importance of police department essay

Essay On Police

500 words essay on police.

In this world, we must have laws to maintain peace. Thus, every citizen must follow these laws. However, there are some people in our society who do not follow them and break the laws . In order to keep a check on such kinds of people, we need the police. Through essay on police, we will learn about the role and importance of police.

Importance of Police

The police are entrusted with the duty of maintaining the peace and harmony of a society. Moreover, they also have the right to arrest and control people who do not follow the law. As a result, they are important as they protect our society.

Enforcing the laws of the land, the police also has the right to punish people who do not obey the law. Consequently, we, as citizens, feel safe and do not worry much about our lives and property.

In other words, the police is a saviour of the society which makes the running of society quite smooth. Generally, the police force has sound health. They wear a uniform and carry a weapon, whether a rifle or pistol . They also wear a belt which holds their weapons.

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Role of Police

The police play many roles at police stations or check posts. They get a posting in the town or city depending on the crime rate in the area. When public demonstrations and strikes arise, the police plays a decisive role.

Similarly, when they witness the crowd turning violent during protests or public gatherings, it is their responsibility to prevent it from becoming something bigger. Sometimes, they also have to make use of the Lathi (stick) for the same reason.

If things get worse, they also resort to firing only after getting permission from their superiors. In addition, the police also offer special protection to political leaders and VIPs. The common man can also avail this protection in special circumstances.

Thus, you see how the police are always on duty round the clock. No matter what day or festival or holiday, they are always on duty. It is a tough role to play but they play it well. To protect the law is not an easy thing to do.

Similarly, it is difficult to maintain peace but the police manage to do it. Even on cold winter nights or hot summer afternoons, the police is always on duty. Even during the pandemic, the police was on duty.

Thus, they keep an eye on anti-social activities and prevent them at large. Acting as the protector of the weak and poor, the police play an essential role in the smooth functioning of society.

Conclusion of Essay On Police

Thus, the job of the police is very long and tough. Moreover, it also comes with a lot of responsibility as we look up to them for protection. Being the real guardian of the civil society of a nation, it is essential that they perform their duty well.

FAQ on Essay On Police

Question 1: What is the role of police in our life?

Answer 1: The police performs the duties which the law has assigned to them. They are entrusted to protect the public against violence, crime and other harmful acts. As a result, the police must act by following the law to ensure that they respect it and apply it in a manner which matches their level of responsibility.

Question 2: Why do we need police?

Answer 2: Police are important for us and we need it. They protect life and property, enforce criminal law, criminal investigations, regulate traffic, crowd control, public safety duties, search for missing persons, lost property and other duties which concern the public order.-*//**9666666666666666666666+9*63*

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Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Police Brutality — The Importance of Police Reform

The Importance of Police Reform

Categories: Government Shutdown Police Brutality

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Words: 600 |

Published: Mar 20, 2024

Words: 600 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

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What Police Are For: A Look Into Role Of The Police In Modern Society

NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Barry Friedman, the director of New York University's Policing Project, about the role of the police in modern society.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

A better path forward for criminal justice: Police reform

Download a PDF of this chapter.

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Rashawn ray and rashawn ray senior fellow - governance studies @sociologistray clark neily clark neily senior vice president - cato institute @conlawwarrior.

20 min read

Below is the first chapter from “A Better Path Forward for Criminal Justice,” a report by the Brookings-AEI Working Group on Criminal Justice Reform. You can access other chapters from the report here .

Recent incidents centering on the deaths of unarmed Black Americans including George Floyd, Daunte Wright, Elijah McClain, Breonna Taylor, William Green, and countless others have continued to apply pressure for wide sweeping police reform. To some, these incidents are the result of a few “bad apples.” 1

To others, they are examples of a system imbued with institutional and cultural failures that expose civilians and police officers to harm. Our article aims to combine perspectives from across the political spectrum on sensible police reform. We focus on short-, medium-, and long-term solutions for reducing officer-involved shootings, racial disparities in use of force, mental health issues among officers, and problematic officers who rotten the tree of law enforcement.

Level Setting

Violent crime has significantly decreased since the early 1990s. However, the number of mass shootings have increased and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security report being worried about domestic terrorism, even within law enforcement. Nonetheless, despite recent increases that some scholars associate with COVID-19 spillovers related to high unemployment and underemployment, violent crime is still much lower than it was three decades ago.

Some scholars attribute crime reductions to increased police presence, while others highlight increases in overall levels of education and employment. In the policy space, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 and the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 are often noted. We believe there is some validity to all of these perspectives. For example, SWAT deployment has increased roughly 1,400 percent since 1980. Coinciding with the 1986 Drug Bill, SWAT is often deployed for drug raids and no-knock warrants. 2 The death of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman killed in her home in Louisville, Kentucky, is most recently highlighted as an example that demonstrates some of the problems with these tactics. 3

The 1994 Crime Bill ushered the COPS program and an increase in prisons around the country. 4 This legislation also coincided with stop-and-frisk policies and a rise in stand-your-ground laws that disproportionately disadvantaged Black Americans and led to overpolicing. It is an indisputable fact that Black people are more likely to have force used on them. In fact, Black people relative to white people are significantly less likely to be armed or be attacking at the time they are killed by police. This is a historical pattern, including during the 1960s when civil rights leaders were being beaten and killed. However, officer-involved killings, overall, have increased significantly over the past two decades. 5 And, we also know that if drugs were the only culprit, there would be drastically different outcomes for whites. Research shows that while Blacks and whites have similar rates of using drugs, and often times distributing drugs, there are huge disparities in who is arrested, incarcerated, and convicted for drug crimes. However, it is also an indisputable fact that predominately Black communities have higher levels of violent crime. Though some try to attribute higher crime in predominately Black neighborhoods to biology or culture, most scholars agree that inequitable resources related to housing, education, and employment contribute to these statistics. 6 7 8 Research documents that after controlling for segregation and disadvantage, predominately Black and white neighborhoods differ little in violent crime rates. 9

These are complex patterns, and Democrats and Republicans often differ on how America reached these outcomes and what we do about them. As a result, bipartisan police reform has largely stalled. Now, we know that in March 2021 the House of Representatives once again passed The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. States and localities are also presenting and passing a slew of police reforms, such as in Maryland where the state legislature passed the Maryland Police Accountability Act of 2021. We are not here to debate the merits of these legislations, though we support much of the components, nor are we here to simply highlight low-hanging fruit such as banning no-knock warrants, creating national databases, or requiring body-worn cameras. People across the political aisle largely agree on these reforms. Instead, we aim to provide policy recommendations on larger-scale reforms, which scholars and practitioners across the political aisle agree needs to occur, in order to transform law enforcement in America and take us well into the twenty-first century. Our main themes include accountability, training, and culture.

Accordingly, our recommendations include:

Short-Term Reforms

Reform Qualified Immunity

Create National Standards for Training and De-escalation

Medium-Term Reforms

Restructure Civilian Payouts for Police Misconduct

Address officer wellness.

Long-Term Reforms

Restructure Regulations for Fraternal Order of Police Contracts

Change police culture to protect civilians and police, short-term reforms.

Qualified immunity is a legal doctrine that courts invented to make it more difficult to sue police and other government officials who have been plausibly alleged to have violated somebody’s rights. 10 11 We believe this doctrine needs to be removed. 12 13 States also have a role to play here. The Law Enforcement Bill of Rights further doubles down on a lack of accountable for bad apples.

We are not out on a limb here. A recent YouGov and Cato poll found that over 60 percent of Americans support eliminating qualified immunity. 14 Over 80 percent of Americans oppose erasing historical records of officer misconduct. In this regard, most citizens have no interest making it more difficult to sue police officers, but police seem to have a very strong interest in maintaining the policy. However, not only do everyday citizens want it gone, but think tanks including The Brookings Institution and The Cato Institute have asserted the same. It is a highly problematic policy.

Though police chiefs might not say it publicly or directly, we have evidence that a significant number of them are quite frustrated by their inability to get rid of the bad apples, run their departments in ways that align with best practices they learn at Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers and National Association of Chiefs of Police, and discipline and terminate officers who deserve to be held accountable and jeopardize not only the public perception of their own department but drag down the social standing of the entire law enforcement profession. As noted above, The Law Enforcement Bill of Rights at the state level needs to be addressed. It further doubles down on qualified immunity and removes accountability for law enforcement.

National Standards for Training and De-escalation

In 2016, Daniel Shaver was fatally shot and killed by officer Philip Brailsford. Brailsford was charged but found not guilty. At the time of the killing, Shaver was unarmed as he lay dead in a hotel hallway. Police experts critiqued Brailsford’s tactics to de-escalate the situation. As he entered the scene, he had both hands on his M4 rifle and eliminated all other tools or de-escalation tactics. Brailsford was fired, tried for murder, and then rehired. He ultimately retired due to PTSD. Highlighting the roles of militarization, mental health, qualified immunity, and other policy-related topics, this incident shows why there is a need for national standards for training and de-escalation. Many officers would have approached this situation differently, suggesting there are a myriad of tactics and strategies being taught.

Nationally, officers receive about 50 hours of firearm training during the police academy. They receive less than 10 hours of de-escalation training. So, when they show up at a scene and pull their weapon, whether it be on teenagers walking down the street after playing a basketball game or someone in a hotel or even a car (like in the killing of Daunte Wright in a Minneapolis suburb), poor decisions and bad outcomes should not be surprising.

Police officers regardless of whether they live in Kentucky or Arizona need to have similar training. Among the roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the country, there is wide variation in the amount of training that officers have to complete as well as what type of training they complete. With the amount of travel that Americans engage in domestically, law enforcement has not kept up to speed with ensuring that officers receive the same training. Consequently, police officers may be put in positions to make bad decisions because of a lack of the implementation of federal standards. Funding can be provided to have federally certified trainers who work with localities within states, counties, and cities.

MEDIUM-TERM REFORMS

From 2015–2019, the 20 largest U.S. municipalities spent over $2 billion in civilian payouts for police misconduct. Rather than the police department budget, these funds mostly come from general funds. 15 So, not only is the officer absolved from civil or financial culpability, but the police department often faces little financial liability. Instead, the financial burden falls onto the municipality; thus, taxpayers. This money could be going toward education, work, and infrastructure.

Not only are the financial settlement often expensive, like the $20 million awarded to William Green’s family in Prince George’s County, Maryland, but the associated legal fees and deteriorated community trust are costly. In a place like Chicago, over the past 20 years, it has spent about $700 million on civilian payouts for police misconduct. New York City spent about $300 million in the span of a few years.

