Picking a New Police Chief: Design the Process a New Mayor Should Follow

How would you set up the the process to pick a new chief of police for a mid-sized city?

Amidst a corruption scandal, Pittsburgh’s police chief resigned this Spring.  (He has announced he’ll plead guilty to the charges against him.)  This happened with an election for mayor already underway; a short time later, the heavily-favored incumbent dropped out of the race and announced that he would leave the choice of a new chief to his successor.  In a post on March 6 (here), I spelled out what my criteria would be for a picking a new chief.  These included unquestioned integrity, experience as a chief or deputy chief in a police department not less than half the size of Pittsburgh, and a commitment to diversity of all kinds in the ranks.  I said that no excellent candidate, whether an insider or an outsider, should be ignored, and that the process of selection the new chief would be critical, given the circumstances of the chief’s resignation.

Imagine that you have the ear of the new mayor-to-be.  (Which candidate this is will be largely determined in the Democratic Party primary, one week from today; whoever wins the primary is overwhelmingly likely to win the general election in November.) What would be your advice on how the process of selecting the new chief should work?  I can think of a number of possibilities, including:

1) Put together a small group of experts — present and former chiefs of police, law enforcement experts, etc. — to give private, candid advice to the mayor-to-be, regarding what to look for in a successful chief.

2) Create a citizens advisory board to advise the mayor on this important choice.

3) Hold a town hall meeting or two to gather a large and wide swath of public comments on the choice.

4) Conduct focus groups, each with members drawn from all of the important stakeholder groups: citizens, rank and file officers, police union officials, the faith community, the business community, neighborhood advocates, etc., to ascertain what kind of person, with what kind of qualities, the mayor should look for.

What are your ideas?  Have you been through this process before, in any role?  I would very much like to hear from anyone and everyone with thoughts on this.  The choice is coming for Pittsburgh, and it’s going to be crucial.

Thanks for your help.

Picking a New Police Chief: Six Crucial Considerations

On Feb. 20, Pittsburgh Police Chief Nathan Harper resigned at the request of Mayor Luke Ravenstahl.  Harper quit amidst a federal investigation of corruption allegations involving police department contracting and possible misuse of funds from unauthorized bank accounts.  (Harper has not been charged with any wrongdoing.)

Pittsburgh now faces a situation that cities all over American face periodically: the selection of a new chief.  In Pittsburgh, the mayor makes the selection, but as you would guess, many people are voicing their opinions on what matters in the selection of the new chief.  All of this became even more complicated when, just days after forcing Harper’s resignation, Mayor Ravenstahl unexpectedly abandoned his bid for re-election.  (The Mayor denied that the investigation played any part in his decision; he has not been charged.) So at this point we have an acting chief, a lame duck Mayor serving out the remaining ten months of his term, and an unresolved investigation.

On March 6, Pittsburgh’s City Council will hold a public hearing on the choice of the new chief; I have been invited to give testimony.  Here are a few of the points I’ll make.

Pick now, or wait?  Given that we know we will have a new mayor in less than a year, Mayor Ravenstahl should strongly consider staying with an acting chief, and allowing the new mayor to select the new chief.  Since there is a reasonable chance that the new mayor will simply prefer to have his or her own chief running the department, we should wait.

Insider or outsider?  Candidates from inside and outside the department each have their advantages.  Insiders would know the lay of the land, and would bring continuity.  An outsider would bring fresh eyes to the situation and might be more willing to make needed changes.  Ultimately, it depends on whether we think the department should continue heading down the same path, or should get a fresh perspective from the top down.  I would hesitate to rule out any excellent inside candidate, but with the ongoing investigation, a fresh perspective seems necessary.

Integrity is paramount.  With the ongoing scandal, nothing is more important than restoring the reputation of the agency in the eyes of the public.  For that reason, the next chief must be not only a very good police officer and a strong leader, but a person of unquestioned integrity.

Experience is key.  This is not the time for someone to learn on the job how to be a chief and an administrator.  Whoever is picked should have experience as a chief or deputy chief in a department that is at least half the size of Pittsburgh’s.  The person should also have experience working with communities in the city to meet their goals, and an unquestioned commitment to working as partners with citizens as part of real community policing.

