Procedural Justice: Organizational Change August 2013 Voiceover: Beat Intro 00:00 This is the Beat—a podcast series that keeps you in the know about the latest community policing topics facing our nation. Debra McCullough 00:08 Hello. This is Debra McCullough with the COPS Office. With us today is Commissioner Robert Haas and Deputy Superintendent Christine Elow from Cambridge, Massachusetts. They are here to discuss organizational changes in police departments that can not only influence the internal structure of policing but can increase community interactions and compliance with the law. They offer procedural justice as a framework for these changes. Commissioner Haas and Deputy Superintendent Elow, welcome. Commissioner Robert Haas 00:42 Welcome, Dr. McCullough. Deputy Superintendent Christine Elow 00:44 Hi, thank you for having us. Debra 00:46 Now, there has long been a disconnect between how police personnel are treated within their organization and how officers are expected to treat the public. If we consider the underlying construct of procedural justice, can or even should that paradigm exist? Christine 01:06 I think that if we expect our officers to treat the public in a legitimate, procedural justice way, we really need to model that behavior internally. From my experience, there’s a lot of either poor communication about disciplinary action that comes down, or non-communication where we’re just not explaining to officers what was done and why it was done. What happens is that officers tend to make up or fill in the blanks about what they don’t know, which I think reflects negatively on the administration. The more we’re communicating with officers about decisions that were made with discipline, the less likely it is that officers are going to walk away filling in the blanks. In my experience, we’re making some really good decisions. I just think we could do a better job communicating those decisions down through the ranks. Robert 01:58 Just following up with what Deputy Elow had to say. A lot of what we’ve done in police tradition has been rule based. Oftentimes imposing rules, enforcing rules, expecting the public to adhere to rules. Oftentimes they don’t understand or they don’t see the rationale for it. Internally in a police organization we do exactly the same thing in terms of our display codes and how we treat members of the police department—very rule-laden in terms of you do this, this, and this. Really I think what we’ve learned through this whole process is that the process itself is so much more important than the outcome. People understanding why things are happening, the reasons things are happening, and I get it. Internally, I think, when they understand what we’re trying to accomplish and what their role and mission is, and we model the kind of behavior we want them to exhibit out in the street, I think there has to be a natural correlation in terms of what takes place internally within our organization and also that we expect to see that in terms of how our officers behave towards the public. It’s no wonder when officers are subject to a series of rules and are basically disciplined predicated on those rules that you then turn around and find out that they go out on the street and when they’re enforcing traffic laws, they’re enforcing laws, especially where they have a lot of discretion, they tend to lean towards the enforcement of the rule, not looking at the overall mission, what they’re trying to accomplish, and figure out what the best course of action is. I think the greater latitude we give our officers in terms of having the ability to ask questions, understand the process, and then have them replicate that kind of behavior on the street is key to how an organization survives. I don’t know how you could have the organization have one set of values or way of doing something and then say to its employees, “By the way, we don’t want you to behave that way out on the street.” It has to be the same internally as it is externally within the organization. Debra 03:37 Absent a triggering crisis or event, how then does a police department begin to change from this posture of legal authority to one that recognizes the values and importance of procedural justice, that sees procedural justice as a key cornerstone of the department’s underlying philosophy and practice? Christine 04:00 I really think this definitely needs to come from the top—again, modeling behaviors. We need to have policies and procedures that are in place. I think we should be having frequent conversations with our officers about the values and importance of procedural justice—informal conversations. They can occur at roll call, we can bring up different scenarios that have happened on the street—not necessarily singling out one officer, but talk about “This is what happened, what do you think about that?”—again, bringing in the importance of procedural justice. We could do debriefs, after a complaint that happens. I understand that that is reactive, but we also do recruit training here, in- service training. I think this is a constant communication that has to take place, formally and informally. Robert 04:46 I think we experiment a lot. And it really has a lot to do with Deputy Elow when she was in her professional standards unit—the whole experimentation around mediation. Rather than simply taking a complaint; doing an investigation and either clearing the officer at the end or finding the officer responsible…we’re now engaging more and more often where—especially when it’s not a serious offense—but where the complainant comes in and has an opportunity to talk to the officer, has an opportunity to have a voice and explain to the officer how they were made to feel and what the encounter felt like to them. And the officer in greater detail explains to them what they were trying to accomplish. More times than not we’re finding officers—that that’s the miscommunication that takes place out on the street. We also believe that because it’s in that kind of threshold, or that kind of form, that officers get much more in terms of learning from their past behaviors when they have the opportunity to sit and listen to how people react to their response and how they were treated out on the street. So I think that’s all critical. I know Deputy Elow has a great deal of experience in terms of what we started to do—procedural justice training here in the department—and her experiences with other departments as we grow it outside of the agency, and I think will