Background

The 10 stages of genocide, according to genocide scholar Gregory Stanton

Through education, training, and technical assistance, the Auschwitz Institute for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities (AIPG) serves to honor the memory of the victims of the Holocaust by supporting states to develop and strengthen mechanisms for the prevention of genocide and mass atrocities. Its mission, “to build a world that prevents genocide and other mass atrocities,” is rooted in the history of Auschwitz and its meaning for our contemporary world. Since its first program launched in 2008, the Auschwitz Institute’s work has spread across the globe to over 92 countries, and back around to our very own.

Often the words “genocide” and “mass atrocities” elicit the horrific images of piles of dead bodies. The Auschwitz Institute, however, looks at atrocities as multi-step processes that begin with the classification of people based on their social identities, such as race, religion, ethnicity, etc., and the social exclusion of groups based on these differences. After this, there are several other stages—like institutionalized discrimination and dehumanization—that societies experience before an atrocity reaches the stage of killing operations. AIPG looks at each of these steps as an opportunity for intervention that can prevent genocide and other mass atrocities from happening.

Risk factors for mass atrocities exist in every society around the world to varying degrees, including in the "United States". The Auschwitz Institute adopts the perspective that in each place where there exists the opportunity to do bad, there also exists the opportunity to do good. Therefore, as the national conversation around policing continues to remain polarized and often frustrating for police officers, AIPG aims to take the narrative that “police commit civil and human rights abuses” and change it to “police have the power to promote and protect civil and human rights.”

REPAIR, which stands for Redefining Policing to Affirm and Instill Human Rights, is a training program designed specifically for U.S. law enforcement with the goal of equipping law enforcement partners with the tools they need to detect relevant risk factors in their own communities and agencies and prevent civil and human rights abuses and the escalation of conflict before it happens.

REPAIR started as in-person annual seminar for police leaders from around the United States in 2017. The seminar was co-sponsored by the National Center for Civil and Human Rights (the Center) and the FBI’s Civil Rights Division. The seminar took place annually in 2017, 2018, and 2019. In 2020, after the murder of George Floyd and the intensification of the national conversation on policing, the program’s law enforcement partners from the seminar saw a growing need for the program and encouraged AIPG and the Center to do more.

Group picture of in-person seminar participants at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights

The ensuing desire to expand its reach and the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic led AIPG to revamp its delivery of the educational content of the training program into an asynchronous online course. The curriculum was developed from the in-person seminars and then adapted to meet the challenges that 2020 presented. AIPG elicited the assistance of national leaders in the conversation around police reform, including Charles Ramsey, Cedric Alexander, Kathrine O’Toole, Edgardo Garcia, and many others, to shape the curriculum of the online course.

In the three years since then, REPAIR has grown from one online course into a multi-component program. To date, AIPG has worked with more than 33 departments, and more than 1,400 successful officers have graduated from the program. AIPG is now in conversation with every major metro police department to bring the program to their agency.

Components

The first and primary component of the REPAIR program is the REPAIR Leadership course. This course consists of a 24-hour curriculum delivered over the span of six weeks. Each week is an asynchronous, distinct, and detailed module involving reading assignments, interactive and reflective exercises, and discussion components. The course material accommodates different learning styles, presenting information with the use of visual, auditory, and written aids.

Although the course is asynchronous and does not require participants to be on the platform at the same time, it is designed so that students are moving through the material at a shared pace, learning each section’s content over the same one-week period. This serves to maximize participant engagement with peers and with the course instructor in order to create a robust learning environment with a vibrant exchange of ideas, solutions, and best practices. The highlight of the course is the discussion forums, which encourage participants of all ranks to share and exchange concrete ideas for change they can create in their departments, bureaus, and units. The conversations are facilitated actively by instructors, who provide personalized feedback to every participant. The result is an average course completion rate of 86 percent, whereas typical statistics for online course completion rates average around 15 percent or less.

The six modules cover the following topics:

1. Social Identity and Deeply Divided Societies–ingroup bias, identity-based violence, and social divisions
2. President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing–training and education, community policing, and officer wellness and safety
3. Challenges in Community Policing–Implicit Bias, policing in traumatized communities, and trauma among police officer and officer wellness
4. Impact of Policing Structures on Policing Behavior–history of policing, psychology of misconduct
5. Citizen Review Boards and Case Studies in Police Reform
6. Active Bystandership and the Duty to Intervene

An image from a recent train-the-trainer session with the Fulton County (Georgia) Sheriff’s Office that took place at their local civil and human rights museum, The National Center for Civil and Human Rights

The second component of the REPAIR program is a train-the-trainer session. After a department’s leadership has been trained online, AIPG conducts a one-day training to certify a selection of leaders or the agency’s training department as in-house instructors of the REPAIR curriculum. The train-the-trainer session provides trainers with the curriculum and focuses on teaching methods and pedagogy, how to navigate difficult conversations, and whatever else trainers might need to customize the REPAIR training to the history and community of their agencies. For example, an important part of AIPG’s theory of change is using the power of place—organizing programs in spaces that are relevant for the consequences of atrocities or for their prevention—which is why its flagship Global Raphael Lemkin Seminar takes place at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland. As a part of its efforts to assist agencies in customizing the REPAIR program to their local communities and histories, AIPG helps departments design the training to incorporate a place that is historically relevant in their communities. The trainers then use all those resources to train the agencies’ rank-and-file officers in-house.

The final component of the REPAIR program is an additional online course. The Trauma-Informed Policing intensive online course for leadership and line officers is a three-week, 12-hour curriculum. Trauma-Informed Policing is one of the five priorities for police reform determined by the Council on Criminal Justice’s Task Force on Policing; it aims to promote a trauma-informed approach to policing that will enhance officer wellness as well as community relations.

Lessons Learned

The most significant challenge that AIPG has needed to address is navigating resistance. In a tense political climate, where the conversation around “reform” has become a touchy subject, many officers approach training on cultural change with wariness of criticism. AIPG has found that, even when the executive leadership of a police department considers the REPAIR program to be a valuable addition to their agency, without active leadership buy-in and departmental investment, no matter how significant the material might be or how well the AIPG instructors deliver it, there can be a lack of interest and participation.

To ensure the best possible outcome, AIPG has made a few changes. The first was the creation of the train-the-trainer session. AIPG found that, for rank-and-file officers in particular, the training was better delivered in-house by their own leadership rather than through the external platform of an outside agency. The train-the-trainer model also allows for the co-creation of materials that localize the curriculum and make it more relevant to officers and their daily work.

The second change was to increase the focus on internal communication and messaging. AIPG encourages departments to start by having their executive and most influential leadership take the course for themselves first, and then to communicate the reason their agency needs it to the staff they supervise. Clear chains of communication allow for all the officers in a department to build the same vocabulary and become partners in the change needed and initiated by their supervisory staff.

Through a combination of asynchronous online and in-person components, the REPAIR program is set apart from other law enforcement training programs by its focus on instilling the values of the promotion and protection of civil and human rights. While other training programs may cover some similar topics such as implicit bias and the duty to intervene, the REPAIR program teaches participants to tie each component back to these essential values. By tailoring its teaching pedagogy to the different ranks within a police department, it works to make each and every officer an agent of change capable of creating a crucial and enduring impact in the culture of the department.

Duaa Randhawa, MPS
Program Coordinator, REPAIR/Program Associate
Research Development and Online Education
Auschwitz Institute for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities

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