The Future of Policing with Jim Burch

In this episode, Don MacPherson is joined by the president of the National Police Foundation, Jim Burch. Jim joins Don to discuss the research the National Police Foundation has collected on policing technology, training and community building. They also discuss the impact of the death of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement and the subsequent protests and unrest across the United States. 

Season Four of 12 Geniuses is dedicated to exploring the future and how life is sure to change over the next decade. This episode explores trends in policing that are reshaping the way we live and work.

Before joining the National Police Foundation, Jim Burch served for more than 20 years at the U.S. Department of Justice. While at the U.S. Department of Justice, Burch served in many roles including as the Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the Office of Justice Programs (OJP) and as the Acting Assistant Director of th Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). Burch also serves on the Board of Directors for multiple organizations including the National Law Enforcement Officers’ Memorial Fund, the National Safety GIS Foundation, and Street Law, Inc.

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Don MacPherson:
Hello, this is Don MacPherson, your host of 12 Geniuses. I have the incredible job of interviewing geniuses from around the world about the trends shaping the way we live and work. Today, we explore the future of policing. The National Police Foundation is a nonpartisan nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing policing through innovation and science. I'm joined by its president, Jim Burch. Jim and I talk about how police agencies around the country can build trust with the communities they serve, how to recruit and train effective officers, what defunding the police is and isn't, and the role technology and science can have in the future of policing. This is one of the most important conversations we've ever shared through this podcast.

Don MacPherson:
I'm recording this one block away from where the George Floyd murder trial started this week here in Minneapolis. That horrific incident illuminated how incredibly important fair, effective policing is, and how awfully things can go wrong when it isn't. I hope this episode provides some optimism about what policing can be when it is done right.

Don MacPherson:
This episode of 12 Geniuses is brought to you by the Think2Perform Research Institute, an organization committed to advancing moral, purposeful, and emotionally intelligent leadership.

Don MacPherson:
Jim, welcome to 12 Geniuses.

Jim Burch:
Thank you. It's great to be here.

Don MacPherson:
Can you talk about who you are and what you do?

Jim Burch:
So I am the president of the National Police Foundation. The National Police Foundation is oftentimes confused. People think that we are the same as a local police foundation, but we operate on a national level. That's not us. We were created 50 years ago for a very specific purpose. And that purpose was essentially to challenge the status quo in policing. And the way that we do that is to conduct research, to conduct studies, training, technical assistance, to work together with communities and police organizations to promote change.

Don MacPherson:
How do you walk the line between building trust with the departments you're trying to influence and presenting them with some things that might threaten, or they may perceive that as threatening what they do?

Jim Burch:
Yeah, this is a big challenge for us. And in some ways, it's interesting. We've gone into communities where people in the communities would say, "Why should we trust you? You have the word police in your name. You're clearly part of the police establishment." But that favors us. That benefits us when we work together with law enforcement agencies. Many of our staff are former law enforcement. But we also have research scientists in our organization. I myself have worked for Department of Justice federal level for more than 20 years, but I was never a sworn police officer in a local community.

Jim Burch:
So we bring together people from very different backgrounds in our organization to work together jointly, to understand each other, and to ask hard questions that really only science can help us answer. And it's one thing for us to say I feel it should be done this way, or I feel it should be done that way. It's another thing for us to say we've done an experiment. We've done a study, a scientific study. And here's what that study has told us about how we can move forward. It's not always exactly what we think.

Don MacPherson:
What are some of the studies that you are currently doing and have done recently?

Jim Burch:
We're testing number of ideas currently. Some of them are very scientifically oriented studies. We're doing one for example in multiple cities where we've assigned officers to two different groups in each one of those cities. The two groups operate very differently. In one case, they are operating with no additional training, no additional guidance. It's essentially status quo. In the other group of officers, what we call the treatment group, that group has been trained in a very specific method of engagement. Something we call procedural justice. The idea is how to be fairer in our process, give voice to those people that we are working with, treat them with respect and understanding. And this process sounds very simple, but it actually is quite different than what many of us have been trained in in terms of how to engage with others.

