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It would be an understatement to say that serious concerns, issues, and bad news about policing seem to be constantly pressing on people in the United States over the last couple of decades. Most recently, many were deeply affected by the killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020 and the subsequent protests and calls for reform that ensued. But even before that, one can recall the not-so-distant deaths of Trayvon Martin, Freddy Gray, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and others, and the calls then for reform, embodied by U.S. President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Story after story, the cycle of negative news and calls for reform in U.S. policing continues. This relentless cycle has been a particularly acute source of continued stress, frustration, and anger for many, particularly people of color who have long borne the scars of police activity in the United States.
In addition to these events, the profession has taken some big hits in the 21st century. The insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, showcased not only the dangerousness of policing but also the possibility of extremists among its ranks. Other trends have exposed law enforcement vulnerabilities— the rise in mass shootings in the 2000s, the ambushes and killings of officers during this period, and the evolving nature of crimes facilitated by the internet, which local police haven’t been well-positioned to tackle. In addition, the society-altering and ever-persistent COVID pandemic has made policing even more challenged and arguably less community-oriented despite increased calls for improving relationships between people and police. The current rise in gun violence in some jurisdictions has added to these vulnerabilities. To compound the situation, there are fewer people interested in tackling these challenges. There is a downward trend in police recruitment and retention, with more people retiring early, leaving the profession prematurely, or simply choosing other professions altogether.
Policing research over the past four decades has also been relatively critical of the police, unveiling its realities and limitations. In particular, the mainstays of police operations, from rapid response to 911, criminal investigations, and daily patrol activities, have not been shown to be too promising in contributing to the primary mandates of democratic policing—crime prevention and safety; equal protection; and public trust, confidence, and legitimacy. More effective proactive, preventative, problem-focused, and citizen-centric deployments are not regularly or consistently used. Law enforcement agencies have put high hopes and significant investment into many technologies that have not met the police or communities’ expectations.
Complexity in Policing Reforms
Of course, it’s easy to assert that policing needs more work, but it is much more difficult to accomplish real change, especially during crises. Some-times, those calling for change have grasped at low-hanging fruit that reflects the “bad apple” theory of police reform. This low-hanging fruit includes calling for more training, weeding out bad officers, banning specific uses of force, purchasing body-worn cameras (BWCs), or firing police chiefs and other leaders. These ideas and their motivations are not problematic per se. However, they are likely not enough to develop the police into a profession that can deliver on its mandates or sustain the larger reforms behind these suggestions. To give a blunt example, the Minneapolis, Minnesota, Police Department had already undergone implicit bias and de-escalation training, had some community programs in place, put body-worn cameras on officers, and had recently fired their previous chief. And yet, George Floyd was still killed.
“Behavioral changes require mechanisms to be in place that strongly connect training to actual actions in the field and sustain those practices over time.”
Even more provocative reforms, such as defunding or abolishing the police, may bring some fleeting sense of justice to those wronged or perhaps temporarily punish any given agency. However, such reforms are tested by the realities of what people call the police for, and the willingness and capabilities of other agencies or community groups to sustain a response.1 These include calls for everyday conflicts and fights between people; suspicious behaviors; minor crimes and juvenile delinquencies; motor vehicle complaints; social or physical disorders; disturbances; and sometimes, very serious crimes. At the same time, the frustration and motivation for defunding are understandable. Research has also found that officers aren’t always using their time in the most effective ways.2
Recent calls for reform are not enough to help transform the police into the justice institution that society needs it to be. Instead, more comprehensive and fundamental adjustments have to be made to police organizational subsystems for suggested reforms to stick, which will likely take more—not less—investment in the police, and also internal motivation by the police. Such adjustments are challenging because police organizations comprise interdependent subsystems of training, deployment, supervision, management, leadership, incentives and rewards, accountability, and technology. Not only are these systems mostly hidden from public view or knowledge, but they are also outcome codependent. In other words, achieving the mandates of democratic policing often rely on adjusting and aligning multiple subsystems together, not reforming one area of policing separately.
