The term “misconduct” in law enforcement broadly covers activities that are inappropriate, dishonest, unethical, or criminal. According to the U.S. Department of Justice,
it is unlawful for state or local law enforcement officers to engage in a pattern or practice of conduct that deprives persons of rights protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States.1
Officers’ abuse of power, as well as any questionable or illegal conduct, reflects poorly on their agencies and the profession as a whole, while also potentially exposing departments and municipalities to scrutiny and liability.
Schooling and Policing
Increased education and training requirements have long been topics of discussion in policing in the United States. In the early 1900s, U.S. policing was beleaguered with corruption and was controlled by political pressure.
In response, the leader of modern law enforcement in the United States, August Vollmer, advocated the development of college education programs in police science and standardized training for police academies in an effort to produce professional and educated officers and police chiefs.
In the 1960s, policing again came under scrutiny due to officer discrimination and brutality. Both the Kerner Commission and the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice recommended education requirements for hiring officers in order to employ better-qualified officers, as well as standardized training for officers to ensure ethical policing practices.2 In the 2015 President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing report, one of the main pillars called for educational standards and increased ethics training in order to develop professionalism in policing.3 As policing has developed, training has come to focus on officer use of force, diversity, implicit bias, officer and agency accountability, and ethics.
Citizen Complaints and Misconduct
Reducing police misconduct is essential to the productivity of a department, as well as maintain positive community-police relations. Often, this relationship is measured by the amount and type of citizen complaints. Education has proven to be a protective factor against citizen complaints.
Research illustrates that police officers with a college education receive fewer citizen complaints than officers without a college education.4 Likewise, researchers John Shjarback and Michael White found police agencies that demonstrate commitments to education through hiring requirements received lower rates of citizen complaints than departments that do not require at least an associate degree for entry-level officers.5
Specifically, officers with only a high school diploma are more likely to receive citizen complaints, as well as accrue a greater number of policy violations than officers with at least some college education.6
In a study of severe or career-ending misconduct, researchers have found that officers who possess at least an associate or bachelor’s degree were less likely to be terminated due to police misconduct.7 A recent study of New York Police Department officers who were fired due to misconduct found that both male and female officers with a college degree (undergraduate or graduate) were significantly less likely to participate in misconduct resulting in termination.8
Excessive Force
Excessive use of force by police officers is of great concern to law enforcement agencies. Quality education and training are key to ensuring that officers employ only the appropriate uses of force.
According to the consensus policy provided by the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) in collaboration with 10 other law enforcement organizations, police officers are permitted to respond to resistance by utilizing the force they deem necessary to ensure compliance, based on their training, education, circumstances, and professional assessment of the situation. Response to resistance becomes problematic when the force used is excessive. Excessive force is any force beyond what is reasonably necessary to control an individual. These guidelines are grounded in landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases such as Graham v. Connor, which established the reasonableness standard, that an officer’s actions must be “objectively reasonable” at the time of the incident.9
Research has shown that officers’ level of education influences their use of force. The more education officers possess, the less likely they are to utilize force.10 Specifically, officers with some college education use less verbal coercion than officers with only a high school education, and officers with a bachelor’s degree utilize less physical force than officers without a college degree.11 Additionally, officers with more education are less likely to utilize deadly force.12
Recommendations
Education Requirements
Researchers posit that the relationship between education and reduced problem behaviors is the result of officers with higher education possessing higher levels of self-control, increased critical and analytical thinking skills, improved attitudes, and reduced impulsivity.13 The added benefits of college-educated officers are that they tend to exhibit better communication skills, which can result in improved community-police relations. Additionally, the hiring of educated officers can contribute to fewer organizational issues, as officers with higher levels of education are more likely to comply with supervisors and to follow department policy, specifically policies on use of force.14
While a college education is important to an officer’s performance, the type of degree does not seem to be of importance. Comparisons of degrees, specifically criminal justice versus non-criminal justice degrees, have demonstrated that the topic of the degree does not seem to influence the number or type of complaints against an officer, rather just that the officer has obtained a college degree in any field reduces citizen complaints.15
Officer Training
In a 2016 survey of almost 8,000 police officers in the United States, the majority of officers (69 percent) stated that they did not believe that their department had provided sufficient training to prepare them for police work. Specifically, in the areas of officer bias and unnecessary force, 56 percent of officers responded that, in the previous 12 months, they had received at least four hours of training in the use of de-escalation tactics to avoid unnecessary force, while less than half (39 percent) had received at least four hours of bias and fairness training.16
Ethics and integrity training should be integrated into all phases of training—in the academy, during field training, and throughout officers’ careers. There is often a disconnect between what recruits learn in the academy and what they experience on the street and within their agencies. Typical law enforcement academies provide curriculum and training based on a standard approach, while the policies and procedures officers follow on the job are specific to their agencies and communities. The academy provides the ideal way to approach ethical quandaries and everyday encounters; however, the job on the street is more pragmatic. In the academy, recruits do not learn to contend with real-life dilemmas and applications of ethical policing.
