3

Knowledge and Skills for Policing

The task of the committee was to address a fundamental question about police training: “what are the core knowledge and skills needed for police to promote the rule of law and protect the population?” As noted in Chapter 1, the second principle when applying an evidence-based conceptual framework to police training is that police agencies need to train officers by translating into practice what is known from science.

This chapter provides an overview of established science on crime that should be translated to knowledge and skills and included in the education and training of police officers and leaders to achieve the aims of promoting the rule of law (ROL) and protecting the population. All jurisdictions have specific laws and regulations that dictate the local powers of law enforcement officers that will be important for officers to learn, but those legal curricula are beyond the scope of this study. Likewise, there are numerous opportunities to build the knowledge and skills necessary to carry out procedures in one’s agency and operate and use equipment, yet this chapter does not address these types of knowledge and skills. Our focus, instead, is on the foundational knowledge and skills that both are needed to promote fair, legal, and effective policing practices and can be integrated into a number of training programs. In the committee’s view, based on its experiences with police training, much of this core knowledge is sorely absent from training curricula across countries in both the Global North and the Global South.

In summarizing the core content of knowledge that policing needs to apply, the chapter describes relevant facts and theory in the science of criminology, including the concentration of most crime into small percentages of all places, times, offenders, and victims, and related patterns of criminality.

The committee believes this knowledge is important for all levels of police officers (e.g., recruits, frontline, supervisors, management, and leadership) and those that become instructors of training programs. It recognizes that such knowledge may be integrated into curricula in different ways for different levels and serve different purposes. It is particularly important for training instructors to be well versed in criminological facts and theories so they can impart this knowledge appropriately in the context of training-specific tactics or strategies.

Likely this knowledge would be discussed at a basic level for recruit and frontline officers, with graduated levels of information and emphasis for supervisors, management, instructors, and leadership. Frontline officers may appreciate the facts about crime and how their efforts may be effective toward reducing crime or reducing the damages in response to crime. Supervisors and management may find the knowledge most useful for resource allocation as well as to inform their own efforts to support appropriate policing behaviors and outcomes in the community. The committee observed that training specifically for supervisors and their role in overseeing the use and sustainability of appropriate knowledge and skills is often lacking.

Before discussing scientific findings and the core knowledge useful for policing, we highlight our view on important supervisory skills. Later in the chapter, we expand on key skills for police organizations, informed by evidence-based approaches to policing, which are likely to be critical for promoting the rule of law and protecting the population but are currently underemphasized in police training.

The research literature and findings presented here are based on a paper prepared for the committee (Mazerolle, 2021). This paper drew on evidence captured in the Global Policing Database.¹ This database contains high-quality research studies of interventions related to policing, including training programs, from 87 countries. This chapter also draws upon the two National Academies reports on policing: Fairness and Effectiveness in Policing: The Evidence (NRC, 2004) and Proactive Policing: Effects on Crime and Communities (NASEM, 2018c). These two reports extensively review the research in policing about effective and fair interventions to

___________________

¹ The database is a web-based (https://gpd.uq.edu.au) exhaustive repository of intervention research relating to police and policing practices. The majority (n = 1822; 52.3%) of all eligible studies (quasi, randomized controlled trial, and systematic reviews) originate from the United States and the top 20 countries see a high prevalence of European work, especially from the United Kingdom (n = 241; 6.9%). Australia also has a high contribution to the database (n = 190 studies; 5.4%) while India (n = 42; 1.2%) is the only country outside of the Americas, Europe, or Oceania whose contribution status ranks in the top 10. Countries from Africa, Asia, South America, and the Middle East appear in the top 20, although they are underrepresented with less than one percent of the publications per country.

reduce and prevent crime and improve police legitimacy in the eyes of the public.

SUPERVISORY SKILLS

Police leaders and supervisors must be well versed in the knowledge base discussed below, perhaps even more so than officers and perhaps at a higher scaffold level than for officers. For example, while officers might be taught the basics about problem-solving or even theories of how crime patterns emerge (and what to do to address those patterns), first-line supervisors may need much more in-depth training on carrying out all steps of the suggested Scanning, Analysis, Response, and Assessment problem-solving model (Eck and Spelman, 1987). Supervisors may be the ones who have to scan and identify problems or even carry out the basic analysis to better understand them. They may be needed to guide officers in problem-solving or critical thinking and, therefore, they must know not only what officers are taught, but perhaps what trainers know when they are teaching officers.

Supervisors also need to be able to identify when officers deviate from their training. Traditional approaches to policing have used performance metrics that are not obviously aligned with this approach. For example, officers are frequently judged on how many arrests they make or how many calls they answer. However, more appropriate and aligned performance metrics must be developed to support supervisors in their management of officers in evidence-based approaches. The ways in which officers are incentivized and evaluated at all stages of their careers likely influence how they work. Supervisors will require training in judging whether officers are implementing the activities, actions, dispositions, and communication styles for a new, problem-solving approach. Taking this a step further, supervisors may need to be trained on how to effectively conduct daily observations and audits of what officers are doing, including training on the right inquiries that will help them determine what officers are doing (NASEM, 2021). They may need training on how to spend their time during the day to effectively balance their administrative duties with observing or auditing officers at the right times and situations. Some assessments of officer performance might also come from analytic sources that supervisors either have to interpret or create. Training on gathering, collating, and analyzing personnel activities or even crime data to better understand officer behavior is critical.