For example, calls for more training for the police to reduce use of force, improve public satisfaction, or improve crime prevention, will work only if training can lead to behavioral change in officers, detectives, and first-line supervisors. This is a significant assumption that may not pan out in practice because of the outcome codependency of internal systems. Behavioral changes require mechanisms to be in place that strongly connect training to actual actions in the field and sustain those practices over time. These mechanisms include in-service training that reinforces knowledge learned and provides opportunities for experiential learning; proactive first-line supervision, coaching, and mentoring that nudges officers toward new behaviors; deployment systems that provide ample opportunity to practice what was learned; using information technologies that monitor and track officer activities; systems of incentives, rewards, discipline, and accountability that ensure behavioral changes are reinforced; using crime analysis to evaluate the effectiveness of the training; and congruence among upper command staff about their support and messaging of these adjustments. Training alone will not achieve the changes that reformers seek without aligning these other organizational elements.
Evidence-Based Policing and the Intellectual Profession
To achieve the necessary fundamental changes so that police can more successfully achieve their mandates, objective and reliable knowledge is needed about whether specific adjustments will work, how those adjustments can be made, the consequences of those adjustments on other parts of the system, and how to realign the system to be amenable to reforms. This requires an enormous amount of complex thought, scientific evaluation, analysis, and innovative and critical thinking applied not just to—but by—the police. In other words, the police have to start thinking of their work as an intellectual profession, not a procedural or experiential-based job. Thinking of policing as an intellectual profession requires the intentional integration of extensive professional knowledge and competency into a dynamic, learning environment to carry out the everyday tasks and mandates of democratic policing effectively.
Unfortunately, this is not the contemporary approach taken by (or expected of) the police or other criminal justice institutions. Currently, the approaches to the everyday boots-on-the-ground tasks of policing like patrol, investigations, responding to calls for service, and interacting with people are determined by the standard operating procedures of any given agency and officers’ personal discretion and experience. Some procedures and activities are based in law, but a great deal of policing is grounded in “best practices,” traditions, and habits. What informs either tactical or strategic decision-making in policing is often the individual officer’s discretion, personal experiences, and routinized behaviors; the experiences of others; the preferences of the chief or command staff that are currently in place; or the decisions often derived from internal consensus. The reactive and procedural approach that characterizes U.S. policing results from and contributes to this discretionary style of policing, as does the insulated nature of the profession. Some (rather romantically) refer to this type of approach to policing as a “craft.”
The stakes, however, are too high in policing to treat the profession as a craft. Often, the best guesses (and hopes) about the outcomes of justice interventions are wrong. Police actions can have serious consequences, which raises the stakes for police to do their jobs in ways that reflect high levels of competency and professional knowledge, much like practitioners in the medical field. Because of the complexity of the interdependent systems in policing, extensive knowledge is required about implementing effective interventions that can reduce crime or improve police legitimacy and predict the consequences of those actions. Science and knowledge need to be integral to policing to accomplish these goals.
This is certainly not a new vision for policing reform. This approach to thinking about policing goes hand in hand with the concept of evidence-based policing. An evidence-based approach to policing was first articulated by policing scholar Lawrence Sherman in 1998 in his Ideas in American Policing lecture for the National Police Foundation (now the National Policing Institute). He asserted that “police practices should be based on scientific evidence about what works best,” explaining that police should strive to use the results of scientifically rigorous evaluations of law enforcement tactics, strategies, and policies to guide decisions.3 In addition, he argued that law enforcement officials should generate and apply analytical and research knowledge from internal and external sources and track and test activities for their effects.4 Evidence-based policing, Sherman argued, could improve feedback systems in police practice, thereby facilitating a dynamic learning process and ultimately progress toward the goals and mandates of democratic policing.
At a minimum, evidence-based policing is grounded in the belief that science and research should at least have a “seat at the table” in public safety policy and practice.5 If the police are going to try to address crime, improve community-police relationships, protect human rights, reduce use of force, mitigate traffic accidents, improve officer wellness, or retain and hire the right people, they have to act in ways that will actually lead to these outcomes. The connection between actions and outcomes is the core of science- and evidence-based approaches. Research forces us to not be swayed by only personal experiences, anecdotes, hunches, instincts, or biases. Instead, incorporating research, science, and constant assessment and evaluation as both an input and a framework for problem-solving means police organizations must adopt a dynamic learning and intellectual approach. Evidence-based agencies recognize and accept that new knowledge and information are constantly being developed. In turn, agencies must stay on top of and contribute to this knowledge to be able to exercise high levels of professional competency in everyday tasks.
Again, this approach is uncommon in U.S. policing, which emphasizes applying either standard operating procedures or a wide range of discretion to deal with the everyday tasks of policing. Research has shown that officers view personal experience and individual discretion as superior to systematically derived information or scientific knowledge.6 This approach and bias toward experience over evidence in policing have led, until recently, to a shunning of scientific thinking, analysis, systematic assessment, evaluation, and dynamic learning in policing. The police are not alone in this perspective; as Sherman discussed in his Ideas in American Policing lecture, the medical field was also driven by this type of thinking in the not-so-distant past.