Diversity in the ranks.  I’ve been working with the Pittsburgh Police command staff for some years, as well as a number of other departments in our county.  There is universal agreement among them that their agencies do not have sufficient racial, ethnic, or gender diversity.  There is strong disagreements about how to become more diverse. Nevertheless, the next chief must bring a rock-solid commitment to diversity in the ranks, and a willingness to closely re-examine current recruitment and hiring practices.

Process cannot be ignored.  The search should be real (not wired for an insider), and must be nationwide.  And it should include input from a citizen’s advisory board formed for this purpose, which would interview all of the final candidates and give the mayor feedback on them.

Those are my six crucial considerations.  What would yours be?

Does Police Reform Through Federal Consent Decrees Hamper Crime Fighting?

We’ve seen it before: a scandal breaks in an American police department over excessive force, racial profiling, or unlawful searches or stops and frisks.  The federal government threatens to sue unless the police department makes specific changes.  But opponents argue that the changes the feds want will keep police from doing their jobs: fighting crime.   The same argument is occurring now, in Oakland, California, with foes of reform saying that implementing the federal demands will keep police from fighting crime.

These assertions are simply untrue.  They are excuses to avoid the hard and necessary work of reform.

For almost two decades, the U.S. government has had a new way to confront problems in police departments.  In 1994, Congress enacted the federal “pattern or practice” law, 42 U.S.C. 14141, which allows the government to step in where an investigation shows that police are engaged in a pattern of depriving citizens of their constitutional rights.  A bad incident, or even a few of them, aren’t enough; it has to be a regular practice.  Where the federal government has stepped in — in Los Angeles, in Cincinnati, in Pittsburgh, and in other cities — there has been resistance, but eventually a package of reforms was agreed upon and put in the form of a federal court order called a consent decree.

That is where Oakland and its police department stand now: poised to moved toward reform under the proposed consent decree.  But the agreement has attracted the typical opposition argument: police and law enforcement resources will be absorbed with compliance and paperwork, and real crime fighting will be neglected.

Not so, says Samuel Walker.  Walker, professor emeritus of criminology at the University of Nebraska and the foremost scholar of police accountability in the U.S., points out that policing that follows the law and the Constitution actually enhances public safety in important ways.  In his Sept. 26 article in the East Bay Express, Walker explains why public safety actually requires police officers to obey the law as they enforce it.

Is keeping crime under control forgotten in all this? No. Police experts from around the country know that constitutional policing is a necessary element of effective crime control. For more than 25 years, the community policing movement has maintained that controlling crime and disorder requires the police to have the trust of the people they serve. The police rely on neighborhood residents to provide information as victims or witnesses to crimes, and provide valuable insights into conditions in their area.  Trust and cooperation are lost when the police engage in unconstitutional and unprofessional conduct…[Even a] single incident of police abuse has long legs and travels far. People not only do not trust the police, but, at its worst, police misconduct also generates fear of the police. Effective crime-fighting cannot work in such an environment.

The resistance to change argument here has a familiar ring for readers of Failed Evidence:  change is too expensive, and it will interfere with getting the bad guys.  It doesn’t wash with regard to science, and it doesn’t wash here, either.

Could Police Leadership Break Down Law Enforcement Resistance to Science?

From The Crime Report, I learned that the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) gathered 70 experts from various disciplines to discuss wrongful convictions at a summit meeting last week in Alexandria, Virginia.  In his August 22 story, Ted Gest tells us “wrongful convictions worry cops,” and that the IACP called the summit to address the problem.

Given the subtitle of my book Failed Evidence — “Why Law Enforcement Resists Science” — the IACP’s interest in addressing issues that lead to wrongful convictions could be the beginning of very important changes in police attitudes and practices.  What’s behind it?

According to Walter McNeil, IACP’s President and Chief of Police of Quincy, Florida, said that police must pay attention to wrongful convictions, even if they are small in number because the damage they do to everyone involved is “irreversible.”  In an article in the IACP’s Police Chief magazine, Chief McNeil continued:

The damage goes beyond the wrongfully convicted citizen; it hurts all those involved in the case, including law enforcement and prosecutorial staff, families of the wrongfully accused, the victim of the original crime in question, and the public at large when justice is not carried out and the true guilty individual is not arrested and punished.

