Policy makers, law enforcement leaders, and line officers have extensively discussed two competing approaches to policing: police as “warriors” or police as “guardians.” At a recent seminar on police reform, the question was posed regarding which moniker was appropriate for the role of law enforcement. The author responded that both categorizations were meaningless as a practical matter. They are also inadequate. The discussion on policing should be broader and encompass more than the myopic roles of warrior or guardian in order to provide a more useful framework for the daily functions of an officer. The proper conceptual approach to policing should be that an officer is a civic leader.
Warrior Concept & Training
In August 2020, department-wide de-escalation training was held in Charlottesville, Virginia, which focused on reducing the need for force—or reducing the amount of force used if force became necessary. This training included a segment that educated participants on how to create the circumstances by which an officer could recover from errors in perception without force. This concept is referred to as resilience and is a component of tactical de-escalation.1
In everyday life, there are examples of mechanisms designed to prevent catastrophic events initiated by perceptual or performance errors. For instance, governing bodies take for granted that a portion of drivers will drift off the road or into oncoming traffic. The rumble strips placed alongside or down the centerline of many roads alert drivers to their erroneous perceptions as to the location of their car on the road. Rumble strips do not stop drivers from looking at their phones, nodding off, or adjusting the radio, behaviors that can result in the error of leaving the appropriate lane of travel, but the strips are a mechanism that affords drivers the time or opportunity to recover by alerting them before it is too late to correct the error. A backup alarm on a vehicle serves the same purpose—it is an alert that allows a person to change behaviors resulting from not paying attention to (or misinterpreting) visual cues. Building these types of mechanisms into policing practices, in the form of tactics, should also be the norm. Unfortunately, some officers who attended the de-escalation course were derisive in their assessment of the usefulness of the training and lamented what was really needed was warrior training.
Tactical de-escalation is warrior training and enables police officers to be more than just warriors, It is an essential component of reforming policing. It is unfortunate that “warrior training” is understood to mean only those activities that revolve around the application of force or violence. The author, a former infantry officer in the United States Marine Corps, where “warrior” training is common, has found very little crossover application to policing or, at least, few skills that directly transfer to law enforcement. Those not in the military lack exposure to the warfighting philosophy espoused by Sun Tzu, in The Art of War, a reading assigned for professional development in the United States Marine Corps. As Tzu states, “To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.”2 This lesson encapsulates the desired outcome for both military engagements and policing engagements.
Extensive “warrior” training is necessary for officers to possess the essential skills that allow them to make better decisions and achieve better outcomes during violent (or potentially violent) encounters. When officers identify a safety issue, they must act decisively. Officers must therefore be conversant in violence so that violent encounters do not overwhelm their cognitive ability to see alternatives to a problem in the moment. A lack of training on how to manage violence will negatively impact their ability to successfully execute tactics that might quickly end an encounter. Violent confrontations cause a stress response in the participants; such a stress response may impede executive function and result in poor decision-making, as well as impair motor performance.3 Several recent and controversial uses of force were causally linked to the failure of officers to successfully control a suspect or the decisions made when less-lethal tools failed to work in the way that officers anticipated. These are training issues that, if addressed, may have prevented the subsequent fatal outcome.
As examples, two officers should be able to maintain control of a single suspect on the ground without the need to use more than empty hand control techniques; officers should be well versed in ensuring target identification and round accountability, which includes inhibiting shots when one does not have the first or have a reasonable expectation of achieving the second. This type of training takes time, which equates to an increased financial commitment. Many agencies will not commit these resources to training their officers, leaving them ill-equipped to effectively deal with emerging threats and making the public less safe.