be helpful for her to just briefly describe what that reaction was when we did it here. Also the correlation we’re finding between very diverse community and more homogeneous communities, and there’s a correlation I think in that realm as well. Christine 05:57 I totally agree, and I think that I have to start by saying quickly that we’ve had policies and procedures in place that talk about procedural justice and bias policing that I believe have been modeled from the top down for a number of years. So when I did bring up procedural justice and legitimacy in training, officers were sharing stories after stories after story about ways that they were already practicing this out on the street. Which is very different from when I went out to a regional police in-service academy—where I don’t believe that they had policies and procedures in place, and they were actually shocked that we had a bias policing policy that required officers to introduce themselves, tell the reason for the stop. That we actively went out to people who we’ve had interactions with and did assessment surveys on quality of interactions with officers. People just could not believe that this is the kind of service that we had in Cambridge. They actually accused us of soliciting complaints against officers when we tried to get feedback on how we could better do business. Robert 06:56 I think if you look at it, there’s a clear paradigm that’s evolving out of policing, and I think the future direction of policing. When you’ve basically always been predicated upon a legal enforcement, a legal authority as being the basis for policing, I think we’re now moving into this procedural form or legitimacy form where we really derive our greatest power is from the community—believing in what we’re doing, supporting what we’re doing, and have a belief that we’re doing things for the right and proper reason. I think that’s the direction we’re heading: respect to policing. The more you rely on the legitimate authority that you gain from the community, the less need you have for the legal authority that’s been granted to you by statute and by official authorities. And I think that’s kind of a good barometer in terms of measuring that balance, in terms of which way is that scale tilting to. If it’s tilting too far on the legal side of things, then I think that just basically speaks to the fact that you’re going to have a lot of communities feeling oppressed, and members of the community feeling that they’re the target of policing, as opposed to members feeling as if it’s heavily leaning on the legitimate side—that the police really are interested in what happens in the community, have a legitimate interest in terms of making sure that we provide for a quality of life in the community. So I think you see that correlation quite a bit in terms of how that scale balances out. I think that’s a good way to kind of look at it, in terms of two distinct paradigms, in terms of where policing is coming from and hopefully where we’re headed towards. Debra 08:17 It seems that there is a correlation between relying heavily on a police department’s legal authority and a sense of mistrust and reluctance to cooperate with the police among neighborhoods that may be marginalized or disenfranchised from the larger community. Is this correlation then, supported by what you’ve seen in the fields? Christine 08:41 I think that there is a distrust in some of the disenfranchised neighborhoods. At least in our community, some of our disenfranchised neighborhoods are disproportionately poor people and people of color that carry a deep-seated distrust of the police. I think from the commissioner’s point it’s really important for us to be engaged with all the different communities and understanding what particular communities need—what they want from their police. So that when we’re going in there, we’re enforcing laws, we’re enforcing things that are important to the community—that they understand what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, that they’re on the same page with us. So we need to have community meetings, we need to be talking to community members, finding out what’s important, finding out the issues, finding out if we need to go in and do particular enforcement for a particular reason—that they understand what that’s going to look like. So I believe that deep-seated distrust, and I think there’s a lot that we can do through community engagement to break some of those barriers down. Robert 09:42 There’s a couple of challenges that I think emerge in policing, and I think we can see evidence of both of those here in the city of Cambridge. We have a very large migrant population that comes from a variety of different places, and a lot of them—their first home here in the U.S. is in the city of Cambridge—and they’re not used to the same type of treatment by the government and by law enforcement officials. So our challenge, quite honestly, is getting them to understand that what they may have experienced in other places does not exist here, and I think that’s an ongoing process. As Christine indicated earlier, our population changes—our core of our population changes every 4 to 5 years, so it’s always an ongoing dynamic process. I think the other piece—and I think that’s where we’re starting to see some of the issues around the dissent decrees that are coming out—that you have large communities that see a smaller portion of the communities being not part of the greater community, and look at the police as being the enforcement tool, the enforcement arm of that community. A lot of times the police are acting on behalf of the larger community and when a dissent decree comes into place then there’s this question “Why are we in the soup?” or “Why are we in trouble over this, when we don’t see anything wrong?” And again, it’s not just the police that are doing this on their own, but I think the police have be very guarded in terms of understanding that all facets of the community need to feel that they’re getting equal treatment by the police force. We’ve had a lot of conversation in our community about where there are neighbors calling the police because they don’t like a neighbor, or for a variety of other reasons. Again, not falling into the trap of just responding and then reacting to the call, but really kind of assessing what’s going on and making sure the people understand why we’re there and making sure that we in fact are treating them fairly and impartially when we deal with them, or having