An Example: The Intellectual Nature of Uniformed Patrol
It is necessary to integrate professional knowledge derived from science and research into the DNA of the police organization, into those previously mentioned codependent subsystems, for police to carry out their jobs more successfully and with high levels of competence. To make this point, one can look at the example of uniformed patrol, the most common and potentially impactful activity of U.S. policing, drawing on the author’s own experience as a young patrol officer in Baltimore City, Maryland, back in the 1990s, but hardly because I was some exemplar of the professional or intellectual competency that I refer to above—far from it. I spent most of my patrol days driving around doing “preventive patrol,” answering calls when they came out and backing up other officers doing the same. When needed, I applied standard procedures to certain calls for service. However, because many other calls and incidents were vague or had no specific procedure connected with them, I watched and mimicked how other officers dealt with those situations and used my experience and “best guesses” to answer those calls. During that time in Baltimore, “broken windows” and “zero tolerance” approaches were popular, which meant; when not answering calls, I conducted pedestrian stops, looked out for suspicious behavior (mostly drug activity); and made many arrests, often for minor offenses.
Was I the best officer I could have been? In hindsight, the answer was “no.” I wasn’t treating the profession at all as an intellectual one. I went with my gut and relied heavily on my experience and that of others in a very insulated profession. I didn’t think carefully about the policing mandate and whether my actions were linked with those mandates. Yet a whole science behind effective uniformed patrol exists that I should have been thinking about and using, trained and supervised on, and held accountable for to be that competent officer I speak of now.7
“The science is pretty clear: arrests do not prevent crime very well, and deterrence is more likely generated in other ways.”
There has been a great deal of knowledge developed about patrol deployment since the 1990s. For example, there is scientific knowledge about where to patrol, including accurately identifying environmental factors, routine activities of people, and opportunities that contribute to crime, disorder, traffic accidents, and other issues.8 Tangible and precise knowledge about these things are needed to more accurately build patrol tactics to address problems more effectively at certain places and times. Relatedly, there is a crime analytic and problem-oriented science to analyze specific place-based problems and to help tailor solutions to those problems.9 Researchers have now amassed evaluation research on what might work best to resolve those problems so that an officer doesn’t repeatedly respond to the same problem using reactive or even general strategies.10
There is also knowledge about how police can optimize their patrolling and visibility to create a deterrent effect and prevent crimes from happening in the first place.11 The science is pretty clear: arrests do not prevent crime very well, and deterrence is more likely generated in other ways.12 Further, police officers can prevent calls by strategically using their uncommitted time (the time between calls for service).13 And there are now translation guides like the Evidence-Based Policing Matrix, the Evidence-Based Policing Playbook, and Ratcliffe’s Reducing Crime Companion that have operationalized much of this knowledge for officers or supervisors to apply in practice.14
It is also now known how interactions with community members—victims, witnesses, suspects, residents, visitors, youths, business owners, and others—can be improved, and ways to reduce the risk of harm either to officers or to other people during these interactions.15 In addition, there is a better grasp of some of the consequences of patrol activity, including disparate outcomes, adverse community reactions, and backfire effects of interventions.16 This critical knowledge can help officers better anticipate what problems may arise from their actions to help them mitigate or avoid adverse reactions from the community.
So yes, officers can do random preventive patrol and answer calls. However, officers are much more effective when they use their uncommitted time to prevent calls in the first place or strengthen their relationships with members of their communities by their actions. It will not be enough to travel back in time to tell Officer Lum about this knowledge and then expect her to operationalize and implement this knowledge willingly. Treating policing as an intellectual profession requires it to reengineer and recalibrate multiple policing systems (training, deployment, accountability, supervision, leadership, etc.) to create the desired policing outcomes.17 To do this requires systematic inquiry, analysis, assessment, and evaluation to figure out effective interventions and how to readjust subsystems toward those interventions.
Science and George Floyd
If policing was treated as an intellectual profession—if the level of competency from police officers was equal to that discussed in this article, would that have prevented Chauvin from killing George Floyd? It’s impossible to be sure, but the perspective of evidence-based policing may offer some insight.