To be clear, violence is chaotic and stress-inducing and can lead to decreased cognitive and motor performance abilities. These factors can cause perceptual and motor skill errors that may result in poor or even catastrophic outcomes, but these errors are a part of the human condition and are not necessarily criminal.4 Meaningful, realistic training can likely reduce the fear response, thereby improving decision-making and outcomes.5 Meaningful training can also create procedural memories that “lead to purposeful action” during fear-based cognitive impairment, ensuring that goal-directed activities are performed even in the absence of conscious thought.6
Why is this training not provided now? One factor is the reality that police use of force is statistically very rare. A two-year study of three mid-size departments showed that less than 1 in 128 arrests resulted in a use of force and that 98 percent of those resulted in minor or no injury.7 The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported an estimated 53.5 million official interactions between the police and community members aged 16 and older in 2015.8 During 2015, and consistently since, police officers kill approximately 1,000 people per year in the line of duty.9 That is a police killing rate of .0019 percent. Removing clearly justifiable shootings reduces that number even further. As importantly, data have shown that “only one citizen death occurred for every 15 deadly weapon attacks” against police officers in 2015.10 This statistic is congruent with the research reporting that “police officers exercised restraint in deadly force in 93 percent of the situations in which they legally could have fired their weapon.”11
This reality is often ignored because the sheer volume of media coverage surrounding unjust or controversial uses of force lead many to believe that these instances occur far more frequently than they do.12 Compounding the statistically errant belief is the very real history of racial injustice, such as enforcement of legislation by law enforcement designed to injure or impede Black U.S. citizens’ pursuit of equitable treatment and opportunities, which can impact the interpretation of visual scenes through personal belief systems. A use of force can (and will) be interpreted very differently depending on a person’s experiences and social identity—even when all viewers are exposed to the same visual information, i.e., a video of an event.13 This does not stop with visual information—what a person hears, tastes, feels, and smells can be perceived differently as the result of socially constructed beliefs.14
Without an understanding of how people derive different viewpoints about a shared event, the foreseeable result of sensory input being interpreted differently is conflict. As such, accusations of deliberate mischaracterization, lying about what was said or meant during an interaction, or disagreements regarding the necessity of the amount and type of force used will not be wholly, mitigated by law enforcement’s adoption of body-worn cameras. This perceptual phenomenon also exposes the danger of any public policy/service entity exerting sole influence or decision-making when that body’s membership lacks diversity, to include diversity of thought. One need only to sample different news organizations to see this play out in real time and to illustrate why a community will have misgivings about an agency evaluating their own officers’ use-of-force incidents or why policing agencies will have misgivings about a civilian review board composed of anti-police activists. So, while the reality of police use of force is starkly different than currently believed by some community members, current training practices continue to aggravate the beliefs of police violence held by many.
A second factor is both the rarity of controversial police killings and the fact that “insurance policies and city and county budgets usually pay for judgments and claims.”15 Police agencies have no fiscal urgency to prioritize training, and municipalities pass on the cost to taxpayers. Again, it is important to reiterate that there are statistically very few uses of force, to include police killings—and even fewer controversial ones—a result of human performance, which largely adapts to produce acceptable outcomes, and because officers primarily use less-lethal methods of force.16 However, the greater the sample size, the more likely that some instance of error will occur in a deadly force encounter. It is a statistical certainty over time.
Therefore, “warrior” training—real, decision based, and frequent—would likely reduce those instances of error even more and improve policing outcomes across the spectrum of community-police encounters. This type of training would enable officers to be more confident in their ability to effectively navigate high-stress, fast-paced environments. As such, “warrior” training is essential for policing, but being a warrior is not the role of a police officer.
Guardian Concept & Training
The “guardian” concept of policing began to be discussed more broadly when it was included in the Final Report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, published in 2015. It was thereafter championed as the role for police officers by some law enforcement leaders, The task force report used Plato’s Republic as a foundation for the concept. In Plato’s Republic, guardians have two roles, either as soldiers or as politicians in the form of philosopher-kings. Plato’s guardians were warriors; the terms are synonymous—and, in the Republic, there is no distinction in education (i.e., training) between guardians who would face an external threat and those that would keep the peace internally. This is not surprising when one considers that enforcing laws, keeping the peace, and restoring order can ultimately call for the use of state-sanctioned violence. As such, even guardians must prepare for that eventuality in a meaningful way.
