The flip-side of evidence-based policing

What better way to start this blog than with a big-picture big-idea post. This is an excerpt from the introductory chapter to our edited two-volume book set with Palgrave Macmillan on Police Conflict Management (fresh off the press). It explores why we keep being stuck in what appears to be a never-ending cycle, moving through crisis and corresponding opportunity over and and over again:

From the Los Angeles Zoot Suit Riots (1943), to the race riots in Watts (1965) and Detroit (1967), as well as the Stonewall Riots in New York City (1969), all the way to the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, the police in the USA have had a consistent track record of brutality against marginalised groups1. The corresponding, broad media coverage across the globe makes the USA a suitable canvas to illustrate the contribution we are confident these two volumes will make to conflict management in the police, not only in the USA but beyond.

Intermittent reconciliation efforts have attempted to identify causes and effects and provide the police with recommendations to move towards better relationships with the communities they serve. As a result, trust in the police and corresponding reform efforts have kept progressing and regressing cyclically, keeping the state of policing moving on the spot rather than in a linear fashion towards sustainable improve- ment. In the 1990s, policing literature started to coin the term “21st- century policing”. In the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots and the Rampart scandal—in which, throughout the 1990s, a number of officers of the Los Angeles Police Department’s (LAPD) Rampart Division had been found to have systematically abused their authority and were implicated in various forms of misconduct—the US Department of Justice (DoJ), and RAND Public Safety and Justice, published a series of research reports.

In 1992, the DoJ published a research brief on Policing Strategies that Address Community Needs in the 21st Century2. The focus-group-based report included a discussion on various trends that determine the potential for conflict during police–citizen interactions. In 1998, the DoJ published Police in the Community: Strategies for the 21st Century3, an overview of evidence-based best practices. This report provided guidance for law enforcement agencies on how community policing could be implemented effectively through interpersonal skills, dealing effectively with diversity, and communication. In 2001, the DoJ posted Policing in the 21st Century: What Works and What Doesn’t4, an analysis of the implementation of community policing in Australia. Among others, this report identified an unhealthy social distance between the police and the communities they serve; ongoing emphasis on traditional, reactive policing tactics were found to be major shortfalls. In 2003, RAND Public Safety and Justice published Training the 21st Century Police Officer, the findings of an independent review assessing police training in the areas of use of force, search and seizure, arrest procedures, community policing, and diversity awareness5.

The crisis–opportunity cycle started over again when, in 2014, Michael Brown was shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri, and unrest unfolded, sparking another international debate on police–community relations and the use of force6. As a result, President Obama commissioned The President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing7, which set out to advance police reform with the successful implementation of commu- nity policing to advance trust and legitimacy and improve training and education for the safety of both officers and citizens. Six years later, George Floyd was killed by police in Minnesota in the USA, which led to a higher interval rate of global coverage and public discourse on police reform.

We are now almost one-quarter into the new century, but the police officer and his or her institution keep struggling with a set of challenges that have not changed since the last century.

What we believe to be key in overcoming that same crisis–opportunity cycle, or at least keep these cyclical setbacks on a trajectory of continuous improvement, is an observation that also reaches back into the last century. The periodic public discussions that follow each setback typically fail to distinguish between clearly extra-legal police action and unsanctioned use of force that is simply the result of incompetence8. The focus on malicious misconduct and the corresponding dichotomy between a few bad apples and mostly good officers deprives all the police, the public, and those who study the relationship between the two, of the necessary depth to make meaningful changes. Systemic features —including the law (e.g., qualified immunity9), policy and procedures (e.g., lack of de-escalation mandates7, or hiring10), as well as training and education (e.g., lack of interpersonal skills training and education11) — have been found to contribute to the negative outcomes of policing. These negative outcomes include excessive use of force12, bad community relations13, and ultimately a lack of trust and legitimacy in the police by those that they serve14,15,16. What all these systemic features have in common is that they are closely associated with the level of competency of both the individual officers and the institution of the police. As Fyfe8 said more than a third of a century ago:

We should take care too to distinguish between legitimate provoked force and incompetence-related violence. The former is that required to put down threats against officers or other challenges to official authority. The latter is unnecessary, and occurs only because officers lack the expertise to employ readily available and less frantic means of putting down such threats and challenges. (p. 221, emphasis in original)

This is Volume I of the Palgrave Macmillan book series on “Police Conflict Management” and will provide readers with an overview of the challenges and opportunities of the twenty-first century. As teased out above in this Introduction and worked out through many of the chapters of this volume, many of the challenges of twenty-first-century policing are substantially the same as those of the twentieth century, although they might present themselves in an updated version that reflects the twenty-first-century society that they are now rooted in. This realisation lends much importance to the opportunities of twenty-first-century policing, and we hope to identify those that might help us more adequately address these long-standing challenges.

