Expert Insight in Criminal Justice: Dr. Michael Scott on the importance of building trust
Podcast coming soon!
Interview Highlights:
So, let’s talk first about your journey from a career in law enforcement to the field of criminology research and education. Could you speak a bit about how your experiences in police leadership positions have leant to your research?
Well, I actually don’t see it as much of a journey at all, in that in my mind everything that I’ve done from working as a street police officer up to teaching here at ASU has been consistent with my overall objective of trying to help the police profession improve and to become more effective and more fair in how they deliver police service. I simply have done that from a variety of different positions both within in departments and outside them.
Okay, awesome. So what projects are you currently working on now?
Well the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing, which was originally created as a private nonprofit organization before bringing it here to Arizona State University, was originally funded by the U.S. Department of Justice and the major initiative was to build a body of knowledge for the police profession about how the police could more effectively deal with the wide range of public safety problems that they routinely confront. And so for the past 15 to 17 years, we have been systematically producing series of guidebooks for police, based on research, based on police practice, to better inform the police about alternative strategies that they could use for dealing with these problems. In addition to those published materials we run an annual conference for police, it’s an international conference. This coming year we’ll be in Houston, Texas and we usually get 4-500 police officers from all over the United States, from Canada, from Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand and other countries. And they’re all there essentially to exchange information about their recent experiences dealing with specific public safety problems and the research that they did into examining those problems, the new ideas that they’ve developed, the responses, and the successes or the failures they’ve had on implementing those new responses. So those are a couple of the projects that keep me busy currently.
Talking about specific challenges that police departments are facing today, especially with the tense political climate right now, are you optimistic about the evolution of effective policing strategies and community-oriented policing, or do you think that police could face severe challenges with this kind of climate?
Well, the history of policing in the United States which is now at about 170 years, is full of challenges. And we police have been through times such as we’re in today when large segments of the public had lost some confidence, lost trust and felt alienated from the police. It’s something that police in a democracy always have to work on. And so we’re in a new phase of that, and this new phase is partly and largely connected to very very longstanding historical distrust between police and especially minority communities. And to some extent this is nothing new. But what is new is modern technology, cell phones and video cameras and so forth bring to the public’s consciousness more so than ever before incidents in which police use force or treat people of, especially of minority groups, in ways that are deemed to be unfair or unnecessary. And overall I am confident, I know that the police have when faced with these challenges before have found ways to reform their institution, to change their practices, to improve what they do. It’s not always quick, it’s not always easy, it’s not always painless. But the long history of policing does show a capacity for continual improvement and even for improving these difficult relationships.
So going back to your experience as a police chief, what was your experience like countering that racial bias, and public perceptions of bias, how did you deal with that?
There’s some things that police chiefs are responsible for doing in their public statements, in their openness and receptivity to communicating with people from disaffected communities, but more important than anything is the relationship that the patrol officers, the uniformed police officers on the streets, in the communities, have with the people who live and occupy the community. And my main approach was to develop a style of policing, an approach to policing, that put all of my police officers in a close working relationship with a highly localized community. So in Lauderhill, Florida, which was a city of about 60,000 people but very densely populated with a lot of racial and ethnic diversity, a blend of upscale wealth and abject poverty and serious violent crime in a very small, concentrated area. But I was able to assign each police officer to a particular neighborhood. And so every community within that city had its own police officer with whom they would relate and my expectation of the police officers was to make themselves known in a personal way to large segments of the community. And then to give the police officers the training, the tools and the expectation and encouragement to work with communities to solve those problems.
In recent years, do you think greater public scrutiny of racial bias or potential for bias has led to improvements?
To be seen. The major effort as most people know today, along these lines is to equip every police officer with a body-worn camera that will video and audio record the interaction that an officer has with an individual. And we, the expectation is multiple: One, that we think that the police officer might be more likely to behave appropriately knowing that he or she is being video and audio recorded. Secondly, we hope that the civilian with whom the officer is interacting would likewise be more inclined to behave appropriately in dealing with the officer, knowing that there’s likewise a record of their conduct. And there’s some reason to think that that will occur. And of course, then we expect that we, if there is inappropriate conduct, that we’d have a record of it, and we would now have documentation and evidence to substantiate either the officer’s view of how things occurred, or of the civilian’s view and this would enhance our ability to hold officers accountable for their conduct. And all that is plausible. What really remains to be seen is there’s nothing about the body-worn camera in and of itself that is going to lead to more effective policing. It may lead to more polite policing, it may lead to procedurally more fair policing, but if ultimately the officer is unable to help that community solve these problems, to make these communities safer, we will not have achieved as much as we need to. Because as I said before, what nearly all communities ultimately want is they want greater safety and security. Not just more polite police, though that’s a good thing. But they want a positive outcome to this. Now that doesn’t mean in every encounter that police have with an individual citizen that that citizen is going to come away happy. Especially if that person is placed under arrest and, but it is possible that the, what we can hope for is that even the person that is unhappy with the outcome, I don’t like the fact that I was arrested. I might even think that I was arrested wrongly, we could expect that they would nonetheless say, But that officer at least treated me fairly. And so where that is felt on an individual basis, collectively an entire community, could come to build up either a level of trust from the stories they here from other people’s encounters with the police in which they presume that the police are in fact fair, or conversely, they could come to distrust the police because they’ve heard so often with individuals that they were not treated fairly. So I’m optimistic, but I’m more ambitious than just wanting to see police officers behave more courteously in the field.