We assert that civilian payouts for police misconduct must be restructured. Indemnification will be eliminated, making the officer responsible, and requiring them to purchase professional liability insurance the exact same way that other occupations such as doctors and lawyers do. This would give insurance companies a strong incentive to identify the problem officers early, to raise their rates just the way that insurance companies raise the rates on a bad driver or a doctor who engages in malpractice. In this regard, the cost of the insurance policy would increase the more misconduct an officer engaged in. Eventually, the worst officers would become uninsurable, and therefore unemployable. This would help to increase accountability. Instead of police chiefs having difficulties removing bad officers through pushback from the Fraternal Order of Police Union, bad officers would simply be unemployable by virtue of the fact that they cannot secure professional liability insurance.

Bottom line, police almost never suffer any financial consequences for their own misconduct.

Shifting civilian payouts away from tax money and to police department insurance policies would instantly change the accountability structure.

Shifting civilian payouts away from tax money and to police department insurance policies would instantly change the accountability structure. Police are almost always indemnified for that misconduct when there is a payout. And, what that means is simply that their department or the city, which is to say us, the taxpayers, end up paying those damages claims. That is absolutely the wrong way to do it.

Most proposals for restructuring civilian payouts for police misconduct have included some form of liability insurance for police departments and/or individual officers. This means shifting the burden from taxpayer dollars to police department insurance policies. If a departmental policy, the municipality should pay for that policy, but the money should come from the police department budget. Police department budget increases should take settlement costs into account and now simply allow for increased budgets to cover premium increases. This is a similar approach to healthcare providers working in a hospital. If individual officers have liability insurance, they fall right in line with other occupations that have professional liability insurance.

Congress could approve a pilot program for municipalities to explore the potential impacts of police department insurance policies versus individual officer liability insurance, and even some areas that use both policies simultaneously. Regardless, it is clear that the structure of civilian payouts for police misconduct needs to change. We believe not only will the change provide more funding for education, work, and infrastructure, but it will increase accountability and give police chiefs and municipalities the ability to rid departments of bad apples that dampen an equitable and transparent cultural environment.

Mental Health Counseling

In this broader discussion of policing, missing is not only the voices of law enforcement themselves, but also what is happening in their own minds and in their own bodies. Recent research has highlighted that about 80 percent of officers suffer from chronic stress. They suffer from depression, anxiety. They have relationship problems, and they get angered easily. One out of six report being suicidal. Another one out of six report substance abuse problems. Most sobering, 90 percent of them never seek help. 16 We propose that officers should have mandatory mental health counseling on a quarterly basis. Normalizing mental health counseling will reduce the stigma associated with it.

It is also important for law enforcement to take a serious look into the role of far-right extremism on officer attitudes and behaviors. There is ample evidence from The Department of Homeland Security showing the pervasive ways that far-right extremists target law enforcement. 17 Academic research examining social dominance ideation among police officers may be a key way to root out extremism during background checks and psychological evaluations. Social dominance can be assessed through survey items and decision-making simulations, such as the virtual reality simulations conducted at the Lab for Applied Social Science Research at the University of Maryland.

Community Policing

Community police is defined in a multitude of ways. One simple way we think about community policing is whether officers experience the community in everyday life, often when they are not on duty. Do they live in the community, send their children to local schools, exercise at the neighborhood gym, and shop at the main grocery store? Often times, police officers engage in this type of community policing in predominately white and affluent neighborhoods but less in predominately Black or Latino neighborhoods, even when they have higher household income levels. Police officers also live farther away from the areas where they work. While this may be a choice for some, others simply cannot afford to live there, particularly in major cities and more expensive areas of the country. Many police officers are also working massive amounts of over time to make ends meet, provide for their families, and send children to college.

Altogether, community policing requires a set of incentives. We propose increasing the required level of education, which can justify wage increases. This can help to reduce the likelihood of police officers working a lot of hours and making poor decisions because of lack of sleep or stress. We also propose requiring that officers live within or near the municipalities where they work. Living locally can increase police-community relations and improve trust. Officers should receive rent subsidies or down payment assistance to enhance this process.

LONG-TERM REFORMS

Unions are important. However, the Fraternity Order of Police Union has become so deeply embedded in law enforcement that it obstructs the ability for equitable and transparent policing, even when interacting with police chiefs. Police union contracts need to be evaluated to ensure they do not obstruct the ability for officers who engage in misconduct to be held accountable. Making changes to the Law Enforcement Bill of Rights at the state helps with this, but the Congress should provide more regulations to help local municipalities with this process.

Police have to be of the people and for the people. Often times, police officers talk about themselves as if they are detached from the community. Officers often view themselves as warriors at war with the people in the communities they serve. Police officers embody an “us versus them” perspective, rather than viewing themselves to be part of the community. 18

It must be a change to police culture regarding how police officers view themselves and view others. Part of changing culture deals with transforming how productivity and awards are allocated. Police officers overwhelmingly need to make forfeitures in the form of arrests, citations, and tickets to demonstrate leadership and productivity. Police officers rarely get credit for the everyday, mundane things they do to make their communities safe and protect and serve. We believe there must be a fundamental reconceptualization of both the mission of police and the culture in which that mission is carried out. Policing can be about respecting individuals and not using force. It is an ethical approach to policing that requires incentives positive outcomes rather than deficits that rewards citations and force.

T here must be a fundamental reconceptualization of both the mission of police and the culture in which that mission is carried out.

Recommendations for Future Research

First, research needs to examine how community policing and officer wellness programs can simultaneously improve outcomes for the community and law enforcement. The either/or model simply does not work any longer. Instead, research should determine what is best for local communities and improves the health and well-being of law enforcement. Second, future research on policing needs to examine the role that protests against police brutality, particularly related to Black Lives Matter protests, are having on reform at the local, state, and federal levels. It is important for policymakers to readily understand the demands of their constituents and ways to create peace and civility.

Finally, research needs to fully examine legislation to reallocate and shift funding away from and within police department budgets. 19 By taking a market-driven, evidence-based approach to police funding, the same methodology can be used that will lead to different results depending on the municipality. Police department budgets should be fiscally responsible and shift funding to focusing on solving violent crime, while simultaneously reducing use of force on low-income and racial/ethnic minority communities. It is a tall order, but federal funding could be allocated to examine all of these important research endeavors. It is a must if the United States is to stay as a world leader in this space. It is clear our country is falling short at this time.

We have aimed to take a deep dive into large policy changes needed for police reform that centers around accountability, finances, culture, and communities. Though there is much discussion about reallocating police funding, we believe there should be an evidence-based, market-driven approach. While some areas may need to reallocate funding, others may need to shift funding within the department, or even take both approaches. Again, with roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies, there is wide variation in funds provided for policing and how those funds are spent. This is why it is imperative that standards be set at the federal level to help municipalities grapple with this important issue and the others we highlight in this report.

The Critical Importance of the Police Community

Examine the vital role of police in communities, focusing on public safety, law enforcement, and community engagement. This essay will discuss the importance of trust between police and the community, the challenges faced by law enforcement, and initiatives to improve police-community relations. Also at PapersOwl you can find more free essay examples related to Communication.

How it works

Undoubtedly, one of the most difficult relationships and dynamics to maintain in the United States today is the one that exists between the police and the communities they serve. This relationship is grounded on the principles of need and respect for the function that the police play, however, this relationship has become tremendously more complex and tense in recent years. The widespread availability of information has brought to light issues within the police force that highlights some of the faults in the relationship they have in dealing with many communities.

At the center of debates about how police interact with community members is the issue of police brutality and racial injustice, and the consequences have been tremendous for both police forces and the people they are meant to protect. With confidence in the police steadily eroding, there is a great need for alternative policing strategies to be employed, and I believe that one of the most effective in bridging these divides and ensuring safety is community policing.

Police departments are provided with one of the most unique and powerful opportunities to ensure public safety. Tasked with organizing and mobilizing their department forces, there are several ways that police resources can be used in order to most effectively serve their communities. If I had the opportunity to act as the chief of police, I would organize myself and the direction of my department in a way that prioritizes the resources that are readily available in the community itself. In my opinion, community policing is one of the most valuable tools available to the police force, and it would be the first change that I would implement.

Community policing is a uniquely valuable and effective tool because it inherently alters the way that police forces operate. It forces the police to reconsider the way that it has operated in order to have necessary impacts. The first of these is a self-evaluation that results in police forces recognizing where they have failed in the past; this may be in the way that they interact with community members, or what elements of crime they choose to focus on. The second effect is a general improvement of community relations. As community members are brought into the process of policing, they gain a better understanding of the value of police themselves, as well as of the difficulties associated with policing. This, in addition to the fact that cooperation with community members greatly increases the manpower and resources that police forces have available, with a specific impact felt on intel gathering.

Understanding the strategy of community policing must begin with a basic exploration of the principles it is grounded on. At its most fundamental, community policing operates on the idea of restructuring the way that police approach and address crime. It forces these changes in order to accommodate the introduction of community members into the policing process, and it does so by creating a direct link between police and their communities (Ward & Rosenblatt, 1994, p. 14). In some cases, police officers are tasked with developing direct communication with community allies in order to learn about the needs and struggles of the community and how to better address them (Walker & Katz, 2011, p. 16). Because community members cannot be asked to carry out police tasks, however, their roles are primarily oriented towards providing police departments with necessary information that can then be used to address any existing or potential issues. Key to this strategy, it should be noted, is the shift in the general approach to crime, which emphasizes prevention.

Considerations must be made when looking to implement the strategy of community policing. Chief among these are the concerns that arise from the weaknesses inherent within community policing, including the informality and loose structure of the strategy itself. Community members involved in community policing regularly lack any form of real training or structure for their policing tactics, and this can result in ineffective tactics or power struggles amongst one another (NLCATP, 2015, p. 4). Some community members also expressed discomfort with the idea of increases in police presences in the community that unavoidably follows the implementation of community policing. These issues, however, are offset by the values of community policing, which notably include changes in public perceptions and attitudes towards policing itself. Community members can learn about the service and function of police, which gives them an appreciation for their work that gradually improves their relationships and public image. Trust can then be built, and police can ultimately be more effective as they establish a dedication to community safety (NLCATP, 2015, p. 2).

The value of community policing in efforts to fight and prevent crime is clear. In looking to implement it I would begin with structural changes to my police department. In order for community policing to work there needs to be a fundamentally sound relationship between the police force and the community. I would work towards fostering that goal by prioritizing training among my officers that teaches them how to build community values and relationships (Lawrence & McCarthy, 2013, p. 12). Community members behave differently than police officers do, and learning how to navigate these differences is essential to successful community policing.

As an extension of this effort to prioritize relationship-building, I believe that community policing can be tremendously beneficial for repairing fractured relationships. Part of the reason that community policing is necessary is that existing relationships between these two entities is tinged with distrust, particularly in low-income or disadvantaged minority communities. One way that this issue can be addressed in order to allow community policing to work is by directly combating the idea of improper policing though full transparency. Approaching community members and leaders with a well-organized and thoughtful plan on how to address crime in the community, can go a long way to showing skeptical community members that there is an active effort to create positive reforms.

