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Two recent incidents from Oklahoma and Illinois will help to set the tone for this discussion. One has a tragic outcome; the other does not. But the underlying issues are the same and frame this question: Should those officers have been there in the first place? The answer to this question emphasizes why tracking officer performance is such an important aspect of public safety leadership.
Oklahoma: An illegal detention
In Oklahoma, officers encounter a man walking on a public street with his 6-year-old son just before 6:00 a.m. The primary officer approaches him and asks what he is doing. The man explains he is out for a walk with his son who is autistic. The officer says it’s suspicious of them to be walking around at this hour and the man replies, “We do that.” The officer says, “No, you’re not. Give me your ID.”
When the man says his ID is at his house, the situation escalates. The officer takes him to the ground, then handcuffs him. In several points in the video the officer has a difficult time explaining why the man’s behavior was so suspicious and would lead to an arrest for failing to identify himself. While this is happening, the child is screaming and crying.
Eventually the man is released without a formal arrest. The bodycam video goes viral in the community. According to news reports, once the video is released, other people contact the media to report they had previous encounters with the same officer who they felt was disrespectful to them.
Illinois: Unnecessary escalation
In a more prominent incident, Illinois deputies responded to Sonya Massey’s home in response to her 911 call for a possible intruder outside her home. Deputies quickly determined Sonya may be a person with mental illness and interview her within her home. The situation quickly escalates when deputies ask her to shut off a stove burner, which she was using to heat up a pot of water. Sonya picks up the pot and states to the primary deputy, “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus,” which the deputy perceives as a threat. He yells for her to drop the pot, stating, “I am going to shoot you in your f***’ing face,” then he does, killing her.
The deputy did not activate his body camera until immediately after the shooting, which was captured in the video buffer. This incident drew national media attention.
A history of escalation
So, what caused these poor outcomes? In the Oklahoma incident, the officer did not fully understand his legal limitations and let his anger control his decision making, leading to what I believe was an illegal detention. In Illinois, the deputy unnecessarily escalated the incident with the decisions he made.
The common theme in both incidents is that the officers had been previously employed at other law enforcement agencies and both received questionable performance reviews from their prior employers. The warning signs were there, but no one acted on them.
Willful blindness?
The Oklahoma officer had previously worked for a sheriff’s department and, per the sheriff, had been demoted and placed in a non-public-facing position due to complaints from both fellow employees and citizens. He was later hired by a local city department.
As for the deputy involved in the shooting of Sonya Massey, much more information is available due to the tragic outcome. The deputy’s entire personnel record was released to the public on the sheriff’s department website, including the results of his background investigation. The investigation included conversations with three of his prior police agencies. All three indicated the deputy needed more training, and one indicated he had poor officer safety skills.
Since the shooting, information obtained by media outlets from at least one of those agencies revealed there was much more to the story. In a separate incident, while employed by a different agency, the deputy had apparently attempted an inappropriate vehicle stop, which led to a high-speed pursuit and an accident. More importantly, the investigating member of that agency concluded the deputy lied about the incident. This was not fully documented. Also, the deputy had been discharged from the Army for “misconduct (serious offense)” according to the discharge document in the file, yet there is no indication anyone contacted the Army to inquire about his records.
Certainly, the former agency should have been forthcoming with all their information. But the responsibility falls on the hiring agency to review all available information firsthand and follow up as necessary with interviews. It has been my experience this happens less often than it should. A brief phone call with one person at a prior agency is often the extent of the inquiry.
As a chief, I had several occasions to initiate disciplinary actions that led to the resignation of officers. On at least three occasions, I spoke with the heads of other agencies looking to hire these former officers. I told all three the same thing: Bring a signed release and I will tell you everything I know. One did and did not hire the person. The other two hired the former officers regardless of my warnings.
I acknowledge that law enforcement is in a recruiting and retention crisis, which has been exacerbated over the past few years. The desire to fill open positions can be overwhelming and, without careful balance, can be fraught with risk. Background investigations need to follow a rigid and detailed process that should be the same for all candidates, whether new officers or lateral transfers. Administrators may think they are helping their current members by getting them relief with the addition of personnel, and those existing members may welcome the help. But when one officer backs up another during an ongoing call, the backup officer must be able to trust that the first officer is doing the right thing.
The goal of all law enforcement leaders should be to make their agency a better place for the members who deserve to be there and do what they must do to get rid of the ones who do not. Not all people are suitable to be officers or deputies. And as the sheriff in the Massey incident noted, good cops do not want bad cops.
Changing the paradigm
Does this mean you can never hire someone who has a poor review from a prior agency or employer? No, that is not my point. Policing is not easy. Officers commonly have different strengths and weaknesses. Young officers will also progress at different rates. Every case is potentially different and must be weighed on its own merits after all efforts to obtain information about the candidate have been exhausted. This allows for an educated decision as to whether the positives outweigh the negatives and whether the agency has the talent and resources to develop a tailored performance improvement plan for that officer or deputy. Equally important, we need to have a system in place for tracking officer performance in an ongoing, rigorous, data-driven way.
