Want to know why cops keep killing unarmed people? Could be as simple as looking at their culture.
Culture overhaul is critical to success of other contemplated change initiatives
Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2014. Botham Jean in Dallas in 2018. George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. All unarmed black men; all killed by police.
These shootings and others reignited the Black Lives Matter movement across the country last year. And threats to defund the police. Now, in April this year, Maryland has enacted police reform legislation which imposes one of the strictest police use-of-force standards in the nation. And President Joe Biden’s Justice Department has rolled back restrictions on consent decrees which can be used to force law enforcement agencies to make changes.
Cities and states across America are amping up their focus on policing, considering a variety of changes. Yet, little is being said about police department culture.
I wonder why.
Culture Is Critical to Change Initiatives
After all, it’s culture that eats strategy and pretty near everything else in organizations, including police organizations, for lunch every day of the week. All policy changes imposed on police departments — limiting police officers’ use of force, restricting the use of no-knock warrants and repealing the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights will likely fail if department cultures themselves remain unchanged.
In Plymouth, Minnesota, where the police department is oft-touted as an example of a positive culture, just retired Police Chief Mike Goldstein said, “If you want to have success in accomplishing anything in your department, you have to have the culture to support it. By not assessing what you have and where you need to go with culture, you won’t have success. And you’ll have lots of problems.”
What Should a Changed Culture Be?
What is culture? Here’s a geeky definition: It’s a system of shared values and beliefs that can lead to behavioral norms that guide the way people in an organization approach their work, interact with others, and solve problems. Here’s a simple one: It’s the way we’re expected to do things around here. If police department brass and officers on the street won’t embrace a fundamentally different culture when it comes to policing, all the legislation in the world won’t force them to do so.
What should a changed culture be? In a word, constructive. Not defensive. Here’s how Rob Cooke, a culture expert who heads Human Synergistics where he has conducted research on culture for nearly 50 years, explains the difference between the two. A constructive culture is one in which people are expected to and feel secure in bringing their best selves to work. Defensive is one in which people are worried about their own security and act accordingly.
In other words, the creativity and collaboration necessary to solve today’s policing issues rest on a police department’s ability to establish a constructive culture.
Manifesto for Change
Although they didn’t say so in terms of constructive versus defensive, constructive is what President Obama’s Task force on 21st Century Policing recommended. The task force recommendations amounted to a manifesto for change, including culture change, and were the equivalent of a national playbook on what to do.
Report authors pulled together a long list of best practices which they said would “promote effective crime reduction while building public trust.” Among them: “Law enforcement culture should embrace a guardian — rather than warrior — mindset to build trust and legitimacy both within agencies and with the public.” To do so, the report said, law enforcement ought to adopt “procedural justice” methods which means cops ought to consider the spirit versus letter of the law with everyone inside and outside their departments regardless of race, religion, gender or any other difference. Does every minor infraction require a citation? No. The reaction ought to meet the circumstance.
The report also singled out community policing as another important strategy. It asked police to “engage in multidisciplinary, community team approaches for planning, implementing and responding to crisis situations” with complex causes. A successful program in Oakland, California, to bring down homicides using life coaches is such a program.
The 21st Century Policing report cautioned, “…if policies conflict with existing culture, they will not be institutionalized and culture will not change.”
Some departments are already far along implementing various recommendations; others lag well behind. Continued high profile incidents like the George Floyd death at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin last summer highlight the urgency for change. Specifically, the urgency for culture change.
Why No Change?
What’s the hold-up when it comes to culture change? It’s that many don’t know exactly how to bring it about. Fear and fixed mindsets stand in the way of learning how.
Take deeply held views on warrior versus guardian, for example. Decades of federal gifting of surplus military hardware to local police together with wins by police unions seeking to protect their members have made it difficult for law enforcement leaders to root out unwarranted use of force. And made it so much more difficult to forge a constructive police department culture.
The back and forth is nuanced. “Sometimes we need warriors,” said Goldstein. Adds my culture-change colleague Amber Peterson, a former police officer, “If the next school shooting comes, responders have to be warriors. It’s not either/or. It’s a spectrum. It’s not if you choose one or the other given the situation, it’s when that switch happens and to what degree.” Think procedural justice here. Also, think community policing. Officers decide many times a day how to react. Going guardian or warrior — switching from one to the other — can be done poorly. Or it can be done well.
Different Cultures Get Different Results
Through a growing body of evidence from their culture assessment work using Human Synergistics surveys and qualitative approaches, Peterson and another of my colleagues Cathy Perme have found measures for what constitutes “poor” and “well.” In addition, they’ve been able to point to levers for change. Here’s how Cooke at Human Synergistics defines cultures as predominately constructive or defensive over 47 years of research. Again, constructive culture is one in which people are expected to and feel secure in bringing their best selves to work. Defensive is one in which people are worried about their own security and act accordingly. And here’s how Peterson and Perme have found these cultures operate in both a guardian and warrior role:
Guardian Role
In a Defensive Culture
- The department culture may drive officers to be intensely focused on gaining approval from their community. In doing so, officers could sacrifice what’s right and realistic within their capabilities.
- Officers may avoid taking calls where they may be required to use force, or could fail to use force when it is warranted, which, in turn could cost them their jobs.
- Officers could take on too many responsibilities — consider themselves always on duty, for example — which isn’t sustainable. This could be for fear of being passed over for promotion, which endangers their health and their ability to serve others.
In a Constructive Culture
- The culture drives officers to stay in touch with their core motivation for becoming a police officer. Usually, that’s service and servant leadership.
- It pushes officers to plan ahead, to talk through scenarios with their sergeants, fellow officers and community members so they can be prepared to quickly flip into either warrior or guardian mode at a moment’s notice.
- It prizes officers’ ability to deescalate difficult situations.
Warrior Role
In a Defensive Culture
- Officers may trap themselves in a status quo mentality, and might follow orders from senior officers even if they know they’re wrong.
- They may remain constantly at odds with department goals and policies, which they could see as unrealistic, based on their own personal experience on their shift.
- When difficult incidents occur, communication among officers may break down with the result that some officers may refuse to work together and some officers might freeze while others go rogue.
- When police unions prevail in defending rogue officers, toxic warrior mentalities become tougher to change.
In a Constructive Culture
- Often occurring in tense situations, officers keep all stakeholders’ welfare top of mind.
- In the moment, they cooperate well with others, even with peers they don’t see eye-to-eye with.
- They are trusted to make sound “decide-to-shoot” decisions.
- They treat well those they arrest.
- After an especially difficult incident, debriefings occur where officers learn what went well and what didn’t.
Combine Current Initiatives With Culture Change
In Maryland, in Joe Biden’s Department of Justice, in various cities small and large, I see leaders grabbing hold of a single initiative here or program there which sometimes force police officers to do things differently or hold back entirely. What I don’t see is police reaching out for fundamental culture change, the foundation for making the new initiatives and programs stick.
It’s time to combine new initiatives with culture change. Instead of playing defense which leads to their being battered by elected officials and community members, police departments ought to play offense by taking deep dives internally into their culture to understand what it is and isn’t. Police and police departments need to own how they currently are expected to behave in multiple scenarios. And what the ideal expectations ought to be. The community ought to be included in the effort because some community members will point out areas where police are blind to their behaviors. Local, state and national leaders ought to push for the deep culture dives.
The good news is the tools are out there to do it. And so is the expertise in people who can guide departments through assessments and change. Departments which focus on culture are seeing positive results. Real change is within reach. Now is the time to reach out and grab it.
