Towards better policing: The imporrtance of training

David C. Couper was Madison’s chief of police from 1972 to 1993. Since his retirement, he has attended seminary and was ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church. He is the author of Arrested Development: A Veteran Police Chief Sounds Off About Protest, Racism, Corruption and the Seven Steps Necessary to Improve Our Nation’s Police (2012) and How to Rate Your Local Police (2015).

David C. Couper, Progressive Magazine - Today, the use of deadly force by police across the country has become a national disgrace. We have been overwhelmed by the all-too-frequent deaths of black men and persons with mental illness at the hands of police. It has happened in Ferguson, Staten Island, Cleveland, Albuquerque, North Charleston, Baltimore, and even Madison, Wisconsin, where I served as chief of police for more than twenty years.

Were it not for the advent of new technologies, like cellphones that take video, many of the incidents documented above would have been lost in doctored police reports, organizational denial, and cries of “support our police.” It is difficult not to be stunned after viewing the videos.

I have come to the conclusion that the problem is not bad cops, but rather a bad system of training. It is a vast problem. The good news: It is a correctable one. But solving the problem must start now.

Since 9/11, our nation has lived in a climate of low-grade fear. Our decade-long military adventures abroad have led to the creeping militarization of our nation’s police at home. Police have gone from being the guardians of our democracy to being our homespun warriors. It is not an appropriate shift: Police guard and protect us; a warrior’s job is to kill our declared enemies.

... The questionable killings by police drive home the point. Police in some communities have lost the confidence of those they are sworn to protect and serve. They are seen as threats to justice, not agents of it. That is bad for everyone, including cops.

If police commit to rebuild the trust they have lost, they will be more effective, their work will be personally rewarding, and they will be safer. But this will not begin to happen until their system of using deadly force is fixed.

.. I came to Madison in 1972 as a young, reform-minded police chief. The department I inherited was mostly white, traditional, and battling with students and young people over the war in Vietnam. Of 300 officers, one was African American. Within the patrol ranks, there were no women. The seven women we did have were unarmed juvenile policewomen, who were required to have a four-year college degree. Policemen, on the other hand, were required only to have a high school diploma.

One of my most important improvements, along with trying out new and softer ways of handling almost daily protests, was to integrate the department. I announced that one-half of the new officers we hired must be women and officers of color. This became our hiring standard for the two decades I led the department.

When I retired, twenty-one years later, 10 percent of Madison police officers were African American and 25 percent were women. It took that long and that level of commitment.

... Transforming the police is just like management guru Peter Drucker once said: Leaders have to be “monomaniacs with a mission.” They must also be persistent, patient, and passionate. One of my mantras in those early days was, “Let’s make the changes we need and not have the court make them for us.”

Leading an organization-wide transformation is a difficult and often painful process. When I proposed the changes that I believed were necessary, they were met with resistance. Many of the old guard employees were not happy. They felt I was giving up control of the organization. Of the ten top commanders, I had the support of three of them.

.. I called a meeting of my management team and told them .. I needed them to come with me. I would help them be successful in this new venture. But they needed to come on board now.

Many were reluctant. They were afraid to ask and listen to their employees, to be collaborative with them, but they moved forward. And during the next ten years, we made remarkable organizational improvements. Today, the president of the police officers’ union still is a member of the department management team and an elected officers’ council still meets monthly with Madison’s chief of police to give input and support.

... How did we get to where we are today? It seems we unknowingly fell into a system of criminal justice in America that has become oriented more toward domination than problem-solving, more toward arrest and incarceration than prevention and treatment, more toward using coercion rather than earned authority to get their work done.

... It is my opinion that in order to restore trust between police and the communities they serve, we need to begin to heal the relationships between blacks and police. If this fails to happen, our present system of policing will continue to erode away the foundational values of our great society, and we will end up with police who look and act like those in nondemocratic countries.

While policing is a dangerous occupation, it is not as dangerous as many people think. The incidence of fatal injuries for police is much lower than for other professions, including loggers, fishers, roofers, and airline pilots. Sadly, over the last decade, an average of 150 police officers have lost their lives each year in the line of duty, to causes ranging from gunfire to traffic accidents.

In contrast, it is estimated that an average of more than 900 U.S. citizens a year are killed by police; that is between two and three people per day. While more whites than nonwhites are killed by police, a recent analysis found that blacks are three times more likely to meet this fate than whites.

... Making matters worse is the questionable instruction given to police recruits. They are taught that a person armed with an edged weapon and within a twenty-one-foot distance can kill them before they can discharge their firearm. And police, when confronted with situations they believe merit the use of deadly force, are taught to shoot and keep shooting multiple times at a person’s “center mass”—the chest and heart.

A much better approach would be for police leaders to affirm their department’s commitment to the sanctity of life and discuss how they are going to change their policies and practice to reduce the use of deadly force. The public needs to know that their police are trained to de-escalate and manage conflict situations; that they are able to control their fear, and be respectful to everyone with whom they come in contact, regardless of their station in life.

Police are here to represent us. They may tell us that using deadly force in these situations is legal, and, therefore, permissible. However, if they do that, we need to tell them that even if it is permissible, it is not moral, and it is no longer acceptable.

In 1829, when setting forth the principles of policing a democracy, Sir Robert Peel declared, “The police are the public and the public are the police.”