While I believe that community policing is one of the most valuable tools that are currently available, I also hold that there are changes that can be introduced to make the strategy more effective. A noticeable problem related to community policing is that the strategy is often very vague after it has been implemented. I believe that community policing overall would benefit from a more formal and structured organization. This would include the introduction of actual community organization strategies such as dedicated foot patrols, and the implementation of a network for community members to interact with one another more quickly and efficiently. The objective with making these changes would be to try and make the community policing strategy more effective, instead of allowing it to exist loosely, as is its tendency.

Ultimately, I believe that my role as a police chief would be to increase productivity and success through the implementation of changes that are more effective. While traditional styles of policing can be effective, I believe that community policing will be a much more effective strategy for policing moving forward. The fundamental point to understand about community policing is that it is largely focused on improving the way the police are able to operate by focusing on the public perception that people have about them. As this perception improves, the police will be able to function more easily in these communities, gaining the support of leaders and community members that will ultimately allow them to better carry out their duties.

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Police Reform Is Necessary. But How Do We Do It?

By Emily Bazelon June 13, 2020

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A discussion about changes in policing, moderated by Emily Bazelon.

Emily Bazelon --> A discussion about how to reform policing. Moderated by Emily Bazelon Photographs by Malike Sidibe

On Memorial Day, the police in Minneapolis killed George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man. Three officers stood by or assisted as a fourth, Derek Chauvin, pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes. Floyd said he could not breathe and then became unresponsive. His death has touched off the largest and most sustained round of protests the country has seen since the 1960s, as well as demonstrations around the world. The killing has also prompted renewed calls to address brutality, racial disparities and impunity in American policing — and beyond that, to change the conditions that burden black and Latino communities.

The search for transformation has a long and halting history. In 1967, the Kerner Commission, appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the causes of uprisings and rioting that year, recommended ways to improve the relationship between the police and black communities, but in the end it entrenched law enforcement as a means of social control. “Neighborhood police stations were installed inside public-housing projects in the very spaces vacated by community-action programs,” writes the Yale historian Elizabeth Hinton , author of “From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime.” In 1992, after the acquittals of three Los Angeles police officers who savagely beat Rodney King on camera, unrest erupted in the city. The police were ill prepared , and more than 50 people died. In 1994, Congress gave the Justice Department the authority to investigate a pattern or practice of policing that violated civil rights protections.

Since 2013, the Black Lives Matter movement has made police violence a pressing national and local issue and helped lead to the election of officials — including the district attorneys in several major metropolitan areas — who have tried to make the police more accountable for misconduct and sought to decrease incarceration. The killing of George Floyd in police custody shows how far the country has to go; the resulting protests have pushed the Minneapolis City Council to take the previously unthinkable step of pledging to dismantle its Police Department. But what does that mean, and what should other cities do? We brought together five experts and organizers to talk about how to change policing in America in the context of broader concerns about systemic racism and inequality.

The Participants

Alicia Garza is the principal of Black Futures Lab, the director of strategy and partnerships for the National Domestic Workers Alliance and a founder of Supermajority, a new women’s activist group. Between 2013 and 2015, she helped coin the phrase #BlackLivesMatter and helped found the Black Lives Matter Global Network. Her forthcoming book, “The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart,” will be published in October.

Phillip Atiba Goff is a founder and the chief executive of the Center for Policing Equity, a research-and-action think tank at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where he is also the Franklin A. Thomas Professor in Policing Equity.

Vanita Gupta is the president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. She led the Justice Department’s civil rights division from 2014 to 2017.

Sam Sinyangwe is a founder of We the Protestors, which created a database that maps police killings, and Campaign Zero, a policy platform to end police violence. He is also a host of the “Pod Save the People” podcast for Crooked Media.

J. Scott Thomson served as the police chief in Camden, N.J., from 2008 to 2019 and was the president of the Police Executive Research Forum from 2015 to 2019. He is now executive director of global security for Holtec International.

This discussion has been edited and condensed for clarity, with material added from follow-up interviews to address developing news.

The Use of Deadly Force

Emily Bazelon: The conversation about how to invest our tax dollars to keep the public safe has broadened a great deal in the last few weeks, but let’s start with a relatively narrow question — what kind of change can take place within Police Departments? Phil, your Center for Policing Equity worked with the Minneapolis Police Department from 2016 to 2018. Over the past five years there, the police have used force against black people at seven times the rate it has been used against white people. Chief Medaria Arradondo, the city’s first black police chief, who took over in 2017, quickly fired Derek Chauvin and the three officers who were with him. But for years, complaints of misconduct and excessive use of force rarely resulted in discipline. Chauvin had a record of at least 17 misconduct complaints over his 19 years in the department, yet he was a training officer for new recruits, including two of the officers present at Floyd’s death. What do you take from your work in Minneapolis?

Phillip Atiba Goff: After Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, we, along with partners, got a grant from the Justice Department to address racial bias in policing. We invited Minneapolis to be one of the six cities we would work with. Our trainings were designed to help the police recognize interactions that are likely to result in discriminatory behavior, or undermine trust, and practice not to do that. And later we also used analytics to put resources back into the community. For example, in North Minneapolis, the police were giving out a lot of tickets for broken taillights, so we recommended they give out vouchers to get those lights fixed instead.

But the Minneapolis police have struggled for a long time with pockets of resistance to those kinds of changes. One terrible lesson of George Floyd’s death is that we don’t have mechanisms to stop terrible officers from doing terrible things on a given shift.

Bazelon: The Supreme Court has given the police a lot of leeway to use force. In 1989, in the case Graham v. Connor , the court held that officers could use force if doing so was “objectively reasonable” from their point of view in the moment.

Sam Sinyangwe: The police in Minneapolis put George Floyd in a neck restraint. Their department’s policy allowed them to do this if someone was exhibiting what’s called active resistance, which really means they’re trying to get up, or the police officer says they are, as he’s pressing them down. We’ve known for a long time that these neck restraints are dangerous. There was no reason for the Minneapolis police to authorize that tactic. In early June, the city banned it, as some others have.

J. Scott Thomson: The Supreme Court standard allows for a lot of situations that should never develop. Think about the mentally ill individual who refuses to drop a knife when a police officer tells him to. The law as the Supreme Court defines it allows the officer to advance on him and then shoot him — not because someone is necessarily in danger but because the person didn’t comply with the officer’s verbal commands. But why advance in the first place if it’s not necessary? How can any industry be considered legitimate, professional or trusted if it holds itself to only the absolute lowest permissible standard?

Bazelon: Alicia, you’re a longtime activist, and you live in Oakland, Calif. In 2009, a police officer there shot and killed a 22-year-old black man, Oscar Grant, who was lying face down on a BART station platform. This was one of the first police shootings to be filmed by a bystander on a cellphone. After that, activists worked hard for civilian review of the police, with real enforcement mechanisms. How has that worked?

Alicia Garza: There’s a deep sense in the black community that when the police commit harms, they’re not held accountable, and of course that erodes trust. People in these communities often ask why the police fight so hard to keep investigations and complaints in the shadows. The continual push to shield the police from responsibility helps explain why a lot of people feel now that the police can’t be reformed. Civilian review boards are one way to address that, but they often lack teeth. If you can’t hire and fire officers, or even make a recommendation for discipline that sticks, then you don’t have real power. That is a big frustration.

Bazelon: Sam, you’ve tracked police killings and nonfatal shootings around the country. What have researchers found?

Sinyangwe: In 2013, when the Black Lives Matter protests began, we didn’t have the data to understand what policy interventions could address the problem of police violence. Now we do, and the data nationwide show that about 1,000 people were killed by the police in 2019, which is about the same number killed each year going back to 2013. The overall numbers haven’t gone down. That’s because in suburban and rural areas, police killings are rising.

But if you look at the 30 largest cities , police shootings have dropped about 30 percent, and some cities have seen larger drops. In some of these cities, like Chicago and Los Angeles, activists with Black Lives Matter and other groups have done a lot of work to push for de-escalation, stricter use-of-force policies and greater accountability.

Thomson: In 2019, when I was chief of the Camden police force, we adopted a use-of-force policy with the help of Barry Friedman, a law professor at New York University, and the Policing Project he started there . The policy mandates that the police de-escalate a conflict, use force only as a last resort, intervene to stop excessive force and report violations of law and policy by other officers.

Bazelon: I can see why that’s a starting point, but Eric Garner was killed on Staten Island in 2014 by a police officer who used a chokehold that was banned by the New York Police Department more than two decades earlier . And Minneapolis had a policy in place that required officers to intervene if they saw an officer use excessive force, but the three who were with Chauvin — who were much more junior than he was — didn’t step in to save George Floyd. What else does it take to prevent more of these deaths?

Thomson: Within a Police Department, culture eats policy for breakfast. You can have a perfectly worded policy, but it’s meaningless if it just exists on paper. You get trained in it when you’re a recruit in your three to six months at the police academy. But in too many departments, officers never receive more training on the policy or even see it again unless they get in trouble. They are then befuddled by being held to account for behaviors that regularly exist among their peers, and they feel scapegoated.

At the Police Executive Research Forum, we released a survey in 2016 that found that agencies spend a median of 58 hours on training for recruits on how to use a gun and 49 hours on defensive tactics, but they spend about only eight hours on de-escalation and crisis intervention.

To change the culture around the use of force, you have to have continuous training, systems of accountability and consequences. In Camden, when an officer uses force in the field, supervisors review the body-cam footage. The following day, internal affairs and a training officer also review it and either challenge or concur with the supervisors’ findings. If they see something wrong, they bring the officer in and go over the tape. If the supervisors had approved something unacceptable, they, too, are held to account.

Vanita Gupta: Let’s talk about Congress. There are 18,000 law-enforcement agencies in this country, and I don’t think we’ve seen major federal legislation for police reform pass since the 1990s, when Congress gave the Justice Department the power to investigate departments for civil rights complaints. This is why civil rights groups are pushing for several measures. These include a national registry of police misconduct — for infractions like excessive use of force or falsifying a police report, as well as terminations and complaints — to stop the cycling in and out of officers who have poor disciplinary records. There also needs to be a national standard for force to be used only as a last resort, a ban on chokeholds and an end to qualified immunity, a doctrine from the Supreme Court that shields the police from being sued when they break the law.

A few weeks ago, none of this was at the forefront. For several years now, there has been a growing bipartisan consensus for addressing mass incarceration. But policing has been this untouchable area outside it, even though police stops and arrests are the front door to the rest of the system. Now, with these massive, multiracial protests across the country, House Democrats have introduced a sweeping bill , the Justice in Policing Act, to address police misconduct and racial discrimination, reflecting the accountability framework of the Leadership Conference, the civil rights coalition that I help lead, signed by 430 groups.

