The opportunity to rearticulate public safety delivery keeps being presented: Rochester New York

Rochester New York's police department was in the news in 2020 for the death of a person in custody, who was having a mental health episode ("Daniel Prude Was in ‘Mental Distress.’ Police Treated Him Like a Suspect," New York Times), and an attempt to cover up the death.

This led to the police chief's resignation and calls for the mayor ("Several Black Lives Matter groups calling for Rochester mayor, police chief to resign," WHEC-TV) to resign.

Rochester's police department is in the news again because "Rochester police handcuffed and pepper-sprayed a 9-year-old girl, body-cam footage shows" (Washington Post).

Clearly the department is proving they are not well suited to responding to mental health matters.  After the Pearl incident, the city created a mental health response unit, but clearly the staffing is inadequate, because they didn't have available personnel to respond to this incident, so the police responded instead.

Defund the police versus broadening the approach to public safety.  It's unfortunate that calls to "defund the police" haven't been termed better in terms of not only moving away from the "warrior policing" approach ("Law Enforcement's 'Warrior Problem,'" Harvard Law Review), which too often results in unnecessary death, but moving towards a new and broader approach to public safety, which goes beyond just having police respond to calls, but having a broader and more nuanced system of response.  

-- "Police response to mental health matters," 2016
-- "Broken windows/collective efficacy: Baltimore; Newark; Grand Junction, Colorado; Pittsburgh; Albany," 2019
-- "Towards a public safety model that is broader than policing," 2020
-- "Creating 'community safety partnership neighborhood management programs as a management and mitigation strategy for public nuisances," 2020

The book End of Policing lays out new ways of thinking about this, although I have some serious disagreements with the author, who seems to believe that it's not just policing, but the need for order that should be called into question.

Having lived in DC in the late 1980s and 1990s when crime was rampant, and having been a victim of multiple crimes, I believe that there is a lot to be said for order and public safety.  Public safety is a primary function of government.

There is no question that the crime drop starting in the mid-1990s was essential to the resuscitation of cities in the 2000s.

Fullerton, California as a counter-example.  Fullerton's police department completely revamped its use of force, training, and other practices after police officers beat a homeless man to death.

While the city paid out 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 through annual independent reviews.  From the article:

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 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.

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

Rochester needs to do what Fullerton did: a top-down reorganization and repositioning of the police department and public safety more generally.  I've written that these kinds of incidents and high payouts in settlements for cases of police misconduct are indicators of a need for systematic, structural change.

-- "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," 2020
-- "Where is the risk management approach to police misconduct and regularized killings of citizens?," 2020

Rochester and other police departments have the opportunity to completely rearticulate their approach to policing as a response to egregious response failures.

Instead of sweep the problems under the rug, transform.

In college, I came across the book Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution, which distinguishes between first and second order change.  I describe the difference as in first order change, it's like moving your socks from dresser drawer #1 to dresser drawer #3, and in turn reversing where your underwear is placed.  Second order change is substantive, transformational, and structural.

Investigation of use of force complaints, even those resulting in death tend to result in findings that the police officer was justified.  Instead, the regular occurrence of such outcomes should be seen as a need for substantive change, just as it was in Fullerton.