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How to fix a broken police department: Lessons from Cincinatti

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Amir0x

Banned
It seems like every day on neoGAF there is a topic relating to some profoundly criminal act by a police officer, and how they are going to get away with it. Perspectives about police have essentially turned fully toxic in the community and amongst much of the country, in response to all the data (and indifferent law enforcement) and primetime news suggesting that everyone's worst fears about them are, in fact, at least partially true.

The inevitable question then arises: what exactly is the solution to fix the rampant corruption, inability to self-police and horrific instances of brutality which plague this institution on a daily basis? We can discuss all day long the causes of this problem and acknowledge that the issue exists, but it doesn't mean near as much as trying to come together and figure out solutions to reform the system. Will body cameras do the job? An end to grand juries? Fully independent investigative forces tasked solely with analyzing cases of clear police criminality?

In this spirit, let's consider the case of Cincinnati.

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SOLUTIONS TO SUCH COMPLICATED PROBLEMS ARE NEVER SIMPLE
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The average discussion about fixing the systemic problems facing police departments across the country usually focus on a few rather obvious overarching solutions. Things such as body cameras, the vague notion of reforming the justice system (in which ways, how would we accomplish it, and what can we plausibly get through congress?) and even extreme suggestions such as getting rid of police altogether. Many of the suggestions have merit, but one thing that is true is that any one of them are unlikely to fix the problem by themselves. But if Cincinnati is anything to go by, there is a way to move toward real world reform that actually works and results in massive reductions in everything from pure street crime to police brutality.

It's just complicated and requires everyone to be on board. Let's review some of the ways they did it.

From this article (link thanks to Mumei), we can identify several core features of the reform movement that resulted in such significant change.

The Atlantic said:
Yet it might not be so simple to adopt Cincinnati’s changes in other cities. It took a long time—five to ten years, by some counts—to get police to actually buy into the reforms. Nobody likes it when somebody comes into their workplace and tells them how to do their job. The changes Cincinnati adopted were nothing short of a complete turnaround in how the city approached incarceration, crime and its relationship with its residents. And to make sure they were adopted, the federal government had to apply constant pressure, reminding all parties involved about the need to stay vigilant about reform.

“In the early 2000s and late 90s, Cincinnati was just a hotbed of problems, and we got the city and the police department to agree to certain reforms,” said Mike Brickner, senior policy director with the ACLU of Ohio, which sued the city shortly before the riots over discriminatory policing practices. “It’s gratifying for me to see that people are coming back several years later and recognizing how successful it was.”

Some of the changes were small: The police department vowed to hold a press conference within 12 hours of any officer-involved shooting and to provide information as well as camera footage from the event. It agreed to track officers who received an inordinate number of complaints or who violated policies, and take disciplinary action if needed. It established a Citizen Complaint Authority with investigative and subpoena powers over police. It adopted new use-of-force policies, changed guidelines on when to use chemical spray, and established a mental-health response team to deal with incidents in which a suspect may have mental-health problems.

But those changes were tiny in contrast to what Herold and others say completely altered the department over the course of a decade: the adoption of a new strategy for how to police. The settlement agreement for the ACLU lawsuit, dubbed the Collaborative, required Cincinnati police to adopt community problem-oriented policing, or CPOP. The strategy required them to do fewer out-and-out arrests, and instead focus on solving the problems that cause people to commit crimes in the first place.

So, in bulletpoint form:

● Federal Oversight of reforms; constant pressure on department to keep on point.
● Holding a press conference a maximum of 12 hours after any police related killing
● Provide any footage available of the incident and be fully open with citizens regarding the event
● Actually track officers with a build up of violations and pursue meaningful disciplinary action
● Established a Citizen Complaint Authority which had investigative/subpoena power over Police.
● Changed a whole host of policing guidelines, from when the use chemical spray to when to engage with force
● Created a mental health response team which could deal with citizens who may not actually be criminals, but merely mentally unhealthy.
● Most importantly, adopted an agreement with the ACLU called the Collaborative, which completely changed the philosophy behind how to police. It focused not on trying to arrest every petty criminal, but on how to fix the root causes that create such an intense criminal environment.

One of the core components of this entire reform was community outreach. It may seem like a small thing, but it completely changed the communities desire to work with police on real crime.

