As a patrol sergeant in the mid 1980’s, I went to the Assistant Chief one time to complain about a rookie he had assigned to my patrol shift. I told the AC that this kid is trouble. He’s going to hurt somebody. It turns out he had not passed the MMPI, the CPI, or a pre-employment assessment by the police psychologist.
So why the hell did we hire him? The AC explained that if we only hired the applicants who passed all of the psychological tests, we couldn’t fill enough vacancies to meet minimum manpower needs. We had to hire some of the borderline cases and hope they worked out. Part of my job as sergeant was to make sure that if this new rookie was a loose cannon, we would fire him during his probation.
In Fort Worth in October 2019, a neighbor noticed Atatiana Jefferson’s front door standing open at 2:30 AM and called police to request a welfare check. Aaron Dean was one of the responding officers. He stumbled around the side of the house in the dark. He saw Atatiana through a window. She heard the noise he made outside her window and removed a handgun from her purse. She stood up, the gun at her side. Dean saw the gun in her hand, drew his weapon and shot her dead.
The press largely addressed Dean’s use of his weapon as a training issue. But a paragraph in one news article that went largely unnoticed pointed out that the police psychologist who had assessed Dean had recommended against hiring him. Dean had a narcissistic personality disorder that makes him dangerous. Against the advice of the psychologist, the department hired Dean anyway. They needed to fill vacancies.
Rodney King. Abner Louima. Sandra Bland, Atatiana Jefferson. George Floyd. Tyre Nichols, and a thousand more. The cops in those cases were not untrained. They were the wrong kind of people. They should never have been hired in the first place. That conclusion is inescapable.
Police are not a homogenous group. There are good cops and bad cops. Most police officers are honest and compassionate people driven by a genuine desire to serve others. After fifty years in law enforcement, I know this to be true. But there are some who get into the uniform for the wrong reasons.
There is no single answer to the problems of #policebrutality, police corruption, or police shootings. #policetraining is part of it. The formal culture of leadership, written SOPs, and a department’s insistence on good practices is another part. The informal culture of locker room talk is yet another. Some of these factors need correcting in many departments, all of them need attention in a few departments. And, thankfully, many departments are already doing everything right. But it all begins with hiring the right people.
Pay a sufficient wage to attract enough of the right caliber of people to be cops. Set strict psychological standards and follow them — no exceptions. Control both the formal and informal culture in the department. Provide the proper training.
But first, hire good people.