Recent events have focused attention on police reform and led to public demands to “rethink” how police services are provided. The enormous amount of attention focused on restraint techniques, qualified immunity, de-escalation training, impartial policing, and social justice belies a fix to a more complex and interlocking reality for law enforcement administrators. Before police leaders can tackle the Goliath call for reform, they must first know what the community wants and expects from them and understand how those expectations align with the culture and practice of their organizations. There will not be a one-size-fits-all solution; rather, individual agencies will need to look inward and examine what is working, what is not working, and what is needed to meet their specific reform challenges.
The challenge is not in recognizing a need for reform, but how to implement effective changes to meet the policing challenges that exist today within the context of a specific organization.
Reform is inevitable and nothing new. The challenge is not in recognizing a need for reform, but how to implement effective changes to meet the policing challenges that exist today within the context of a specific organization. To complicate matters, there are distinct social, political, and cultural factors within each jurisdiction that challenge efforts for meaningful reform. Reform can be a daunting task if endeavored alone and all at once. It can also be daunting if the right questions are not being asked and answered.
However, what is clear is that communities demand police accountability, transparency, and inclusive engagement. They also expect their police to be agile and resilient enough to meet the demands and challenges of policing in the 21st century. These expectations have emerged as central themes in most conversations, and they point directly to professional responsibility as an organizational practice.
Much like community-oriented policing evolved as a strategic philosophy from innovation to institutionalization from the 1970s to today, police professional responsibility is an innovative strategy that must be woven within the fabric of an organization to bridge the public’s desire for reform with the ideals and nobility of policing as a profession. Police professional responsibility values actions anchored to the philosophical underpinnings of the organization, which are expressed in its mission, values, and culture. As such, police professional responsibility is an overarching strategy that is exercised daily in the actions of officers, supervisors, and agency leaders.
Police professional responsibility as an organizational practice challenges law enforcement leaders to look inward to understand the mind, body, and spirit of the organization.
Embracing police professional responsibility as an organizational practice is much like putting on a pair of glasses to examine something through a different lens. Through one lens, community policing challenged police to look outward to build partnerships with the community and work together as co-producers of police services. It challenged the traditional policing model and created interest in policing alternatives. Through another lens, police professional responsibility as an organizational practice challenges law enforcement leaders to look inward to understand the mind, body, and spirit of the organization and apply that knowledge to create transformative change that truly represents “reform” or “innovation.” Five recommendations are offered herein to help law enforcement leaders understand the mind, body, and spirit of their organizations and help move their agencies toward a professional responsibility focus.
Recommendation 1: Examine the culture of the organization
From the perspectives of social-identity theory and self-categorization theory, police officers form an attachment to the social construct of being a police officer, which has demonstrated effects to one’s self-esteem, perceptions, behavior, and cognitive processes.1 For decades, officers have been indoctrinated in a warrior mindset and taught various techniques to ensure their safety and survival. They have been symbolized by themselves and the public as the “thin blue line,” which connotes their role in maintaining separation between criminal elements and society. However, there has been a shift in recent years to transform this ethos into a less authoritarian one in the hope of redirecting the culture of policing.
In 2015, criminologists Sue Rahr and Stephen Rice wrote an article that questioned the appropriateness of the “warrior” ethos and offered the “guardian” mindset as an alternative. They referred to the warrior mindset as a mental attitude characterized in terms of power and control, driven by a deep commitment to survival. Conversely, they described the guardian mindset as a service-first commitment to policing that emphasizes relationship building, information sharing, the effective use of soft skills, and procedural justice as essential practices for 21st century policing.2 While noble in the distinction, the philosophies come into conflict when peaceful interactions become violent and officer safety and survival become a serious concern.
How valuable would it be to a police leader to understand where their officers, squads, teams, units, divisions, and overall department align in terms of aptitude or tendency toward either ethos? The answer is likely to be found at the individual level, which requires an assessment of the workforce at this level. Can such an assessment begin to inform police leaders about the culture of their organizations and shed light on potential conflicts between existing culture, the mission and values of the organization, and their alignments to 21st century policing values?
The simple fact is that culture matters. It drives how officers perform their daily duties. It subconsciously primes their actions while consciously motivating them. Adherence to either the warrior or guardian ethos is an oversimplification of an expectation. Regardless of what side of the debate one argues, the expectation should be a concept referred to as SM2aRTUR policing.
Recommendation 2: Teach and practice the SM2aRTUR policing concept
The SM2aRTUR acronym stands for self-management and skills mastery that is applied with reliable tactics and unconditional respect. In terms of performance, whether the officer is performing a traffic stop, immersed in a critical encounter, or standing on the front line of a protest, police leaders and the public expect officers to manage their emotions and demonstrate proficiency in the skills and tactics employed. They expect officers to use appropriate tactics that do not exceed their legal authority. Most important, they expect officers to treat everyone with unconditional respect.
