B_Melekian

Bernard Melekian:
Hello, this is Bernard Melekian.  Thank you for listening to the podcast which is brought to you by the U.S. Department of Justice Community Oriented Policing Services 
Office.  We’re committed to bring safety to America’s communities through the advancement of community policing, and this podcast is an effort to keep you informed on 
the latest trends and thoughts within our profession.

I want to talk today about the notion of values-based policing, a concept that has been discussed and tossed around for the last three or four years and I think is 
now starting to find some shape and some cohesion in a way that will start to make a real operational difference in the police departments and sheriff’s departments 
across this country.

I’ve been in this business for a long time, 36-plus years, and in that time I have watched this profession evolve from the professional model, the arms-length, Jack Webb,
“just the facts,” into what I came to call the community relations model which the idea was that we were at least to assign a few officers to dress up as McGruff the Dog 
or some other similar device and go out and put a nice face on the police department while the fundamental aspects of our business changed very little.  

Beginning in 1984 with the publication by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling of their work, “Broken Windows” theory, began the concept of community policing:  the idea 
that the police department needed to work in partnership with the community it served, that it needed to base its actions and responses to those community concerns in 
a way that was acceptable to the community and not simply define it for that community as the professional model would have dictated.

However, that movement has really met, in some degree, with limited success.  While it has clearly changed American policing dramatically and for the better, it has 
probably not hit the level of cooperation and connection that I think many of us anticipated at the time that it began to evolve.  You know, the reality is you only 
need to watch a community’s reaction to one officer involved shooting and how it can seemingly undo multiple years of hard work and outreach to realize that there needs 
to be another step.  We need to go to one more level and some of us have come to call that process values-based policing.

One of the paradoxes of this profession is that we have -- since the advent of community policing -- talked about the fact that officers needed to go out and greet the 
public in certain ways, applying certain values: dignity and respect and adherence to justice and those kinds of things.  But the reality of our internal processes in 
most police departments is that they do not reflect those values.  That is to say that the officers are not treated in that fashion.  All too often, the internal 
administrative processes, particularly the discipline process, very closely resembles a criminal investigation.  The officer’s entitled to representation.  There is a 
procedural format that must be followed.  There’s an appeals process.  There is a hearing process.  It looks, for all the world, like a trial.  And at the end of that
 time, very often the public is not satisfied with the outcome to the degree that the public even knows about the outcome, and the officer’s never satisfied with the 
outcome because it appears, regardless of what happens, it appears as though they’ve been accursed and are treated like a suspect.

Professor Tom Tyler from New York University has done some outstanding work in an area that he has come to call procedural justice.  And in very compact terms, what 
procedural justice suggests is that in any interaction between the police and the public, in any interaction between line officers and their supervisors, it is the 
quality of the interaction and not the outcome of the interaction that determines how everyone will leave, evaluating what just happened.  In other words, if the 
officer or -- if the officer in the case of dealing with a supervisor or a member of the public in dealing with that officer has a sense that there were principles 
of fairness and equity applied, that there was active listening involved, it may not matter at the end of the day what actually comes out of that outcome.  

Those of us that have been in this business for more than about 15 minutes are well-aware of the concept of selling a traffic ticket, for example.  The idea that you 
can stop someone for a traffic violation, you can have an interaction, you can issue a citation and the violator will still leave feeling as though it was a positive
 transaction.  Probably 30 years ago, Southwest Airlines did a study in which they found a direct correlation between how their ticket agents treated the public and
 how those ticket agents were treated by their immediate supervisors.  

The concepts of procedural justice and of values-based policing suggest that we need to look to the quality of our interactions and how our officers are treated, and 
we need to hold everyone accountable to the department’s stated values as much as we focus on the rules and regulations.

Again, this is Bernard Melekian, the director of the COPS Office, and I want to thank you very much for listening.

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Adayana: B_Melekian	1	3/30/10