Jim Burch:
So what we're going to do in the end is we're going to compare with both types of officers, where have we had the greatest effect in reducing crime? Does it matter if we are more fair, more procedurally just in how we interact with communities? Or does it make no difference at all? That's an important understanding, because we're spending a lot of time and a lot of money right now retraining officers around the country in how to be more procedurally just in how they interact with communities.

Jim Burch:
So that's one example. We're also testing very specific enforcement strategies. Stop and frisk is something you've heard about in New York. That's a policing tactic that is sanctioned by the Supreme Court, right? They're called Terry stops. But the question remains, are they effective? And we know that as we saw in New York with the litigation there, we know that these strategies can have unintended consequences. In fact, there was a lot of harm done in certain communities with those particular strategies. And so the question is do they create more harm than good? And that's something that we need to empirically test. Because I think if you and I go out right now and we ask a group of police officers about this, they'll say, "That strategy is accepted by the Supreme Court. I've used it. I found it effective." But we may go and talk to 10 community members who say, "Yeah, I've been stopped a dozen times. I've never carried a weapon. I've never had drugs in my possession. I've never been involved in violent crime." So they don't necessarily agree that that strategy has been so effective. So we have to test these things.

Jim Burch:
We're also working on some innovations. So we've been exploring the concept of virtual reality and whether we can use virtual reality technology to provide to officers, to have them experience something that they may not ordinarily experience. Conversely, can we take people from the community and have them experience something through VR that only officers might experience? Can we create empathy? Can we create understanding using these new tools?

Don MacPherson:
Jim, could you talk about ... and I know you can't talk about this from a firsthand basis. But obviously given the role that you're in, I think you have a really good understanding of what the day in the life of a police officer is like. Could you talk about what that is, stress levels, uncertain situations, and what that does to them?

Jim Burch:
Yeah, I'd be glad to. And as you know, I've never had the privilege or honor of serving as a sworn local law enforcement officer. I did work in the United States Department of Justice for over 20 years. Prior to that, worked in various local criminal justice capacities, but never as a sworn officer. However, I grew up the son of a police officer in Maryland. So very much experienced the world of policing through my father's eyes and his own experiences. Some of that very, very positive. Some of that not quite as positive, frankly.

Jim Burch:
I think the one thing I would want folks to know, and I think many in your audience will probably already well know this is, is I think that Hollywood in some ways really creates a false impression in the minds of communities, of what the day in the life of a police officer is actually like. Most of these shows if you think about it, and there's actually been some research on this, tend to show the kinds of sensationalized actions and engagements that officers might occasionally be involved in. There's a lot of use of force. In fact, there's one study that found that there wasn't a single engagement between an officer and someone that didn't involve force to some degree. Right? It seems that the police always get their man, right? In these shows. They never miss. A case never goes unsolved. There's never a problem. There's never a mistake made, right? They never get the wrong guy. They never make a procedural error of any kind.

Jim Burch:
But we know that cops are human, right, and that we all make mistakes. So we know that these things do occur. In fact, we also know that most police officers, and I know that you know some as well, go their entire career without ever using their firearm. Some that have said they've never even had to pull firearm. Right? We have to think about that. I think we often think about policing in the context of these major urban environments. Those are actually few and far between. Maybe a lot of officers in those situations. But most of the police departments in the country are very, very small. There's 18,000 by the way, in the U.S. Most of them are very small, less than 20, less than 10 officers. And they may go their entire career without ever pulling their gun. So it's just a different world than what we see on television.

