Policing is Complex

I am currently teaching a combined MS/PhD Policing course this semester.

To set the stage, I combined some of my favorite parts of my ASU School of Criminology & Criminal Justice graduate coursework (Discussion Leading from Jacob Young's Theory courses; "Burning Questions" and knowledge dissemination via writing for academic, practitioner, and general audiences from Kevin Wright's Corrections class; and collaborative final papers between students from Cassia Spohn's Courts class). I also religiously incorporate Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Systems Theory into everything I do, first learned from my time working in juvenile justice with Adam Fine.

We are currently covering use of force and misconduct - reading just a TON from Bill Terrill and Eugene Paoline and something magnificent happened. A student posed the question: "With so many different law enforcement agencies across the U.S., how can the country better track and learn from use-of-force incidents to inform standardized training and ensure training reflects those patterns?" and the conversation shifted from assessing those incidents as a brief 10-second timeframe, to looking at higher aggregates to understand WHY uses of force occur (justified or not). We started looking at organizational policies, neighborhood factors, agency culture, citizen factors, and - the delightful kicker - individual officer factors. We focused on education, which led to discussing their upbringing and childhood, their personality and temperament, their motivations for entering policing, their experiences in the academy and on the job up until that specific incident - everything that would mold the individual into who they are as an adult and who they are as an officer.

Basically, these students have started to examine police-citizen interactions and behaviors as being far more complex than we (and the general public) would like them to be. Understanding that we can never completely eliminate negative encounters or uses of force (gathered from listening to Jerry Ratcliffe's Reducing Crime podcast episode with Justin Nix), particularly just by addressing one system, how can we modify small aspects of various systems - such as the officer working environment and personal life - to make improvements?

I absolutely love that my students are starting to think about these things critically and ask more questions.

Cheers,

KP