Bazelon: Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, has asked Tim Scott, the party’s only black senator, to come up with a legislative response to the protesters’ alarm about the police that their party can back. That’s striking in itself, given how aligned Republicans have been with a conservative message about law and order.

Gupta: My fear is that Republicans will just go for mealy-mouthed, piecemeal measures. This is a real moral moment, reminiscent of the moment on the eve of the passage of major civil rights legislation in the 1960s, which Republicans ultimately joined in supporting. If they are serious this time, they should be adopting the Justice in Policing Act.

Bazelon: Some states are starting to act. California legislators have introduced a bill to ban chokeholds, for instance. After years of resistance, on June 12, New York repealed the law that kept secret the disciplinary records of police officers.

Gupta: Granted, this is about reforming the police, not reinvesting the money that is spent on them. But so long as we are going to have policing, this is a big deal.

The Power of Police Unions

Bazelon: After George Floyd’s death, a member of the Minneapolis City Council, Steve Fletcher, tweeted about the city’s police union as an obstacle to change. “They distort hard-earned labor laws to defend indefensible behaviors,” he wrote.

It’s a common complaint. The police began organizing in earnest to improve their working conditions in the 1910s. Today, the largest union, the Fraternal Order of Police, has more than 2,000 local chapters and nearly 350,000 members.

Because Police Departments are often strongly hierarchical, rank-and-file officers tend to rely on unions to give them a voice and shield them from what they see as arbitrary or punitive enforcement of the rules, in a job that relies heavily on officer discretion. But protection for the police, through collective-bargaining agreements or state laws lobbied for by unions, often “exceeds that provided to workers in other industries,” the law professors Catherine Fisk and L. Song Richardson wrote in a 2017 article in The George Washington Law Review. In Minneapolis, the union president, Bob Kroll, followed a common path when he defended the officers involved in Floyd’s death and lashed out at protesters as a “terrorist movement.”

On June 10, the police chief in Minneapolis, Medaria Arradondo, withdrew the department from contract negotiations with the union. He said he wanted to restructure the contract for “flexibility for true reform,” regarding not salaries but rather the use of force and the discipline process. Phil, when you were working with the police in Minneapolis, how did you see the department’s relationship with the union?

Goff: Arradondo wanted to work with us on reforms. He was one of five black officers who sued the department for racial discrimination in 2007. One person they named in that suit is the current head of the police union, Bob Kroll. When Arradondo’s suit was settled in 2009, the two sides didn’t get together and hold hands. So that’s not a unified culture. And if you have a strong union with a union head who says, “We’re not doing any of this because it’s bunk,” the chief of police can’t change the culture.

Gupta: Here’s an example: Arradondo’s department doesn’t do warrior-style trainings, which teach officers to see themselves as fighting an enemy who could kill them at any second. Last year, after it became clear that the officer who shot and killed Philando Castile in a suburb of St. Paul during a routine traffic stop had gone to a warrior-type seminar, the chief said officers who went to these trainings outside work would be disciplined. And then the union president, Bob Kroll, offered this training free for his members.

Sinyangwe: One thing that’s important, and often overlooked, is that police unions enjoy broad bipartisan support. Republicans are generally pro-police, and the left is hesitant to criticize unions. So you see things like Scott Walker, the former Republican governor of Wisconsin, exempting most police unions from the union-busting legislation he pushed through in 2011. And last year, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. pushed Congress to pass a bill that would allow the police to unionize in states where they can’t currently expand, which many Democrats supported.

The whole idea that the police should be able to unionize in the first place needs to be interrogated. One study shows that when sheriffs’ unions were allowed to bargain collectively in Florida in the early 2000s, based on a State Supreme Court ruling, complaints about violent misconduct rose 40 percent.

The language of the contract with the union in Chicago requires misconduct records to be destroyed after five years; in Cleveland, it’s two years. Louisiana has a law, which the police unions lobbied for, that says investigators have to wait 14 days to question an officer who used a weapon or seriously injured or killed someone and 30 days to question an officer accused of other misconduct.

Investigations and the discipline of officers — basic on-the-job accountability — should not be within the purview of collective-bargaining agreements between police unions and cities. One big problem is that cities cannot negotiate a new union contract unless the union votes to approve it, so they’re stuck with old contracts, which include concessions they’ve made to the unions on accountability and oversight over decades. We can’t hold the police accountable for use of force or misconduct if the unions continue to have veto power over change.

Bazelon: Scott, you’re known for making changes in Camden in the decade you were chief. What role did the police union play?

Thomson: I started as a police officer in Camden in 1994. Camden is a city in New Jersey, across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, that is almost entirely black and Latino, and it had extremely high rates of poverty and crime. The department I came up in was largely apathetic and struggled with corruption. Early on, the police union was almost all older white guys. They wielded power through the collective-bargaining agreement and by collecting dues, which gave them the ability to build a war chest. They thought they could outlast any politician or police leader.

When I became chief in 2008, we’d had five chiefs in five years. Camden had one of the highest murder rates in the country. The rate for solving murders was only 17 percent, and there were open-air drug markets all over the city. There was borderline hatred between the community and the police. It was very hard to make any progress.

In 2011, when Camden was in a fiscal crisis, the state threatened huge layoffs to the police force unless the union made major concessions to the contract. The union refused, and nearly half of the department was laid off. Over the next two years, the Republican governor, Chris Christie, worked with Democrats in the county and city governments to disband the city Police Department and start a new county force.

In 2013, everyone in the city Police Department had to reapply for a new job. But about 50 hard-line union folks decided not to reapply. They encouraged people to follow them so that a county force couldn’t be formed. Fortunately, most officers did not follow the union advice. Even more fortunately, these 50 folks who were the impediment to change selected themselves out of the hiring process. I was able to accomplish in three days what I couldn’t in three years. That allowed me to reset the culture.

Camden is not a utopia. There are still huge social inequities there, and before I left last year, we fired and prosecuted a cop for excessive force. But it’s far less violent. Homicides have fallen by more than 50 percent, and the rate for solving them is more than 60 percent, because people are more willing to trust and talk to the police.

Goff: It’s important to know how rare Scott is in having stayed in his job as chief for so long. The average tenure for a police chief in a major city department is two and a half years. So if I’m an officer who thinks that a neighborhood needs somebody to crack a couple of skulls to keep everybody in line and keep crime down, and someone like Scott Thomson comes in as chief, usually all I have to do is wait him out. My job is secure. He can’t fire me for disagreeing. He can’t fire me for doing almost anything, unless I get caught on camera doing the most egregious thing, and even then often not. So in many places, we haven’t given reformers the tools to actually make reform happen.

Bazelon: What else helped change the culture in Camden?

Thomson: Some cops valued the secondary jobs they got, working in security for private businesses or road construction on the side, more than their primary job of police work. They could make an extra $2,000 a week. Guys who worked many hours would use their police job to get rest. New Jersey addressed that problem and in 2013 tightened state oversight. It has been an issue in Minneapolis.

Bazelon: A city audit there last year showed that officers working outside jobs were regularly exceeding the maximum hours they were allowed for the week. In 1994, when the mayor tried to tighten the rules to increase oversight, the union sued.

Gupta: The Justice Department can help create the necessary pressure on the union to participate in reform. When I was there during the Obama administration, we went into cities like Ferguson, Chicago and Baltimore, where there was substantial evidence about a pattern or practice of unconstitutional policing, like racially discriminatory practices or excessive use of force. Over the course of several months, we talked to hundreds of residents, activists and community leaders and hundreds of police officers, digging into every document you can think of in the Police Department, to really come up with a picture of what was happening. Then the Justice Department can negotiate an agreement with that city that contains a lot of reforms around use of force, discriminatory policing, accountability, supervision and training. The agreement is filed in court with a federal judge, sometimes as a consent decree, which has more teeth for enforcement and has often run for five years.

The consent decree forces the hand of the union and the rank and file. It can create the political will, over years, to actually see reforms through. That sustained focus really matters.

Bazelon: In a TV interview in June, Attorney General William Barr said, “I don’t think that the law-enforcement system is systemically racist.” The Justice Department will investigate George Floyd’s death, but Barr said he doesn’t think a larger pattern-or-practice investigation is currently warranted in Minneapolis.

Gupta: From 1994 to 2017, there were 69 investigations into patterns or practice in Police Departments, under both Republican and Democratic presidents, which resulted in 40 consent decrees or settlement agreements. But the Justice Department during the Trump administration has abandoned this work.

Where Should Funding Go?

Bazelon: In one poll this month , 74 percent of Americans supported the protests, and in another , the same number said they thought George Floyd’s death was connected to a broader problem with how the police treat black people. That was a major rise from when a similar question was asked six years ago about two killings. It has taken a long time, but the numbers suggest that a majority in the country have begun to absorb the lessons of Black Lives Matter. Alicia, what do you want to see happen next?

Garza: Most immediate, we need accountability for the death of George Floyd. Increasing the charges to second-degree murder for Derek Chauvin, and also charging the other three officers involved, was really important. Most of the time, there is unrest, and then there is a quick move to convene a grand jury, and people think there is no way that they couldn’t hold these officers accountable. And time and time again, as in the cases of Mike Brown and Eric Garner, grand juries have decided not to indict. So the elemental first step is to show that law and order applies equally to the police.

A demand to defund policing is also sweeping the country. People in Oakland are re-evaluating its budget, and several other cities are, too. We can do that by narrowing the focus of what policing is intended to do.

Bazelon: The United States spends more on public safety than almost all its peer countries and much less, relatively speaking, on social services. In Los Angeles this month, Black Lives Matter activists and members of the City Council succeeded in getting the mayor to propose moving $150 million of the Police Department’s nearly $2 billion operating budget to health and job programs. ( The police union said the mayor had “lost his damn mind” and warned that spending cuts would result in more crime.) In New York, more than 230 current and former members of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s staff signed an open letter pointing out that the police budget has grown since he took office by almost $1 billion (to a total of $6 billion) and demanded that $1 billion be reallocated to “‘essential social services,” like housing support and health care, as a coalition of advocacy groups are urging.

Gupta: That’s why this moment feels different to me than the moment after Ferguson, when Black Lives Matter changed the conversation in this country. Now we’re having a conversation that’s not just about how black communities are policed, and what reforms are required, but also about why we’ve invested exclusively in a criminalization model for public safety, instead of investing in housing, jobs, health care, education for black communities and fighting structural inequality. Budgets are moral documents, reflecting priorities and values.