What’s your stance on how police departments decide whether they should release body camera footage to the public? Do you think it’s better for departments to err more on the side of releasing the information or to be more cautious, in high-profile cases especially?
I think police ought to err on the side of disclosure in releasing the information. We’re living in a world in which the public has an expectation of knowing what’s happening. We expect it of our politicians, we expect it of our police, we expect it of our university officials, we expect to know what happened here so that we can decide whether we think that was right or wrong. And in the modern age we expect to know that pretty soon. So with the stipulation that police need to be quite careful to safeguard information that could either compromise the integrity of an investigation or could disclose an individual’s identity whose identity should not be disclosed: a crime victim, a juvenile, a confidential informant, there are all kinds of reasons why it’s not in the public interest to release somebody’s identity. But more often than not I think police leaders are coming to understand that this information contained on the cameras and in the audio will eventually become public, and that delaying the release of that information can create unnecessary mistrust in the police.
Going back to that relationship between officers and the community, what do you think are the most important steps toward establishing trust between police and the community? I know you talked about assigning police officers to a sort of localized area.
Familiarity is part of it, and that’s something that police chiefs have a lot of control over. It’s important not just for the community to know their police officers, but for the police officer to know the community. The vast majority of information related to public safety, whether it’s crime or disorder, who did bad things, who’s making trouble in the community, the vast majority of that information is in the possession of people in that community. And so if the police want that information, you’ve got to get people willing to talk to the police officer. And as in any aspect of life, communication is fueled by trust. You want to know who this person is and know that you can trust them by giving them this information.
How do you think police departments can best deal with the increasing number of anti-police protests, how can they do that in a way that will establish that trust with the community and minimize violence—and what do you think are the best strategies for policing protests today in general? Since there’s been a rise in anti-police protests specifically.
Well more than anything I would say, police need to learn and be reminded that protests against the police should not be taken as a personal affront, and to remind themselves that this is constitutionally-protected activity. And when people take to the streets and organize and speak their minds, one essential part of the police function is to make sure they can do it, and they can do it safely. It’s not easy because, as you said, oftentimes the people, the very people being complained about are the police themselves. And so it’s kind of ironic, but it is a fact that we do expect the police to protect people’s right to complain about the police. And if police always keep that in mind, then the initial stance and the attitude toward any political protest ought to be one of accommodation, in which the attitude is, we want you to have a safe and successful protest. What you are protesting is, and what your viewpoint is, is not our concern. We want to make sure that you are safe and that the rest of the community is safe so that you’re not destroying property, you’re not hurting other people, but your message is going to be heard.
Well, that’s all of the questions I have for today, unless there’s anything that you’d like to add—just about policing in general, projects you’re working on, anything.
I would say the major issues and the source, I think, of many of the contemporary problems related to policing, especially in the United States, center around the police use of the criminal justice system, the criminal law, as the primary mechanism for carrying out its objectives. So when the police think our job is to make society safe, there has been for a long long time almost a reflexive posture by the police that says the way in which we do that is to arrest the people who break the law and to present them for prosecution, and ultimately to punish them through incarceration. And we have come to realize since at least the 1960s that overreliance on the criminal justice system by the police is a recipe for disaster. The criminal justice system is not equipped to handle all of the business that police have to deal with. So where the police are having significant improvements in achieving their objectives often are where the police are seeking out and employing alternatives to criminal law enforcement as the means by which they get their objectives met, using the criminal law and criminal law enforcement in a more surgical way in only when it’s necessary, only when they’re dealing with serious crimes that demand personal accountability, and only when they think that the criminal justice system can handle that business appropriately. A classic example that many people recognize is that, the police deal with mentally ill people all the time. And we know today that our jails and our prisons are filled with people with mental disorders, and very few people think there’s any reason to think that a mentally ill, seriously mentally ill person is going to get better in a prison, in jail. But we put them there for want of a better alternative. And that’s a major issue not just for police but for all of society to acknowledge is that to the extent police can handle mentally ill people appropriately is heavily dependent on the capacity of the mental health system to have services available to treat people with mental illness so that we’re not resorting to putting them in jail and prison as the only way of controlling their behavior. And there are lots of other examples, whether it relates to alcohol-related crime and violence, drug-related crime and violence, in which incarceration is ultimately going to play a very minimal role in improving those conditions.