Where is the risk management approach to police misconduct and regularized killings of citizens?

Again, I have not yet read the new book published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Scenario Planning for Cities and Regions: Managing and Envisioning Uncertainties, although it's in my pile of "to read."

Officials and stakeholders as managers of the city's identity and "brand." In 2005 I wrote a piece about commercial district revitalization making the point that if we think of ourselves as "destination managers" we will make places great for both residents and visitors.

In 2008, I extended this concept to city elected and appointed officials and stakeholders as a community's collective of "brand managers" responsible for the brand promise of a community:

... elected officials need to take their responsibilities as stewards and managers of a community's image very seriously:
Just as the study team believes that “we are all destination managers now,” elected and appointed officials in particular and in association with other community stakeholders serve as a community’s “brand managers”—whether or not they choose to think of their roles in this manner.

That means that decision-making on land use and zoning, business issues, infrastructure development (roads, sewers, water, utilities, transit), technology (broadband Internet, etc.) and quality of place factors (arts, culture, historic preservation and heritage, education, public schools and libraries, urban design, etc.) must be consistent and focused on making the right decisions, the decisions that collectively achieve and support the realization of the community’s desired vision and positioning.

In 2015 I extended this argument further, that officials and stakeholders need to see their roles as the managers of a community's assets.

For awhile now, I've been meaning to do this around risk management too, although I have written about that in the context of lawsuits around policing.

Police misconduct settlements can be costly. For example, Chicago spends many tens of millions of dollars every year in settlements for police misconduct  ("Chicago spent more than $113 million on police misconduct in 2018," Chicago Reporter).

Add to that the cost of legal representation, often on outside counsel ("A hidden cost of Chicago police misconduct: $213 million to private lawyers since 2004," Chicago Tribune).

And that this might have to be financed in a way that adds to a city's long term debt ("How Chicago's financing of police-misconduct payouts adds hundreds of millions to the tab," Crain's Chicago Business).

Shouldn't settlement costs be seen as an indicator of a system failure that must be addressed?  You'd think that elected officials would take that as an indicator of a problem with the police department, and look at the need for management, process, and policing reforms, rather than merely as the "cost of doing business."

When I take on planning engagements, I look at outcomes in terms of what is desired and what in fact occurs.

When desired outcomes aren't produced as a matter of course by the system of processes that produces them, that's an indicator of a need to work backwards through the processes, to identify why things aren't working the way that's desired, and make changes.

In the case of policing, it's a clear need for different strategies and tactics and more robust training ("Policing: escalation vs. de-escalation," 2014).

Protesters hold signs outside the precinct building. Stephen Maturen / Getty Images

Police misconduct can lead to social unrest.  Another potential cost derived from police misconduct is rebellion and riot.

That's happening this week in Minneapolis after the release of a video showing the death of George Floyd as a result of police use of force in his arrest ("Man dies in MPD custody, 4 cops fired; protesters, police clash," Minnesota Public Radio; "George Floyd protest turns deadly; Minneapolis mayor requests National Guard," NBC).

For example, the 1965 riots in Watts, the 1967 riots in Detroit, and the Stonewall riots in New York City in 1969, were each the response of fed up publics to what they considered to be unreasonable, oppressive, over-policing

More recently the same is true of Ferguson/St. Louis after the death of Michael Brown in 2014 and the development of the #Black Live Matters movement and riots and ongoing unrest in Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray in 2015.

And these costs in both St. Louis and Baltimore are ongoing, 5-6 years afterwards.

Ted Rall editorial cartoon.

Police unions focus on protecting police officers not improving outcomes. One of the problems in all of this is police unions. First, these unions tend to be pretty involved in local politics, funding campaigns, etc.

 Second, they work very hard in collective bargaining negotiations to provide lots of protections to officers in cases of charges of misconduct, in ways that can make it very difficult to discipline undesirable behavior.