The Collaborative said:
+ This Collaborative on Police Community Relations was proposed by the Parties,
authorized by the City Council of the City of Cincinnati and established by United States District Judge Susan J. Dlott as an alternative dispute resolution effort to resolve social conflict, improve community relations, and avoid divisive litigation. The Collaborative has been pursued with Judge Dlott’s direction, encouragement and assistance as a joint project of the Parties. The Litigation alleges racially biased policing by the Cincinnati Police Department (“CPD”). The City and the FOP have denied the allegations but have agreed to pursue this unique partnership as a means of resolving the conflict. The court has appointed as Special Master, Jay Rothman, Ph.D., who has been leading the resolution process.

+ The Collaborative includes outreach to the entire Cincinnati community through eight
stakeholder groups: African-Americans, social service and religious organizations, businesses and philanthropic groups, police line officers and spouses, City officials, white citizens, other minorities and youth. The community outreach included responses to an online questionnaire as well as interviews with citizens for whom a computer was not easily accessed. Feedback sessions were used to collect and discuss the information that was gathered. Over 3500 persons participated in this process. The
collaborative also included an expert research effort headed by John Eck, Ph.D., charged with identifying best practices and model programs. The results of this community dialogue and expert research were shared with the Parties for use in settlement negotiations.

+ The Parties have studied and received the results from community based work done
through Study Circles by the Cincinnati Human Relations Commission; Neighbor to Neighbor, sponsored by numerous Cincinnati organizations; suggestions by the National Conference for Community and Justice (NCCJ) and Cincinnati Community Action Now (CCAN).

+ The Collaborative has engaged the entire community in a constructive dialogue that has resulted in an ongoing commitment to cooperation between the police and the community. The Parties, through this Agreement, make a commitment to promote and foster this ongoing cooperation.

They adopted problem-oriented policing, which is meant to fix the underlying problems that lead to criminal activity.

The Atlantic said:
Problem-oriented policing was developed in 1979 by Herman Goldstein, a University of Wisconsin professor, and was first adopted in Newport News, Virginia. Other police departments, such as Baltimore, have used the method and then abandoned it, said John Eck, a criminologist at the University of Cincinnati who helped the city adopt problem-oriented policing (which it calls Community Problem-Oriented Policing). The strategy suggests that police should not just respond to calls for service. It says they should also look for patterns in these calls to service, determine what is causing the patterns and then implement solutions to solve them, he said.

If hospitals notice an inordinate number of emergency patients coming in with facial injuries due to glass beer bottles being broken over their heads in fights, as was the case in on British precinct, police work with the bottle manufacturer to make bottles are made out of material that won’t break, he said. If police notice a women is a repeat victim of domestic violence because her partner breaks into her ground-floor apartment, they work with the landlord to move her to a higher floor, link her to a social-services agency and help her find free daycare so she doesn’t have to rely on her abusive spouse for help. In another example, when police noticed an increase in metal thefts in a neighborhood, they worked with property owners to paint their copper pipes green, posted signs about the pipes being painted green and then informed scrap yards of the program to gain support, which led to a reduction in copper thefts.

This does not paint every person who commits a crime as an irredeemable blight on society; instead it recognizes that we as a society create the conditions in which mass criminality can thrive, and fixing those problems will actually create meaningful long term reduction in crimes.

The way the country works now is to bend toward mass incarceration; we have more people in prison than even China, and discriminative policies such as the war on drugs have literally decimated minority communities. It hasn't worked. It will never work.

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BUT THIS DID, IN FACT, WORK
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But this strategy we're discussing now? It has worked. With remarkable results.

The Atlantic said:
Looking back, the results of Cincinnati’s reform efforts are startling. Between 1999 and 2014, Cincinnati saw a 69 percent reduction in police use-of-force incidents, a 42 percent reduction in citizen complaints and a 56 percent reduction in citizen injuries during encounters with police, according to a report by Robin S. Engel and M. Murat Ozer of the Institute of Crime Science at the University of Cincinnati. Violent crimes dropped from a high of 4,137 in the year after the riots, to 2,352 last year. Misdemeanor arrests dropped from 41,708 in 2000 to 17,913 last year.

f45c4b777f9qrv.jpg

(Misdemeanor Arrests in Cincinnati)

One of the keys though is to not just give up. This reform was a very time consuming process, as any important and functional reform would be. And right in the middle of it, it had seemed like it might not work at all.