To this end, the summit featured working groups on “Making Rightful Arrests,” “Correcting a Wrongful Arrest,” “Technology and Forensic Issues” and “Reexamination of Closed Cases.”  This is not a bad list of places to start; if I could have made a list of ten possible topics, these four would have made it.

I did not attend the summit; it was not open to the public.  But the IACP says it will use the proceedings at the summit to issue a set of recommendations.  So while I can’t offer first-hand reporting on what went on, I find myself encouraged by the fact that the summit took place at all, and I commend the IACP for their interest in these issues.

So: could the IACP, one of the oldest and most established law enforcement professional groups in the world, become the vanguard of a movement in law enforcement to stop resisting science?

Fingers crossed.  I’d love to hear from anyone who was there.

 

 

 

 

A Good Idea Gone Bad, Part IV: TSA’s Response

Less than a week after the New York Times first reported that TSA officers at Logan Airport in Boston had turned from their vaunted model program of behavior profiling to old-fashioned, ineffective and prohibited racial profiling, the TSA has announced a response: training that will tell agents they shouldn’t do what they’re doing.  According to the Times’s follow up story:

All officers at Boston Logan International Airport, where the profiling is said to have occurred, and managers of similar programs nationwide must attend a four-hour class on why racial profiling is not acceptable and why it is not an effective way to spot terrorists.  [TSA said] the class would include “a discussion on how terrorists in the United States do not match any racial or ethnic stereotype.”  Officers stationed at more than 100 airports will have to take an online “refresher course to reinforce that racial/ethnic profiling will not be tolerated,” the department said.

This is fine, as far as it goes.  But we know that these TSA agents were already trained in behavior profiling.  This must have included an explanation of its superiority over racial profiling.  Behavior profiling works, because it focuses agents on what matters: behavior related to terrorist activity; racial profiling fails to do this and introduces distractions.  Yet the message apparently didn’t “take.”  What assurance is there that this will be different?

The re-training solution also fails to get at what appeared to be two of the major issues behind this problem: 1) managers who do not understanding why profiling does not work (here’s my post on it) and 2) numbers-driven enforcement, in which managers want more activity and hits, to show their worth (here’s my post on that one).  The only real hope for change is to start by getting rid of supervisors who either encouraged or tolerated this activity.

There is one hopeful sign in the TSA announcement: Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano directed TSA “to improve the agency’s collection of data related to the program and to work with the department’s civil rights consultant to review program procedures.”  As I said in a third post on this, lack of data collection on the activity of agents means that the agency cannot possibly know what is going on, and there cannot be any true accountability.  This absolutely must change, so the Secretary’s announcement is a good sign.

I’ll be watching for further investigation and action.

 

 

A Good Idea Gone Bad, Part III: When Behavior Profiling (Good) Leads To Racial Profiling (Bad)

In two previous posts, I’ve explored the New York Times’ article of Aug. 11 that reports that efforts to institute behavior profiling seem to have slid into racial profiling by TSA agents at Boston’s Logan Airport.  Among the reasons for this, I’ve said, are supervisors who still do not understand that that racial profiling  is ineffective and counterproductive, and numbers-driven enforcement efforts, in which agents on the ground are pushed to produce more stops, searches, and arrests — even if they have nothing to do with terrorism.

The third problem the article highlights is data — or rather, the lack of it.  It seems that those in charge at Logan have not been collecting any data on their stop and search practices.  According to the Times, “The transportation agency said it did not collect information on the race or ethnicity of travelers and could not provide such a breakdown of passengers stopped through the behavior program.”

After more than ten years of news reports and advocacy on racial profiling, going back to the New Jersey Turnpike in the 1990s, it is simply astounding that a federal agency like TSA, set up to do security and enforcement tasks that may involve sensitive encounters with particular ethnic groups, in a high-security setting like an international airport, would not gather statistics on its practices.  They should — in fact, they undoubtedly do — know better.   No data means that it isn’t possible to prove whether they may or may not be engaged in profiling.  And perhaps that is the why they have not collected data.

