There is A Solution to Violent Policing in Our Cities!
Here is Why We Need to Go Back to the Drawing Board and Rethink The Police Officers’ Training
According to a Gallup poll, confidence in police officers in the U.S. is at its lowest in 22 years.
‘Even with people you can trust, if the truth is inconvenient, they don’t trust you.’ — from the TV Series ‘Unbelievable’
This simple sentence sums up perfectly how I felt when I called the police out of fear. And how police officers failed to protect me. I still have a hard time forgiving the police officers who failed to protect me. But I choose to do so and use this experience as a catalyst to research and share the best strategies to help police officers become more mindful and present when dealing with humans and stressful situations.
The traumatic experiences and events that happened in our lives can become the greatest source of empowerment if we decide to see it that way. By empowering ourselves and seeing solutions rather problems, we show that we not only refuse to give away our power but that we also choose to become a better version of ourselves because of these experiences, a better citizen.
For the first forty years of my life, I assumed that everyone was treated with the same dignity and respect by police authorities — where I was born in Canada. I discovered that this was far from the truth.
To Protect and to Serve?
In a recent episode of the Patriot Act, Hasan Minhaj explored how the behavior of police officers is conditioned mainly by their training.
Most police officers in the world are conditioned to act and react as warriors. In Canada, where I live, the training focuses mainly on defense, physical training, and intervention technical skills, i.e. the physicality of the job. I still remember sharing philosophy classes with future police officers as part of our common general curriculum; I still remember how they lacked the basic quality of analysis and reflection required, I believe, to become later in life, an urban street social worker.
When I called the police because I feared a neighbor who came banging on my door so hard I thought it would fall, I felt threatened and even intimidated by the police officers who came at my door. They both refused to come inside to sit and talk; I expected them to come in. I was scared by my neighbor, and intimidated by them, especially by the woman officer, whose body language was completely closed-off. When I mentioned to her that her body was showing me a language of non-communication, she suddenly turned her back at me and said: ‘Go ahead, you can talk now!’ Never did I expect to discover that the motto ‘to protect and to serve’ was that far from reality.
I believe that I experienced these challenging experiences not only to speak for those who don’t have a voice but also contribute to challenging the status quo and share my wisdom on how we should reframe and rethink the way we train police officers.
From Warrior to Protector
I strongly believe that there is an urgent need to rethink police officers' training, to go back to the drawing board. Businesses usually find the best solution to a problem, by disrupting the current system. And this is what the police officer police training needs urgently: positive disruptors.
I strongly believe that being able to read someone’s body language, as well as intuitive skills, are essential for this work. In order to protect, one must be able not only to read someone’s body language but also to be aware of the technical skills required to ask the right questions to know the truth when a narcissist of sociopath calls the police and presents himself as a victim to bully someone. This happened to me twice.
Those who are supposed to protect us must learn to master the techniques required to let the truth prevail and protect the real victims when people try to manipulate the truth.
From my experience of dealing with police officers in the past as well as from my experience as a journalist, I have come to realize that police officer do not possess the emotional intelligence required to respond with clarity and compassion to calls from people who really need to be protected, especially for those who are on the ‘wrong’ side of the wall. A good police officer, in theory, would listen without being biased by his own thoughts or past experiences. Compassion is often perceived as a weakness by many police officers, still as of today.
Without the necessary skills required for self-inquisition and awareness, police officers tend to react rather than act and this might be dangerous or even leave traumatic memories for the victims, and even possibly, post-traumatic stress disorder.
Police officers are at the forefront of solving some of the most pressing issues our society is facing. They are in a way some of the most important ‘social workers’ in our society. In Canada where I live, people often call them to resolve conflicts with neighbors that escalate to verbal, emotional or physical violence.
Rather than warriors who react and attack, we need peaceful mediators who know how to use intuition and awareness to become aware and present to those they should be helping, to make everybody feel safe, to protect and serve. It is time for everybody to feel protected, it is time to select future police officers based on their human qualities and emotional intelligence, the way universities have started doing for doctors in the past years.
In some cases, police officers trained in yoga and mindfulness have successfully put an end to a situation in a peaceful way, while keeping everyone safe. Police officers need to become mediators/social workers/peaceful warriors. Creating this new peaceful force starts by selecting and training people differently, by bringing in intuitive people, and focusing on the prevention and peaceful end of conflicts, rather than focusing on punishment in the face of a criminal act, prioritizing healing and forgiveness, rather than arresting and filling the prisons.
Leading the Way with Fierce Empathy
According to an article published by the Greater Good Center at UC Berkeley,
‘new training programs that help police to listen, stay calm, and communicate during charged encounters may lead to fewer arrests and less use of force’.
According to a preliminary study, using empathy and slowing down their encounters and learning to practice more empathic and respectful communication might not only ease the tensions with the public but also help avoid unnecessary arrests and reduce the use of excessive force. The study also suggests that empathy might also lead to a better acceptance of their role in the communities where they are hired to serve and protect.