The Atlantic said:
In 2004, the independent monitor determined that the city was not complying with provisions of the collaborative, which constituted a material breach. The police department had barred plaintiffs from ride-alongs, denied the Department of Justice access to certain documents, publicly questioned the competence of the monitor, complained about the Collaborative, and kicked a member of the monitoring team out of police headquarters, according to the monitor.

“We walked into it very skeptical,” Streicher told me. “We didn’t think we were being treated fairly and objectively.”

In 2005, the city and the police department had to reaffirm their commitment to the Collaborative. Also in 2005, a RAND study on policing in Cincinnati found that residents of black neighborhoods were still subject to aggressive policing, traffic enforcement and pat-downs.

Meetings between the parties in the Collaborative were “unbelievably rancorous,” the monitor, Saul Green, told me. “The police and the city were extremely recalcitrant.”

It was bad enough that little seemed to have changed. But for a few years after the riots, it seemed like things were actually getting worse in Cincinnati. The Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, where Thomas had been shot, had been on the cusp of a recovery, but after the riots, it was boarded-up and once again riddled with blight. A boycott organized by community members who thought the reforms were moving too slowly caused more tensions in the city.

After the Collaborative, Cincinnati initially experienced a plague of “de-policing,” in which patrols stayed out of certain neighborhoods to avoid trouble, Baker said. Homicide and violent crime rates began to climb in 2002, and in 2006, the city had 85 homicides, which was the highest murder rate on record. Frustration seemed to be creeping into the report by the city’s independent monitor, too.

“It is highly disappointing that only a small number of the projects from this quarter contained in the Unit Commander reports reflect any familiarity with problem solving,” the monitor wrote, in December 2006. “Clearly there is a lack of oversight, guidance, coaching, and perhaps adequate training since the majority of the efforts should not be of this quality after four years of stated commitment” from the police department.

But amongst the major things that starting changing things toward actually working is that the city government started getting involved and being supportive of the changes. And that made a huge difference:

The Atlantic said:
Many people in Cincinnati say the police finally started to buy into these reforms in 2006, after a new mayor had been elected and a new city manager appointed (Mayor Charlie Luken, who governed the city from 1999 to 2005, had asked the Justice Department to stop putting police through “this silliness,” in 2004.)

Green, the monitor, said the changes tracked very closely to new city leadership taking office. The police chief reports to the city manager, after all. New city manager Milton Dohoney Jr. started attending meetings of the parties in the Collaborative, and made sure that the rancor that had characterized them before wasn’t tolerated.

“They became much more business-like, and we were able to move forward,” Green said.

Dohoney seemed to understand that the city had signed an agreement and that it needed to come into compliance with the reforms, or face penalties, Green said.

A new attitude from people at the top made all the difference, Herold said. Police, at the end of the day, will do what they’re told. When they’re told to engage in problem-oriented policing, and are evaluated on how well they do that, their habits start to change.

Senior officers slowly started making it clear that officers weren’t going to get promoted if they didn’t embrace problem-solving and make an effort to listen to the community, Dunn said. That may be because those leaders had to answer to the independent monitor. The monitor looked closely at district reports for examples of problem-solving, held police accountable for training officers in problem-oriented policing, and constantly checked in with the Citizen Complaint Authority for police progress.

In other words, you need a mechanism in which to actually enforce reforms, above and beyond even federal oversight. You need the local government to also be on board, and actually go into the reforms full bodied, not half-assed and not trying at every moment to undermine it.

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NOTHING IS PERFECT
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Another important note is to recognize that it's not a cure all. Larger, country-wide solutions need to occur to really level out the playing field, and simply submitting reforms on a city-by-city basis is not enough to change the deeply troubling institutional problems that exist. Even in Cincinnati, they take steps back every now and then.

The Atlantic said:
Police and the community still struggle to maintain the changes. A new chief, James E. Craig, appointed in 2011, wanted the department to implement Compstat and do away with problem-solving. When current chief, Jeffrey Blackwell, became head of the department in 2013, he wasn’t familiar with problem-oriented policing, but has since embraced it.

“We had to fight hard to keep problem solving,” Herold told me. “Every time we have a new leader, I’m worried that it’s going to go away.”