When I went to Baltimore to investigate policing for the Justice Department, after Freddie Gray died from injuries he got in police custody, in every community meeting that I went to, folks were not just talking to me about concerns about police abuse. They wanted the Justice Department to fix the schools, to fix public transportation so they could get to their jobs more easily. Policing problems — police violence, overpolicing — were often the tip of the spear.

Garza: In 2018 and 2019, my organization, Black Futures Lab, did what we believe is the largest survey of black communities in America. It’s called the Black Census Project. We asked more than 30,000 black people across America what we experience, what we want to see happen instead and what we long for, for our futures. About 90 percent of our survey respondents said that the No.1 issue facing them, and keeping them up at night, is that their wages are too low to support a family. People want to see an investment in an increase of the minimum wage to $15 an hour. About 80 percent of respondents said that college costs were too high. In cities like San Francisco, we have made city college free for residents. These are things people can do right now to invest in black communities, by diverting resources from some of the ways we use law enforcement.

Goff: I’ve been saying for years that the No.1 thing you can do to help law enforcement is to call them less often. But I’m concerned about the slogan “Defund the Police.” It’s so much easier, time after time, for white people to take money out of communities than it is to put it back into communities, particularly when those communities are black.

Bazelon: In a 2016 survey by the Pew Research Center , black people were much less likely than white people to say that the police do an excellent or good job. Yet in a 2019 survey for Vox , they were almost as likely to support hiring more officers. Maybe that’s partly because they don’t see the government providing other resources for making their neighborhoods safe. But it seems really important to think carefully about how change should happen.

Goff: Imagine that you have a tool chest for solving social problems. It gives you options. Then you lose the tool of mental-health resources. You lose the tool of public education. They take out the tool of job placement. And then all you’ve got left is this one rusty hammer. That’s policing. Right now, the only money flowing into some black communities is law-enforcement money. There are many black activists doing this the right way. But there are also a bunch of white people saying, “Let’s defund the police,” because they like the police as an enemy, but then when it comes to investing in black communities, they are silent.

Simply defunding the police cannot be a legacy of this moment. I want to hear about investing in black communities more than I want to hear about defunding.

Garza: There has been such a massive disinvestment in the social safety net that should exist to give black communities an opportunity to thrive, whether it’s access to health care or housing or education or jobs. It’s really powerful to see the impact of the organizing that groups have been doing in Minneapolis in the City Council’s promise to disband the Police Department and then rebuild a different kind of public-safety system. My understanding is that they will rehire some officers. The details matter, and we don’t know what they are yet, but I think there’s reason to be hopeful.

I think people in this movement are more aligned in their goals than I’ve seen for the last seven years. I feel a deep level of responsibility not to let the moment pass and then all we get is better police training and chokehold bans. That’s what keeps me up at night.

Reimagining 911

Bazelon: The current protests are justifiably focused on the problems of overpolicing, including black and Latino people being stopped a lot for no good reason. But I’m going to also make an obvious point: Every society needs some way to prevent lawlessness and deter and investigate violent crime. Because civilians have an estimated 400 million guns in the United States — more than one for each of us — we probably need armed responders more than other countries that we might otherwise compare ourselves to, like Canada or Britain.

As people like Randall Kennedy, a professor at Harvard Law School, and Jill Leovy, the author of “Ghettoside,” have argued, black communities have often been underpoliced for serious crimes, because law enforcement doesn’t treat solving murders and shootings in their neighborhoods as a high-enough priority. In Baltimore, when the police got a lot of negative attention after Freddie Gray’s death in April 2015, there was a “pullback” in policing, as the writer Alec MacGillis described in these pages, which some officers thought the union encouraged. Homicides surged in the rest of 2015, and 93 percent of the victims were black.

Is this a danger in Minneapolis, and elsewhere, if cities fundamentally challenge their Police Departments and unions?

Gupta: I’m wary of making assumptions about depolicing. In 2015, I fielded calls from some police chiefs asserting that Department of Justice investigations and consent decrees were causing depolicing. But they had no evidence. A study by Richard Rosenfeld and Joel Wallman from 2019 found no evidence linking police killings of black people in 2014 to an ensuing homicide spike from depolicing. In New York, the big reduction in stop-and-frisk has been good, and crime has continued to decline.

Thomson: There is a prevailing sentiment in policing that “you can’t get in trouble for doing nothing.” But police officers take an oath and don’t get to decide whether they’ll follow it or not. This doesn’t necessarily mean writing tickets or making arrests, but if you are actively visible and engaging the public in your patrol area, flagrant criminal activity is far less likely to occur.

A tiny percentage of people are the ones destabilizing communities. They cause others to be armed, out of fear, who shouldn’t have to worry about defending themselves. So when I became chief of police, we worked with the F.B.I. and state investigators to arrest violent gang members. Then we put cops out walking the beat and on bicycles to prevent a cycle of violence over new turf. As a result, people started coming out of their homes, which is what you really need to start making a neighborhood safe.

Bazelon: I’m going to shift to other kinds of police work. In many cities, the police spend a lot of time “on traffic and motor-vehicle issues, on false burglar alarms, on noise complaints and on problems with animals,” the law professor Barry Friedman writes in a forthcoming article in The University of Pennsylvania Law Review. When a police report leads to criminal charges — only a subset of the whole — about 80 percent of them are for misdemeanors. Friedman argues that we should hand off some of what the police do to people who are better trained for it.

What if Americans retrained ourselves to expect armed officers to come only if they truly think there’s a real risk of someone getting hurt? The dispatcher would route calls that aren’t about crimes or a risk of harm to social workers, mediators and others.

Goff: In a sense, it’s not that hard to imagine. People already know that to some extent, 911 isn’t just for the police. In cities, it includes fire and emergency medical services.

Sinyangwe: There are a host of things that the police are currently responding to that they have no business responding to. If you have a car accident, why is somebody with a gun coming to the scene? Or answering a complaint about someone like George Floyd, who the store clerk said bought a pack of cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill?

Thomson: Perhaps, in a different city, the police wouldn’t have been sent in Floyd’s case. In Camden, I had a supermarket that called the police a lot about shoplifting. People would go in — and I’m not saying it’s right, but they’re taking food because they’re hungry or they need to feed their family. Then the security guards at the store engaged them; they would get in a fight, and now it turns into a robbery. It got to the point where I asked them to design their store to make it more difficult for people to steal and to stop calling us constantly. Because we’re not going to continue to charge our entire population with robbery on these minimal offenses.

Similarly, if you have a homeless man panhandling at a red light and you say to a cop, “Go fix it,” he’ll arrest the man. And now he has a $250 ticket. And how does he pay that? And what does any of this accomplish?

Bazelon: Let’s talk about domestic disputes. They’re the subject of 15 to more than 50 percent of calls to the police, according to Friedman’s article. He points out that such conflicts can turn serious quickly and unexpectedly. “We may well want force on the scene,” he writes. “But might we get further in the long run if someone with other skills — in social work or mediation — actually handled the incident?”

Monica Bell, who is a Yale law professor and sociologist, interviewed 50 low-income mothers in Washington about the police for a 2016 article in Law & Society Review. The women were deeply wary of the police in general, but 33 of them had called them at least once, often for help with a teenager. “Calling the police on family members deepens the reach of penal control,” Bell wrote. But the mothers in her study have scant options.

Garza: I lived in an apartment complex in Oakland for almost two decades. And we had incidences of harm, but we had a kind of ethos of not calling the police, not because people were organizers or activists but because of their experiences. They knew that if they called the police that real harm could come, and they didn’t want that.

Gupta: When I did investigations for the Justice Department, I would hear police officers say: “I didn’t sign up to the police force to be a social worker. I don’t have that training.” They know they’re stuck handling things because there is a complete lack of investment in other approaches and responses.

The International Association of Chiefs of Police put out a statement in June in which it said “defunding the police” was misguided. But it also said that funding cuts in social and medical welfare often put officers in an “untenable position,” because they are “often the only ones left to call to situations where a social worker or mental-health professional would have been more appropriate and safer for all involved.” On that, police leaders and protesters would agree.

Bazelon: In Eugene, Ore., some 911 calls are routed to a crisis-intervention service called Cahoots, which responds to things like homelessness, substance abuse and mental illness. Houston routes some mental-health calls to a counselor if they’re not emergencies. New Orleans is hiring people who are not police officers to go to traffic collisions and write reports, as long as there are no injuries or concerns about drunken driving. I’m borrowing these examples from Barry Friedman’s article. The point is that some cities are beginning to reduce the traditional scope of police work.

There are alternatives for crime-fighting too. New York has had some success by funding groups that do what’s called “violence interruption” in East New York and the South Bronx. They train people who live in the community, and who have often been involved with gangs in the past, to talk to younger people when there’s a conflict brewing that could turn violent.

One of the most interesting studies about policing is a randomized comparison of different strategies for dealing with areas of Lowell, Mass., that were hot spots for crime. One was aggressive patrols, which included stop-and-frisk encounters and arrests on misdemeanor charges, like drug possession. A second was social-service interventions, like mental-health help or taking homeless people to shelters. A third involved physical upkeep: knocking down vacant buildings, cleaning vacant lots, putting in streetlights and video cameras. The most effective in reducing crime was the third strategy.

Thomson: I would trade 10 cops for something like a Boys and Girls Club in my city. Those types of investments are crucial to safer, more stable communities. You clean up a vacant lot and turn it into a playground, and if people feel it’s a nice place, they bring their kids there. And then they are outside, looking out for one another. They are the eyes on the neighborhood. You have to have that, because the police can never be everywhere all the time.

Garza: We also shouldn’t accept a zero-sum game. An overwhelming majority of people we surveyed said they strongly support increasing taxes on people who are making $250,000 or more as a way to fund the services that are disintegrating in our communities.

I think there is a danger now that when protests start to die down, which they always do, when the blue-ribbon panel is dismantled, which it always is, black communities won’t necessarily be in a more powerful place than where we started. The country has to deeply invest in the ability of black communities to shape the laws that govern us.

As a country, we have to redistribute our resources. It’s not out of our reach. But it requires political will over the long term. Some of us have been running this race for a while now. We need you, if you’re newer to this fight, for the rest of the marathon.

Additional design & development by Shannon Lin.

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ICYMI: Stand Together's vision for policing reform

The past year has made one thing clear: The status quo of policing needs to change. Here's our vision for making policing work for everyone.

A police officer enters a squad car in the background

The past year has illuminated America's challenges with more urgency than ever before, and it's clear that the status quo of policing needs to change. Minority communities are unreasonably harmed by overcriminalization — the overuse and abuse of criminal law to address every societal problem — and police brutality. For police officers, both structural and cultural barriers stand in the way of protecting and serving communities justly. But an either-or solution — pro-police or anti-police — is a false choice.

