Graphic images of police violence are now seen on television and social media with greater frequency than ever before. And even though crime statistics show the numbers of these incidents has not gone up, public outrage is raising new questions about how police handle these situations. There’s a small but growing movement to change the way police are trained to interact with people they encounter on the job.
No one is suggesting police officers don’t already have a tough job. But some are saying it’s time for them to change the way they do it.
“We’re teaching police officers (that) people need to see the situation from the other person’s perspective. Too often we impose the way we see it onto the other person without taking the time to listen to their side of the story."
Scott Geller is a psychology professor at Virginia Tech. He’s written a series of books focused on violence prevention in communities.
“And some of these problems we’re having that the media is showing us, with regard to police officers, is that they didn’t find out or they didn’t think they had time, perhaps, to understand the other side.”
Geller’s latest addition to the series is called, “Actively Caring for People Policing.” It builds on findings from the field of psychology to help change the current mindset of this country’s police and the communities they serve.
“The mindset is top/down enforcement. Enforcement caries with it a lack of control; top/down control. So this book attempts to turn that around. At least to help police officers see the other way and we know through behavioral, we know the other way is more effective science improving behavior and attitude."
The book is like a training manual for police, with exercises, explanations and suggested scenarios for things like using positive reinforcement and leading by example. Geller bases his principles for changing minds on a lesser-known plank from the humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow’s famous model, the hierarchy of human needs.
“Many people think Maslow hierarchy of needs – the top – is self actualization. Maslow passed away in 1970 and (in) his last book, 'The Farthest Reaches of Human Nature,' he said he was wrong: the best you can be is not self-actualization. It’s self-transcendence. Going beyond yourself for somebody else.”
Geller’s previous books, which address issues such as school violence, come with method of tangibly rewarding that behavior. Disciples of the philosophy have handed out thousands of green bracelets to people they "catch in the act" of committing kindness to someone. Each green band has a number and their stories are recorded on the organization’s website. The new book focused on policing, uses blue wristbands and the goal is to get this onto the hands of police all over the country and the book into policies academies.
Bobby Kipper was a police officer in Newport News, Virginia for 26 years. He says, “ I just finished the first full year of piloting it in six police departments.”
After he retired from the force, Kipper founded a nonprofit called The National Center for the Prevention of Violence and he co-wrote the “Actively Caring for People Policing” book with Geller.
“I have always believed, through research and a (police) practitioner, that violence is a process and not an event. What we do in our society, is we wait for these major tragedies to occur when clearly know the research tells us that the tragedy could be prevented.
In our next report, we’ll hear more about the former cop and the Alumni Distinguished Professor from Virginia Tech, who teamed up to create a new police training program for these times, when violence between police and citizens is broadcast around the world with frightening regularity.
PART TWO
The problem of violence in police encounters threatens to become a crisis if it continues to define the public’s image of police-community relations. But crises also present opportunities. The horror of this cycle of violence has people desperate for solutions.
One of the biggest shifts in police work came 30 years ago with the advent of community policing. Cops were assigned to neighborhoods, where they could get to know people and where citizens could play a role in solving crimes.
“But what has tended to be a little bit lacking in the police field is the application of community policing.”
Former Virginia Police officer Bobby Kipper is now part of a movement to change the way police academies train new officers to interact with their communities.
“When you look at the average academy now in this country, there’s a lot of emphasis placed on fire arms training, tactics training, pursuit driving. When you look at the overall way that officers in America are trained, building positive relations and trust between communities doesn’t really make up a tremendous amount of that curriculum.”
Kipper is the co-author of a book called, “Actively Caring for People Policing,” part of a series of books that aim to teach new ways of relating in communities to stop the awful drum beat of shootings and violence that is becoming a staple of our society.
“You can teach this at the police academy level on how people can go in and break down the barriers of communities that they may not be welcome in, number one, or they may not really feel comfortable in policing.”
The books draw on evidence-based behavioral psychology –about how people respond to stressful situations. And on a field once considered its opposite, humanistic psychology, which seeks to understand the whole person doing the behavior and why, not just the action.
Virginia Tech Psychology Professor Scott Geller created the series of how-to books full of ideas for taking down the temperature in situations that could otherwise become dangerous.
“A police officer might say to a person, not ‘Why did you do that?’ but ‘Why did you choose to do that?’ You chose to do that behavior. And it wasn’t necessarily the right behavior. Let’s talk about it. One way to help a person feel more in control is to ask more questions. Instead of telling people what to do, get their perspective.”
Another one of the concepts in the book is the distinction between the meaning of the words management and leadership.
“Management is about holding people accountable, but leadership is inspiring people to hold themselves accountable. That’s different, you know? That’s when we inspire self-motivation.”
And then there’s the idea of teaching people with jobs that give them authority over others to incorporate simple human kindness.
“They’re not random, by the way, they’re planned. They’re not mindless, they’re mindful. We’re thinking about it and we think about what we did and what that person did and how they reacted – we have to build that mindset of positive interaction.”
But will the concepts of the ivory tower find their way to the streets and communities where police could be putting their lives on the line? Again, former cop, Bobby Kipper:
“That why it’s important at the academy level to let the people know that there are some forms of policing that have already been proven not to be practical and not to be successful. So the research has clearly shown that, and that changes our whole philosophical approach to how we train police officers.”
Right now, says Scott Geller, we see mostly negative interactions when police are caught on camera, which he says further distorts the way the community and the police regard each other.
“We need positive stories. We need to share the notion that police officers care. They care for us and we care for them. And we need them.”