Of course, no data means that TSA is in no position to say they are not engaged in profiling, either.  The public is simply left wondering whether to accept the TSA’s professions of innocence on the subject.

There’s an old saying from business: you can’t manage what you don’t measure.  At Logan, stop and search activity is not being measured — not even in basic ways.  And that almost certainly means ineffective management.  The failure to gather data shows that if there is racial profiling happening at Logan, it isn’t a problem of one or a few “bad apples.”  Rather, it is a systemic management issue that allows this to occur, or even encourages it.  And that’s something we can’t tolerate.  As one of the TSA officers who complained about the profiling said, focusing on minority members “takes officers away from the real threat, and we could miss a terrorist we are looking for.”

 

A Good Idea Gone Bad, Part II: When Behavior Profiling (Good) Leads to Racial Profiling (Bad)

In yesterday’s post, I discussed the New York Times‘ article reporting that behavior profiling efforts at Logan Airport in Boston seem to have mutated into racial profiling.  Reuters has now picked up the story, too.  It seems that some  (not all) TSA agents at Logan who were trained in behavior assessment techniques have turned, instead, to the discredited tactic of stopping and searching people based on racial or ethnic appearance.  The goals of the program also seemed to have shifted: from spotting potential terrorists to looking for garden-variety criminals.  Why did it happen?

Yesterday I discussed one reason: a failure of leadership.  The TSA managers in charge of the program seem to have not gotten the message that profiling based on race or ethnic appearance does not work, but that behavior profiling does.  Today, I’d like to highlight another reason: an obsession with numbers to show results.  ”[M]anagers’ demands for high numbers of stops, searches and criminal referrals had led co-workers to target minorities in the belief that those stops were more likely to yield drugs, outstanding arrest warrants or immigration problems,” according to the Times.  In order to get the numbers, some TSA agents at Logan fell back on the same old profiling tactics: “They just pull aside anyone who they don’t like the way they look — if they are black and have expensive clothes or jewelry, or if they are Hispanic,” according to one TSA officers who complained.

When the pressure to produce numbers in order to show effectiveness drives police or security work, bad things happen.  We see this in New York City right now and for the last few years, with precinct commanders’ fixation with producing ever-higher numbers of arrests, citations, and stops driving police officers to stop and frisk more and more people every year, despite the fact that crime is falling New York and has been for some time.  The evidence of this pressure to “get the numbers” burst into the open with the wide press coverage of NYPD commanders telling officers they had to make stops and frisks, whether those actions did any good or not.

Numbers-driven police work produces no real progress toward public safety.  And it can push out or even destroy efforts to use more effective tactics.  That’s what seems to have happened at Logan.

For further explanation, look for my next post.

 

A Good Idea Gone Wrong: When Behavior Profiling (Good) Leads to Racial Profiling (Bad) — Part I

In “Racial Profiling Rife at Airport, U.S. Officers Say,” the New York Times say that the behavior profiling program at Boston Logan Airport, designed as way to effectively ferret out potential terrorists, has morphed into racial profiling.  How did this happen?

I’ve argued for years that racial profiling is a bad idea.  Even putting aside moral questions, the substantial social costs of the practice, and the like,  it simply does not work.  Contrary to common assumptions, using race or ethnic appearance as one factor (among others) in deciding who to stop, question, frisk, etc., does not result in more efficient, productive police work.  Instead, it handicaps police, resulting in fewer seizures of drugs and guns and fewer arrests.  The title of my 2002 book,  “Profiles In Injustice: Why Racial Profiling Cannot Work,” says it all.   Instead, law enforcement should use behavior profiling: sophisticated, precise systems of spotting behaviors that indicate wrongdoing, regardless of racial or ethnic appearance.  I discussed the success of behavior profiling in my 2005 book, “Good Cops: The Case for Preventive Policing.”  Behavior profiling originated with the Israeli aviation security system.  In my interview with Rafi Ron, who had for years headed Israel’s aviation security, he told me that the Israelis had abandoned appearance-based profiling, because it was too easy to beat.  Behavior profiling — for instance, looking for minute changes in behavior that come with concealing a weapon or an explosive — works well when it is part of a multi-layered security effort and includes comprehensive training and close supervision.