If supervisors are to ensure that officers implement the skills and knowledge they receive in training, the supervisors themselves may also need to be trained in coaching, mentorship, and leadership techniques. This will enable them to relate to, communicate with, and educate officers who either need daily help or more serious remediation for long-term lack of alignment with training. Supervisors may also need to acquire training

in accessing and using an agency’s accountability infrastructure, assuming that such infrastructure exists, when serious concerns and violations of officer activities occur. For example, supervisors need a clear understanding of the various internal discipline and internal affairs processes that help supervisors correct poor behavior, including how to use those processes. Supervisors may also need training on how body-worn cameras and automatic vehicle locators function with regard to their accountability effects. Again, everyday accountability mechanisms such as performance metrics, inspections, and audits are part of this accountability infrastructure that supervisors need training upon.

KNOWLEDGE FROM CRIMINOLOGY

It is the committee’s evidence-informed judgment that major facts and theories from criminology, if integrated into police training curriculum, are likely to support the rule of law, protect the public, and prevent crime. Greater awareness of criminological theory and facts can help police in both the Global North and the Global South to understand the “where, why, how, who, and what” of crime problems and how interventions might disrupt the conditions or opportunities for crime. Incorrect beliefs or biases about who commits crime and where it is committed (and why) may lead to ineffective or even harmful policing tactics, including unnecessary use of force and arrest that neither protects the public nor supports the rule of law. This is the committee’s collective opinion. As discussed later, evaluations of any police curricula, much less evaluations of instruction on crime fact and theory, are very limited. Little is known about the effectiveness of teaching specific content, either because such content has yet to be evaluated or evaluations focus on participants’ perceptions of the curricula and short-term impacts and not on changes in behaviors or performance.

Nonetheless, the committee feels strongly that learning about research-supported facts and theories on crime and crime prevention can lead to the knowledge that better supports police participation in, and development of, evidence-based interventions. These facts include the “laws” of crime/problem concentration, the relationship between age and crime, and repeat victimization. Knowing about these concepts and facts may empower police organizations to better implement policies in ways that more effectively target resources while at the same time promoting the ROL and protecting human rights. Similarly, a grounding in basic criminology theory, especially deterrence and criminal opportunity theories, will support critical knowledge for policing.

It will be important to ensure that training at all ranks and units of the police organization draw from a shared conceptual model of crime, crime prevention, and policing interventions. Leaders particularly benefit from

this knowledge by understanding how to allocate their scarce resources for crime prevention more strategically. Box 3-1 summarizes the key implications for practice from this section.

Key Facts and Concepts About Crime

One fundamental fact for police education at all levels is that criminal activity concentrates among a “power few” individuals (Sherman, 2007) and does so both geographically (Weisburd, 2015) and temporally. Eck and colleagues (2005) gathered together studies from 1970 to 2015 that provided quantitative data on crime distributions to produce a series of systematic reviews demonstrating the consistent and clear concentrations of crime across places (Lee et al., 2017), offenders (Martinez et al., 2017), and victims (O et al., 2017). The fact that crime concentrates is especially important knowledge for police leaders, who can design resource allocation strategies that balance emergency police responses and preventive approaches to building community safety. That balance, as substantial evidence shows (NASEM, 2018c; NRC, 2004), is more effective at reducing crime than reactive approaches that are less focused on specific places, times, and offenders. The following sections discuss how these laws of crime concentration could become the foundation for police curricula.

Concentration of Crime at Places

In 1989, Sherman, Gartin, and Buerger outlined the concept of a “criminology of place’’ when they discovered that three percent of micro places—which they called “hot spots”—produced 50 percent of all calls to police for service in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Weisburd, in his American Society of Criminology Sutherland Award address, emphasized that “the single most important empirical observation in the criminology of place is that crime concentrates at very small units of geography” (Weisburd, 2015, p. 135). The discovery of crime concentration is the foundation for crime prevention programs targeted at specific places, including hot spots policing (Weisburd, 2015). Lee and colleagues (2017), reporting on their systematic review, concluded that “there is no doubt that crime is concentrated at a small number of places regardless of how crime is measured, the geographic unit of analysis used, or type of crime” (Lee et al., 2017, p. 11). Their research is highly supportive of Sherman’s (2007) “power few” argument and their findings support Weisburd’s (2015) law of crime concentration in places. Two National Academies consensus committees (NASEM, 2018c; NRC, 2004) have also confirmed that policing interventions that focus on these crime concentrations can be effective in preventing and reducing crime at these locations.

