Police force and the public: Q&A with Dr. William Terrill
Dr. William Terrill is a professor in the School of Criminology & Criminal Justice. His research centers on police behavior, with an emphasis on police use of force and police culture. Dr. Terrill has published two books: “Police Coercion: Application of the Force Continuum” (2013) and “Police Culture: Adapting to the Strains of the Job” (2001). He recently completed a National Institute of Justice grant geared toward examining police use of force polices throughout the country. The Center for Public Criminology interviewed Dr. Terrill to get his thoughts on the most effective (and ineffective) methods of regulating police use of force.
This interview has been condensed.
I see you just wrapped up some research in Flint, Michigan. What were your biggest takeaways from your time there?
The city itself was undergoing dramatic resource loss, so the police department literally lost 50 percent of all their officers. They had to figure out, how do we police the city with 50 percent of the resources that we had previously? So my work there was mainly riding with officers. We had five or six people riding with officers over the course of two years, helping them kind of figure out ways to be more efficient with their time. It was what we call a technical assistance project, where we’re there to work with city managers and police department executives to essentially help them figure out, how do we go about deploying police officers in this resource-scarce environment. It was less research-oriented than it was kind of a public service type of approach.
How do you build police trust in a community? Is trust the most important factor?
There’s been a lot of talk about trust and legitimacy over the last several years. It seems to have a renewed focus ever since Ferguson. It’s something though, that really dates back, I would say to the 1960s with the Civil Rights Movement and the rioting in the streets that were going on then. Trust and legitimacy was at an all-time low, to the point the Supreme Court stepped in and created several landmark cases to curb or reduce some police authority or overreach. And so the idea was, citizens’ rights were being overstepped and the police need to be reined in with the idea that was going to improve trust. But it really, it also propelled the early days of community policing, which date back to the 1970s and 80s, and that whole movement was very much around trying to get the police to understand that, in order to be effective we need to work with the community. And so while it’s a renewed interest post-Ferguson, it’s really been going on for 40, 50 years. A lot of attention is paid on a critical incident; a deadly-force shooting, for instance, but I think trust isn’t about that high-profile police shooting, it’s about the everyday interactions. How do the police and the community interact on things as simple as traffic stops, on a suspicious person stop. It’s how you talk to people, it’s how you treat them, it’s how you explain things. You treat them as a peer, rather than, “I’m the law and you’re not. I do the questioning here, and you do the answering.” And when police officers and police departments are good at that everyday low-level interaction, the humanity, the empathy, of the interaction, that’s cumulatively what builds trust. So then when you get to a critical incident where there is a deadly shooting, if you have built up a public reservoir of trust, then it doesn’t explode into the streets when there’s a question about a deadly shooting. Just language, treating people with respect, is the forerunner of trust.
What do you think about hot-spot policing?
The research is somewhat mixed in this area. It tends to show that if you’re going to engage in stop-and-frisk, and particularly a stop-and-frisk within a hot spot, that if you have a targeted approach rather than a general umbrella approach that it tends to be more effective. So instead of saying, “This is the hot spot, we’re going to stop everyone in this area,” and then we realize we stop 10 people and only one of them have contraband, you’re only right 10 percent of the time--that’s not going to be good. That’s going to chip away at that trust. But if you have a target, a certain offender, maybe they have warrants, maybe they’re on probation, parole, and you want to check on them for violations, so you specifically know who you’re looking to target, it tends to have a greater effect, in terms of gun seizures, drug seizures, those sorts of things. So I think that’s kind of the key with hot-spot policing. The flip side of it is, in some ways in defense of the police, they’ll often say it’s a hot spot for a reason, because this is where the community themselves call us and where our workload is. So if we’re getting 50 percent of our calls to this one or two or three hot spots, and that’s 50 percent of our department’s workload, well where do you expect us to be—in the hot spots. The community often misses that. They’re saying, “Wow, the police are spending a lot of time and energy here.” Well, if the police are using analytics, or science, or data, that’s where they should be spending it, because that’s where the public is saying they need help. So it’s a very tough situation for the police. I’ll often describe the police [as being under] this impossible mandate. They’re asked to do a little of everything-- be the warrior and the squad officer when we need them, but be the kinder, gentler person when someone’s lost for directions. But that’s hard to switch on and off constantly when you ask them to do so much.