Jim Burch:
Similarly, most officers may not have ever been involved in a high-speed pursuit. They just don't happen that often. Force is a rare event. We looked at this once a few years back. The data shows that there were 67 million face-to-face contacts between police officers and people in communities. This was in 2008. 67 million face-to-face contacts. That's about 1 million per week almost. And when we think about the tragic outcomes that occur, let me be clear, they are tragic. And it doesn't matter whether there's one or there's 1,000. They're tragic, right? And we want to avoid them. But deaths occur in those contexts 0.0015% of the time. Again, it's too many, no matter how many it is. But it doesn't occur as often as we see on television and we're sometimes encouraged to believe by some of these Hollywood shows.

Jim Burch:
But it's a challenging career nonetheless. As many officers will tell you, they deal with people on their worst days. They deal with problems one after another, many long shifts. Officers are typically working anywhere from eight, to 10, to 12-hour shifts. Now in Mexico, I'll tell you there's officers who work 24-hour shifts. A whole different world in Mexico.

Jim Burch:
And as I saw in my own father, this career of dealing with these very negative experiences every single day and dealing with the fatigue that comes with the job typically will lead to some of your own issues, right? So many officers deal with as my father did depression. Other negative outcomes could include alcoholism. It could include substance abuse, or worse.

Jim Burch:
We do see a fairly high number of officer fatalities. About 163 on average are killed every year. We also see an emerging dataset around police suicide. So in 2019, an organization called Blue H.E.L.P., another nonprofit organization counted 228 police suicides. In 2020, the count 171. So we believe that that's an under-reported fact, that the numbers are probably much higher than that, but we're just beginning to really understand that problem.

Jim Burch:
And I mentioned shifts. Many officers work long, overnight shifts and then will go from working a midnight shift to working a day or an afternoon shift with minimal time off. That kind of transition is very, very hard for anyone to take.

Jim Burch:
There was a study that was done in 2017 of police officers. A very large study, a national study that found 51% of officers who said that their work always or often makes them feel frustrated. Only 42% of those officers said that they feel fulfilled in their role. Fatigue and exposure to all of the different stressors that we've talked about take their toll not only on the officers, but also on their families.

Jim Burch:
According to another study from 2017, police officers and the public disagreed about the nature of their role. 86% of the police officers included in this survey in 2017 said the public doesn't fully comprehend the struggles that officers face, the challenges they face in their role. 40% said Americans don't understand well the risks or the challenges of police work. But conversely, when we asked the public or when the public was asked in 2017, 16% of them, only 16% said they didn't understand very well the risks and challenges officers faced. 38% said they thought they understood it very, very well.

Don MacPherson:
How do we bring good people into this field? Low pay, high stress, under-appreciated. This is not a recipe for attracting really good people into this field. How do we solve that problem?

Jim Burch:
I think it does start with salary. It does start with education. It starts with training and benefits. In 2019, I looked at some of this earlier. In 2019, the average salary of a police officer according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it's about 67,600 annually. But that varies very significantly across the states. That's from as low as 36,290 in Mississippi to as high as much closer to 100,000 in places like California, for example. This of course is based on cost of living in those places as well as other factors. But only 16 states have police officer salaries that are higher than the national average for all occupations. And if you look at the data and you look at it over the last five years, the average salary for police officers across the states really hasn't changed much. And in fact, in one case New Jersey, it's decreased over five years. Very small, about 1%.

Jim Burch:
So the salaries have really remained static. I think though again, a lot of people aren't going into policing because of the salary, right? The salary issue is not a secret. It's very well-known that you're not going to get rich being a police officer necessarily. So I think for us to be successful in recruiting, we really have to focus on public and community service.

Jim Burch:
The chief of the Dallas Police Department many years ago at a sort of a critical moment in Dallas, this was after five police officers had been shot and killed there. You may remember that incident. He was giving a speech. And I don't recall whether it was at a press conference or whether it was at a funeral of one of the officers. And he said that if you have doubts about policing, you have concerns about policing, if you don't like the way that the police are operating or the way the police do business, then he said, "Sign up. Join us. Become a part of the solution. Help us change how we engage our communities." And I thought that was one of the best moments in policing that I'd seen in many years. He's now the superintendent in Chicago. Thankfully, he's still in this business. I think he brings a lot to this field. But I wish that that comment would have gotten more attention. I think that's exactly what we need to say.