Of course, not everything is perfect now in the Cincinnati police department. Two families filed lawsuits against police, for example, after two separate run-ins with the same police officer, whose dashcam was turned off during both encounters.

Some police officers still discriminate on the basis of race, said Dion Branhan and Mike Dodson, two black men I met near the University of Cincinnati.

These solutions we are discussing represents real ways we can start to fix police departments, but there's never going to be to the level we want it to be unless we figure out how to solve the even more difficult issues of income inequality and economic distress (which may be a topic for another thread):

The Atlantic said:
What’s more, he said, any policing changes since 2001 have done little to remedy economic inequality in the city. Many of the people he knows can’t find a job, even as the nearby neighborhood prospers. For all the talk of police as social-service officers, police reform can’t fix an economy that’s tougher for people at the bottom.

“People need help in the streets—they don’t need help from police,” he told me. “They can’t give you a job.”

Roley, the community activist, has the same complaints. In the aftermath of the riots, a Minority Business Accelerator was created in the city, but the black community is being pushed out of Over-the-Rhine, she said. She sometimes wonders if the police reforms are meaningful without a corresponding degree of economic change.

Cincinnati has more income inequality than any municipal area in Ohio except Cleveland, and fares worse on that measure than other similar cities, including Pittsburgh, Louisville, St. Louis and Indianapolis, said Julie Heath, the director of the University of Cincinnati’s Economic Center. The median household income in Cincinnati in 2001 was $21,000 for African Americans and $36,500 for whites, she said. In 2013, the median household income for African Americans had only gone up a few hundred dollars, to $21,300, while white median income jumped to $48,000 in Cincinnati.

But this is a start. It's a reform that actually is street tested and had spectacular results that continue to reverberate to this day. And until we can get leaders in Washington and the courts that start to change the institutional problems that have led to such income inequality and economic distress for huge groups of people, particularly minorities, we'll never be able to say we have a police system we can all be proud of.

Still, with these reforms alone many lives have almost certainly been saved in Cincinnati, and police relationship with the community has improved. The data supports this. And it's a place to start the conversation.

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DISCUSSION
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What other ideas would you add to these reforms? What solutions might we have to address the even deeper underlying issues that deal with the economic stress so many in the country deal with? How should the federal government apply pressure to keep police institutions in check?

I'm eager to hear your constructive responses. :)
 

Mumei

Member
Fantastic work on the thread. I hope this gets more attention, especially in light of the thread about the uptick in violence in Baltimore.
 

kirblar

Member
On a larger scale for states, South Carolina's SLED program appears to be one that is working - outsourcing all internal investigations to a larger third party unit puts them in a position where the normal conflicts of interest that arise are somewhat lessened as the investigators and officers report to entirely different people at entirely different levels of government.
 

Goldrush

Member
Problem-oriented policing sounds like they're expecting officers to be sociologist, psychologist, health worker, engineer, etc. The idea is sound, but might be better to spread the burden across multiple government agencies.
 

Amir0x

Banned
Problem-oriented policing sounds like they're expecting officers to be sociologist, psychologist, health worker, engineer, etc. The idea is sound, but might be better to spread the burden across multiple government agencies.

However one goes about it, the police need to be on board as well for it to work. My feeling is that the more government groups we create to oversee all these different elements, the less likely police are going to want to be onboard... too many hands in their cookie jar, you see.

I think if you get police involved in the way the article mentions, they become proactive members of the community and feel they have a stake in it. There are other jobs for the federal government in this reform imo.
 

TAJ

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Problem-oriented policing sounds like they're expecting officers to be sociologist, psychologist, health worker, engineer, etc. The idea is sound, but might be better to spread the burden across multiple government agencies.

Or just give them as much training as other countries do, three or four years full-time before they're even allowed to interact with the public.
 

andthebeatgoeson

Junior Member
Good thread.

I always say everything starts at the top. Every bad employee has a boss who tolerates their bad practices. It may not be the police chief but other bosses they interact with. Good for the city.

The economic change will take the populations effort. Boycotts, protests, etc. Probably more difficult than changing the police. But still worth it.
 

a.wd

Member
Systemic problems are resolved through fundamental change in top down thinking and an understanding that the responsibility for those changes lie at the feet of people at the top of the system? And measuring success against a morally focused set of groups who are transparent and have no financial incentives to reduce the efficacy of that system produces results? Who da funkit...
 
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