “de-fund police” movement.
De-militarize policing
There’s a powerful incentive driving police departments to embrace a military approach. The 1990’s saw an expansion of the “War on Drugs”—complete with pre-dawn SWAT raids, no-knock warrants, and aggressive “pretext stops”. I witnessed some of these firsthand. In some cases officers enforced “asset forfeiture laws” that allowed the police themselves to keep everything from cars to personal property seized in connection with suspected drug crimes. It became known as “policing for profit,” and it only intensified distrust between police and citizens.
This aggressive policing was compounded by a federal program that funnels surplus military equipment to police departments. The 1997 National Defense Authorization Act (Section 1033) passed under the Clinton administration, required the Department of Defense to make surplus tactical military equipment available to civil law enforcement agencies, who had only to pay for shipping. The wildly popular program accelerated further after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in America. The federal government massively armed itself for more attacks, but when they didn’t come, the feds transferred unused equipment to local police agencies. That included machine guns and assault rifles, armored vehicles, concussion grenades and camouflage gear. Suddenly, people were seeing armored tanks invade their neighborhoods and officers dressed in “hardened gear,” including body armor, face shields, night vision goggles and a plethora of weaponry. They looked more like Darth Vader characters than guardians of their communities.
After Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, President Obama scaled back the 1033 Program--but Donald Trump lifted those restrictions after taking office.
Militarizing civilian police departments has backfired. Results are documented in “The Rise of the Warrior Cop,” written by Investigative Journalist Radley Bilko in 2013. It examines the increased militarization of police in the U.S. and outlines the damaging impacts of a battlefield mentality on the democratic values of free society.
Empower Officers to Stop Abuses
Nearly every recruit I interviewed over the years told me they wanted to be a cop to help people. And I believe they were sincere.
So, how do some of those very same officers wind up at the center of the kinds of egregious crimes they vowed to help prevent? Once again, we need to look to the military model adopted by police departments, which adheres to a strict hierarchy. Follow orders, stay loyal to the organization and you will likely flourish. Contest your superiors or challenge veteran officers and you will not.
There is no more disturbing or heartbreaking example of this than the recent killing of George Floyd, a black man, by Derek Chauvin, a white officer. There was another black man at the scene, rookie police officer Alex Kueng, who held down Floyd’s back while Chauvin pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck for more than 8 minutes. According to his family, Kueng had entered policing to make a difference, to help fix a broken system from the inside out. But prosecutors say he did nothing to stop Chauvin. Had he tried, it would have been an extremely risky breach of protocol under the military hierarchy he’d been taught to follow.
It was only Kueng’s third day on the job. Chauvin had been on the department 19 years. Chauvin was not only the authority figure on scene…he was also Keung’s training officer.
Critics say Kueng should have tried to stop Chauvin anyway--Minneapolis requires police to intervene if they witness fellow officers using unreasonable force. But doing so can have severe consequences—from being disciplined, to being ostracized to the point that their colleagues fail to back them up on dangerous calls.
Police departments need to impose protections for officers who speak up or intervene when they see their brethren crossing the line. And they must stop protecting bad cops, which can mean revamping union contracts that often contain powerful roadblocks to discipline and termination.
Stop Asking Police to Fix Society’s Problems
We ask police to do too much. Seattle, like many cities, has been struggling with an increase in homelessness and urban encampments. More than once, I’ve heard people ask in frustration, “why don’t police do something about that illegal camping…the trash…the addicts shooting up under bridges…the mentally ill living on the streets?”
But exactly what are they supposed to do? A patrol officer typically has two choices: take someone to the hospital or take them to jail--whether they belong there or not. And in virtually every case, they will quickly be released to return to their former circumstances.
Many police departments, including Seattle, have instituted crisis intervention teams and extra training for officers tasked with handling people coping with mental illness. Beyond that, why not dispatch mental health professionals who are experts in handling these situations--in place of law enforcement? .
Does that sound impractical…idealistic? It happens in other countries. Take Sweden for example. Since 2015, Stockholm has been dispatching a mental health ambulance to help people in crisis. The ambulance is staffed with two trained nurses and a driver, but no police officer. It typically responds to five or six emergencies per shift. Swedes own far fewer guns than Americans, so it might be necessary in this country to send along an officer escort in case things go wrong. But turning over mental health problems to the experts frees up more police to do more of what they’re trained to do. And mental health experts are pros at developing trust and deescalating situations that could otherwise turn violent. Just the absence of a uniformed officer with a gun can go a long way toward reducing the anxiety and fear exhibited by people in crisis, leading to a more peaceful outcome.
As for handling the homeless, Finland launched a “housing first” program in 2008, providing the homeless with permanent stable homes, and supporting them with access to key services such as addiction and work placement programs.
(For more on what other countries or doing, I recommend a recent article in the Washington Post titled: “Defund the Police? Other Countries Have Narrowed Their Role and Boosted Other Services.”)
Which leads me to the final question. Should we abolish policing as we know it and start over?
DECIDE: Revamp, Defund or Abolish?
Critics contend police departments are too broken to be fixed and should be blown up altogether.
In 2013, Camden, New Jersey dissolved its police department and jettisoned its expensive and restrictive union contract, then rehired most of those officers plus others to staff a new county police force. It’s being praised as an example of how a fresh start can fix old problems. Camden’s crime rate is down, as are excessive force complaints.
But Camden is still heavily policed. The new force is larger than the old one, and the county invested in a massive surveillance system, with hundreds of cameras now being monitored by law enforcement. The police department wasn’t so much abolished as it was transformed, and its budget has grown.
So, what to make of slashing police budgets in favor of more social services? Consider where departments typically cut spending. Haberfeld, the police research expert, points out that 85 to 90 percent of a police department’s budget goes to salaries and benefits, with the other 10 to 15 percent spent on equipment and training.
She claims, “training is the first thing that goes in cuts to police budgets. At the end of the day, (such cuts) will generate a less professional organization.” Haberfeld believes that officers need more and better training, not less, and that reform will happen only with recruiting the right people and training them the right way. That means not over a few weeks, but for years.
True reform will only happen if police departments are held accountable. But to whom? Here again, it’s instructional to look to how other countries manage this. England and Wales have 43 separate police forces, but they’re all accountable to an independent body, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary. This body can conduct inspections, make recommendations, write reports and sanction those who fail to measure up by withholding funding – up to half of their budgets. That helps bring problem departments under control. To date, this form of de-funding seems far more effective than simply blowing up every department and starting over.
he systemic racism, bias and excessive force that’s been exposed by police nationwide must stop. We need to choose our police officers carefully, and teach them to act as community protectors, not warriors. Narrow their role and support them by investing in social services to address mental illness, drug addiction, and homelessness.
Only then will we see a shift from officers viewing their role as “catching bad guys,” to one of “protecting communities.”
Only then can “warrior cops” be replaced by “guardians of democracy.”
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