Don MacPherson:
Let's talk about how technology is leveraged and how to build community trust through new technologies. Do you have some ideas for how technology can be leveraged to build trust?

Jim Burch:
Yeah, absolutely. And let me just, before we sort of get into this, let me say there's no doubt that technology has changed policing and can be a force multiplier. You look at what's going on today with video. You look at what's going on with machine learning, artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, sensor technologies. There's a lot that we can do with that. But the solution really calls for the opposite order, I think, than what you and I have just talked about. That is it's not technology first, then build trust. In fact, it's the other way around. It's build trust, then leverage technology, and then build something we call digital trust.

Jim Burch:
Studies have shown that the number one concern that the public has with the police use of technology really isn't a surprise. It's privacy. Privacy is the number one concern. When you look at all the bands on facial recognition, they all talk about privacy concerns. So the public really if you think about this and you break it down, the public has a trust issue with policing and with big tech. When we look at the data on trust, most trusted institutions, I think this is from a Gallup Poll. We see law enforcement and big tech not too far apart from each other in terms of lacking trust. Law enforcement generally ranks fairly high. We're coming out of a period of decline on that for law enforcement, but we do still have a trust issue that's there.

Jim Burch:
And what research tells us is that if we build trust, and most importantly, a sense of legitimacy. And I can talk a little bit more about what that means, we can offset those privacy concerns. So the research really tells us that if people believe that the police are a legitimate authority, they've earned the trust of the community and the community is willing to say that the police should be allowed to exercise their legitimate authority, then they are going to be more likely to accept the use of these technologies. Especially if there's controls in place.

Jim Burch:
So examples of that are body-worn cameras. The body-worn camera is the place where we have really strong agreement between police and community that body-worn cameras are a good thing. We see some evidence that they can be useful in reducing the number of complaints, but we don't necessarily see consistent evidence that it will reduce use of force or reduce unnecessary arrests and things like this. Nonetheless, the community and law enforcement both agree that body-worn cameras are an important tool for law enforcement.

Jim Burch:
So what we I think would love to see is more tech innovators, more companies, more leaders in the tech space embracing this idea that there's more to policing than traditional outcomes. So much of what we focus on in the tech space is how do we design a system that will enable officers to do X, or Y, or to be more efficient in doing X or Y. And I think what we need is for technology leaders to understand that we've got to first fix the trust and the legitimacy issue. And if we focus on that first or that as part of the solution, then we're going to be much better at reaching that ultimate goal of helping officers use this technology to solve crime, for example. So that's got to be an important piece of the package.

Don MacPherson:
What are the steps to build trust between the community and police officers?

Jim Burch:
I'll preface this by saying this isn't popular, what I'm about to say. And a lot of people have been criticized for saying this, but unfortunately it's necessary. And that is to rebuild trust or to build trust, I think we first have to acknowledge what's been broken. We have to do that. And this is something that this is not my words. This is the president's task force on 21st century policing took place in 2015, recommended that that law enforcement agencies and leaders, city leaders, and others have to acknowledge law enforcement's historical role in injustice. And that's complex. It primarily revolves around being complicit in historical wrongs that took place at the time. People may not have thought it was wrong. Law enforcement was following orders, doing what they were supposed to do. But law enforcement played a role in those things. And we have to acknowledge that. We have to acknowledge that, because that is more than water under the bridge. These are memories that people have. You don't have to look hard to find images of police with water hoses and canines being used against protesters. So I think we have to acknowledge those harms first before we can move on.