any kind of encounter with them. I think that’s key, and I think that’s a greater challenge that a lot of police departments are facing now a days, in terms of being able to navigate through a very complex society that’s very diverse, and very different, and has different views, and also being assured that the entire community believes that the police department is acting on behalf of the entire community, and not just solely second to that community. Debra 11:39 Now, it would also seem that if the public is going to move to a place of willful compliance and cooperation with the police, that there would need to be a higher understanding of how the police operate in this very complex, often difficult environment that is very dynamic and constantly shifting. Aside from attempting to win over a community one interaction at a time, what other initiatives should a police department be doing to actively engage neighborhoods to build relationships based on trust? Christine 12:16 So this is interesting, because it came out of our in-service training when we went over procedural justice and legitimacy with our officers. One of the things that the officers said is that we really need to be engaged with the community—we really need to be out there talking to them about what we’re doing, how we do it, and also find out what’s important to them. We’ve recently put together a community engagement presentation that we’ve been using in a couple of different focus groups, and we’re going to fold this into our neighborhood sergeants’ program, that really addressed the complexity of policing in the city of Cambridge. In the same neighborhood, same street, there’s very different needs, and as the commissioner brought up earlier, you know, we’ll have somebody calling the police on their neighbor because they don’t know their neighbor and their kids are being loud in the street. So the police are called in to answer that call, and how do we do that effectively? When we looked at the community engagement presentation, one of the things that we broke down is our calls for service, and we realized that 80 to 85 percent of our calls for service had to do with quality of life issues, noise complaints, and things of that nature. And really, talking to the community about those 80 to 85 percent of those calls and what would be the most productive way to service them. And it is very complex when we get called to those calls. But as the commissioner pointed out, we have 25 to 50 percent of our population has turned over every five years, and looking for ways just to educate the community about that. We’re also constantly looking for ways to engage with the community in positive ways. I think our officers—time after time after time—they’re getting called to a call for service…which is a negative interaction. We need to look for opportunities to have officers engage positively with the community, whether it’s at a community event, at a teen center, but we need to have positive interactions I think, as well as the calls for service. Robert 14:03 So as the deputy’s doing these community forums, I think the thing that we learned a lot was that people really didn’t appreciate what the police do overall, and I think it was an opportunity for us to really explain…what we actually assume that the people understood what the police role is in the community and what we’re trying to accomplish. As we started to delve into the kinds of calls we’re handling, the kinds of situations we handle, and actually play back to them a couple of different scenarios so they can understand the complexities of what the officer needs to deal with and navigate through some of the situations. I think it really was remarkable in terms of just showing us that there needed to be a greater understanding of what our role is, if in fact we’re going to have better collaboration and partnerships with the community. And also not misinterpret what we do in the field. A lot of times we doing things for legitimate purposes, but the community misinterprets that because they don’t understand what the reasons are that an officer needed to take some precautionary measures, or needed to take a stance initially to assess a situation before he could engage in a conversation. Because again, a lot of times when officers walk into a situation not realizing what he’s entering into and has to need that moment of time to kind of assess it. The thing we’re trying to get our officers to understand is that once you’ve made that assessment then the posture needs to change. So if you don’t see the threat any longer, we don’t need to stay in that command presence through the entire encounter, that we can now, basically, react to the situation and really start to connect with the people that we’re dealing with. So, I think those community forums are really important in terms of building communities of trust. Again, different communities have different understandings and beliefs about the role of the police, and I think it’s important for us to not just assume that it’s the same vanilla presentation over and over again. We’re really addressing some of the underlying concerns that each of these communities have. One of the things we found early on when we were working with the Haitian community, for example, is we actually did a six week program—really to get them to understand just the different facets of policing and what we do, and how we answer calls, and our role within the community. Again, being very different from what they’re accustom to—and many of these folks had come directly from Haiti to one of our housing developments—and really this is the first contact they’ve had with the police outside of a call for service. I think that’s when you really reach the communities—being able to have those kinds of community forums, have those discussions, answer questions, and really hear what their concerns are and make sure that is a common understanding of what we’re trying to accomplish, in the fact that we really are part of trying to support them in terms of their legitimate needs within the community as well. Debra 16:18 Looking at police organizations then, police organizations have an internal disciplinary system that tends to be punitive in nature. If an officer violates a rule then, there is some form of disciplinary action imposed which could have a counterproductive outcome. In your view, should internal disciplinary systems be changing to focus more on achieving corrected behavior and instituting changes that promote a