Setting implicit and explicit biases aside, the expectation of leaders and the public is that officers treat others with empathy, restraint, and fairness regardless of any identified affiliation—to simply meet others where they are in the moments of their need or crisis. If officers are not performing their duties in alignment with these basic expectations, then the police leader must ask why and work to redirect officers toward meeting these expectations.
Recommendation 3: Supererogation of duty and obligation
Duty and obligation must be distinguished and understood for there to be supererogation of police professional responsibility. While “duty” defines the tasks a police officer and/or police agency are required to perform, “obligation” encompasses a moral commitment to exercising those tasks. Supererogation seeks an action beyond that which is minimally accepted.3
The International Association of Chiefs of Police has published on its website a Law Enforcement Code of Ethics in which the first line states,
As a law enforcement officer, my fundamental duty is to serve the community; to safeguard lives and property; to protect the innocent against deception, the weak against oppression or intimidation, and the peaceful against violence or disorder; and to respect the constitutional rights of all to liberty, equality, and justice.4
This passage and others like it define the fundamental duties of a police officer. Obligation, however, is defined by the way these fundamental duties are performed. Some would argue that the essence of duty and obligation have been lost among police officers and agencies.
Walk into any police department, and there is likely to be the mission statement and core values that direct the organization’s duties and obligations to the community prominently displayed. Problems arise when the mission and core values of the agency come into conflict with or are diluted by current social, political, or cultural antagonists. The challenge for the law enforcement leader is knowing how officers embody and demonstrate the mission and core values of the organization as they perform their daily tasks. An assessment of this begins with knowing how officers and the community define duty and obligation within the context of policing and how they each define what is minimally acceptable performance to “service beyond the call of duty.” This is an important step because an agency cannot move toward supererogation of police professional responsibility without first knowing what is minimally accepted in terms of duty and obligation from both the officer and the greater community. Therefore, community involvement and officer engagement are critically important to the conversation and to the sustained movement by an organization to police professional responsibility as a practice.
Recommendation 4: Assess the emotional intelligence of the organization
There is a tendency for people to act in every emotion, be it fear, anger, love, happiness, surprise, or sadness.5 As emotions intensify, they exert an increased influence on behavior. Intense emotions can thus overwhelm cognitive processing and deliberate decision-making, often causing those who experience the intense emotion to feel as though they are “out of control.”6 The resulting outcome is referred in science literature as “amygdala hijacking,” which has evolved into the contemporary term “emotional hijacking.”7 Emotional hijacking typically manifests in policing during critical and dangerous situations like violent police-public encounters, vehicle pursuits, or environmental crises. Actions associated with emotional hijacking can take place in an instant, and disturbing past events, acute stress, or displaced anger can trigger an emotionally driven response.8
Training officers to recognize, understand, and regulate intense emotions while deliberately considering alternative actions will likely lead to more desired outcomes.
Researchers Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer defined the term “emotional intelligence” (EQ) to represent a noncognitive aspect of intelligence involving “the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions.”9 The primary competencies of EQ are emotion regulation and metacognition. Emotion regulation refers to how one influences his or her emotions when experiencing them and how those emotions are ultimately expressed.10 Metacognition refers to control, modification, and interpretation of worrying thoughts.11 The law enforcement objective, as it relates to the EQ of officers, is identification, awareness, education, and demonstration. Training officers to recognize, understand, and regulate intense emotions while deliberately considering alternative actions will likely lead to more desired outcomes.
However, before moving in this direction, police leaders must first understand the EQ of their organizations. Valid and reliable assessments have been used extensively in research to examine relationships between EQ and physical health, psychological health, social interaction, and performance at work and in school, as well EQ’s potential as a predictive measure of human performance.12 Businesses all over the world are using these assessments as a function of their hiring and retention practices to identify, strengthen, or develop emotional competencies within their workforce to meet their organizational objectives.13 Police leaders should consider using EQ assessments as a function of monitoring staff for significant changes in their emotional health and well-being. As leaders continue to explore ways to address the health and wellness of their officers, they must become more proactive in identifying when a potential problem exists. If police agencies are to have a robust early warning system, they must have quality data with multiple points of reference to properly evaluate what is being triggered and why it is being triggered and to diagnose next steps for a “red flag” notification.
Recommendation 5: Develop robust policies, standardization, and evaluation practices
Policies are created for internal use to guide the organization’s workforce toward the execution of accepted practices in areas of interest or concern to the organization. Most of these policies do not carry the force of the law, but rather serve as guidance documents to be followed.14 A problem arises when these documents do not conform to best practices or are too ambiguous to provide acceptable guidance. Unfortunately, many police agencies suffer from poor policy development and are in a high liability or risk position because of them. Key considerations should be addressed in any policy development. Are there applicable laws or regulations that need to be highlighted and are there specific plans or actions that need to be undertaken to achieve the goals of the organization? Although policy formation can be a complex process, sound research evidence should serve as the starting point for policy solutions. However, is this the actual case?