It comes to this: We need to change the paradigm about how we monitor, track and evaluate officer behavior. This means collecting extensive and consistent data on what our officers are doing.
“Wait, what? You mean you want to spy on us and use the data to discipline us? You don’t trust us and you are catering to all the police critics!”
Nope, that is not what I am saying — and here lies the paradigm shift. We need to move from this attitude into one more accepting of reality, which is that policing is complicated and difficult. We need to use every tool available to us to strive for continuous improvement on both an individual officer and agency level. Leaders also need to realize that while blaming individual officers is easy, accepting that an organization has contributed to a bad result is typically resisted.
Mining the data
The use of data should not be considered only as a means of disciplining or micromanaging an officer. Instead, we need to take a far more expansive approach and look at the data to determine if there is a need to improve the entire agency. I will use two examples from my first agency. Like many departments back then (and like many still today), our record-keeping — such as use of force reports — was paper-based. Minor disciplinary records were kept by supervisors of each individual shift or division. There was no sharing of complaints unless conduct rose to the level of an internal affairs investigation. With that background, let’s look at the examples.
The first example involved a personnel complaint arising from a traffic stop that quickly escalated and led to the temporary handcuffing of a motorist. I was in internal affairs and as we investigated the incident, we concluded the source of the conflict was that the officer refused to tell the driver why he had been stopped until the driver provided his paperwork. We could have just recommended some level of discipline for the officer, but then we thought, did we create this through our training? That led to a search through each shift and division’s individual disciplinary records. The answer to us was a resounding yes, and we had to fix it at the organizational level. We fundamentally changed how we trained officers to communicate with a stopped driver. Our personnel complaints plummeted.
The second example involved the deployment of TASER devices department-wide. I oversaw the training unit at the time. We were early adopters of the devices in our area, and we closely followed the recommendations for initial training. We put everyone through the training and that was that. After a period of months, we had an incident where an officer used a TASER device on an elderly woman with questionable justification.
Again, the easy out would have been to blame the officer, discipline him to some degree and move on. At the time, our use of force reports were submitted with incident reports and/or arrest folders and filed away. Once they were reviewed by a supervisor, they were generally not looked at again. We decided to pull every incident where a TASER device had been deployed and look at the circumstances. Once we had all that data available to us, it became clear that officers in some cases were improperly deploying them. We evaluated the initial training and quickly concluded that we did not properly prepare the officers for the interplay and overlap of TASER device use with traditional defensive tactics. We retrained the entire department, and the problem was effectively eliminated.
These are two examples of how tracking officer performance can benefit individual members and help them improve while also improving the department. Yes, there are also times when discipline will result. But what we are trying to do is create an atmosphere of continuous improvement that will benefit both the community and the members of the agency.
Years ago, I was asked by the union of another agency to informally review some video of an incident and give an opinion about the actions of the officers. It involved an officer illegally arresting an intoxicated person out of anger. When the person began resisting and kicking while handcuffed, the officer called for help. Backup officers arrived and jumped in to assist, as any officer would do under those circumstances. There is more to the story that I will not get into, but this led to a massive investigation, involvement of an outside agency, and a termination and other disciplinary actions. But here is the most important part — when I watched that video, I saw an officer who had no ability to effectively communicate with the person. Instead, he escalated the incident.
Upon my inquiries, I discovered his shortcomings were well known among fellow officers, but these concerns had never been formally documented. What if the agency had central access to overlapping data points that may have raised a flag about this officer? Resulting audits of in-car or body camera video could have quickly revealed an obvious problem. The first step then would have been to ask whether the officer could be retrained to remain calm and de-escalate situations. If not, separation may have been necessary. The point, however, is that such a system would ultimately be to the benefit of all the officers by highlighting a vulnerability and correcting it.
A continual process
Still leery of collecting data on officer performance? Many years ago, when license plate readers (LPRs) started rolling out, civil rights groups were concerned about the potential for abuse that could come with all that data available to the police. What was the typical law enforcement response? You have nothing to worry about if you did nothing wrong. Today, LPR data is a vital component of countless criminal investigations.
The same argument can be made about officer performance data — you only have to worry if you are doing something wrong. Leaders must shoulder the responsibility to use available data responsibly, with the willingness to accept organizational shortcomings.
For agencies that are still heavily paper-based, the process I am describing is possible but admittedly time-consuming and burdensome. But the potential long-term rewards are not only worth it; they are essential in any contemporary law enforcement agency. Rigid and thorough background investigation guidelines are immediately attainable and had they been followed in the incidents discussed in this article, may have prevented a man from being illegally detained and a woman with mental illness from being shot and killed. The question at the conclusion of the investigation should not be, “Is there something that disqualifies the candidate under state law?” Instead, the question should be, “Do we want this person in our agency?”
We must also stop thinking about such evaluations as a one-time occurrence. Rather, all law enforcement leaders should be asking themselves, “Do we have the proper tools and systems in place to monitor all our officers, identify risks and training needs, and enhance performance on an individual and agency level?”
If the answer is no, well then, in the words of Lexipol co-founder Gordon Graham, you have a “problem lying in wait.”