Given these findings, the concentration of crime at specific places deserves a central place in police education. Not all neighborhoods are wholly “bad” or “good,” but rather, specific places (street corners, particular houses or businesses, a specific location within a park, a portion of a long alleyway, etc.) have characteristics about them which are more likely to present opportunities for crime commission. Lee and colleagues (2017) explain that five percent of street segments account for around 42 percent of the crimes, whereas five percent of neighborhoods account for only around 20 percent of crimes. Recognizing this criminological fact means that police can target (and conserve) resources by focusing their problem-solving attention for the 20 percent or less of places that generate from 50 to 80 percent of all crimes and crime harm (Lee et al., 2017; Weinborn et al., 2017).

Understanding why criminal events occur at specific locations² (and how frequently) can provide insight into efforts to prevent such crimes from occurring. Eck and colleagues explain that “different types of crime have different spatial relationships, dependencies, structures, and distributions, which are the result of different social and spatial processes over an area” (2005, p. 67; see also Brantingham and Brantingham, 1993). That is, interactions at places vary because of the combination of routines, place features, and opportunity structures that make some places more prone to substantial crime concentrations.

The converse of the law of crime concentration is that there are large numbers of streets, homes, apartment blocks, and parks in even high-crime communities that are relatively crime-free (Sherman et al., 1989). Appreciating the routines, features, and opportunity structures in these crime-free “cool spots” can contribute to the knowledge and skills needed to apply strategies for maintaining cool spots or to cool down existing hot spots or build what is known as “collective efficacy” in local communities (Sampson et al., 1997). Recent evidence shows that the police can strengthen crime prevention in deprived communities, increasing the willingness of residents to take action and develop collaborative efforts to solve local problems (NASEM, 2018c; Weisburd et al., 2020).

Concentration of Crime Over Time

The law of crime concentration also applies to the temporal distribution of crime in high-crime places. Ratcliffe (2002) shows that the opportunities

___________________

² For example, this includes understanding why burglaries occur often in a specific part of a street segment, but not another; where vehicle thefts are most likely to occur; which stores, or bus routes, might be most prevalent for armed robberies; or which street corners attract violence or vice.

to commit crime are not evenly distributed spatially or temporally. From a resource deployment perspective, allocating police to the right places (hot spots) at the right times (hot times) is a fundamental leadership practice. It not only needs to be part of middle- and upper-level management education and training to improve police effectiveness and prevent crime; it also needs to be widely understood by patrol officers, who want to target hot spots at the right time and spend their job time in ways that align with the occurrence of crime problems.

Concentration of Most Offences Among Few Offenders

Research consistently shows that most individuals are law-abiding citizens who do not come in contact with the criminal justice system or else commit minor infractions infrequently. Only a small proportion of people commit a large proportion of crime (Blumstein et al., 1986; DeLisi, 2005; Hindelang et al., 1981; West and Farrington, 1977; Wolfgang et al., 1972). Put another way, a large proportion of crime is committed by chronic offenders who engage in a wide range of offending behavior (Kennedy, 1997). Police education therefore needs to balance the presentation of this research about the concentration of crime among a few offenders by emphasizing the law-abiding nature of most people.

Youth, Offending, and the Age-Crime Curve

An important key fact about crime and offenders is the “nonlinear relationship between age and crime” (Farrington, 1986, p. 236). Crime rates consistently increase from the minimum age of criminal responsibility (which can vary by country) to reach a peak in the teenage years. Farrington (1986) and many others have consistently argued that “the most plausible theory is that the age-crime curve reflects decreasing parental controls, a peaking of peer influence in the teenage years, and then increasing family and community controls with age” (Farrington, 1986, p. 236). Moffitt (2015) adds an important nuance to understanding juvenile offending. She differentiates between the vast majority of juvenile delinquents, who commit minor offenses and desist as they become adults, and the very small group of youth who will continue offending into adulthood.

The most critical implication of this pattern may be that police can safely divert from prosecution low-level offending by most young people, since most of these young offenders will stop offending regardless. Moffitt (2015) explains that most young offenders “age out” of offending, but there are a few young who are persistent/chronic offenders and engage in criminal behavior throughout the life-course. She further argues that the antisocial behavior of the latter life-course-persistent offenders tends

to emerge in childhood. In contrast, offenders who age out of crime (adolescent-limited offenders) start to exhibit antisocial behavior around age 14 or 15, alongside puberty. Moffitt shows that “life-course persistent antisocial behavior emerges from early neurodevelopmental and family adversity risk factors, but adolescence-limited delinquency does not” (Moffitt, 2015, p. 593). She also notes that “life-course persistent antisocial development is almost exclusively male, whereas most female antisocial behavior is of the adolescence-limited type” (Moffitt, 2015, p. 593).

Repeat Victimization

Repeat victimization is a pattern by which a small percentage of the population suffers large percentages of all criminal victimization (Farrell, 1995). Such concentration on victims has been observed in repeat incidents of burglaries (Townsley et al., 2000) as well as in frequent reports among domestic violence and intimate-family-violence victims. Police who are taught to think very carefully about repeat victimization can aid in reducing crime by targeting support for certain individuals.