More importantly, in Plato’s Republic, citizens were deemed to be suited to a single role, whether that be a shoemaker or a soldier. It was held that a person could do only one task well. Plato argued, “Each individual can practice one pursuit well, he cannot practice many well, and if he tried to do this and dabbled in many things, he would surely fail to achieve distinction in all of them.”17
This is a cautionary tale in the context of public safety reform. It was certainly not proposed that an individual have multiple, often conflicting roles, but this is currently the expectation for modern police departments and their officers. Community members and politicians expect officers to be legal scholars, diplomats, psychologists, mediators, marriage counselors, world-class marksmen, self-defense experts, racecar drivers, forensic scientists, pharmacologists, and social workers, unfazed by abuse one moment and compassionate the next. These expectations defy the reality of human capability and are the very antithesis of the role of guardians in Plato’s Republic. Socrates asserts, “Our guardians must be kept away from all other crafts so as to be the most exact craftsmen of the city’s freedom, and practice nothing at all except what contributes to this.”18 The origins of the guardian model notwithstanding, even as a guardian of the Constitution or individual liberties, it is a role that is simultaneously too broad and not broad enough to capture the requirements of modern policing. Thus, being a guardian is merely a component of the policing role. It is important in the current atmosphere that society more precisely identify the role officers will fill. Both warrior and guardian are insufficient and unsatisfactory models.
Police as Civic Leaders
Instead, consider a model of a law enforcement officer as a “civic leader.” This concept was first introduced to the author by Dr. Greg Thompson during a cultural diversity training roughly five years ago. A police officer fills a leadership role in the community and can influence the behaviors and attitudes of those they encounter, both as an informal leader or through positional authority. Successful leaders influence others by being honest, forward-looking, competent, and inspiring—in short, by being credible to those around them.19 The notion that an officer, as a community leader, can use this credibility to influence others is overlaid with the concept of civic engagement. A useful definition of civic engagement comes from Civic Responsibility and Higher Education:
Civic engagement means working to make a difference in the civic life of our communities and developing the combination of knowledge, skills, values, and motivation to make that difference. It means promoting the quality of life in a community, through both political and non-political processes.20
A person involved in civic engagement is described as follows:
A morally and civically responsible individual recognizes himself or herself as a member of a larger social fabric and therefore considers social problems to be at least partly his or her own; such an individual is willing to see the moral and civic dimensions of issues, to make and justify informed moral and civic judgments, and to take action when appropriate.21
These concepts encompass how officers should view their role and approach the profession of policing. The qualities of confidence, competence, creativity, and compassion are essential for good policing, but these qualities do not develop in a vacuum. The profession of policing requires a commitment to life-long learning; it requires continued personal development through training and exposure to new ideas and ways of thinking. It is a process of incrementally improving and evolving every day. It takes a culture of discipline that is not often witnessed in policing supervision or agencies. A police officer should have the personal discipline to continue in academic pursuits; be physically fit; maintain proficiency in hand-to-hand, less-lethal, and lethal means of achieving societal goals; and expose oneself to different viewpoints in order to better understand and develop empathy for others.
“Developing officers into civic leaders … is an investment that law enforcement leadership must embrace.”
The exposure to other viewpoints is critical. More specifically, the ability to understand other perspectives is critical. One need not agree with a different perspective but should understand the foundation of another person’s beliefs precisely because beliefs drive decision-making and resultant behaviors. As an example, the issue of race and policing is a recurrent societal issue that should be understood by officers—and officers need to be open to this conversation. An officer who approaches policing as a civic leader would both understand and embrace efforts at understanding others’ beliefs or perspectives.
One of the most impactful presentations that the author has experienced was the Groundwater Approach to understanding systemic inequities given by the Racial Equity Institute. The information provided at this training powerfully illustrated disparate outcomes experienced across many systems (criminal justice, education, health care, employment, and more) by Blacks in the United States. The training was particularly meaningful because the instructor presented social science research in an academic and educational way, and she was welcoming to participants from all walks of life, including a police officer. It created an environment where the information could be heard, allowing a paradigm shift for understanding the scope of racial inequalities.
