Guns and "Quotas" and PANDAs...OH MY!
When you reward a behavior, humans will look for a shortcut to the reward.
"If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud." - Nicholas Nassin Taleb
A recently article written by (and I can’t believe I’m saying this) The People’s Fabric talks about in depth, with BWC footage and interviews with victims, about a rouge group of police officers who allegedly knowingly, willfully, and illegally take money, guns, and dope. There is a lot of really damning video evidence being shown, and in a lot of the stops and seizures the receipts aren’t adding up to the sum total the officers presented in their reports.
I’ve written about how officers shape their and the profession’s legacy, I’ve written about the sins of our fathers, so the notion of cops doing stupid shit isn’t unheard of or foreign to me (or just about any cop for that matter). What comes into play, and was pointed out in the article, was that there is a rewards system for a certain type of behavior.
Every officer, especially ones that have been on teams or specific a unit, knows this phrase:
“Hey the [insert rank] needs more arrests/traffic stops/tickets/interactions/etc….”
Many times the request is well-intentioned; perhaps there is a noticeable issue in an area and one of those metrics will address it in the short term. Or there is a nagging politician that is getting the phone tree phone call barrage about an issue, so the edict comes down the pipeline and lands in the patrol officer’s lap. The officer has now been tasked with this problem and the end-all-be-all solution that will fix the problem in perpetuity: We Need More of XYZ!
Except the solution is rarely thought out beyond when the command staff will get a promotion and move on, leaving the issue to their successor. Even when kicking the can down the road for their replacement to deal with isn’t their thought process, even when it is done with complete ignorance of a long-term vision, many times the damage has been done. Cops hear this and as things get rolling they begin to see what actions get rewarded. The supervisors are happy because it keeps the brass off their backs, so they reward their officers more, and the officers look to do more.
A professional experience…
Any cop that had a chance to work a high crime area like Chicago’s 011th district probably knows about, remembers, or performed dispersals (knowing Chicago, it’s probably a Chicago-only thing). Essentially what a dispersal was is the officer could shag someone off a corner for gang or narcotics loitering by reading off a card. The consequences were getting arrested, which is an annoyance to the individual, and the officer had to complete a stop report (ISR).
Many times people would walk off before the card could be read or as soon as we pulled up. So unless we knew who they were, it was a J Doe ISR and a detailed description. We had to get an event number for the dispersal, how many we dispersed, and what kind (narcotics or gang). While it was a municipal ordinance that probably originated out of a concern for community safety by reducing the number of people clustered in a high crime area thus reducing targets for violence, or just to create an illusion of lower crime for vocal community members, it became weaponized by supervisors.
It became just another stat.
Jerry Ratcliffe, former UK cop, criminologist, and author of “Reducing Crime” wrote:
"Harmful negative outputs occur frequently, such as when commanders try and drive productivity by setting targets for traffic tickets, pedestrian investigations, or arrests. Demands for quotas can infuriate the public and police officers alike."
He’s right, and just about every cop who has heard some number demanded from a roll call briefing or a supervisor knows that feeling. If you’re like me you immediately begin to formulate a plan to get that arbitrary number out of the way so you can go do real police work. When it was dispersals my teammates and I would go to corners where we knew the players and when we saw them, we dispersed them. Many times it was just a, “hey, you can’t be here for 8 hours or we are locking you up” and we drove off, not asking for names or identifiers and just writing a J Doe ISR with physical descriptors. We had typed out narratives to copy and paste where we just needed to plug in the relevant info from the day (similar to the old typewriter and paper reports with pre-filled narratives…don’t judge us old school) and off we went to do the fun stuff.
We knew the best places to go to hit whatever number they wanted that day and usually, we never went back. We would go and chase someone off the corner under threat of arrest and leave. I have my personal misgivings with the whole process and muni code, but I was just a lowly police officer who wanted to go and arrest real bad guys, not someone just standing on a corner. This was just my fare for the day to pay the toll to go and do what I wanted.
We will never call it a quota, it’s a “suggested donation”
If it wasn’t dispersals it was blue cards, or ISRs, or PCIs, or guns. While less pervasive where I’m at now, when a unit or team isn’t coming up with the numbers that a higher up expects, nastygram emails get sent around. And where do you think all that lands in the end?
Right back in the patrol officer’s lap.
While I understand that a team or unit needs some sort of metrics to justify their existence, supervisors need to be wary of how and what they demand of their officers. In a city like Chicago, as I’m sure most big cities are similar, gun violence is a real and pervasive issue that hasn’t gotten any better in the last few years. So with those issues comes a demand to remove more illegal guns off the streets. Suddenly there are awards for “Top Gun” or time off or commendations; it becomes a Pavlov’s dog situation..or police K9 for a more cop friendly version.
Classical conditioning is a real thing, and when officers see buddies or the cops they look up to being spotlighted, they want the same thing. Well I should say MOST cops because I know there are the cops who answer their calls and nothing more (not knocking you all who do just that). When the metric is set and cops figure out how to ring that bell for a treat, they find ways to ring the bell.
Then cops find that ringing that bell is kinda hard, or time consuming, or it’s not ringing loud enough or enough times. And as some of the best problem solvers out there, cops will figure out how to shortcut the system. Suddenly there are stories about cops bringing the bell and planting it on someone who didn’t have it in the first place. Or, as in the case of the cops in the article, they start taking bells and not arresting the people with the bells. Or taking the bells in a questionable, and even illegal, manner and making up stories about how they found the bell.
I’m not talking about bells, I’m talking about guns.
So when I read an article like the one mentioning the actions of Fair, Morrow, Collins, and Taylor I am not surprised they shortcut the system. I’m not surprised that as they discovered(my hypothesis here) that they can shortcut the system by taking a gun from someone, just inventory it, thus avoiding the whole arrest process and waiting on hold forever for Felony Review, they found they could create shortcuts on the shortcut. Suddenly what MIGHT have been done under honorable pretenses of removing illegal firearms and getting that coveted gun recovery stat, became more a sinister behavior scarring the police profession as a whole. Ring-a-ling!
I also don’t think they were in it alone. Somewhere, whether direct supervisor or higher up the brass food chain, there was a constant demand for more guns. Last year this officer got X number of guns, or this team recovered XX, so lets push for more this year! Suddenly cops are jonesing for another award, ribbon, name on the wall, or attaboy for their increasing their number of whatever. While the supervisors or brass didn’t FORCE the officers to perform the (so far alleged) illegal acts, they also setup a system that could be abusive in nature.
I am by no means absolving the officers of their (potential) wrongdoing. If they are found to have committed the acts they have been accused of (the BWC kinda spells that out) and unfit to be a cop, or face criminal charges and jail time, so be it. At the end of the day no one MADE them perform illegal acts; they used their own freewill to perform the acts for an award. Heck, I even wrote about what I feel is a good supervisor in policing, but at the same time it shouldn’t need to be said that cops should be doing the right thing to earn the accolades. I think in policing we need a better system to address crime and rewarding the officers that properly address it.
After reading Ratcliffe’s book Reducing Crime and currently in the last chapter of Simon Sinek’s The Infinite Game we need a proper strategy for addressing the immediate needs of the community AND how to sustain long-term program that keeps the crime away. Within that program the supervisors need to reward the good behavior that PROPERLY addresses crime and those same supervisors need to have a solid system of accountability so what took place in the 004th district (and seemingly all over at times) doesn’t happen again. A combination of evidence based policing tactics with the proper mindset instilled in the leadership and the officers.
What that looks like, I don’t know yet, but I’m exited to work with the next generation of police officers and police leaders to design, develop, and execute that program. Sounds like a good time to use the PANDA model.