Relevant Theories in Criminology

Routine Activities Theory

One of the handful of criminological theories that should perhaps be considered for inclusion in the education curriculum at the police recruit level is routine activities theory. First articulated by Cohen and Felson (1979), the micro-level, place-based interpretation of this theory argues that crime emerges when a likely offender converges with a suitable crime target in the absence of a capable guardian. The everyday routines and social activities of people—going to work, attending school, socializing, and so on—contribute to these convergences at the particular places where people shop, eat, or socialize (etc.), such as certain street corners and bars, as Sherman and colleagues (1989) discuss. Understanding the public’s routines and the interaction between these routines and specific places can help officers understand why crime concentrates at certain places.

Residual Deterrence Theory

According to general deterrence theory, crime rates in an area will reduce with continued police presence and the capacity to apprehend offenders. One of the big surprises to police officers in training is the deterrent effect of police patrols when police are not on the scene—and may not even have been there for days. The “residual” deterrent effect of police

action was first observed by Sherman (1990) and tested by Koper (1995), who found that short periods of police presence in a crime hot spot (12–15 minutes) predicted longer periods of no crime or disorder after police left (up to 30 minutes). Ariel and colleagues (2020) confirmed this finding in an experiment on 115 London Underground platforms, in which patrol presence deterred crime up to the ticketing and street levels. Most surprisingly, Barnes and colleagues (2020) reported up to four days of residual deterrence in hot spots of 200 meters by 200 meters in an area in a Western Australia city, after a day with one patrol in each of those spots averaging about 15 minutes. Related findings were reported in two new experiments in the United Kingdom in 2021 (Basford et al., 2021; Bland et al., 2021). Hot spots studies have also used short dosages of police presence to successfully create a deterrent effect in crime hot spots (see, e.g., Kochel and Weisburd, 2019; Koper et al., 2021; Koper, Wu, and Lum, 2021; Rosenfeld et al., 2014; Telep et al., 2012; Williams and Coupe, 2017).

Displacement of Crime Proven False

A common misconception is that crime is simply pushed elsewhere when the police patrol high-crime places. However, after initial falsification of that theory by Weisburd and colleagues (2020), two systematic reviews have failed to find evidence in support of the displacement hypothesis (Bowers et al., 2011; Braga et al., 2019). Studies generally show that not only does hot spots policing not displace crime to places nearby, it may also cause a “diffusion of benefits.” That is, that crime also goes down in the areas near the hot spots targeted for patrol.

Evidence-based Policing Approaches

In addition to learning about criminological theory, recipients of police training and education will likely benefit from learning about specific interventions shown to reduce crime by focusing on crime-prone places, people/groups at high risk of committing crime, and protection of victims. These approaches also have few adverse unintended consequences.³ Much of this evidence has been reviewed in two National Academies consensus studies, Fairness and Effectiveness in Policing (NRC, 2004) and Proactive Policing: Effects on Crime and Communities (NASEM, 2018c).

___________________

³ It is important to note that crime reduction alone does not justify a particular strategy. The costs associated with implementing some policing strategies, like Terry stops or the use of police officers in schools, can be large enough to outweigh any benefits associated with reducing the harm from crime.

High-risk Offenders: Focused Deterrence

To address high-risk offenders, police education could describe police tests of focused deterrence (Braga, 2008; Braga and Dusseault, 2018; Braga and Weisburd, 2015; Braga et al., 2019). Focused deterrence approaches (also known as “Operation Ceasefire” or “the pulling-levers approach”) were reviewed in the National Academies’ 2018 report on proactive policing. Such approaches have been used in the United States to reduce and prevent violence by high-risk offenders, gangs, and those involved in illegal drug markets. These programs reach out directly to individuals at high risk of committing serious violence in the future to communicate the threat of sanctions, the promise of surveillance, and the support of resources that can help integrate individuals back into law-abiding society and behavior. The strategy involves direct interaction with offenders and clear communication of incentives for compliance with the law in a procedurally just manner. The message is that not only must each individual not commit murder, but neither can any of their known associates. If someone in a rival group is murdered, the police and authorities will impose full enforcement on the entire social network suspected of causing the murder.

A meta-analysis of 24 focused deterrence strategy evaluations found moderate reduction in serious crimes (Braga et al., 2019). All but one of the studies⁴ were conducted in the United States. Organizational structures and characteristics of street and organized crime gangs have been shown to differ considerably across cultures and regions (see Ratcliffe, 2016; Ratcliffe et al., 2014). The degree to which a focused deterrence strategy could achieve similar crime reduction outcomes in other parts of the world, particularly countries outside the Global North, is unknown. However, the difficulty in developing and testing such programs is not great. It could well be encouraged by donor nations, especially as an alternative to extra-judicial killing (which may be used in just such situations in many countries).

Low-level Offenders: Diversion

According to a systematic review of almost 30 experiments in Global North nations, police can prevent more crime and reduce harm by not prosecuting young first offenders who have committed relatively minor offences (Petrosino et al., 2010). Diversion makes good sense in most cases, because many young offenders desist from offending as they enter adulthood (see theories above). Police training could usefully include a module on diversion of young people (see Wilson et al., 2018) to build the skills necessary so that police optimize diversion opportunities to reduce repeat

___________________

⁴ The exception was an evaluation conducted in Glasgow, Scotland.

youth offending. The application of diversion programs is similar for adult drug offenders (Hayhurst et al., 2019; Payne et al., 2008). The concepts of “net widening” (Decker, 1985) and “snares” in the criminal justice system need to be well understood by police. Police training on diversion (both adult and young people) should focus on the broader benefits of diversion to society as well as the individual offenders.