This is an example of the nature of the type of education and the commitment to personal development that is at the heart of civic engagement. Note, this approach has a basis in behavioral science—critical, accusatory, aggressive, and demeaning delivery is counterproductive, often eliciting a rejection of both the message and the messenger.22 Recent implicit bias training conducted in Central Virginia for police officers and described below illustrates this point. Although evidence suggests that implicit bias training designed to change implicit measures does not result in behavioral changes, this type of training is often undertaken to “check a box.”23 The real value lies in introducing the concepts of heuristic-based association and decision-making, which are important starting points for self-reflection and behavior analysis.
However, this training was largely panned by officers of every demographic because of the delivery. Two of the trainers were specifically mentioned as demonstrating a remarkably negative bias toward police officers and were condescending and argumentative, an irony that did not go unrecognized. As such, officers, who were mandated to be there, left feeling attacked and angry, discarding any potential value from the training. Exposure to new ideas requires the proper approach and is essential to the healthy development of a police officer. Much like warrior training, exposure to new ideas must be realistic (evidence based), decision-centric (exploring the foundations of officer beliefs/behaviors), and frequent (not merely as the result of a catastrophic event). Most importantly, to be impactful, the training must be delivered in a way that the message is received and considered by the intended audience
To this end, for policing to evolve and for police officers to perform at a level expected by the public, more money and effort need to be invested in police officer education and training in order to mitigate poor outcomes and to develop officers as community assets with a community focus. Police leaders should embrace the notion that officers are civic leaders whose goals are to ensure safety and improve the quality of life for all people in their jurisdiction.
This model of civic leader is simple; it provides guidance and, most importantly, defines the officer’s role holistically. Associated with the civic leader designation is the expectation that officers know their role in the community and do only those things that are consistent with that role. To that end, many of the current functions of policing would be better directed to other social service disciplines. This is a position that officers should champion, not resist. The civic leader will know which resources would best address both immediate and long-term problems in the community and coordinate with an interdisciplinary team to achieve desired outcomes by obtaining those resources.
To fill the role of civic leader, officers must work to become part of the community fabric and be motivated to respect community values while obtaining the knowledge and skills necessary to promote a better quality of life in their community, including legitimate law enforcement action when appropriate. Legitimate appropriate actions that there is an actual safety or quality of life issue being addressed that merits the intervention and potential use of violence for achieving that goal. Otherwise, a different intervention should be initiated. The models of warrior or guardian stops at safety and crime prevention while the civic leader model uses them as a starting point, and promotes innovation for officers to be more than just enforcers. Officers who know when to engage in a formal or informal capacity and when to step back are civic leaders, and their daily decisions and behaviors will have a lasting impact on the community.
A mature, well-educated, well-trained officer, who applies a civic leader approach to policing more consistently provides positive outcomes—outcomes expected and accepted by the broader community. This is what community policing is and should be. It is not a program, a unit, or occasional event. It is the immersion into a neighborhood by an officer with a unique skill set and commitment to helping others. Developing officers into civic leaders will cost agencies time, money, and human resources. Nonetheless, this is an investment that law enforcement leadership must embrace. It is past time to move on from discussing the role of policing as simply a choice between a warrior or guardian and to embrace policing reform that creates confident, competent, creative, and compassionate officers who are given the skills and support to be effective civic leaders in their jurisdictions. d
Notes:
1Paul Taylor, personal communication, 2020.
2Sun Tzu, The Art of War (Oxford University Press, 1963), 77.
3Gregory S. Anderson et al., “The Impact of Acute Stress Physiology on Skilled Motor Performance: Implications for Policing,” Frontiers in Psychology 10 (November 2019); Grant S. Shields, Matthew A. Sazma, and Andrew P. Yonelinas, “The Effects of Acute Stress on Core Executive Functions: A Meta-Analysis and Comparison with Cortisol,” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 68 (September 2015): 651–668.