The Greater Good Science Center defines empathy as ‘the ability to sense other people’s emotions, coupled with the ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling’.
David Weisburd, a criminologist at Mason University is one of the researchers who believe that police officers need to rethink the way they interact with the public. He suggests procedural justice as a potential solution to help police officers build trust with the people they serve, rather than looking at crime reduction as the main goal.
David Weiburd conducted a study in which a supervisor coached them on how to use the principles of procedural justice in their everyday interactions.
‘This involved police explaining what they are doing and why, using calm and respectful language, and listening to members of the community, taking into consideration their perspective on what’s occurring’.
The results of the study were enlightening: police officers had different behavioral patterns and had done approximately 26% fewer arrests one week after the training. Moreover, the group who took part in the study were 50% less likely to use force in an encounter — with the same number of encounters.
According to Emily Owens, a criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania and lead author of the study, ‘that training is relatively minimal and not reinforced over time. Instead, ongoing police training tends to focus on high risk/low probability events, like what to do in active shooter situations, leaving police undertrained for routine encounters, where LEED principles could help.
Mindfulness-based training s changing Law Enforcement practices
Mindfulness-based resilience training for law enforcement personnel has been present for over ten years. “The practice of pausing, coming into awareness, breathing, and gently responding can dramatically alter the way we respond to stress and anger,” says Aaron L. Bergman, coauthor of a study in the journal Mindfulness. According to that study, focusing one’s awareness and attention on the present significantly lessens law enforcement professionals’ stress and anger.
According to Aaron Bergman, Michael S. Christopher, and Sarah Bowen, all from Pacific University’s School of Professional Psychology,
‘the station, officers face unique challenges: departmental politics, pending litigation, irregular shifts. And on the street, they come face-to-face with criminals, violence and death, and situations that threaten their own safety’.
Many law enforcement professionals try to cope with these stressors by having a tough-guy attitude and life-threatening behaviors. The rates of substance abuse, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and suicide are higher than in the general population.
Thankfully, meditation is already helping many police officers deescalate volatile situations and improve community relations. In El Cerrito, California, the mindfulness-based training is led by Oregon police officer Richard Goerling and Brian Shiers, a mindfulness facilitator from UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center. Their training is a combination of mindful awareness practices with information about the science behind those techniques and their use in their everyday policing tasks.
According to Richard Goerling,
‘a stressed-out police officer will be more likely to resort to intimidation or aggression when confronted with ambiguous situations, which can lead to inappropriate or even violent actions. Misreading a potentially volatile situation could mean putting oneself in danger — or shooting at an unarmed suspect or bystander’.
This is one of the reasons why Sylvia Moir, now ex-El Cerrito’s chief of police, decided to organize the workshop for her officers.
“We as a profession cannot be tactically sound, operationally savvy, guard people, and put our life on the line for people we may not ever meet if we can’t see or handle the tragedy and heartache that’s part of our everyday job,” she says.
“This whole notion of self-compassion is huge,” she adds. “It doesn’t take long in this business before you pretty much dislike everyone around you, and then you begin to dislike yourself, and then you wonder why the grizzled police officer seems to have no effect and seems to be the classic asshole cop, she adds.”
When police officers suffer from debilitating stress, they are more likely to exhibit problems at work, “including uncontrolled anger toward suspects,” researchers at Oregon’s Pacific University noted in a 2015 study.
“If I’m clinically depressed [and]
undiagnosed — which I would argue many of us are — and I’m struggling to even regulate my own space, how the hell do I have the capacity to have empathy?” asks Richard Goerling, a police lieutenant in Hillsboro, Oregon. “How are we supposed to navigate someone else’s suffering if we can’t even navigate our own?”
Goerling is the founder of the Mindful Badge Initiative, a consultancy that provides resilience training to first responders. He’s one of the leaders of a growing movement to introduce mindfulness practices to police departments — and, in the process, to cultivate compassion toward the communities they serve. Goerling is working with law enforcement agencies around the country, participating in research, and helping develop a set of best practices for the young field.
According to his profile on his website,
Richard served in civilian law enforcement for twenty-four years and has extensive experience in patrol operations and criminal investigations. He retired from policing in 2019 at the rank of lieutenant at a police agency in Oregon.
Richard has developed a training specialization in first responder mindset, health, resiliency, and human performance. Over the last decade, he spearheaded the introduction of mindfulness skills training into policing as part of a larger cultural transformation toward a compassionate, skillful and resilient warrior ethos.
Richard is a co-investigator and trainer in ongoing National Institutes of Health-funded research on the impact of mindfulness training for police officers.
The multiple studies and on-field training experiences clearly show a pattern, that integrating a mindfulness-based practice in all police officers training could potentially create a new generation of police officers, making them better at responding peacefully to stressful events and more eager and compassionate when it comes to establishing community relations.
Please share if you want things to improve in your own city, province, state or country when it comes to mindful policing!