Domestic Violence Perpetrators: Targeting Offenders, Risk Assessment, and Protection Orders

As with crime in general, concerning domestic abuse it is a small number of (or “power few”) domestic abusers who cause the most harm. Selective targeting of the most dangerous people could prevent many domestic murders and serious injuries; however, these people are often hard to identify, given that few domestic murders are preceded by any reports to police about violence in relationships. Training on these issues might encourage police leaders to launch digital records systems and collaborative relations with social agencies needed to identify the most dangerous domestic abusers.

Where information is available, threats or attempts of suicide by the future murderer may be the best way to predict homicidal behavior in a relationship. Neyroud’s (2018) systematic narrative review of 31 studies explored the level of suicidal ideation within perpetrators of domestic homicide (as well as those of mass shootings and suicide terrorism). The review found that suicide ideation is three times more prevalent in domestic homicide perpetrators than in the general population. Previous suicide attempts are seven times higher in domestic violence perpetrators than in the general population. This work provides insights that might be instructive to police to help them be more targeted in their risk assessments of domestic violence and monitoring of protection orders.

Police training should be implemented so that police have the skills to administer validated risk assessments (Campbell et al., 2009; Roehl et al., 2005; Turner et al., 2019). Likewise, training should teach the skills needed to apply a screening set of questions when protection orders are processed to help police better monitor the “power few” (Sherman, 2007), who are most at risk for harming their partner or families.

While police training must be aligned with the laws of a jurisdiction pertaining to domestic and family violence, the training curriculum should be clear about the harm to victims, or even waste of resources, that can be caused through the mandatory arrest of offenders (Sherman and Harris, 2015; Sherman and Smith, 1992; Xie and Lynch, 2017). Police also may benefit from training in the law and application of protection orders, known variously as restraining orders, apprehended violence orders, and family

violence orders. They may benefit as well in learning that, as Dowling and colleagues concluded, “protection orders are associated with a small but significant overall reduction in severe domestic violence re-victimisation … [yet they are less effective in cases of] less severe and non-physical forms of re-victimisation” (Dowling et al., 2018, p. 13).

High-risk Drug Offenders: Spatial Targeting

For high-frequency drug offenders, proactive arrests have a mixed impact on recidivism (Eggins, Hine et al., 2020), which suggests that police could likely increase public safety by limiting this type of tactic. By contrast, training officers to have the necessary skills to target, investigate, and conduct drug seizures could impact the collateral damage from drug dealing. With seizures targeting places at high risk of drug crimes (rather than people at high risk of committing drug crimes), it may be possible to reduce the harms of retail/street drug dealing. With the increase in drug availability in regional and rural areas (see Schalkoff et al., 2020), this type of spatial targeting of seizures to reduce harms to retail users could be explored as a part of police training.

High-risk Micro-geographic Places

Two National Academies reports (NASEM, 2018c; NRC, 2004) have come to fairly robust conclusions about place-based approaches in policing: when conducted legally and with an eye toward prevention rather than apprehension, they can effectively reduce and prevent crime in the short to medium term. By increasing officer presence at these places and adjusting or mitigating the environmental, social, and physical characteristics that contribute to crime concentration, crime can be prevented without the threat of displacement. As discussed earlier, effective place-based approaches specifically target micro-geographic locations, also known as hot spots, rather than the larger neighborhoods or communities that envelop them. Some notable hot spots include entertainment precincts (Eggins et al., 2020), road areas at high risk of accidents (Mazerolle, Eggins et al., 2019), places that attract mass gatherings and protests (Police Executive Research Forum, 2018), and some risky online communities (Davidson et al., 2020; Eggins et al., 2021).

At a minimum, effective place-based approaches involve increased police presence at micro hot spots to increase the perceived risk of apprehension by would-be offenders at those places. However, it is important to note that effective place-based approaches at micro-geographic hot spots mean more than simply having police presence at those spots. It is also not enough to place closed-circuit cameras or other technologies (license plate

readers, gunshot detection systems, etc.) at those locations. Rather, what the police do at those hot spots is what matters immensely to their impact on crime (Lum and Nagin, 2017; Nagin et al., 2015). Studies reviewed by the National Academies (NASEM, 2018c) committee on proactive policing indicate that problem-solving and focused deterrence efforts related to crime hot spots can help to reduce crime. Community engagement in hot spots—while it alone may not necessarily reduce crime—could also improve citizen satisfaction and perceptions of the police and aid in problem-solving efforts. New research by Koper and colleagues (2021) has also found that hot spot approaches can produce large-scale, long-term crime reduction when practices are sustained and well managed.