If one were able to roll back time and do things differently, it probably would not be enough to try and find the Chauvins of the world and fire them or train them better, or even to have use-of-force policies in place that do not allow them to put their knees on people’s necks. Instead, more fundamental and systemic adjustments would be needed for such reforms to stick.
For example, Floyd’s death partly reflects an overemphasis on crime reaction and arrest for minor offenses. Floyd was arrested for allegedly passing a $20 counterfeit bill. As mentioned previously, research shows, that proactive, problem-oriented, targeted, place-focused, and preventative approaches are more effective in reducing crime and improving community satisfaction than reactive approaches and an overreliance on arrests. Research also shows that the indiscriminate use of zero-tolerance arrests for minor offenses is ineffective in deterring crime and can have costly consequences. Therefore, one long-term change to reduce the risk of another Chauvin is to readjust patrol deployment to be more focused on prevention and problem-solving, not arrest and reaction for minor offenses. This is not equivalent to simply giving up on having the police addressing what some may think are “small” community concerns. Those small concerns are part of a larger landscape of public safety and community feedback. Figuring out how to problem solve so that problems don’t reoccur is a more effective approach than reacting individually to any given call for service. However, simply shifting resources around or ending police responsibility for such calls in communities that need more service and visibility, not less, is a privileged perspective.18
Adjustments across other systems would be needed to readjust patrol deployment to better align with these evidence-based approaches. At a minimum, officers must be trained carefully on evidence-based practices that effectively reduce crime and do not increase the risks of exacerbating disparities, using force, or violating community trust. Part of deployment science is to engineer tactics to achieve these goals. However, training alone is never enough. As mentioned, the Minneapolis Police Department had been up to date with all of the contemporary training on community policing, procedural justice, implicit bias, use of force, and de-escalation before Floyd. Thinking intellectually in policing requires building links between that training and actual behavior and outcomes. The effectiveness of those links must also be tested and evaluated to confirm that those links work. Further, training in such approaches would have to be reinforced through active and transformational supervision and coaching of officers. Given the current more passive and reactive supervisory approaches in U.S. policing, there is also a need for action research on how first-line supervisors can transition into these roles.
Technologies, such as BWCs, will also not stop the next Chauvin, as the totality of research indicates that BWCs don’t seem to impact officer behaviors consistently or in ways that communities might think.19 This is unsurprising, as technology is seldom the panacea for police reform.20 Body cameras can work to achieve accountability only when agencies have a robust accountability infrastructure that can optimize BWC technology. U.S. agencies, however, generally have weak accountability infrastructures and poorly developed internal affairs and supervisory systems that police unions have often hampered. More importantly, there is not much scientific knowledge about the effectiveness of specific accountability strategies like early warning systems, internal affairs processes, officer activity tracking, community review boards, supervisory actions, duty to intervene policies, or other disciplinary approaches. Much more evaluation and scientific understanding of accountability systems are needed so that accountability technologies like BWCs can then be optimized.
Also, treating the profession intellectually means valuing emotional intelligence as a valuable skill. This includes nurturing officers’ ability to critically listen to those at the receiving end of policing and finding ways to improve and incorporate communication and feedback loops between officers and community members into deployment tactics. In Floyd’s case, not only was Floyd himself providing feedback to Chauvin, but community members and medics were also trying to tell Chauvin that he was going to kill Floyd, yet he just ignored their warnings. Floyd’s killing more broadly reflects and symbolizes the weakness in policing’s feedback systems and the lack of receptivity to outside information and warnings. Procedural justice approaches may be a good start to developing emotional intelligence but may be only one beginning element. It will take some thinking to build these systems that are either weak or absent in policing.
Policing is a complex profession and requires a high level of professional competency and knowledge to achieve fundamental changes to its operations. This will require even more intentional investment in improving U.S. policing, not less. The profession not only needs to apply and integrate the knowledge acquired so far, but it also needs science to help to develop policing into the institution that everyone—including police officers—deserves.
Notes:
1Cynthia Lum, Christopher S. Koper, and Xiaoyun Wu, “Can We Really Defund the Police? A Nine-Agency Study of Police Response to Calls for Service,” Police Quarterly 25, no. 3 (2022): 255–280; Cynthia Lum, et al., “Constrained Gatekeepers of the Criminal Justice Footprint: A Systematic Social Observation Study of 9-1-1 Calltakers and Dispatchers,” Justice Quarterly 37, no. 7 (2020): 1176–1198.
