Are We Asking Too Much Of Our Police?

I was watching one of the news channels the other night and I believe it was during the Charlotte, NC protests and as they usually do the news anchor had an “expert” on discussing the protests and the police. A question was asked that I have heard several times lately and it started me thinking. The question was, “Are we asking too much of our police these days.” The expert said, “Yes, I think we are. We expect them to deal with criminals on the street and be psychologists and social workers at the same time.” It brought back memories of days gone by.

This is not a new discussion. Since there were few requirements when I joined the Tuscaloosa, Alabama Police Department I received no formal training. This was in 1968 and my training was done on the job by other officers who likely had been trained by officers before them. Fortunately, I love to read and so did some other newly hired officers about that time. So, we became pretty much self trained through reading everything we could about police procedures from various sources and sharing information with each other. We also had a number of older officers who were very good at what they did who also joined in to find resources.

One of our best resources came from an unlikely source, the University of Alabama Law School Library. Also, the Law Enforcement Assistance Program had started in 1968 and had started funding research in law enforcement and criminal justice programs began to spring up everywhere, including the University of Alabama. It was in one of those courses that I read an article by Dr. A.C. Germann, a former Los Angeles police officer and a professor at the University of California at Long Beach. The title of the article was “Police as Social Workers” and was probably the antithesis of everything police thought during those days, as well as today. But it also reminded me of what several of the older officers had told me right after I had joined the force. To be a good cop you needed to be a priest, psychologist, marriage counselor, educator, social worker, thief catcher, animal control expert, sharpshooter, world class wrestler and judo expert, and expert negotiator all at the same time. I thought at the time it was a joke, but it was not.

The problem then, and now, is that people do not join the police ranks to be all of those things. They join to become law enforcers and their training is primarily geared toward law enforcement. In 1974 myself and a colleague undertook a research project to determine if the expectations of new officers was meeting the reality of their jobs. We sent questionnaires independently to chiefs of police of 25 large police departments and to the directors of the same departments training. We asked the chiefs what percentage of the officers time was spent doing various duties including making arrests, firing their weapons, domestic violence calls, nuisance calls for service (loud music, parties, barking dogs, etc.) and traffic duties. We asked the trainers how much training time was spent in handling the same basic categories of activities. What we found was an inversion of emphasis.

By collapsing the totals into to two categories, law enforcement and social services we found that 80% of the officers time was spent in social service delivery (this included traffic investigation) and 20% of their time was spent in law enforcement (which included traffic enforcement). However, 75% of the training time had been devoted to to law enforcement activities and 25 % of their training time had been spent in social service delivery. Based on follow up phone calls there was a presumption that anyone should know how to communicate with another person but everyone did not know all the laws, defensive tactics, or how and when to use their firearm. While the second part of their presumption seems accurate we speculated that the first one was not necessarily true.

My own experience as a police officer, plus my experience as a researcher and observer in a number of police departments around the country told me that everyone does not know how to properly communicate with people. There are several factors that come into play when an officer responds to a call. The first, and probably the most frequent, is that the officer does not have all the information he, or she, needs when responding to a call. For example, they may get a call for a “person with a gun”. In some cases the dispatcher is able to give specifics but in others it may simply be that someone saw someone with a gun. The officers must prepare for the worst case scenario. When they arrive, if they are human, their bodies are pumping adrenaline like crazy and they are trying to locate this person. Now, in reality, it may have been a person with a cane, or a stick, or a B B gun, or a real gun that he was just showing to someone. The officers do not know the difference at this time so when they get out of their car they are treating it like a live gun situation. When they find out it is not, which is often the case, their heart rate does not immediately go back to normal.

Then, they are given a call to a domestic dispute and that is all they know, their temperament has to change before they get there. For any normal person, it likely would not, but police are expected to be different. The people at the domestic dispute do not know what the officer has just been through a stressful event and they do not expect that stress to be taken out on them. This is where the extra training is needed because the people at the need call are in crisis and if a stressed out police officer shows up, he, or she, will only add fuel to the crisis. Officers hate domestic calls in the first place, and they are already stressed and tense. A crisis situation is like a balloon filling with air. More tension simply adds more air to the balloon and it may well burst and things get out of hand.

In a 1976 study of domestic violence in New York City by William Hewitt he found that in 9 out of 10 cases where the officer showed up in a calm, relaxed manner the situation was handled quickly and without anyone being injured or arrested. He compared that to another sample in which officers showed up already stressed or in an authoritarian manner in more than half the cases the officer and/or one of the complainants ended up injured and an arrest was made.

The issue today does not seem to be any different than it was 40 or 50 years ago. It is not that the police do not need the amount of training that they get in law enforcement or firearms training, they probably do need that. But they also probably need far more training in handling social service issues. Law enforcement is the only 24 hour a day, 365 days per year service call agency that is available to a community. So when people are in need of help that is who they call. So, we go back to the original question, “Are we asking too much of our police?”

My response would be that it depends on our expectations. Among the many programs I have worked as a researcher there have been alternatives suggested, but they do cost. Birmingham, AL experimented with having social workers working with police on domestic calls. As soon as the situation was calmed down and no threats were present the police left and the social workers stayed and dealt with the participants. In Peoria, IL they had a publicly funded agency that would respond to public drunk calls and take the drunk to a detox center and after the drunk sobered up they offer free rehab services. In Hartford, CN, the police stop investigating fender benders on the streets. They would go to the scene to check for injuries and hand the two parties forms to fill out and leave telling them to contact their insurance companies. Another possibility was to have auto theft victims simply call in their complaints. After all, if the police go out there what can they see but an empty parking space. In 98% of the simple theft cases if there is no immediately identifying information of the suspects they will not be solved. Even if they are most people will not have the serial numbers of the items to prove ownership. So why tie up the police? It is so rare that the police come up on a crime in progress do we even need them patrolling the streets at all? If we find others to do the 80% of non law enforcement work, do we lay off half the police? I do not know anymore. Maybe we are asking too much of them.

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