As an example, take any police agency’s use-of-force policy and ask five important questions:
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- Does the policy align with state law?
- Does the policy align with current best practices in the field?
- Do the officers follow the policy to the letter?
- How often does the agency train officers in this policy beyond readings and Q&A?
- How often are the practices evaluated?
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Most use-of-force policies align with state law, but are they continually updated with best practices that are broadly accepted? The answer is no. Look no further than the lateral vascular neck restraint (LVNR) technique. A once-accepted technique to control combative individuals was, until recently, permitted by some agencies but banned by others. Inconsistencies in best practices are found throughout policing. There are additional concerns and questions with how closely officers follow their organization’s use-of-force policy, how often they train on the policy, and how often they are evaluated on their use-of-force decision-making, technique proficiency, and applied skills with the tools available, to include hand-to-hand engagement and verbal de-escalation.
Police policies should be based on the best available research and evidence, but the police profession is not researched to the depth and breadth of other public safety and public health professions. The evidence that supports policy development may also vary from region to region and jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and the issues effecting policy change or development also vary and change over time. The common practice for many agency leaders is to examine related policy mechanisms from other agencies and tailor them to meet the needs of their organizations. This is not a bad approach in terms of standardization, but it is not ideal either. While there are best practices to follow, there is little policy standardization in many high-risk areas. There is also little evaluation to refine implementation, monitor effectiveness, and inform necessary change at the organizational level.
Without robust evaluation practices, agency leaders are looking through obscured lenses, which affects their ability to move quickly and easily when problems surface. There is a big difference in being agile and being subject to “knee-jerk” decision-making. Being agile is being continuously informed through evidence-based findings and using that knowledge to lead short-term and long-term improvements. The other involves bending to internal or external pressure, relying on a “gut” feeling, or implementing change merely because others are doing it.
Conclusion
Implementing police professional responsibility as a practice begins with understanding the mind, body, and spirit of an organization. Police professional responsibility as a focus does not address all reform challenges, but it demonstrates the heart of the organization to those looking in and offers guidance to those officers and supervisors representing the body of the organization and nobility of the profession.
Notes:
1 Michael A. Hogg and Scott A. Reid, “Social Identity, Self-Categorization, and the Communication of Group Norms,” Communication Theory 16, no. 1 (2006): 7–30; Leonie Huddy and Nadia Khatib, “American Patriotism, National Identity, and Political Involvement,” American Journal of Political Science 51, no. 1 (2007): 63–77.
2] Sue Rahr and Stephen Rice, “From Warriors to Guardians: Recommitting American Police Culture to Democratic Ideals,” New Perspectives in Policing (April 2015).
3 Mitch Javidi, “Impartial Policing” (course curriculum presented at Wake Technical Community College, National Command & Staff College, 2020).
4 International Association of Chiefs of Police, “Law Enforcement Code of Ethics,” September 2, 2020.
5 Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1995).
6 George Loewenstein and Jennifer S. Lerner, “The Role of Affect in Decision Making,” in Handbook of Affective Sciences (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2003), 619–642.
7 Goleman, “Emotional Intelligence; Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (New York, NY: Touchstone, 1996).
8 Kevin M. Gilmartin, Emotional Survival for Law Enforcement: A Guide for Officers and Their Families (Tucson, AZ: E-S Press, 2002).
9 Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer, “Emotional Intelligence,” Imagination, Cognition, and Personality 9, no. 3 (March 1990): 189.
10 James J. Gross and Oliver P. John, “Individual Differences in Two Emotion Regulation Processes: Implications for Affect, Relationships, and Well-Being,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85, no. 2 (2003): 348–362.
11 Sam Cartwright-Hatton and Adrian Wells, “Beliefs About Worry and Intrusions: The Meta-Cognitions Questionnaire and Its Correlates,” Journal of Anxiety Disorders 11, no. 3 (1997): 279–296.
12 Reuven Bar-On, “The Bar-On Model of Emotional-Social Intelligence (ESI),” Psicothema 17 Suppl. (2006): 13–25.
13 Laura Thi Lam and Susan L. Kirby, “Is Emotional Intelligence an Advantage? An Exploration of the Impact of Emotional and General Intelligence on Individual Performance,” The Journal of Social Psychology 142, no. 1 (2002): 133–143; Kerry S. Webb, “Why Emotional Intelligence Should Matter to Management: A Survey of the Literature,” SAM Advanced Management Journal 74, no. 2 (2009): 32–41.
14 Keshia M. Pollack-Porter, Lainie Rutkow, and Emma E. McGinty, “The Importance of Policy Change for Addressing Public Health Problems,” Public Health Reports 133, no. 1 Suppl. (November 2018): 9S–14S.
Please cite as
Eric Preddy and Patrice Andrews, “Police Professional Responsibility as an Organizational Practice,” Police Chief Online, January 20, 2021.