2Cynthia Lum et al., “Examining the Empirical Realities of Proactive Policing through Systematic Observations and Computer-Aided Dispatch Data,” Police Quarterly 23, no. 3 (2020): 283–310.
3Lawrence W. Sherman, Evidence-Based Policing, Ideas in American Policing (Washington, DC: National Policing Institute, 1998), 2.
4Lawrence W. Sherman, “The Rise of Evidence-Based Policing: Targeting, Testing, and Tracking,” Crime and Justice 42 (2013): 377–451.
5Cynthia Lum and Christopher S. Koper, Evidence-Based Policing: Translating Research into Practice (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017), 133.
6Cynthia Lum, Cody W. Telep, Christopher S. Koper, and Julie Grieco, “Receptivity to Research in Policing,” Justice, Research and Policy 14, no. 1 (June 2012): 61–95.
7For reviews of this research, see National Research Council, Fairness and Effectiveness in Policing: The Evidence (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2004); National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Proactive Policing: Effects on Crime and Communities (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2018); National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2021).
8See, e.g., John E. Eck and David Weisburd, “Crime Places in Crime Theory,” in Crime Prevention Studies, vol. 4 (Center for Problem-Oriented Policing, 1995): 1–34; David L. Weisburd, Elizabeth R. Groff, and Sue-Ming Yang, The Criminology of Place: Street Segments and Our Understanding of the Crime Problem (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012).
9See, e.g., Herman Goldstein, Problem-Oriented Policing (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1990); See also the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing.
10For reviews of this research see Anthony A. Braga, Brandon C. Welsh, and Cory Schnell, “Can Policing Disorder Reduce Crime? A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis,” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 52, no. 4 (July 2015): 567–588; Joshua C. Hinkle et al., “Problem-Oriented Policing for Reducing Crime and Disorder: An Updated Systematic Review and Meta-analysis,” Campbell Systematic Reviews 16, no. 2 (June 2020): e1089.
11See, e.g., Anthony A. Braga, Andrew V. Papachristos, and David M. Hureau, “The Effects of Hot Spots Policing on Crime: An Updated Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” Justice Quarterly 31, no. 4 (2014): 633–663; Christopher S. Koper, “Just Enough Police Presence: Reducing Crime and Disorderly Behavior by Optimizing Patrol Time in Crime Hot Spots,” Justice Quarterly 12, no. 4 (1995): 649–672.
12Daniel S. Nagin, “Deterrence in the Twenty-First Century,” Crime and Justice 42 (2013): 199–263.
13Lum and Koper, Evidence-Based Policing.
14See Center for Evidenced-Based Crime Policy (CEBCP), “Evidence-Based Policing Matrix”; The Playbook (Fairfax, VA: CEBCP, 2017); Jerry Ratcliffe, Reducing Crime: A Companion for Police Leaders (New York, NY: Routledge, 2019).
15Charlotte Gill et al., “Community-Oriented Policing to Reduce Crime, Disorder, and Fear and Increase Satisfaction and Legitimacy among Citizens: A Systematic Review,” Journal of Experimental Criminology 10 (2014): 399–428; Robin S. Engel et al., “Assessing the Impact of De-Escalation Training on Police Behavior: Reducing Police Use of Force in the Louisville, KY Metro Police Department,” Criminology & Public Policy 21, no. 2 (May 2022): 199–233.
16See National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Proactive Policing.
17Gill et al., “Community-Oriented Policing to Reduce Crime, Disorder, and Fear and Increase Satisfaction and Legitimacy among Citizens”; Engel et al., “Assessing the Impact of De-Escalation Training on Police Behavior.”
18Cynthia Lum, “Perspectives on Policing,” Annual Review of Criminology 4 (2021): 19–25.
19Cynthia Lum et al., “Body-Worn Cameras’ Effects on Police Officers and Citizen Behavior: A Systematic Review,” Campbell Systematic Reviews 16, no. 3 (2020): e1112.
20Cynthia Lum, Christopher S., Koper, and James J. Willis, “Understanding the Limits of Technology’s Impact on Police Effectiveness,” Police Quarterly 20, no. 2 (June 2017): 135–163; see also Christopher S. Koper and Cynthia Lum, “Critic: The Limits of Police Technology,” in Policing Innovation: Contrasting Perspectives 2nd ed., ed. David L. Weisburd and Anthony A. Braga (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 517–543.
Please cite as
Cynthia Lum, “A Vision for Policing Reform: Policing as an Intellectual Profession,” Police Chief 89, no. 9 (September 2022): 76–81.