It is also important to note that, as with all policing interventions, training on place-based interventions may be misinterpreted, creating harmful effects. For example, the concept of “hot spots” patrolling has been incorrectly interpreted by many police agencies in the Global North as aggressive crackdown approaches, which have employed unconstitutional or illegal uses of stop-and-search. In both the Global North and the Global South, targeting individuals has also resulted in excessive use of force, violations of human rights, and inequities in treatment across racial, ethnic, or religious groups. As aligned with the committee’s broader goals of understanding what police strategies can simultaneously promote the rule of law and protect the public, training approaches for police have to strongly couple any training on prevention with training on protecting human rights and the dignity of people more generally.

CRITICAL POLICING SKILLS

This section describes key skills that police officers need to carry out evidence-based policing approaches. These approaches generally emphasize proactive policing, as opposed to reactive approaches, as core to preventing crime. Proactive strategies necessitate greater problem-solving and critical thinking to address crime problems and increase the frequency of interactions with the public. Abilities such as building multi-agency partnerships, communications skills, and interviewing are also needed within police organizations.

Critical Thinking Skills

As outlined above, to absorb a large portion of the scientific knowledge related to effective policing requires critical thinking, not just rote memory. Successful implementation of tactics, operations, strategies, and activities beyond routine technical processes requires complex analysis not often associated with policing. To promote the rule of law and protect the public, police officers will benefit from acquiring more knowledge and skills in

how to think—and not just how to march, write reports, physically detain someone, or use their vehicles or weapons. Many of the policing approaches discussed above and in the committee’s first report (NASEM, 2021) use problem-oriented policing, proactivity and crime analysis, community- and citizen-centric approaches, or geographic targeting that require critical and creative thinking skills.

Critical thinking skills include an array of dispositions and have been defined by several groups and scholars. The Delphi Report on critical thinking (Facione, 1990) brought together several international experts who concluded that an ideal critical thinker would be

The translation of these concepts to an evidence-based policing approach is straightforward. Scholars have argued that critical thinking is essential and closely coupled to evidence-based practices in other front-line fields, such as nursing (see, for example, Finn, 2011; Profetto-McGrath, 1999, 2005; and Staib, 2003).

For example, as described in this committee’s first report (NASEM, 2021), problem-oriented policing is an evidence-based approach that begins with a fundamental assumption: no event, call for police service, or public safety incident is unique or unrelated to other events (Goldstein, 1979, 1990). Instead, events are connected by some underlying problem or causal mechanism. Thus, problem-oriented policing requires an officer to discern where and why crime clusters by using data to examine possible reasons why crime repeatedly occurs in a particular location or why a group or individual repeatedly commits crime in certain ways. Proactive problem-solving to prevent future crimes may also require officers to engage with various members of the public, including groups with whom an officer may not be accustomed to collaborating.

Thus, problem-solving requires officers to be inquisitive, apply analytical and theoretical knowledge, make well-informed judgments that are contextualized to the environment and community, and rationalize, judge, and weigh the costs and benefits of their actions. Critical thinking in problem-solving also means that an officer can take theoretical or evaluation knowledge about crime or police interventions, synthesize various pieces of knowledge, and then apply that knowledge to physical actions.

The Scanning, Analysis, Response, and Assessment model of problem-solving (Eck and Spelman, 1987) includes an evaluative and assessment component, which requires building on existing knowledge by assessing current actions. In sum, many aspects of a problem-solving approach require critical thinking skills.

Data Skills

As noted above, a problem-solving approach requires officers to make decisions based on data and, more importantly, on data that are appropriately collected, collated, and analyzed as to be accurate. Police agencies must have systems that can reliably produce information about crime and police interactions. Such systems will include an accountability infrastructure to monitor and audit the collection and reporting of data. Accurate counts of crime and measurement of trends in crime as well as outcomes of police interventions are essential for tracking and maintaining police effectiveness.

Examples of useful measurements include crime-mapping of high-frequency and high-harm “hot spots,” rank-ordering of the most frequently or seriously harmed repeat victims, rank-ordering of people returning from prison to local communities by their prior or predicted seriousness of offending, forecasting the highest-risk places and people likely to suffer high harm from violence or other crime, counting indicators of internal challenges such as officer absenteeism and public complaints, and tracking the before-and-after differences in the effects of police policy changes.

Frontline officers will need the skills to report data accurately and be able to understand basic crime trends and outputs of the type of measurements identified above. Such skills include the ability to make sense of basic graphs and plots and to understand implications of structural biases in the data (e.g., presented data on crime reported may not reflect crime incidence). It is also important to ensure a grounding in basic statistical concepts that are linked to their operational and reporting requirements; such concepts may be appreciating the uncertainty in statistical analyses and understanding the difference between data analysed to show current trends and data analysed for forecasting purposes. Supervisors will need the skills to be able to monitor whether data are recorded accurately and to determine trends accurately to direct operations and officer assignments. Management, for appropriate policy development and response, will need the skills to understand trends over time and the significance of results from tracking the before-and-after differences in the effects of police policy changes. Higher-level data skills will also be useful for understanding any misinterpretations of the trends and the complexities of cause, effect, and magnitude of effect.