Jim Burch:
But more specifically, the things that we can do is we can practice procedural justice, right? And what procedural justice really means is fairness of process. It's primarily built around four different components. That's respect, giving others voice, neutral decision-making and process, and conveying trustworthy motives, right? So that's what procedural justice really means. And we have to have that in our interactions with members of the public, as well as interactions internally with officers.

Jim Burch:
So we've actually just finished a study a few years ago that implemented this approach in Seattle, Seattle Police Department, where supervisors were trained in how to use procedural justice as a supervision method within the agency. So what they did was they would take officers after they've had contact with a member of the public, they would sit down and have a conversation with them to hear their perspective on how the contact went. Did it go well? Did it not go well? Why? And through that process that was used, we were able to sort of slow down the thinking and the decision-making process. And as a result of that intervention, we were able to see a reduction in use of force by those officers as a result of that study. So this procedural justice works internally, and it also works externally. And that's an important piece of building trust. Accountability at the officer level, at the agency level. And also with elected officials who oversee policing, that we've implemented a program. We're actually working with more than a dozen police departments around the country right now, something we refer to internally as 360. And this idea is that success can be measured in a way that takes into consideration more than just the traditional outcomes of policing.

Jim Burch:
So we can't have success if we've driven down ... let's say for example, we've driven down robberies or aggravated assaults in a community. But we've done it in a way that has completely demoralized our officers and has really upset the community. That doesn't work. That's not success. That's success in one measure, but not success in a 360 way. So what 360 really talks about is to be successful, you have to be successful in each of three domains. Public safety, community, and with the organization.

Jim Burch:
And then the last piece is around transparency. So one of the things we're working on today is what we call an after-action review. Los Angeles Police Department has asked us to come in and look at how they handled the response to George Floyd protests over the summer. We're going to be doing a similar type of work in Fort Lauderdale, Florida here soon. We just finished similar work in Portland. Those are situations where police leaders, city leaders have invited us in to be critical publicly of their actions. That is uncommon.

Don MacPherson:
So they invite your agency in?

Jim Burch:
They invite the Police Foundation in or another organization to do a review and assessment. They share information and data with us. They say, "This is what we saw. This is what we did." And then we have the ability to say, "That worked," or, "It didn't work." And in a lot of cases, what I say to chiefs all the time is, "When we come back with our recommendations, there probably will be some that you'll say, 'I'm really glad they said that.' And they'll probably be others that you'll say, 'I really wish they hadn't said that.'" Because that's the way we do it. We don't pull punches on these. We give them facts. And we'll be releasing the report from Los Angeles will be released here within the next few weeks. And that's typically what they look like. But that's transparency.

Don MacPherson:
And that's done in a community environment?

Jim Burch:
Yeah. And every one of these reviews, we insist on having the ability to hear from the community. It's challenging. I'll acknowledge that a lot of people see us as too closely associated with police because of our name. Unfortunately, they don't know enough about us to really understand that we're not a part of that organization so to speak. But we always ask for the community's views and we always pay very close attention to what we hear from the community. In fact some ways, we get more from the community than we get from others.

Don MacPherson:
You mentioned accountability a couple of times. And I would imagine that a technology like body cameras is a great accountability tool. But can you talk about other ways in which accountability is being used or is being implemented within different agencies?

Jim Burch:
Yeah. One of the areas that I really like to point to is one that we've done a lot of work in. Our chief behavioral scientist Dr. Karen Amendola has a lot of expertise in this area, is called early intervention. Now many in law enforcement and even outside of law enforcement still talk about early warning systems. Early warning is very different from early intervention. So an early warning system is designed to be a system that flags problem behaviors that need some sort of disciplinary response or investigative response, administrative response. What we talk about with early intervention is long before that. Long before a warning becomes necessary, an early intervention system is designed not to be disciplinary, but instead to flag performance and behavioral issues that we need to address so that they don't become warnings.

Don MacPherson:
How is this identified? How do you flag that?