-- "The unjust power of police unions," The Week
-- "Our Police Union Problem," New York Times
-- "The Impact of Unions on Municipal Elections and Urban Fiscal Policies," University of Pennsylvania

Fullerton California as a counter-example:  completely revamps use of force, training, and other practices after the after a police officer beat to death a homeless man.  After the fatal beating of Kelly Thomas, a schizophrenic (the city paid a big judgement to his family) rather than accept what happened as "an accident," the City of Fullerton evaluated various police processes and changed them, to reduce the likelihood of injury and death in interactions between the police and the public ("Here's how Fullerton police have improved since Kelly Thomas' death," Orange County Register).

The changes in practice were not limited to dealing with homeless people or people in mental distress, but in how all of the city's police officers interact with the public and how they are trained.

The police department has set a goal of being one of the best police departments in the country for its size, and measures its success in part   The OCR article reports on the most recent review:

The study offers a half-dozen recommendations – compared with 59 in its first review – that range from striving to use the least force necessary to more cautious foot pursuits.

.. Four years ago, OIR Group recommended that officers – when safely possible – employ less force by increasing time and distance, using cover and concealment, creating barriers, and calling and waiting for backup.

“The department,” the document says, “has substantially addressed many of the shortcomings we noted in our 2012 report.”

First, a new training room was built for officers to practice lesser-force techniques. Then, a video-based interactive training system was installed. It offers more than 200 bad-guy scenarios, and each one can be altered with the touch of a screen.

“These upgrades in training facilities,” the report concludes, “allow trainers to emphasize the importance of tactical alternatives to force, particularly deadly force.”

The training may be paying off. Citizen complaints have dropped from a high of 36 in 2014 to a low of 24 last year.

Still, the new report offers new suggestions. They include requiring incident reports to check off threat perception, least-use-of-force efforts, and adherence to reporting policies.

The process in Fullerton appears to be a national model, albeit a one-off that hasn't been adopted elsewhere, unlike the whitewashes that seem to be happening in most other cities when it comes to evaluating police departments and officers in terms of excessive force and deaths at the hands of police officers.

Britain. A commenter in one of the many articles on the George Floyd killing mentioned watching the BBC tv series, "Our Cops in the North," (episode one) and made the point that it showed how the officers were very good at dealing with conflict, arrests, etc., without guns and in a manner that didn't escalate conflict, attributing this to the level of training and usually being unarmed. I thought that was an important point.

Contrast that to reality tv shows in the US like "Cops" which show the widespread use of militaristic approaches and tactics to policing here.

Racialized social control as a structural feature of urban police departments.  I have mentioned before the biggest issue probably in the US wrt policing besides the fact that policing is the leading element of what Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness calls "racialized social control" ("Racialized social control and risk management: Baltimore," 2020).

Typically, urban police forces tend to have a majority of white officers and often they don't live in the communities they patrol.  But even in cities where a police chief may be black, like Minneapolis, or in places where a preponderance of officers are people of color like Baltimore or DC, there are still issues.

A man poses for a photo in the parking lot of an AutoZone where a fire broke out.

Video showed the AutoZone with broken windows and spray paint. One bystander was warning people against damaging the business, saying it had nothing to do with Floyd's death.

— Carlos Gonzalez / Minneapolis Star Tribune via AP

Take a risk management approach.  Regularly producing outcomes of death as a function of police processes is an indicator of an endemic, systematic, structural problem, not a series of one-off problems.  It can only be addressed through significant changes in training, hiring, and management.

By this time, most cities have an "Office of Risk Management" or a similar function as a standard element of public administration.  But probably too many communities haven't given this function the ability to think creatively and expansively.

From the report Risk Assessment and Management in Local Government Emergency Planning, by the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction:

The following statement captures the essential elements in dealing with risk:

• risk is the possibility that harm may occur from an identified hazard;
• risk analysis is the process of evaluating the frequency and consequence of the hazard;
• risk control uses methods of reducing the frequency or consequences of a hazard; and,
• risk management is the ongoing process of daily decision-making given the existence of an identified hazard and that all practical and reasonable measures have been taken to
minimize any potential impacts it may have.