Interacting with the Public

Police officers routinely interact with the public. These interactions require that officers treat people professionally, respectfully, and lawfully, regardless of whether they have committed a minor offense, a serious crime, or no crime at all. One way to do this is to develop officers’ cultural humility and awareness of their own implicit and explicit biases. Cultural humility is defined by flexibility, a lifelong approach to learning about diversity, and a recognition of the role of individual bias and systemic power in interactions (Agner, 2020). Cultural humility is considered a self-evaluating process that recognizes the self within the context of culture (Campinha-Bacote, 2018). Such practices have been effectively implemented in other public service-oriented fields, such as health care and education (NASEM, 2020), and could be expected in policing.

Implicit biases are expected to play a role in differential treatment by police with diverse populations. Interventions designed to address these biases may assist in motivating improvements to police behaviors to create more fair and just interactions with all members of the public. However, current evaluations of implicit-bias training indicate that it cannot stand alone but should be integrated with broader departmental policy strategy (Kahn and Martin, 2020). Meta-analyses demonstrate small positive effects of implicit bias interventions but only for a short period (Forscher et al., 2019). A systematic review of interventions designed to reduce implicit bias found that many such interventions are ineffective, and some may even increase implicit biases (FitzGerald et al., 2019).

Improved interactions between police officers and the public could also benefit from a training curriculum on police legitimacy and procedural justice. Studies have shown that when police practice procedural justice, citizen satisfaction with the police improves, among other benefits. Procedural justice training for police recruits has also resulted in higher ratings of desired on-the-job behaviors by mentors (Antrobus et al., 2019). In addition, training that aims to guide officer thought processes and slow down reactions through supervisory intervention has been shown to reduce officer use of force and potentially unjustified or unnecessary discretionary arrests (Owens et al., 2018). Procedural justice training for officers conducting random roadside breath testing found that people stopped by trained officers were more likely to report changing their views on drinking and driving, as well as to report higher levels of satisfaction and compliance (Mazerolle et al., 2012).

At the committee’s workshop, an example of implementing a three-day procedural justice training in Mexico City was highlighted (Canales, 2021). The training was organized into four key elements: (1) describing police legitimacy/trust as the principle of operational efficacy; (2) outlining

the four principles of procedural justice and associated tools, mindsets, and tactics to integrate them into policing; (3) discussing the structural complexities of the citizen-police relationship; and (4) reviewing Mexico City’s policing history. A survey of trainees⁵ showed moderate to large effects of the training on how police officers thought about procedural justice, distributed across each of the four principles. Additionally, because of the training, those police officers in the treatment group became more identified with the profession of policing and the institution of the Mexico City Police and their perception of citizens improved through the training. Trained police officers also improved their behaviors in the field relative to control officers, as demonstrated through a “mystery shopper” evaluation instrument. For police officers whose managers had also been trained, the effect size of the training on the frontline officers was 30 percent larger. This moderator effect highlighted the importance of linking training to broader organizational factors. Following the study, the Mexico City Police opted to train all their officers in procedural justice and weave the training into the recruit academy and the police university, emphasizing organizational justice.

Relatedly, regarding interactions with the public, police training on de-escalation and use of force has received much recent attention. The committee will examine policies and practices to reduce officer use of force and effective training methods on this topic in its third report.

Communicating, Collaborating, and Building Multiagency Partnerships

The facts and theories about crime and crime prevention discussed above can be drawn on to help police understand why working cooperatively with other service providers, such as child social services, educational services, healthcare workers, and therapists, can in some cases prevent crime more effectively than prosecution and imprisonment. For example, Mazerolle and colleagues (2019) found that programs where police are trained to work in partnership with schools to implement family treatment

___________________

⁵ The research team took a baseline survey of where the officers stood on ideas of procedural justice, and then evaluated the officers four to six months following the training through different instruments to measure each of the three trust factors. A second measure of whether officers internalized their training was drawn from photo journaling and interviews. These data showed officers shifting from an identity of being a strong enforcer of the law to being a trusted protector of the population, helping citizens feel safe. The third and most powerful measure was on observer coding of police officer behavior in simulated interactions. The coding measured whether trained officers changed their behaviors if they had received training. Across three perceptions of the assigned evaluation, coders found similar effects—both in size and direction—to those they found in the surveys. The survey responses were consistent with the coded behavioral impacts of the training on how police officers addressed interactions in the field.

groups in combination with case management show some promise. These programs benefit both the students and the families that are involved (Mazerolle et al., 2019). They may be beneficial to include as a central part of police training to address youth crime issues.

Police would need to develop the skills necessary to work with local and government partners in providing integrated services to the different types of adults and youth with whom they come into contact. Good communication skills and the ability to work cooperatively with other people and entities will necessarily be important. Another skill that cuts across many aspects of efforts to protect victims is interviewing. Some of these skills are taught in existing training modules, such as procedural justice training and specialist hostage negotiation training. However, police organizations would likely be well served if they made learning these skills foundational at all levels of police training.