Jim Burch:
That's the tricky part of this. So in some ways, it's not much different than what you would find in any other workplace. So these are things like abuse of sick leave, or vacation leave, AWOL, other sorts of potential financial issues that could be places where we can offer an intervention. But then there are some obviously policing-specific flags that we tend to look at. So if a person has received a disproportionate number of uses of force or certain types of complaints. It's important though that I say that one of the real challenges of doing this in policing is that ... let's take your hometown Minneapolis, for example. There are parts of Minneapolis that police officers work in where they probably don't make a ton of arrests. They probably don't have a lot of use force, probably don't have a lot of complaints. There are other parts where it's probably very different.

Jim Burch:
Similarly, the day shift, right? Those people who are out working at 7:00 AM, 7:30, 8:00, 9:00, they probably don't see the same kind of activity that someone working evenings or midnights is going to see. So it's really important when you're doing flagging in an early intervention environment that you compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges. So you want to be looking at people that are on similar shifts in similar places, so that I'm not saying, "Well, this officer A has got 50% more complaints than officer B." And someone says, "Well, officer B is a school resource officer. He's not on the street."

Jim Burch:
So we compare the apples and apples to oranges and oranges so that we hand develop a flagging process for supervisors to be able to have a conversation. To say, "Is there something I can do to help you in resolving this type of situation?" The point I'm emphasizing is an early intervention system is a way of flagging behaviors long before they become disciplinary where we have to take some punitive action. So that's, I think early intervention is one clear example of how we can enhance accountability.

Jim Burch:
Another is the technologies that we see emerging in the market space today, much of it is being used for what I would say is sort of the typical and superficial types of enhancements that we want to pursue. So we want to see for example, with body-worn cameras, we're after accountability, right? We really want to know what happened in these circumstances. And, we understand that body-worn cameras tend to cause people to behave better than they would if there was not a camera. But where I would hope that we can get to together, partnering with tech is how do we use those videos to improve our training, to improve our, to improve the detection of problem areas?

Jim Burch:
Again, going back to that early intervention system, there are some companies now that are experimenting with those. In fact, there's one company that is using technology that is being transferred over from the business world to examine the audio recordings, the words that are used by officers and subjects through the body-worn camera video. So it's not the visual piece, but it's the audio piece to assess tone and voice infliction and other sorts of things to tell us how that officer may be coming across to the community and how the community is responding. It's not necessarily an individualized tool where they can say officer A needs more training in how to speak to someone, but instead it's looking at the organizational level, how are we doing? How are we coming across to the people that we're encountering? These are important aspects to what we've been talking about here today. Procedural justice.

Jim Burch:
Another company called SpiderTech, it's a small firm, has been developing technology to work with police departments in their computer-aided dispatch systems, their 9-1-1 systems, to be able to sort of call back the people who have called 9-1-1 after an incident is resolved. They call back and they say, "Would you mind taking a brief survey to tell us about your experience with the officer that you interacted with? How were you treated? Were you treated professionally?"

Jim Burch:
There's another company just starting up here locally in Virginia that's trying to explore something similar to Yelp for law enforcement agencies, right? What's your experience with this agency? How did they treat you? How did the officers treat you?

Jim Burch:
So I think there's some roles for technology in the accountability space that don't necessarily have to be ... it's not really a punitive type of a solution. It's a solution that helps agency leaders really understand how the community is feeling about the services being provided by the agency.

Don MacPherson:
What does it mean to defund the police?

Jim Burch:
I think it means different things to different people. I just recently saw less than 30 days ago, USA Today published a poll you may have seen. It said less than one in five Americans support the idea of defunding the police, including only according to this poll, only 28% of Black Americans who had responded to this particular survey.