After 9/11, it was Rafi Ron himself who was brought in to construct the first behavior profiling program: at Logan Airport, in Boston.  So what are we to make of the Times report? How did this happen?

There are several clues in the article, and I’ll discuss each in a separate post.  Let me start with this: the people in charge still believe that racial profiling will help them get more bad guys,  and they’re looking not only for potential terrorism but also for garden-variety crime.  According to the Times, “passengers who fit certain profiles — Hispanics traveling to Miami, for instance, or blacks wearing baseball caps backward — are much more likely to be stopped, searched and questioned for “suspicious” behavior.”  Pressure from TSA managers led TSA agents “  to target minorities in the belief that those stops were more likely to yield drugs, outstanding arrest warrants or immigration problems.”

Apparently, the TSA folks running the behavior profiling program didn’t get the message, or preferred to ignore it: Behavior profiling works, when done correctly; racial profiling fails, and must be avoided.  So some of those agents under their supervision responded by using racial profiling.  In other words, this is, first and foremost, a failure of leadership.

Other reasons for this failure follow shortly.

Do Your Police Know Where You Are? If You’re Driving, Yes.

Yesterday’s article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that residents at several Pittsburgh intersections are unknowing participants in an experiment on mass surveillance.  “Cameras Record License Plates in a Snap” revealed that at several intersections, police had mounted high-speed camera systems that took images of the license plates of every car that passes through, and retains those images for up to five months.

These very capable systems will give a wealth of data to police, and will instantaneously make various checks on every vehicle.  According to the article:

The devices snap photos of every passing car, “read” their license plates and log them in a searchable database.  The system is also equipped to run every passing plate with national, state and local “hot lists,” compilations of cars wanted by authorities because they’ve been stolen or associated with crimes or missing persons. The federal database, called the National Crime Information Center, also includes license plates associated with suspected terrorists.

The camera systems are funded through the Port Security Grant Program.  This strikes me as odd, because the main camera post featured in the article is just a mile or two from where I live, and I can tell you for sure that there is no port there to secure.

The article quotes skeptics, such as attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, who express privacy concerns about retention of and access to months worth of data on the activities of law-abiding citizens.   But the law enforcement people quoted in the article are almost all big believers.  And the mayor of nearby Braddock, Pennsylvania, was unequivocal.  The only rights that matter is “the right not to get shot.”  The small chance that the system could be abused by police or others “is infinitesimal  compared with the public safety and the public good.”

I agree that there is a place for surveillance technology like this, but I want to see proper consideration given to equally valid concerns like privacy and the right not to be tracked everywhere we go.  If regulations on the proper use and retention of these images is too much to ask, we ought to take another path.  Forgive me, but I’m not satisfied when my government officials give me assurances that it won’t be abused, and if I’m not doing anything wrong, it shouldn’t be a problem.

DOJ Police Reform in Seattle: Will It Address Failed Evidence?

Widely-circulating reports over the last few days indicate that the U.S Department of Justice has settled another police reform case, this one with the Seattle Police Department.  Details are sketchy, with much of the coverage focusing on how the mayor resisted an earlier proposed settlement as too onerous and expensive.  That’s the thrust of today’s article in the Seattle Times on the settlement.

When we finally do see the agreement, it will interesting to see whether it requires changes to how basic types of evidence — eyewitness identification, suspect interrogation, and forensics — are handled.  In last week’s posts on the subject, here and here, I reported that the DOJ/New Orleans Police Department consent decree expressly addressed both photographic eyewitness identification, and the recording of suspect interrogations.  The main issues in Seattle was the use of force and how that might be reformed, tracked, and supervised, so this agreement may not address those concerns with evidence.    When I get a look at the settlement document, I’ll report here whether those issues are included.

Whether the Seattle agreement hits those issues or not, it is refreshing to see the Department of Justice take them on in the New Orleans case.  It will be important to watch whether that happens in other consent decrees in the future.

Update, 8/1: The documents now available on the Seattle settlement indicate that it did not touch upon issues involving eyewitness identification, interrogation, or forensics.  The focus was on the use of force.