Stand Together believes that equal justice and public safety aren't mutually exclusive. Our vision is to unite with communities and law enforcement to make policing work for everyone. Police have an essential role to play in keeping people safe by preventing and solving serious crimes. To do that, they need to establish strong trust and collaboration with the communities that they're sworn to protect and serve. Our community's policing reform efforts focus on policy change paired with grassroots community empowerment to create a system of policing that preserves public safety, while also respecting human dignity through collaborative practices that build trust.

Policing reform is an often overlooked, yet critical component of comprehensive criminal justice reform. "If we're going to work on criminal justice at all, we have to start with policing, because that's the first touch point into the system," says Brianna Nuhfer, director of criminal justice reform at Stand Together. "What police do — how they enforce the laws, which laws they enforce — starts the chain of events that determines the outcomes a person gets from the criminal justice system."

Challenges in the status quo

Nuhfer says the current state of policing is dominated by three challenges. First, police are asked to do too much. An overabundance of laws that aren't necessary to protect public safety or individual liberty forces police departments to choose which ones they will enforce, and which ones they won't.

The second challenge is the structural barriers to good policing. For example, police officers are often viewed as informal "tax collectors" within communities because of fines and fees policies — a process that unnecessarily saddles people with debt and leads to arrests for nonviolent infractions like unpaid traffic fines. "The ways in which officers succeed or advance in their career are often not the sort of things the community needs," Nuhfer says. "That's not helpful in terms of [advancing] what the core mission of policing should be, which is protecting people and keeping communities safe."

Third, cultural norms in law enforcement hinder transparency and accountability. Nuhfer points to the culture of silence that invades law enforcement, often resulting in officers being hesitant to report a colleague using inappropriate force or being overly aggressive with a citizen. The effect is that people who have direct interaction with police — particularly minority communities or communities with high crime rates — tend to distrust the police and adopt a similar culture of silence, resulting in many serious crimes going unsolved.

"There are often racial biases informing policing decisions that can entrap people in the justice system unnecessarily," Nuhfer says. This is particularly visible when it comes to enforcing drug laws. Black individuals are disproportionately incarcerated for drug-related charges compared to white individuals, even though drug use is relatively equal. This lack of trust hinders community members from partnering with police and sharing information to solve crimes. Rather than viewing law enforcement as a partner, they see them as an opponent who is going to arrest them or arrest their loved ones."

Rebuilding trust, growing collaboration

Stand Together believes that a shift away from silence and mistrust, and towards transparency and collaboration, must begin with police. "Because police have so often been the ones bearing responsibility for unnecessary brutality against communities, they ought to be the ones to really make the first move," says Nuhfer. "And to do that, it's going to require some deep cultural transformation within law enforcement."

To do this, Stand Together is proposing solutions to help law enforcement rebuild community trust — something that can only happen if police are able to focus their time and energy on what is important to their communities, not solely on arbitrary measures like arrests. The organization is concentrating on policy changes to reduce over-criminalization and unnecessary arrests, such as legalizing marijuana and changing the current system of fines and fees to cut down arrests of people who don't pose a threat to public safety.

Nuhfer hopes that these policy changes will transform the way the public and law enforcement, interact, so that police are an integral part of the community, not an external force that's being imposed upon them. "Sir Robert Peel, a former English statesman regarded as the founder of modern policing, said that the police are the public and the public are the police. It's this idea that [police] shouldn't be this occupying force, they should be the guy who lives next door," she says.

Elevating real solutions

Rather than adding to the noise of a two-sided debate — pro-police or anti-police, equal justice or public safety — Stand Together seeks to find alternatives and elevate tangible solutions. "Yes, this conversation nationally is important. We want to be an avid listener and contributor," Nuhfer says. "But at the end of the day, we have to ask ourselves, 'Are we being effective in providing real solutions that are valuable to people?'"

The key to elevating real solutions is this holistic approach: tackling reform from a policy and a community level. The Stand Together community is uniting to build strong communities that can equip people to find purpose and live in safety. "The answer here isn't just policy change, it's not just change within communities — it's a both-and approach," Nuhfer says.

Through the Stand Together community's policing reform initiatives, we are helping to strengthen bonds between community members and the police. Individuals will feel respected and heard, and structures in policing will equip law enforcement to apply the law fairly. Together, police and communities can work together to advance the shared goal of public safety supported by fairness and equal justice.

Learn more about the Stand Together community's policing reform efforts .

The partnership will focus on breaking down barriers by destigmatizing addiction and prioritizing mental health, empowering everyone to live their best life.

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Discipline as an Integral Part of Effective Police Supervision Essay

Introduction, fostering discipline in the police force.

The police department, as faction of the judiciary and law enforcer, cannot be allowed to be tainted with traces of indiscipline. It is a ridicule and an outright insult to the judicial system in its totality. The duty to ensure that unbecoming behavior and unacceptable professional conduct does not gain ground in the police force is bestowed on the police supervisor.

For the effective role of supervisor to be fully realized, the individual supervisor cannot overlook the importance of a disciplined force. Without discipline, the supervisor will have failed as an individual and failed the whole institution as well. This essay looks into the maintenance of discipline among the police as an integral part of effective police supervision.

Supervisors as disciplinarians

The ability to maintain discipline among the subordinates is one way of measuring the suitability of a supervisor for the role. The sergeant is the most important party in the police force, and his position the most challenging one. “It is the sergeant…who plays the pivotal role and, in large measure determines whether the police department will face unfair labor practice charges, costly arbitrations, lengthy litigation, and more union activism,” (More & Miller 2007, P.314).

The police are the point of connection between law enforcers and the society. They have been given discretion to deal with matters concerning the public such as determining when to arrest a suspect or when to shoot. “The powers that police hold and exercise…if improperly used, reduce public confidence in police, decrease respect for the law, and increase fear amongst a community, thus destabilizing it,” (Office of Police Integrity 2007, P. 18).

When a supervisor sleeps on his work as the disciplinarian organ of the institution the result is; “lower quality of service provided by a given department and undermine the integrity of the entire profession,” (More & Miller 2007, P. 316). Further, “poor supervision and the lack of effective disciplinary mechanisms allow ‘loose cannons’ who are in positions of power to abuse that power,” (More & Miller 2007, P. 317).

Being the one who has the most contact with the subordinates, he can use that advantageous position to create a police force whose professional standards are not tainted with unethical issues.

The discipline could be constructive or punitive. Constructive refers to disciplinary measures geared to create internal discipline of an officer while punitive comes way after the employee has been found to have committed an indiscretion and is intended to make him not repeat the act, and should only be used when all other alternatives are depleted.

Good disciplinary measures

Sergeants, when they notice indiscipline, should not wait until the situation gets out of hand. They should take corrective measures with immediate effect. “Failure to act promptly and decisively tends to perpetuate the problem and sets the stage for more debilitating interpersonal conflict,” (More & Miller 2007, P. 301).

It makes other subordinates believe that the disciplinary measure laid down by the organization are merely for formalism purposes and are not really applicable. Further, they show that the supervisor is in control and has the authority over the subordinates yielding respect from them.

The disciplining should also be firm and fair and must be seen to be applied indiscriminately and equitably. “A great sergeant establishes a sense of equity. This doe’s not mean people are always treated equally, just always fairly,” (Werder, 1996).

They should not be in violation of any written law or accepted rules of procedure and the subordinate must be able to understand his reasons of being disciplined. The root of the indiscipline and motive of performing the act must be established through enough evidence and the errant subordinate must be given a chance to be heard and explain his case.

Further, other less serious disciplinarian measures such as formal reprimands or arbitration should be tried out before the supervisor can jump to the more serious ones such as demotion or discharge. The measure adopted should be reasonable and not excessive taking into consideration the circumstances of the particular case.

The disciplinary measure should be less bureaucratic and filled with many formalities. A research currently conducted showed that “amongst the significant defects with the current discipline system, are the numerous, inconsistent, excessively formal and slow review and appeal processes available,” (Office of Police Integrity 2007, P. 14)

The employees should be properly informed of the unacceptable form of behavior to avoid a situation where the employee was unaware of the existence of the offence in the first place. “Once, the subordinate knows the rules he knows what to expect in case of failure to follow the disciplinary code,” (Shimansky 2006).

The discipline measures adopted must have just two objectives i.e., to act as a future deterrence both to the deviant subordinate and to the others or to change the specific individual and ensure he is reformed.

Any other objective of the supervisor such as to muster control of the subordinate or to settle some old scores, will be inappropriate and an abuse of power. The supervisor must at all time guard himself against making an emotional decision on discipline matters. They must remain in total control of the situation without having to be accommodative of subordinate’s improper behavior.

As much as supervisors are mandated to maintain discipline, they should not take to themselves the habit of nosing around the private business of the subordinates. All their actions should be confined to circumstances within the formal business of the organization. What the subordinate does outside the employment circle should be a no go zone for the supervisor.

The most effective manner of maintaining discipline is by outlining some procedures and principles, uniform to the whole organization, that every individual has to adhere to. The rules must also prescribe the right punitive measures to be undertaken in case of the subordinates defying such rules.

This makes the system a lot more formal and will yield respect from subjects. It will also ensure uniformity and avoid situations where the subordinate feels unfairly handled. They must, accordingly be communicated to all the subjects in a manner to obtain acceptance from them. Rules which are not generally accepted by the subjects often result into a situation of chaos and unresolved conflicts.

Positive discipline

These are measures taken by the supervisor long before any indiscipline has been detected. they are more of preventive measures as opposed to curative. They are aimed at securing the officers loyalty to the principles and procedures and get them to adhere to such policies willingly, without being sanctioned.

The subordinates are driven by “the human tendency to do what needs to be done, to do what is right in a given situation, and to voluntarily comply with the reasonable standards of performance and conduct that apply to all members of the workforce,” (More & Miller 2007,P. 291).

The supervisor has the duty of ensuring that create this kind of dedication from the subordinates. They develop self-discipline where the subordinate decide to give their all to the better performance of the whole institution for which they work for. Here, the supervisor simply acts as role model to be emulated.

They take a personal decision to motivate the subordinates through recognition and rewards. They create an environmental that is necessary for the growth of such a self-driven employee. A supervisor who has acquired skills and expertise to achieve this is a quality staff to the institution.

Discipline in the police force is one of the most important things and the topic should be handled with care. Lack of discipline in the force means that the indiscipline is extended to the society in general since a person who is undisciplined himself cannot function to the right standards.

But as much as we delve in punitive discipline institutions should realize that the most important discipline is the positive discipline. When subordinates are internally disciplined, the effects will be long lasting as opposed to corrective discipline which is administered after some malpractice has already happened. Police supervisors should seek to adopt methods of according positive discipline if they want to be effective in the role in the long run.