more willful compliance with the police organization’s values; and if they should, how do you see the systems being changed? Christine 16:59 So, one of the things that I ask myself when I do have a rule violation—we need to have the quote unquote punishment fit the crime—what kind of violation was it? I also want to ask myself, does the officer understand that there was a violation? Does the officer take any responsibility for the violation? Do they know what they did wrong? Do they know what they could do differently? So I think the first part is a conversation with the officer about the violation and just try and gain an understanding. I think when you have an officer who makes a rule violation and you can kind of explain what happened, the corrective action can be something like training, and I think it should be appropriately that. The problem that I have seen is that when there is a violation, when something does go wrong—when an officer doesn’t take responsibility, or just isn’t forthcoming with what happened—I think officers who take responsibility and really learn from the rule violation, we’re less like to see that pattern of behavior continue. It’s when they don’t recognize that something’s done wrong that they’re more likely to do it again. Robert 18:04 I think the underlying premise of most experiences systems was, and I think that the notion was that by having some kind of disparage action to a rule violation, that you’re going to change behavior. The problem was we were getting the wrong kind of behavioral changes—you had the police officer shutting down, you had police officers busting gates, you had police officers feeling like they were being victimized because their sides of the stories weren’t being considered. I think there’s an important fundamental assessment that takes place in every case we have with a complaint; was it an intentional act, or was it a mistake? If it’s a mistake, there’s a lot more latitude in terms of trying to get officers to understand what the mistake was, give them an opportunity to say, for example, “If you could of done it over again, how would you have done it differently?” And really think about that situation, and use that instance as a teaching moment, to make sure they don’t find themselves in the same kind of situation. I think what’s key for most police departments is interacting with officers sooner rather than later, not waiting till it gets to the point where it gets intolerable—and oftentimes then it’s too late to make it an effective or positive change in terms of the officer’s outcome. Our goal, quite honestly, is to make our officers prosper and really be good ambassadors of the police department. We’re all going to make mistakes along the way, and I think we acknowledge that the majority of what the officers do when something goes wrong is a miscall, a mistake, a miscalculation in judgment, as opposed to intentionally doing something wrong. I think rule violations need to be reserved for those officers that basically, who just intentionally violate department rules, because they hurt the agency, they hurt all the members of the department, and it hurts the reputation of this agency. I think the majority of the officers that make honest mistakes—things like mediation, things like having a conversation about the issue, and not resorting to a suspension, or some kind of formal disparate action is a better way to go. So again, the process becomes more important than just an outcome of just issuing some kind of remedial type of document that goes in their file. I think that’s where we’re making great strides in terms of getting our officers engaged more, in terms of conversations, and we’re actually using opportunities where officers have been accused of something and they have been cleared because they acted appropriately, to sit down and have a conversation with them—not just the fact that they’re saying they were cleared, but are stating this is the nature of the complaint was, there were some misunderstandings along the way, not necessarily because of what you did, but because the person really didn’t understand what you were trying to accomplish—and use those as opportunities to kind of increase their ability to do things differently, so that they’ll don’t find themselves in that kind of situation. I think the thing that’s been key for us is also trying to intervene early in a process, and not wait for a pattern to become too elongated before we try to engage. You get a lot of minor violations, or you get a lot of those you can’t substantiate, and a lot of times departments will just ignore those until it gets to a point where they can substantiate a complaint. We don’t do that. If we start to get complaints or start to see a pattern, we have an early intervention system, we engage our officers sooner, and we have a conversation with the officer—we let them know that although that you’ve not been found responsible for rude and discourteous, and you’ve had three or four of those in the last month, there’s something going on here where you’re reeling in the same kind of complaint from different people. And unless all these people are colluding with one another, there’s got to be some basis where people are misunderstanding your approach and you need to think about what your approach is and what does that look like, and have that kind of conversation and get them to think about it. I think that’s where the organization makes that shift, that we’re basically trying to get our officers to understand that we want them to learn from past mistakes and then grow from those mistakes. Debra 21:22 Commissioner Haas and Deputy Superintendent Elow, thank you so much for your time and expertise on this very important topic. Christine 21:30 Thank you. Robert 21:32 It was a pleasure. Thank you for having us. Voiceover: Beat Exit 21:34 The Beat was brought to you by the United States Department of Justice COPS Office. The COPS Office helps to keep our nation’s communities safe by giving grants to law enforcement agencies, developing community policing publications, developing partnerships, and solving problems. Voiceover: Disclaimer 21:50 The opinions contained herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or polices of the U.S. Department of Justice. References to specific agencies, companies, products, or services should not be considered an endorsement by the authors or the U.S. Department of Justice. Rather, the references are illustrations to supplement discussion of the issues.