Do you think making police more liable to civil liability or criminal liability could create a de-policing effect?
The potential’s certainly there. Again, there’s not good research on this. It tends to be more speculative in nature. I do think civil litigation, when someone sues the police officer, or the police department, that sometimes when those judgments come down, significant million-dollar types of judgments, I think that is a stimulus for police departments to say, “Boy, we really need to rethink whatever we’re doing because now we’re losing money out of the budget.” And so it’s hitting you in the pocketbook. I think that can create reform and have police departments rethink their policy approach. The other side of it though is if police officers believe that they’re not being treated fairly. Sometimes a police officer will say, “I’m not a problem officer, I’m a productive officer.” And what they’re getting at is, “Look, if I go out on my shift and I’m looking for problems and I stop 15 people, and you go out and you only stop one person because you don’t want to get in trouble, then of course I have 14 times more likelihood that a complaint’s going to be filed on me.” And so some officers say, well it’s just not worth the risk for me to generate complaints and get in trouble with the department so I’m just going to sit behind the tree or sit in my car and not do anything. I don’t know [about] the long-term though. My gut tells me most police officers can’t help themselves, they may de-police for a while, but it’s generally in their nature [to police effectively]. They’ve been going through training and socialization and culture, [and] it’s hard 5 years later, just to say, “Well now there’s a lot of heat on us, I’m just going to stop policing.” I think that’s more of a temporary thing and then they just go back to their same-old same-old, which is being a police officer. And so I think de-policing’s a concern in the short term, but not the long term.
Do you believe body camera policies, as they stand, can be effective? How do we make them more effective?
In terms of policy, I think they’re still developing. I don’t think we know much about what are the policies, or what are the best policies. I think departments are figuring out, how do I get body cameras, how do I get them for everyone in the department, or who should have them, when should we activate them, when shouldn’t we activate them. I think they’re a great tool moving forward for not only police accountability, but what I would refer to as community accountability. It puts the officer on notice, but it also puts the community on notice. Much of the research says a good portion of complaints are frivolous. And so if a citizen knows that they’re caught on camera, [and they would normally] say, “I didn’t do that,” but they did it, the likelihood of that complaint being filed is probably going to go down. So I think it holds both community and police accountable. And we’re just technologically past the threshold where we can go back. People want to know what the police do now.
How do you think police departments should determine whether to release body camera footage to the public?
It’s a tough balance. I generally will say release it sooner rather than later. With the caveat of, police departments will often claim, we need to keep it because we need to do an investigation. But I think it’s only going to create suspicion and perception of lack of legitimacy and trust. Whether true or not, the perception is real--the longer you hold it, there’s something to hide. And so I think it’s contingent on police departments to take more of an education role; to say, “Look, we’re releasing this now, but understand that you’re getting one picture in time, you didn’t see what happened before this, there’s other angles that may present a different story.” That’s where I’d recommend police departments come at it from. And I think departments are generally doing much better. More departments realize the backlash of holding on to that [footage] or just releasing a clip when you have four minutes and only releasing 30 seconds because you don’t like what’s on the other three minutes and 30 seconds. They’re realizing, I’m going to get it out the next day or two days later. And I think that’ll become the industry standard.
What do you think are the biggest factors the public overlooks about police use of force?
I think they overlook how often officers use less, not more force than what law allows. Some of my research and others’ shows that officers are actually really good at using less force rather than more, but when officers use less force it’s often not captured in the official record. We have roughly 900,000 sworn police in the United States across 18,000 separate police departments. That’s a lot of police officers, a lot of police force. Imagine if they weren’t using force that well, how much excessive force would be in the media. You think it’s in the media a lot now because there is [some] bad force. With those numbers, you’re going to have some bad uses of force. But what you don’t see is the good force. And that research is out there, but it gets dismissed. It just, it’s not sexy. I hope body cameras get to the point that we’re not just activating the cameras when we’re about to go into a critical incident because if we can see the whole shift, you’re going to see what I’ve seen and other observational research[ers] have seen for years: Wow, police are actually pretty good at their job 90 percent of the time. Yes, they fail 5 percent of the time, 10 percent of the time, but the other 90 percent is really good.
What advice would you give a police chief in a large city about regulating police use of force?