More, H and Miller, L. (2007). Effective Police Supervision: Coaching, Counseling and mentoring , 5th Ed, Chapter 11-13, copyright Mathew Bender and Company, Inc, a member of the LexisNexis Group

Office of Police Integrity. (2007). A fair and Effective Victoria Police Discipline System , Victorian Government Printer, session 2006-2007, P.P No. 3

Shimansky.B. (2006). Discipline as an integral Part of Effective Supervision, retrieved from web.

Werder, E.J. (1996). The Great Sergeant! Personal Qualities of a Great Sergeant, National Executive Institute Associates, Major Cities Chief’s Association and Major County Sheriff’s Association.

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Criminal Justice

Police Leadership

Police Communication Skills Matter More Than Ever: Here’s Why

Importance of Communication
Communication Tips?
Language Barriers
De-Escalation Strategies
Improve Your Communication
How a Master's Degree Can Help

Why Is Communication Important in Law Enforcement?

Perhaps today more than ever, communication matters. For police and law enforcement professionals, having the interpersonal skills necessary to effectively communicate with fellow officers, subordinates, higher-ups, community members, victims and their families, other departments and jurisdictions, and the court systems is critical to the mission of “protect and serve.” Police communication skills — needed to investigate crimes; de-escalate situations; build trust with communities; and write memos, reports and grants — are crucial for everyone working in law enforcement, and especially for those with leadership aspirations.

Many of the top officers and professionals in law enforcement have cited effective communication skills as a key ingredient to their success. That’s because the most successful law enforcement leaders understand how to communicate with people from diverse backgrounds under varying and often unpredictable conditions. They use communication to build trust, create transparency and foster an atmosphere of mutual respect and empathy, be it in the office, on the streets or in the courtroom .

[RELATED] Sharpen Your Communication Tools with a Law Enforcement Leadership Master’s Degree [Free eBook] >>

A Bartelby Research report titled “ Effective Communication and Police Officers ,” put it best: “Police officers could not serve the public effectively without good communication skills…Police officers can only succeed if they master communication, both social and professional, so that they can be comfortable with the public and get their jobs done.”

What Does Good Police Communication Look Like?

Using what are sometimes referred to as “tactical communication skills,” many police officers are trained to use a set of strategies in the field that can help diffuse situations and identify the root cause before they escalate out of control. In order for officers to effectively communicate with their community, earn their trust and get citizens to cooperate with their instructions, some effective communication strategies that are deployed include:

The “ 80-20 principle ,” which was originally used in sales, says that officers should spend 80% of their time listening and 20% talking, and then use what they hear to make a connection.
Using body language to show the person that the officer is listening carefully.
Asking many questions, and making simple requests, one at a time.
Asking open-ended questions , especially questions that begin with “what” and “how.”
Understanding how “ emotional contagion ” can benefit or hurt you. A person with mental illness may not understand all of the words an officer says, but the person will sense their tone and attitude. If the officer is shouting orders and appears tense, that increases the tension. Speaking slowly and calmly can help de-escalate the situation and convey to the person that the officer is not in a rush, that they have as much time as needed to converse and reach an understanding.

Breaking Down the Language Barrier for Better Communication

It can be hard enough to communicate with suspects and community members when they speak the same language, let alone when there is a language barrier involved.

As the diversity of citizens in the United States continues to grow, police departments are actively seeking officers and law enforcement professionals who possess second language skills – and many of these departments are willing to pay a premium for those skilled candidates. For example, police in San Diego, California, receive an additional 3.5% bonus for being bilingual , and the Salem, Oregon, police department offers a 5% pay incentive for bilingual speakers of Spanish, Russian, Asian dialects or American Sign Language.

Additionally, there are a number of language training programs geared specifically toward police officers, such as the free online language training courses offered through the National Institute of Justice.

Communication is Key in De-Escalation Strategies

Communication is also being heavily relied upon to help change police perceptions and improve community relations. In response to events that have taken place over the last few years and the high level of community–police tensions that currently exist in communities across the country, police departments are increasingly focused on de-escalation strategies when it comes to training officers, making arrests and interacting with community members. What many of the best chiefs and officers have long known is that communication, done right, works. “Sometimes when a person is in crisis, all they need is to be heard,” said Craig Stowell, Crisis Intervention Officer and Staff Instructor, with the Stearns County (Minnesota) Sheriff’s Office in an interview with the Crisis Prevention Institute .

De-escalation in policing is a technique that attempts to reverse the long taught and encouraged method of using force to control a situation. Instead, de-escalation attempts to diffuse a situation through peaceful means such as speaking calmly, showing empathy, and asking open-ended questions to engage people in a real dialogue rather than demanding answers and displaying power and authority.

The importance of de-escalation and educating officers about that skill is beginning to impact police departments around the country. Officer Stowell’s department in Minnesota now includes in-depth crisis prevention training in their classroom sessions, and Minnesota has begun awarding six hours of continuing education credit for licensed officers who complete these programs. The Chicago Police Department has also updated its de-escalation protocols and emphasized their commitment to finding non-violent and non-lethal outcomes during incidents. The department mandates annual de-escalation and use of force training for officers.

But learning how to communicate with diverse populations ranging from criminal suspects to victims, social service agencies, witnesses and other community members –some of who may be dealing with trauma, addiction, mental illness, poverty or any number of afflictions — is not easy. Communication techniques and skills, especially as they apply to modern police work, must be learned and practiced in order to be effective. That’s why professional training and experience combined with higher education can be so effective.

Tips for Law Enforcement Communication

In addition to practicing active listening, asking questions when needed and using the right body language, there are other steps law enforcement agencies and departments can take to improve and strengthen communication.

Talk less and listen more. As Lexipol Co-Founder Gordon Graham explains, “In law enforcement, the ability to communicate is one of our most important tools,” emphasizing that both talking and listening are essential to being an effective law enforcement officer. “Take a few minutes to listen compassionately, emphatically to what they’re saying. And who knows — you might even hear some valuable information.”
Be aware of potential language barriers . English is a second language for many in the United States, which is why it’s important for law enforcement officers to keep this mind and seek out a translator, if needed.
Ask open-ended questions . While “yes or no” questions are important, consider adding in questions that begin with “what” or “how,” which may help you draw out more details or a more elaborate answer.
Be mindful of body language and non-verbal cues such as body position, tone of voice, facial expression, eye contact, hand gestures and physical distance.
Do not take any insults or any verbal attacks personally . Law enforcement officers are often faced with stressful situations, but they need to remain calm and poised — which is not to say they cannot show any signs of emotion.
Be compassionate and empathetic . An effective law enforcement leader must be able to try and understand how someone else is feeling. It is also important to treat everyone with compassion and respect, regardless of whether they are fellow officers, victims, witnesses or community members.
Understand the limits of verbal de-escalation. While verbal communication is typically the first step, it is important to understand when physical intervention is necessary, such as when immediate action is needed to prevent death or injury.
Develop effective, consistent communication. It’s crucial to have protocols in place, regardless of the situation. This includes everything from figuring out the process for public alerts and internal communication to deciding when, and if, officers are allowed to speak with the media. Agencies and departments also need to consider through which channels — and how often — information is communicated.
Prepare for crisis communication , which includes identifying a crisis team and a spokesperson ahead of time. This is especially important when it comes to fast-paced situations in which a variety of stakeholders and individuals need to be quickly contacted or alerted.
Be proactive . Law enforcement agencies should continually examine policies and procedures and update them if necessary. It’s also important to communicate any updates to the appropriate parties (internal personnel, the public, etc.) This type of transparency and initiative will also help build trust with the community.
Participate in specialized communication programs. One such example is the Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication (CERC) training from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Both webinars and in-person training options are available.
Engage in continuing trends and information. For example, the CERC Corner includes specifics on messaging and audience, crisis communication plans, community engagement and the role of social media, media and cell phone communication.

How a Master’s Degree Can Improve Communication for Law Enforcement

Many law enforcement professionals seek outside educational resources to help them develop and refine their communication and leadership skills. Programs like University of San Diego’s online M.S. in Law Enforcement and Public Safety Leadership include entire graduate-level courses on topics such as “Communication Skills for Law Enforcement Leaders,” and “Law Enforcement Management and Conflict Resolution.” Practical, relevant coursework like this is resonating with students. As Eddie Brock, a San Diego County Sheriff Lieutenant said, “A police officer with a limited education will see one way to solve a problem in the community. The educated officer, on the other hand, might see the problem from different angles, bringing in different resources to solve a problem, not just the law. Education causes you to think slower and think broader.

And the research supports Lt. Brock’s perceptions. While a college degree is no replacement for on the job experience, research shows that college-educated officers generate fewer citizen complaints and are more likely to work proactively with community members to resolve issues and prevent problems.

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Why Universities Turn to the Police to End Student Protests

Colleges and the police have a long shared history.

Universities, the Police and Protests

Kena Betancur | AFP via Getty Images

NYPD police officers march onto Columbia University’s campus in New York City on April 30, 2024.

A two-week standoff between Columbia University administration and student protesters who advocated for the school to divest from companies that work in or support Israel culminated on April 30, 2024, one day after a group of students occupied a campus building, Hamilton Hall.

New York police arrested 109 demonstrators at Columbia and 173 other demonstrators at City College, in uptown Manhattan, on April 30.

The Conversation U.S. politics and society editor Amy Lieberman spoke with John J. Sloan III , a scholar of crime and police on college campuses at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, to better understand the different roles that police play on university and college campuses.

NYPD officers in riot gear break into a building at Columbia University, where pro-Palestinian students are barricaded inside a building and have set up an encampment, in New York City on April 30, 2024. New York police entered Columbia University's campus late April 30, 2024 and were in front of a building barricaded by pro-Palestinian student protesters, an AFP reporter saw. Dozens of people were around Hamilton Hall, on the Columbia campus in the middle of New York City, as police arrived and began pushing protesters outside, the reporter said. (Photo by KENA BETANCUR / AFP) (Photo by KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty Images)

NYPD officers on April 30, 2024, enter a building at Columbia University, where pro-Palestinian students barricaded themselves and set up an encampment.

How do universities differ in working with police?

The first documented appearance of a sworn police officer patrolling a college campus was in 1894 at Yale University.

Generally, there have been two approaches to police on university or college campuses. Initially, university administrators asked local police to respond to issues with antiwar demonstrators during the Vietnam War and with women’s rights protests in the 1960s. When many of those encounters did not go very well for anyone , campus police departments were created. Today, about two-thirds of universities and colleges – mainly public ones, like University of California, Los Angeles – have their own campus police departments . There is no difference between these campus police officers and their municipal counterparts, in terms of training or legal authority.