4James Reason, The Human Contribution: Unsafe Acts, Accidents and Heroic Recoveries (New York, NY: Routledge, 2016).
5Alexander Ahammer, Mario Lackner, and Jasmin Voigt, “Does Confidence Enhance Performance? Causal Evidence from the Field,” Managerial and Decision Economics 40, no. 3 (July 2019): 704–717; Tim Woodman and Lew Hardy, “The Relative Impact of Cognitive Anxiety and Self-Confidence upon Sport Performance: A Meta-Analysis,” Journal of Sports Sciences 21, no. 6 (June 2003): 443–457.
6Sarita Robinson and Nikola Bridges, “Survival—Mind and Brain,” The Psychologist 24, no. 1 (January 2011).
7William P. Bozeman et al., “Injuries Associated with Police Use of Force,” Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery 84, no. 3 (March 2018): 466–472. https://doi.org/10.1097/TA.0000000000001783
8Elizabeth Davis, Anthony Whyde, and Lynn Langton, Contacts between Police and the Public, 2015 (Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2018).
9Joseph Wertz et al., “A Typology of Civilians Shot and Killed by US Police: A Latent Class Analysis of Firearm Legal Intervention Homicide in the 2014–2015 National Violent Death Reporting System,” Journal of Urban Health 97, no. 3 (June 2020): 317–328.
10Richard R. Johnson, Dispelling the Myths Surrounding Police Use of Lethal Force (Raleigh, NC: Dolan Consulting Group, 2019), 5.
11Anthony J. Pinizzotto et al., “Law Enforcement Restraint in the Use of Deadly Force within the Context of ‘the Deadly Mix,’” International Journal of Police Science & Management 14, no. 4 (December 2012): 295.
12Nate Kornell, “The Heuristic That Caused the Ebola Panic of 2014,” Psychology Today (blog), December 6, 2015.
13Timothy J. Andrews et al., “Neural Correlates of Group Bias During Natural Viewing,” Cerebral Cortex 29, no. 8 (August 2019): 3380–3389.
14Y. Jenny Xiao, Géraldine Coppin, and Jay J. Van Bavel, “Perceiving the World through Group-Colored Glasses: A Perceptual Model of Intergroup Relations,” Psychological Inquiry 27, no. 4 (2016): 255–274.
15Cheryl Corley, “Police Settlements: How the Cost of Misconduct Impacts Cities and Taxpayers,” America Reckons with Racial Injustice, NPR, September 19, 2020.
16Erik Hollnagel, The ETTO Principle: Efficiency-Thoroughness Trade-Off: Why Things That Go Right Sometimes Go Wrong (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2009); Bozeman et al., “Injuries Associated with Police Use of Force.”
17Plato, Republic, trans. C.D.C. Reeve (Indianpolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2004), 76.
18Plato, Republic, 76.
19James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner, The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations, 5th ed. (San Francisco, CA: Jossel-Bass, 2012).
20Thomas Ehrlich, Civic Responsibility and Higher Education (Westport, CT: American Council on Education and Oryx Press, 2000), vi.
21Thomas Ehrlich, Civic Responsibility and Higher Education, xxvi.
22Maddy Greville-Harris et al., “The Power of Invalidating Communication: Receiving Invalidating Feedback Predicts Threat-Related Emotional, Physiological, and Social Responses,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 35, no. 6 (2016): 471–493; J. Lukas Thürmer and Sean M. McCrea, “Beyond Motivated Reasoning: Hostile Reactions to Critical Comments from the Outgroup,” Motivation Science 4, no. 4 (2018): 333–346.
23Patrick S. Forscher et al., “A Meta-Analysis of Procedures to Change Implicit Measures,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 117, no. 3 (September 2019): 522–559.
Please cite as
Brian O’Donnell, “Police Officers as Civic Leaders: Reframe, Reform, and Fund,” Police Chief Online, January 11, 2023.