Therefore, it is essential that ethics training continues into the field training stage. The field training officer (FTO) is considered to have the most influence on an officer’s development; therefore, careful selection of experienced senior officers with good work records contributes to the positive development of new officers. The time the new officer spends with the FTO allows for discussions, situation debriefings, and practical applications of textbook knowledge.
Additionally, it is imperative that training continues throughout officers’ careers. Supervisor training has shown to be important in influencing the behaviors of their subordinates. In a study of the relationship between the education and training of supervisors and officer use of force, the level of education of the supervisors, as well as supervisors’ participation in use-of-force training, significantly reduced the subsequent use of force implemented by their subordinates.17
Specifically, simulation training has proven to be an effective method. A variety of simulator programs are available to cover police issues such as active shooters, ethical decision-making, community policing, implicit bias, and use-of-force encounters. These advanced computerized systems place officers in real-world scenarios while also tracking their responses.
The data collected from simulation training allows trainers to identify the precise moment an officer decides to utilize force or to identify implicit biases in an officer’s decision-making. Through the recording of officer actions followed by a detailed review with the officer and training, the officer becomes aware of his or her own decision-making process while identifying his or her positive and negative behaviors before encountering difficult situations on the street.
Scenario-based training utilizes real-life situations in which participants must work through their responses. Scenarios can also be discussion-based, using tabletop exercises in which trainers and participants work through ethical or other police-oriented scenarios. Tabletop exercises are frequently used in emergency management to assist community leaders in working through potential emergency situations. Alternatively, scenario-based training can be more engaging through the use of role playing. Role-play training allows trainers and trainees to actively participate through acting out a situation.
In either form, scenario-based training should be developed with specific objectives in mind and allow for decision points in which officer decisions influence the next stage and the final outcome. Just as with simulation training, it is imperative that a component of the training be a debriefing to identify correct and incorrect decisions, as well as education to avoid future mistakes. However, it is essential to realize that the implementation of scenario-based training can be time-consuming. Such training often requires the efforts of multiple trainers, as well as the participation of several law enforcement students. Police departments frequently report that they do not use scenario-based training due to small departments or the lack of available time for such involved training.18
When integrating simulation and scenario-based training with ethics training, content is critical. Officers know that stealing is wrong, excessive force is unethical, and racial profiling is discriminatory. Therefore, it is best to develop complex and realistic scenarios. For instance, while an officer might walk past cash on a table and never consider pocketing it, the same officer might not consider taking another officer’s gear or department property as stealing.
Equally important, ethical scenarios can include situations to assess the officers’ sense of responsibility. For example, imagine a scenario in which an officer does not personally utilize excessive force, but witnesses another officer or supervisor doing so. Will the witnessing officer report it? Or, if an officer has knowledge of his or her partner’s planting evidence or stealing equipment, will the officer intervene? Such scenarios step outside of the straightforward ethical questions and integrate officer accountability.
Early Intervention Systems
In recent years, police agencies have looked to early intervention systems (EIS) or early warning systems as solutions to identify potentially problematic behaviors, as well as to ensure officer accountability. These systems provide a means to stay ahead of misconduct issues through proactive measures of early identification and corrective actions. EIS track individual officer data such as allegations of officer misconduct, use-of-force reports, abuse of sick leave, continual poor performance, citizen complaints, civil litigation, and traffic stop data, among myriad other factors.
EIS are designed to identify officers who hit specific levels or numbers of warnings. Supervisors review the data and warnings to determine if intervention is necessary. If so, intervention then occurs through training, education, supervision, counseling, or discipline. Research has shown that in most departments, it is usually a small number of officers who are responsible for the majority of issues.
EIS have the potential to influence not only individual officer behavior, but also to impact the training programs, policies, and procedures of the department. Through the EIS, police chiefs and administrators can develop initial and remedial training specific to the needs of their officers, which can reduce officer misconduct and strengthen community-police relations.
Conclusion
These studies reveal that proper preparation of police force candidates is enhanced by higher education. Developing and improving effective communication and analytical skills greatly influence officers’ abilities and options when they frequently encounter stressful, dangerous situations in their jobs. The better officers are at thinking and verbally diffusing animosity and threatening confrontations, the less likely the officers will be to resort to force, especially excessive force. Ethical training can be implemented through many avenues for all officers throughout their careers. By going through specialized training to identify potentially unethical situations and how to deal with them, officers will learn how to develop their ethical values. Through education standards and continual, focused training, police misconduct can be reduced. 🛡
Notes:
1U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), “Addressing Police Misconduct Laws Enforced by the Department of Justice,” February 28, 2019.