Another one-third of colleges and universities ultimately chose to instead hire their own private security guards – not police officers. Columbia and other Ivy League schools, as well as other private institutions like Johns Hopkins University, are in this group. Increasingly, many of these guards are armed .

One reason different options were taken was because the legalities of creating a police department at a private school are more complex than are those for creating police departments at public universities. Aside from these logistics, there have also been image concerns about whether schools really wanted to have armed, uniformed police on their campuses.

Does this difference in police or private security matter, practically?

Colleges and universities that have their own police departments frequently have a memorandum of understanding or mutual aid agreement that formalizes the relationship between campus and municipal police. Often, both groups will train together to better coordinate their response to, say, a mass shooting on campus. It’s likely that in the post-George Floyd era, mutual training included responding to campus protests.

For schools without campus police, security personnel may lack extensive training in how to deal with demonstrations. As a result, things can spiral very quickly. I would imagine that Columbia’s president made the most recent call to bring in the NYPD because of a combination of factors – including that private security personnel may not have been fully trained and equipped to address the situation, plus the perceived urgency of the situation of students taking over a university building.

What else is notable about how different schools have responded to these protests?

There appears to be a wide range in both university and police responses to the protests. On the one end is the Columbia situation, where you literally had NYPD officers using drones and other types of military tactics to take the building back that the students first occupied on April 29.

At the University of Wisconsin, Madison – which has its own campus police department – the university president also made the decision to call in the Madison police , perhaps for different reasons. This gets to the question of how university administrators want to deal with these protests. Do they want to wait out the protesters? And if they don’t want to wait them out, then how quickly do they want the campus cleared?

I certainly understand there is a need to ensure that the campus is secure. But when you invite local or state police to campus to address protests, you are turning over control of the situation to them and you are relying on them having the necessary training and preparation to come in and not create more problems. What I have seen so far, at least, is those who have called in outside law enforcement are going to have to answer questions about the use of force that was used against protesters.

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - MAY 01: California Highway Patrol (CHP) officers patrol near a protestor (L) at a pro-Palestinian encampment, the morning after it was attacked by counter-protestors at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) campus, on May 1, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. A group of counter-protestors attacked the camp overnight leaving some demonstrators wounded. The camp was declared ‘unlawful’ by the university yesterday and classes have been cancelled today due to the violence. Pro-Palestinian encampments have sprung up at college campuses around the country with some protestors calling for schools to divest from Israeli interests amid the ongoing war in Gaza. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Mario Tama | Getty Images

California Highway Patrol officers walk near a protester at a pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA on May 1, 2024, in Los Angeles.

What is important to know about the police’s tactical response to the protests?

New York Mayor Eric Adams spoke at a press conference and explained the NYPD’s approach to entering and clearing the Columbia campus and it reminded me of military tactics. He talked about how the NYPD had drones flying around to pinpoint better access points into the building and where the students were. He discussed encrypting the police’s radio frequency, so no one could listen to them. The garb that the police were wearing and the visuals of so many officers marching down the street reminded me of an army.

Adams said that no one was hurt at Columbia, but there are reports that show three students were hurt , as well as potentially some police officers. There have also been reports of police officers being injured at University of Wisconsin, Madison.

In other places, like UCLA, there has been a heavy outside police presence on campus, as well as reports of police officers using pepper spray and tear gas on protesters there and in other places like Florida . And at the University of Texas, Austin, officials called in state troopers to arrest protesters this week. Police using pepper spray and other aggressive tactics were reported there as well.

Part of this phenomenon involves the extent the police, nationwide, are becoming more and more militarized as a standard operating procedure. The Ohio State University purchased a surplus military armored personnel carrier for its police team in 2013, for example.

In the post-9/11 era, initial law enforcement concerns were with terrorism; now, the concern is mass shooters. In response, many police departments, including those at colleges and universities, are now routinely using military-grade surveillance, communications, equipment and training as part of their operations, such that it can look like you have the military on your campus .

John J. Sloan III , Professor Emeritus of Criminal Justice, University of Alabama at Birmingham

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

Tags: colleges , police , activism

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Police Use Of Force explained by UPD of SUNY Albany

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Essay on Police for Students and Children
Through essay on police, we will learn about the role and importance of police. Importance of Police. The police are entrusted with the duty of maintaining the peace and harmony of a society. Moreover, they also have the right to arrest and control people who do not follow the law. As a result, they are important as they protect our society.
Importance Of Police: [Essay Example], 627 words GradesFixer
Importance of Police. In a world where security and safety are paramount concerns, the role of police forces cannot be overstated. From preventing crime to maintaining public order, law enforcement officers play a crucial role in upholding the rule of law and ensuring the well-being of society. The importance of police presence in our ...
The Importance of Police Reform: [Essay Example], 600 words
In conclusion, the importance of police reform cannot be overstated. Addressing systemic issues within law enforcement, promoting accountability and transparency, and shifting the culture of policing are all essential components of meaningful reform.While the challenges to police reform are significant, the potential solutions outlined in this essay provide a roadmap for enacting positive change.
What Police Are For: A Look Into Role Of The Police In Modern Society
There's a new app that some police departments are using called Elucide (ph) that does an ongoing measure of community trust in the police or their feeling of safety in the neighborhood. And those ...
A better path forward for criminal justice: Police reform
Police department budgets should be fiscally responsible and shift funding to focusing on solving violent crime, while simultaneously reducing use of force on low-income and racial/ethnic minority ...
Importance of Police-Community
4. Maintain focus on the importance of collaboration, and be visible in the community. It is important for the police to be visible in their communities and know their residents. Many people do not interact with the police outside of enforcement contexts. This can result in people developing negative associations with the police - for example ...
Goals and outcomes of police officer communication: Evidence from in
Research has shown that the actions of officers during interactions have a major impact on how police are perceived (Bolger & Walters, 2019; Tyler, 2004).Research on police-initiated contact finds that fair and courteous treatment, providing reasons for being stopped, and explaining their rights to civilians all contribute to satisfaction with police-initiated encounters (Quinton et al., 2000 ...
The Critical Importance of the Police Community
This essay will discuss the importance of trust between police and the community, the challenges faced by law enforcement, and initiatives to improve police-community relations. Also at PapersOwl you can find more free essay examples related to Communication. ... Police departments are provided with one of the most unique and powerful ...
PDF Essays on the Politics of Policing
police collection of fees, ﬁnes, and civilly forfeited assets affects the quality of other police functions (namely, whether or not it affects the rate at which police clear violent and prop-erty crimes). A second essay examines police ofﬁcers as street-level bureaucrats, focusing on how they exercise their discretion.
PDF A Need for Change: The Importance of Continued Training and Education
Law enforcement agencies range from local police departments patrolling the streets of America to federal agencies responding to national and even international criminal ... police agencies revolve around and thereby is the most important. With that interaction, comes a need for accountability and responsibility, not only to that citizen, but ...
Police Reform Is Necessary. But How Do We Do It?
Photographs by Malike Sidibe. June 13, 2020. SHARE. On Memorial Day, the police in Minneapolis killed George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man. Three officers stood by or assisted as a fourth, Derek ...
Diversity in policing can improve police-
A study first debuted Feb. 7 at the American Association for the Advancement of Science 2021 Annual Meeting harnesses newly collected data from the Chicago Police Department to show that deploying officers of different backgrounds does, in fact, produce large differences in how police treat civilians.. The researchers link millions of daily patrol assignments with police officer demographics ...
Police
police, body of officers representing the civil authority of government. Police typically are responsible for maintaining public order and safety, enforcing the law, and preventing, detecting, and investigating criminal activities. These functions are known as policing. Police are often also entrusted with various licensing and regulatory ...
PDF Police Organizational Structure and Police Performance a ...
This shift was so important because it allowed researchers to examine police organizational theory directly due to the creation and use of more effective organizational measures. ... many aspects of police departments such as the organization's effects on police officer's attitudes and behaviors (Harrison, 1975; Smith & Klein, 1983; Wilson ...
The New York City Police Department and Society Essay
Officially, the first police department was introduced by Boston authorities in the middle of the 19th century (Mosteller). New York City was the next state to found a similar agency, now known as the New York City Police Department or the NYPD. Possessing exclusive power and opportunities, it is expected from police departments to encourage ...
What really matters for effective police leadership?
Chris D. Lewis. Leaders must be able to effectively talk and honestly listen, in good times and bad, formally in meetings and casually in the hallway, in groups and individually. Photo/Police1. In my previous two articles, I espoused two of my steadfast beliefs - based on over 30 years in police supervision and executive leadership roles in ...
Stand Together's Police Reform Ideas & Vision
Stand Together believes that equal justice and public safety aren't mutually exclusive. Our vision is to unite with communities and law enforcement to make policing work for everyone. Police have an essential role to play in keeping people safe by preventing and solving serious crimes. To do that, they need to establish strong trust and ...
Police Department Essays (Examples)
police dept. Proposal for City Police Department (State of Florida) The objective of this proposal is to establish a Police Department, Macomb Police Department and employ the number of personnel needed to deliver professional and competent police services to the citizens of this city. A determination has been made that there will be 175 sworn officers and 50 civilian or non-sworn officers.
Discipline as an Integral Part of Effective Police Supervision Essay
The ability to maintain discipline among the subordinates is one way of measuring the suitability of a supervisor for the role. The sergeant is the most important party in the police force, and his position the most challenging one. "It is the sergeant…who plays the pivotal role and, in large measure determines whether the police department ...
Law Enforcement Professionalism: Training Is the Key
Training Is the Key. American law enforcement is professional, effective, efficient, and, often, regarded as a model to follow worldwide. Some would hold that a significant factor in the history of this professionalism is training, which imparts the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that form its foundation. The recent deep economic decline in ...
Improving Motivation and Productivity of Police Officers
Motivating police personnel can be complicated. Supervisors must work hard to ensure officers perform their duties efficiently and effectively. Many factors can negatively affect productivity and cause officers to become complacent, doing the bare minimum necessary. The difficult nature of crime fighting can cause officers to become cynical ...
The Overlooked [But Crucial] Skill of Police Communication
The importance of de-escalation and educating officers about that skill is beginning to impact police departments around the country. Officer Stowell's department in Minnesota now includes in-depth crisis prevention training in their classroom sessions, and Minnesota has begun awarding six hours of continuing education credit for licensed ...
Perspective: Writing Clear, Effective Police Reports
Writing Clear, Effective Police Reports: No English Degree Required. Report writing continues to be a vital task for law enforcement. Police officers often have heard that the most powerful instrument they carry is a pen. 1 Unfortunately, writing reports sometimes intimidates recruits, instructors, administrators, and even seasoned officers.
Why Universities Turn to the Police to End Student Protests
The Conversation U.S. politics and society editor Amy Lieberman spoke with John J. Sloan III, a scholar of crime and police on college campuses at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, to ...