Powell (2013) offers a range of insights into police interview training, concluding that “good questioning comes from specialised training programs incorporating ongoing spaced practice exercises, exemplars of best practice, expert instruction and feedback” (p. 713). These skills are central for police to develop because research finds that effective interviewing of victims can “increase the volume of information a complainant provides and has the potential to increase the credibility of this evidence” (Bull, 2014, p. 1). This is particularly the case for sexual assault victims (Westera et al., 2019).

Many of the evidence-based policing approaches discussed above require a relationship between police and other agencies and entities. For example, to support diversion and focused deterrence, officers would need to know about and have access to child and adult social services to follow through with these tactics. When targeting places at high risk of crime, a central aspect of police work is partnering with other agencies and community members to regulate, control, and prevent crime (Mazerolle and Ransley, 2006). Police likely benefit from training in ways that foster good working relationships with property owners, building inspectors, environmental regulators, education department representatives, community groups, insurance companies, business leaders, and local government personnel.

The police are likely to encounter a myriad of issues and to come into contact with delinquent youth and their families, child and elderly victims, people with mental illness (Kane et al., 2018; Livingston, 2016), people with disabilities (Morgan, 2021; Wright, 2018), domestic violence perpetrators and victims,⁶ and members of organized crime

___________________

⁶ Globally almost one in three women have experienced intimate partner violence, non-partner sexual violence, or both once in their lifetime. See https://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/ending-violence-against-women/facts-and-figures.

groups,⁷ among others. A common theme in research and practice is the need for police to work as a partner in multi-agency response to these encounters. For example, Eggins and colleagues (2020) in their rapid review of criminal justice responses to child abuse found that “collaboration between child victim advocates, law enforcement and multi-disciplinary teams in child sexual abuse investigations may benefit case outcomes by increasing the satisfaction in non-offending caregivers of victims and the likelihood of successfully prosecuting child sex offenders” (p. 28).

Breckenridge and colleagues (2016) evaluated integrated responses to domestic violence,⁸ identifying some common benefits such as “a broader range of services that are offered beyond the initial crisis period, improvement of the professional knowledge base and service provider relationships, facilitation of responsive and prompt decision-making, increased cross-program or agency collaboration on case management, and provision of multiple entry points for clients to access support” (2016, p. 3).

A review by Mazerolle and colleagues (2021) of efforts to target organized crime groups found that it is important for police to take time to build trust and shared goals among partners, not overburden staff with administrative tasks, build in targeted and strong privacy provisions for intelligence sharing, and provide access to ongoing support and training for multi-agency partners. As such, programs and training curricula could be formed for select officers to develop specialized skills and techniques for setting up and running multiagency partnerships and building the capacities to understand and structure privacy provisions around sharing intelligence data.

Likewise, multiagency cooperation and joint training are important in relation to crowd control. The Police Executive Research Forum (2018) report suggests that police “training together can help agencies achieve a coordinated response with all agencies in agreement about tactics and rules of engagement. Interagency training can also serve as a training of trainers and allow agencies with advanced skills (in areas such as mobile field force) to share their knowledge” (p. 34).

CONCLUSION

This chapter has drawn on the scientific literature and the strongest findings about crime and crime prevention to identify knowledge and skills useful for police to promote the rule of law and protect the public. It

___________________

⁷ Such as in groups for drug distribution, human trafficking, money laundering, terrorism, gun markets, and child exploitation.

⁸ In protecting victims of domestic violence, a partnership-building organization includes the Multi-Agency Risk Assessment Conferences (MARACs) that aims to reduce harm to high-risk domestic violence victims. Representatives from various agencies contribute information during the MARACs, producing a positive, measurable impact in victims’ lives (Robinson, 2006).

organizes knowledge around the key facts about crime, significant criminology theories, and evidence-based policing approaches. It identifies skills necessary for proactive evidence-based policing, including critical thinking, interacting with the public, and collaborating and building multiagency partnerships. The committee believes that if police understand the evidence about what works (and what does not) and have a sound understanding of criminological theory and the mechanisms that cause crime problems, then they may have a better chance of using their police powers in ways that are fair and effective.

The capacity to train officers on the scientific evidence base for policing requires more than just convincing officers of the merits of basing their actions and decisions on a reliable body of scientific knowledge. Receptivity to this knowledge is low, and such knowledge is generally considered by officers to be inferior to both experience and anecdotes (see Lum et al., 2012; Telep and Lum, 2014; Telep, 2016b). Such research knowledge needs to be translated into digestible forms that officers can easily understand, including the stories of research projects and successes in crime prevention, so they can institutionalize that knowledge into actual police tactics, operations, strategies, and technologies (Lum and Koper, 2017).

It is important to note that very few training programs, in the Global North or the Global South, have been subject to rigorous evaluation that uses officer behavior in the field as an outcome.

If policing is to become a global profession that values evidence as a foundation and uses evidence to guide police policy and training, it must develop the capacity to collect and analyze data necessary to regularly refresh curricula and to ensure that police educators and trainers are equipped with the latest information about crime and effective solutions. What might be the foundations for education and training now might change or be refined over time.

This page intentionally left blank.