Jim Burch:
So I think that there's a lot of concern now about the definition that means abolishing, right? But I think that there seems to be much more support for this idea of restructuring or reallocating responsibilities amongst other agencies. I think our concern with that though is that that can't be done superficially. If you've talked to those in law enforcement, I'm sure you have, they'll tell you that a call that comes in for a stranded motorist could very well end up being a crisis intervention call. It could end up being someone with a mental health issue. Maybe they weren't stranded. Maybe they were just having a breakdown on the side of the road. So you can't just simply look at calls for service data and say, "Well only about 20% of these calls should be shifted to another entity."

Jim Burch:
What I fear with that is that we will fail to significantly resource whatever agency it is that's going to have to respond to these calls, these social issues, right? Whether it's mental health, whether it's substance abuse, it's homelessness, or something else. Whoever it is that's going to respond to that should have the resources to respond effectively. And if we don't do that, what's going to happen is that those calls will ultimately be shifted back to the police department without the resources to adequately handle them. So it's a failure on top of a failure.

Jim Burch:
And I think most of the officers I've talked to and executives that I've talked to have said they'd be happy to have the responsibility and the resources to handling those types of situations move to another agency.

Jim Burch:
So I think there are many police leaders and probably many police officers who would support this idea of restructuring who responds. But we have a really big challenge in this. And I'm surprised that more people are not talking about this issue. That might work really well in a major city where there's a lot of resources to respond or even a large suburban area. But in a rural part of the state, I mean look, most of this country is rural, smaller communities. There is no one else working in the middle of the night. There's no one else working on Sunday afternoon. In many cases, than the police.

Don MacPherson:
And they're resource-strapped already.

Jim Burch:
Look, one thing you and I probably can agree on here today is that if we're going to move in this direction, we really need to study this so that as we do it, we can learn and perfect the approach. Because we can't go back. We can't keep doing this. If we're going to make the switch, let's make the switch. Let's do it right. And let's make sure that whoever has the responsibility to respond is really resourced well and has the capabilities and the plans, the strategy and the infrastructure in place to really respond to these problems. Otherwise, we're doing no one a service.

Don MacPherson:
How would you want officers to be trained going forward?

Jim Burch:
Well, I think one of the things that concerned us last year when we started to see many local organizations calling for reforms, and these were all very well-intended calls, very well-intended recommendations. But some of the things that we saw being asked for were certainly understandable, but there was no evidence to say that they would actually an impact. And one of those unfortunately is de-escalation training. So we had real concerns last year that as calls and demands for de-escalation training were being responded to, that we could be potentially implementing something that would have no effect, or worse, have a negative effect.

Jim Burch:
Now thankfully, things have changed in just the last few months. We have seen evidence that there is a de-escalation training program that has been shown to reduce use of force in some situations. And that's a program called ICAT, I-C-A-T. It stands for Integrated Communications, Assessment, and Tactics. It's a training program that's being put together by a different organization, one that we've had a long history with called the Police Executive Research Forum.

Jim Burch:
This was a training program that they've spent years developing, but it's just been through a rigorous evaluation by folks at the University of Cincinnati and the International Association of Chiefs of Police. This is the first true de-escalation training we've seen have a positive impact that is a reduction in use of force. So now our concerns shift a little bit away from, "Okay, let's be careful with recommending de-escalation training if we don't know that it actually works." Now we have something that works.

Jim Burch:
So what we would really recommend now is that folks look at the ICAT training, give it a hard look. And if you're going to implement de-escalation training, that should be the training that you're trying to implement or something very similar to it.

Jim Burch:
There's another kind of training that has also been shown recently to have an impact on behaviors. And it sort of follows before de-escalation trainings. This was an evaluation of a training program called social interaction. And this was a training that was evaluated I believe it was in Tucson by researchers from the University of Michigan. And they found that the program could have a significant impact on behavior, police behavior, and subject behavior, just by reframing the way in which we are engaging. So it's not really de-escalation because things haven't escalated to the point of needing to de-escalate. But it is before de-escalation, how do we keep an interaction on a very positive level and a very effective level socially?

