Breonna Taylor, Louisville Police and the acceptance of "unpreferred" outcomes as a matter of course vs. indicators of a need for change: business process redesign

Process redesign.  When I get the privilege of working on a planning engagement, I always start out by saying, the point of planning and zoning is to improve quality of life, and when "routine outcomes" from planning processes produce undesirable outcomes, we need to work backwards through the process to determine how and why those outcomes are produced as a matter of course, and change the processes as appropriate so that routine outcomes become the desired outcomes. 

My way of thinking about this has been influenced by books like Thomas Davenport's Process Innovation: Reengineering Work Through Information Technology, and other approaches along these lines such as "reengineering" and "reinventing government."  It's called business process redesign.

Basically a process is a sequence of activities that creates outputs from inputs, and all organizations--not just for profit businesses--have sets of processes used to direct what it does (produce outputs) using various personnel and process resources (inputs).

BPR assumes that most processes can be improved, and that innovation will improve outcomes significantly.

Accepting motor vehicle deaths by exonerating drivers of responsibility.  The system around automobile-related death has been set up to accept a large number of deaths every year, and for the most part, these deaths are treated as accidents that couldn't be prevented, and except for cases where the driver is impaired by drugs or alcohol, motor vehicle operators are held to a pretty minimal standard and don't face much in the way of legal consequences ("Wrong Turn," New Yorker, 2001).

The "Vision Zero" movement aims to change the mindset about motor vehicle-related deaths, and to systematically address the problem, with a scalar reduction in deaths and injury.

Mann Gulch forest fire, 1949.  Decades ago, 13 members of a 15 member unit of forest fighters were killed fighting a fire in Arizona.  The speed and amount of death was shocking and the US Forest Service analyzed what happened and made multiple changes to their process and approach to fighting fires, including suppression.

Policing.  The same acceptance of failure as a routine outcome is true of policing.  Some cases where a tragic chain of errors resulted in death include Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, Atatiana Jefferson in Fort Worth, Texas, Daniel Prude in Rochester, New York, etc.  

For the most part, the officers who killed face no consequences, although because of a separate legal settlement with the family in Louisville, there the police department and city government will make some changes in the way it operates wrt policing. 

There is something terribly wrong with a system where routine outcomes frequently result in death or injury, especially of people of color, and this is seen as acceptable, a normal process outcome, the product of the way the system is supposed to or frequently works.

The veneration of the police, "Blue Lives Matter" etc. makes it that much harder to point out and address the fact that police operating processes too often result in death and injury as a routine outcome.

When cases go to grand juries or to court before regular juries, often jurors are unwilling to vote to move charges forward or to convict out of a sense similar to why motor vehicle operators evade prosecution--with driving it's "it could have been me," while with police officers it's "I don't want to question their decisions made in the heat of duty."

Fullerton California police department completely revamps use of force, training, and other practices after six police officers 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 has annual external reviews of its operation   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 is appears to be a national model, unlike the whitewashes that seem to happen in many cities when it comes to evaluating police departments and officers in terms of excessive force and in-custody deaths.

-- Fullerton Police Department: Audit of Force Reviews and Internal Investigations, August 2016, OIR Group

Conclusion.  Policing is ripe for "business process redesign" as I have written about in many blog entries over the years.

-- "Broken windows/collective efficacy," 2019 (and cites within)

-- "Towards a public safety model that is broader than policing," 2020

Fewer than 300 of the nation's 17,000 police departments have substantive oversight boards or processes.  Having body cameras doesn't seem to make much difference in how police officers handle calls ("The research results of the DC police body camera study: idiographic vs. nomothetic approaches," 2017).  By contrast, OIR Group has contracts with a number of police departments where they audit every instance of use of force and all civilian complaints.

According to Michael Gennaco, the principal of the OIR Group, while his firm is busy doing audits and working with departments and cities to reduce the use of force and "in-custody death," just a handful of police departments overall are interested in the kind of organizational redesign that the firm often recommends ("Out of Crisis Comes Opportunity," Dartmouth Alumni Magazine).

Clearly, opportunities for a business process redesign approach rebound within policing.  

While Georgetown Law professor Paul Butler, author of Chokehold: Policing Black Men, argues that the police officers in the Breonna Taylor case are "bad apples" and deserving of prosecution for their failures ("I’m a former prosecutor. The charge in Breonna Taylor’s death is pathetically weak," Washington Post), in this article but not his book, it doesn't seem as if he acknowledges the systematic and systemic process failures that led to her death.

I'm not trying to exonerate the police officers, but they are products of the system that hires, trains, manages, and supervises them.  

That being said, while accepting that police officers, like motor vehicle operators who cause deaths while improperly operating vehicles, are products of a system that accepts catastrophic death as routine, this shouldn't mean they should be able to avoid responsibility for their actions.

Just as motor vehicle operators, operating heavy potentially lethal machinery should be held to a higher level of responsibility, so should police officers wielding the "coercive power of the state" which includes guns and other equipment than can either subdue or maim and kill.