2 Samuel Walker, Popular Justice: A History of American Criminal Justice (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1980).
3 Final Report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing (Washington, DC: Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, May 2015).
4 Victor E. Kappeler, Allen D. Sapp, and David L. Carter, “Police Officer Higher Education, Citizen Complaints and Departmental Rule Violations,” American Journal of Police 11, no. 2 (1992): 37–54; Kim Michelle Lersch and Linda L. Kunzman, “Misconduct Allegations and Higher Education in a Southern Sheriff’s Department,” American Journal of Criminal Justice 25, no. 2 (March 2001): 161–172.
5 John Shjarback and Michael D. White, “Departmental Professionalism and Its Impact on Indicators of Violence in Police-Citizen Encounters,” Police Quarterly 19, no. 1 (2016): 32–62.
6 Lersch and Kunzman. “Misconduct Allegations and Higher Education in a Southern Sheriff’s Department.”
7 Robert J. Kane and Michael D. White, Bad Cops: A Study of Career-Ending Misconduct Among New York City Police Officers, Criminology & Public Policy 8, no. 4 (February 2005): 737–769.
8 Janne E. Gaub, “Understanding Police Misconduct Correlates: Does Gender Matter in Predicting Career-Ending Misconduct?” Women & Criminal Justice, May 2, 2019.
9 The 11 agencies who collaborated on the National Consensus Policy and Discussion Paper on Use of Force were the Association of State Criminal Investigative Agencies, Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies, Fraternal Order of Police, Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, International Association of Chiefs of Police, Hispanic American Police Command Officers Association, International Association of Directors of Law Enforcement Standards and Training, National Association of Police Organizations, National Association of Women Law Enforcement Executives, National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, and National Tactical Officers Association.
10 William Terrill and Stephen D. Mastrofski, “Situational and Officer-Based Determinants of Police Coercion,” Justice Quarterly 19, no. 2 (August 18, 2006): 215–248; Robert E. Worden, “The ‘Causes’ of Police Brutality: Theory and Evidence on Police Use of Force,” in And Justice for All: Understanding and Controlling Police Abuse of Force, edited by William A. Geller and Hans Toch (Washington, DC: Police Executive Research Forum, 1995); Jason Rydberg and William Terrill, “The Effect of Higher Education on Police Behavior,” Police Quarterly 13, no. 1 (March 2010): 92–120.
11 Eugene A. Paoline, III and William Terrill, “Police Education, Experience, and the Use of Force,” Criminal Justice and Behavior 34, no. 2 (February 2007): 179–196.
12 James P. McElvain and Augustine J. Kposowa, “Police Officer Characteristics and the Likelihood of Using Deadly Force,” Criminal Justice and Behavior 35, no. 4 (April 1, 2008): 505–521; Christopher M. Donner et al., “Quick on the Draw: Assessing the Relationship Between Low Self-Control and Officer-Involved Police Shootings,” Police Quarterly 20, no. 3 (January 2013): 213–234.
13 Christopher R. Huber and Nathan R. Kuncel, “Does College Teach Critical Thinking? A Meta-Analysis,” Review of Educational Research 86, no. 2 (June 1, 2016): 431–468.
14 Paoline and Terrill, “Police Education, Experience, and the Use of Force”; Nicole E. Haas et al., “Explaining Officer Compliance: The Importance of Procedural Justice and Trust Inside a Police Organization,” Criminology & Criminal Justice 15, no. 4 (January 20, 2015): 442–463.
15 Lersch and Kunzman. “Misconduct Allegations and Higher Education in a Southern Sheriff’s Department”; Jennifer Manis, Carol Archbold, and Kimberly D. Hassell, “Exploring the Impact of Police Officer Education Level on Allegations of Police Misconduct,” International Journal of Police Science & Management 10, no. 4 (December 2008): 509–523.
16 Rich Morin et al., “Behind the Badge,” Pew Research Center, January 11, 2017.
17 Hyeyoung Lim and Hoon Lee, “The Effects of Supervisor Education and Training on Police Use of Force,” Criminal Justice Studies 28, no. 4 (August 19, 2015): 444–463.
18 A.G. Sharp, “The Importance of Role-Playing in Training,” Law and Order: The Magazine for Police Management 48, no. 6 (January 2000): 97–102.
Please cite as
Sherah Basham, “Education Offers Best Solution for Police Misconduct,” Police Chief Online, November 6, 2019.