Have a restrictive policy. Emerging evidence, some of the stuff I’ve recently done, shows that if you have a more restrictive policy, meaning you reduce discretion on the officer’s part of what force options are available given the type of resistance [they are] faced with, that tends to lead to less force. You don’t say, you can do an arm bar, you can chemical spray them, you can Taser them, you can hit them with a baton--when you give them all those options, they tend to use more force. When you restrict them, still give them options, but reduce discretion, it leads to less force. That’s my recommendation. And it’s a tough spot for a police chief, because officers will often say, “I want more discretion.” And police chiefs say, “Okay, I want to create morale in the department, I don’t want to put you at unnecessary risk for danger,” because officers will often say, “Well, it’s going to be dangerous if I can only do these two tactics and not this.” But good departments will give them an out. They’ll say, look, there are alternatives when you go outside the policy. There may be a good reason that I use my Taser in [some cases]. It may be because there’s 15 citizens and I’m the only officer and I don’t want to roll around on the ground and risk being beat up by the crowd. That’s fine, that’s an out clause, but the policy by default, when it’s more restrictive, it’s generally better. Give them a few response options of force but not unlimited options. And that’s where something called a force continuum comes into play.
What research are you currently working on?
Right now I’m doing a couple projects. One with the Orlando Police Department in Florida doing a five-year analysis of all their use-of-force incidents, looking for patterns, potential areas of concern, to advise the chief on examining their policy and how it fits with how they’re using force. So it’s kind of that technical assistance approach again, of being asked, “Could you look at our use of force and give us recommendations on how we might police better?” If we police better on an everyday basis and can avoid force, the more trust we’re going to have. So they’re trying to be proactive. Another project I’m working on is Milwaukee, Wisconsin with their police department, where it’s actually an experimental study involving shooting simulators. So officers are going into simulators and being presented with various threats and we’re assessing whether they use deadly force or not, whether race bias is part of it or not, and that data collection actually starts on Monday.
Is there anything else that you’d like to add?
The use of force, visually, is never pleasant. Just because it looks bad, though, doesn’t make it bad. In some sense, force that looks like it’s excessive isn’t excessive. It’d be like, if you watch a surgery, when they cut your stomach it doesn’t look good, but they’re not doing anything wrong, right? But when you Taser someone, the officer could be completely within their rights and we would consider it a good force. Sometimes the public looks at that and says, that’s not only not good force, it’s bad force. And so you get these varying views of how the public looks at something, police officers look at something, researchers look at something, politicians look at something and we all come to different conclusions because we’re looking at it through a different lens. And so police officers get frustrated sometimes because it’s like, “Well I was being attacked, or you were being attacked, so of course I Tasered them.” Well, when you look at a clip of someone being Tasered, it is not pretty. It looks bad, but just because it looks bad doesn’t make it bad. We’re not in a pretty dynamic when it comes to that.
Going back to race bias, how do you start trying to fix that?
I’d probably be a world leader if I could fix that. How do you fix race…The go-to statement all the time is training, yet I know of not a single study that links some kind of training to be successful at curbing police bias. And so while that’s often a recommendation, I’m hesitant often to say it, because we don’t have any evidence that it works. I really push for higher education for police officers. I think police officers should have a four-year degree. And there’s pushback on that sometimes because you’ll say, “Well there’s good cops without a college degree,” and there are. But my research generally shows officers with a four-year degree use force less. I think there’s something about getting a degree where you’re being exposed to culture, you’re being exposed to race, you’re being exposed to class, and that’s hard to measure. There’s something about that process, I think, that leads to a greater ability for a police officer to have empathy. And officers that have empathy or compassion, I think have an advantage of looking past race, and looking past, just, “Well they committed the crime because of free will.” They have a greater understanding that “being a bad guy” is more than just waking up in the morning and choosing to be a bad guy. And officers that have that, I think have an advantage not to let race bias and other biases, class bias, gender bias, come into play. And I have evidence that those officers are better, at least in [terms of] force. A lot of departments have jumped in and started training their officers on implicit bias. The evidence just isn’t available yet whether you can get at implicit bias through training. If I put an officer through implicit bias training for one days, two days, or even an entire week, which would be a lot-- virtually none of the implicit bias training is a week—you’re trying to override someone’s implicit bias in a couple days. I’d rather say, let’s take four years, five years, and let life interactions have a greater chance than three days of training.