Already in the 1970s, the USA had seen a demand for building a policing policy and strategy based on independent research and scientific evidence. The Police Foundation (now the National Policing Institute) and the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) were, to our knowledge, among the first national level research and education organizations to advance policing through innovation and scientific research17. Since then, research projects, programmes, and institutions have sprawled across several countries, culminating in the establishment of professional societies of evidence-based policing in the UK in 2010 (Society of Evidence-Based Policing)18, in Australia and New Zealand in 2013 (Australia and New Zealand Society of Evidence-Based Policing)19, and in the USA (American Society of Evidence-Based Policing)20 and in Canada in 2015 (Canadian Society of Evidence-Based Policing)21.

There is broad agreement on the need to implement policing practices based on scientific evidence as well as on the success that evidence-based policing has produced22,23. However, we have seen recent reiterations of the crisis–opportunity cycle and the corresponding public sentiment, which is now articulated in the “defund and abolish the police” discussions24, as indicators that conventional research on policing is insufficient to address the needs of society in the twenty-first century. The discourse between the police and the public fails to effectively negotiate the needs of two separate social systems (i.e., the police and the public). Each system filters that much called for evidence through its own socio-perceptual lens. The police and the public lack an epistemic consensus, which we argue seems to perpetuate the crisis–opportunity cycle.

As a consequence, in an effort to better coordinate the creation of mutually agreed upon knowledge between science, the police, and the public, we advocate for reflexivity as a prerogative in modern police practice and research25. Reflexivity calls for the analysis of the preconditions and consequences of scientific perspectives themselves. It is a process upstream from the creation of an evidence- base, as it gives primary attention to the point of view of a second-order observation that critically engages social and individual constraints, such as personal experiences, beliefs and knowledge, or scientific and disci- plinary theories and methods, which enable and limit not only what can be seen, but also how it is seen.

A reflexive practice enables practitioners and researchers to learn conscientiously and deliberately from experiences that range from first- hand frontline occurrences in the field to critically evaluating an evidence-based policy implementation or finding the right research question to address a socially relevant issue in policing26. The process of reflection allows them to incorporate the second- order observation to become aware of the biases that naturally come with the perspective, which are operating in the first order. In policing, such insight often includes matters of how the police or research relates to society or the role that culture mediates and moderates between the positive variables under investigation. As such, a reflexive practice can challenge assumptions, ideological illusions, and damaging biases rooted in both society at large and police culture in particular; it can also question inequalities and personal and institutional behaviours that might silence or marginalize the voices of others27. It prevents us from perpetuating an evidence-base of what has often been deemed “best practice” in policing, but which has been created “working backwards”, from “within the box” of an assumed hypoth- esis, contaminated by the presence of a heuristic and confirmation bias28. Think of the 21-foot rule, also referred to as the Tueller drill, as an example. The 21-foot rule states 21 feet to be the distance far enough away for a police officer to safely draw their firearm and shoot a knife attacker, who launches at them with the intent to use the knife29. Since the 1980s, this rule has informed police training and practice, as well as corresponding jurisprudence in the USA30,31, 2020. Sandel et al.32 found that, even though the rule had been discussed throughout its exis- tence, peer-reviewed evidence was lacking. Consequently, the authors ran a series of experiments and concluded that 21 feet was not far enough for officers to defend themselves against a knife-armed citizen launching at them. Despite its methodological rigour and conclusive results, we find the study to be constrained and of limited relevance for practitioners. All of the four studies published were designed to test drawing time in rela- tion to threat distance, measuring running speed and drawing speed and the accuracy of participants, along with playing out a knife attack across 21 feet, in a linear fashion, without any obstruction or any other factors that might determine the way such a scenario might play out in the real world. It is this lack of ecological validity that we argue can be filled so as to make officer safety research more meaningful and applicable for police in the field (and jurisprudence on the corresponding uses of force).

Ultimately, reflexivity enables researchers and practitioners to better understand

  • What they know and what they do not know;
  • What they do not know they know and do not know; 
  • The constraints of their own perspective; and the
  • The complexity of the interactive co-experience, within which all the researchers, the police, and the public continuously negotiate and renegotiate their coexistence.

This is the mindset with which Mario, Swen, and I worked to compile a new set of perspectives on an old line-up of problems in Palgrave Macmillan’s tow volume book set on Police Conflict Management.

References:

  1. Moore, L. (2016). Police brutality in the United States. In Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Police-Brutality-in-the-United-States-2064580/additional-info
     ↩︎
  2. Jordan, R. E. (1992). Policing strategies that address community needs in the 21st century. Department of Justice. https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/policing-strategies-address-community-needs-21st-century ↩︎
  3. 3Miller, L. S., & Hess, K. M. (1998). Police in the community: Strategies for the 21st century. Department of Justice. https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/police-community-strategies-21st-century-second-edition ↩︎
  4. Mazerolle, L. (2001). Policing in the 21st century: What works and what doesn’t. Department of Justice. https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/policing-21st-century-what-works-and-what-doesnt ↩︎
  5. Glenn, R., Panitch, B. R., Barnes-Proby, D., Williams, E., Christian, J., Lewis, M. W., Gerwehr, S., & Brannan D. W. (2003). Training the 21st century police officer: Redefining police professionalism for the Los Angeles Police Department. Rand. https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1745/RAND_MR1745.pdf ↩︎
  6. Robinson, L. O. (2020). Five years after Ferguson: Reflecting on police reform and what’s ahead. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 687(1), 228–239. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716219887372 ↩︎
  7. Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. (2015). The President’s task force on 21st century policing implementation guide: Moving from recommen-dations to action. Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. https://cops.usdoj.gov/RIC/Publications/cops-p341-pub.pdf ↩︎
  8. Fyfe, J. F. (1986). Police personnel practices, 1986. City Management Association. ↩︎
  9. Obasogie, O. K., & Zaret, A. (2021). Plainly incompetent: How qualified immunity became an exculpatory doctrine of police excessive force. Univer- sity of Pennsylvania Law Review. https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=9769&context=penn_law_review ↩︎
  10. Hilal, S., Densley, J., & Jones, D. (2017). A signalling theory of law enforcement hiring. Policing and Society, 27 , 508–524. https://doi.org/10.1080/10439463.2015.1081388 ↩︎
  11. Police Executive Research Forum. (2015). Re-engineering training on police use of force. Critical Issues in Policing Series. Police Executive Research Forum. https://www.policeforum.org/assets/reengineeringtraining1.pdf ↩︎
  12. White, M. D. (2001). Controlling police decisions to use deadly force: Reexamining the importance of administrative policy. Crime & Delinquency, 47 (1), 131–151. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011128701047001006 ↩︎
  13. Giles, H. (2002). Law enforcement, communication, and community. John Benjamins Publishing. ↩︎
  14. Kochel, T. R., & Skogan, W. G. (2021). Accountability and transparency as levers to promote public trust and police legitimacy: Findings from a natural experiment. Policing: An International Journal, 44(6), 1046–1059. https://doi.org/10.1108/PIJPSM-04-2021-0062 ↩︎
  15. Kyprianides, A., Bradford, B., Jackson, J., Yesberg, J., Stott, C., & Radburn, M. (2021). Identity, legitimacy and cooperation with police: Comparing general-population and street-population samples from London. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 27 , 492–508. https://doi.org/10.1037/law0000312 ↩︎
  16. Tyler, T. R. (2002). A national survey for monitoring police legitimacy. Justice Research and Policy, 4(1–2), 71–86. https://doi.org/10.3818/JRP.4.1.2002.71 ↩︎
  17. National Policing Institute. (2022, December 30). About us. https://www.policinginstitute.org/about-us/ ↩︎
  18. Society of Evidence-Based Policing. (2022). About the Society. https://www.sebp.police.uk/about ↩︎
  19. Australia and New Zealand Society of Evidence-Based Policing. (2022, December 30). Home. https://www.anzsebp.com ↩︎
  20. American Society of Evidence-Based Policing. (2023). About ASEBP. https://www.americansebp.org/about_asebp.php ↩︎
  21. Canadian Society of Evidence-Based Policing. (2022, December 30). Home. https://www.can-sebp.net ↩︎
  22. Bennell, C., Alpert, G., Andersen, J. P., Arpaia, J., Huhta, J.-M., Kahn, K. B., Khanizadeh, A.-J., McCarthy, M., McLean, K., Mitchell, R. J., Nieuwen- huys, A., Palmer, A., & White, M. D. (2021). Advancing police use of force research and practice: Urgent issues and prospects. Legal and Criminological Psychology, 26 (2), 121–144. https://doi.org/10.1111/lcrp.12191 ↩︎
  23. Todak, N., McLean, K., Nix, J., & Haberman, C. (2021). The globalization of evidence-based policing. Faculty Books and Monographs. https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1349&context=facultybooks ↩︎
  24. McDowell, M. G., & Fernandez, L. A. (2018). ‘Disband, disempower, and disarm’: Amplifying the theory and practice of police abolition. Critical Criminology, 26 , 373–391. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-018-9400-4 ↩︎
  25. Koerner, S., & Staller, M. S. (2022). Towards reflexivity in police practice and research. Legal and Criminological Psychology, 27 (2), 177–181. https://doi.org/10.1111/lcrp.12207 ↩︎
  26. Bolton, G., & Delderfield, R. (2018). Reflective practice: Writing and professional development. Sage. ↩︎
  27. ibid. ↩︎
  28. Staller, M. S., Zaiser, B., & Koerner, S. (2022). The problem of entanglement: Biases and fallacies in police conflict management. International Journal of Police Science & Management, 24 (2), 113–123. https://doi.org/10.1177/14613557211064054 ↩︎
  29. Martinelli, R. (2014). Revisiting the “21-foot rule”. Police: The Law Enforcement Magazine, 18. http://www.cainstructor.com/Articles/21%20Foot%20Rule%20July%202016/Revisiting%20the%2021%20foot%20rule.pdf ↩︎
  30. ibid. ↩︎
  31. Machacynski, B. (2020). Qualified immunity and the 21-foot rule [Preprint]. Preprints. https://doi.org/10.22541/au.160091472.26983717 ↩︎
  32. Sandel, W., Martaindale, H., & Blair, J. P. (2020). A scientific examination of the 21-foot rule. Police Practice and Research, 22, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/15614263.2020.1772785 ↩︎

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