Jim Burch:
So I think those two types of training are vitally important. The other I would say is procedural justice training. Again, really helping to reframe the way we engage the public in a more service-oriented way. Kind of going back to the basics of policing, we're here to serve. We're here to protect. Not necessarily always to enforce, right? Unless there's some reason to enforce. But how do we change our interactions with the public so that they are seen as more fair, more effective procedurally? So I've probably given you three there, but those are things I would recommend.

Don MacPherson:
When you look out 10 years, what does the future of policing look like?

Jim Burch:
What we're seeing right now is a major shift in how people think about policing. How they think about authority, how they think about equitable treatment and fairness. And I've learned a lot about this from my own son who has extraordinarily different views than I do about the way the world should work. His idea of fairness is so fundamentally different than mine, because I was raised very differently at a different time. So his generation I think brings with it, and this is the generation that we largely see on the streets today, right? Protesting about how they feel. I think that they see things very differently, and they want to be treated differently. They want to be treated in a much more equitable, fair kind of a way. And I think that policing frankly has been slow to adapt to these kinds of societal shifts. And I don't know how we get to where we need to get to on this, but I think we really have to reorient and be prepared to pivot how we interact with communities.

Jim Burch:
So if you have an officer who goes out and says, "Get out of your car. Turn around and put both hands on the trunk." In my generation, I would do it without a word. My son and his generation, he would want to know why. He would want to understand what was happening. And he would think it would be very unfair if he was forced to turn around and put his hands on the car without an explanation. It seems very reasonable to me, but it's just not the way I would have handled myself when I was his age.

Jim Burch:
But look, society is changing. Communities are changing. And police departments I think and law enforcement agencies, justice systems have the responsibility to respond and to understand what the community wants. In this country, we police by consent, right? We don't police by mandate. We police by consent, with the consent of the community. So we have to be responsive to what the community wants.

Jim Burch:
Now I think one of our challenges is when you look at polling data and survey data, the national survey data about how people feel about policing and whether they think that police are fair, whether they think that police and the justice system should be tougher, I see a great split. I see polarization in that data the same way we see in our political debates today. And that really worries me. This is based on the data. A lot of the data that we see breaks down Republican and Democrat views, but it also breaks down demographics. White, Black, others. I see splits along Democrat and Republican lines whereas Republicans tend to believe that the justice system could be tougher and that the system is fairer than what Democrats tend to think. This is again, based on data.

Jim Burch:
And I also see splits along racial lines. Whites tend to think that the system could be tougher, that there's less need for fairness and equity, that there's no issue essentially, not as much of an issue as what Black Americans think. So there is this split in our society that I think we have to come to terms with. And what worries me about this most is that those perspectives, those opinions, those views are all being informed by what people see on television, not the realities that really exist within policing and within communities. So I would have to advocate for more science, more research, more data, more factual information about what's actually occurring today. So I hope that our future is one that's more informed by science than one that is informed by popular media so to speak.

Don MacPherson:
Where can people learn more about the National Police Foundation?

Jim Burch:
So we encourage people to visit us on our website policefoundation.org. Or you can find us on social media. We're on Facebook, we're on Twitter, we're on Instagram, we're on LinkedIn. You name it, we're there. But visit us on our website and you can certainly sign up for our mailing list. We'd love to have your feedback. Tell us what we need to be thinking, what we need to be doing.

Don MacPherson:
Awesome. Jim, thank you for sharing your time with us today, and thank you for being a genius.

Jim Burch:
I'm far from a genius, but I'm glad to be here.

Don MacPherson:
Thank you for listening to 12 Geniuses, and thank you to our sponsor the Think2Perform Research Institute. The next episode, we'll explore the future of sex with Bryony Cole. That episode will be released May 4th, 2021. To subscribe to 12 Geniuses, please go to 12geniuses.com. Thanks for listening, and thank you for being a genius.

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