The New Standard for Policing

Across the U.S., communities are struggling with how to make productive changes inside their police and public safety agencies. But Dr. Cedric Alexander, author of The New Guardians: Policing in America’s Communities for the Twenty-First Century, says while we do have some obstacles to overcome, we also have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to shift how we think about the role of the police.

Essentially, he says police should be guardians, not warriors. They need to see themselves that way, and the public needs to see them that way. Thinking of police as guardians changes a lot of things. It forces us to make changes around transparency, recruiting, training, etc. And it calls for us to build a relationship between the police and the community. We are not separate entities (“us versus them”) but one force working together for public safety. We need a sense of mutual trust.

Dr. Alexander addressed this issue when he spoke with me as part of Pensacola’s CivicCon series. CivicCon is a virtual event that brings together some of the nation’s top thinkers and experts to educate people on issues they need to know to lay the groundwork for positive change and raise the civic IQ in their community. For more information, including upcoming speakers as well as links to previous speakers, please visit www.studeri.org/civiccon.

During this virtual event, he talked about how communities and our nation can move into the twenty-first century with accountable, effective, and equitable policing. This was one of our most popular CivicCon events to date, with nearly 15,000 viewers.

Before we go into some of what he had to say during the CivicCon event, let me point out what an unusual background he has. He’s a former chief of police with forty years’ experience in public safety, a thought leader on twenty-first century policing, a clinical psychologist, an expert on biases, and he has the first-person perspective of an African-American man living in America.

Now, let’s take a look at some of his insights. He brings a balanced and thoughtful perspective to what has proven to be a divisive subject—and he does it in a way that inspires a lot of hope.

Dr. Cedric Alexander. Image source.

We need to get clear on the link between public safety and community vibrancy. Dr. Alexander said this, and my own experience bears it out. In Pensacola when we do the Mason-Dixon Quality of Life Survey, safety always comes out as the top priority. Without that, nothing else matters. People want to work and live in a community where they feel safe. And this is true for people of all races and cultures. We all want good schools, jobs, and safe neighborhoods. This is why the state of our police force has to be a priority.

Transparency needs to be a top priority. There must be transparency if there is to be trust. Police need to be open and honest about what the problems are and what we’re doing to fix them. The police work for the public, not the other way around.

We need to hire for compassion and a moral compass and train for the rest. Police agencies need to ask themselves: Are we hiring for the wrong skill set? Dr. Alexander noted that we can train people to jump and fight and shoot. But we can’t train for compassion. We need to go deeper into their background to see who they really are. We need to make sure we’re hiring people who feel they are part of the community. We need to hire people who understand that human life is important. We need to hire people who see themselves as guardians, not warriors.

We need a different approach to recruitment. Recruitment videos tend to be really adrenaline-fueled. They show a lot of high-speed chases and glorify the takedown of bad guys. Dr. Alexander points out that when you show these kinds of ads, you’re going to get the personalities that resonate with these images. But real police work isn’t like that (except for maybe a fraction of the time), and it doesn’t serve us to sell it that way.

More and better training is needed to shift the culture. We need to look at our training curriculum and revamp it. It shouldn’t just meet the same standard but a new standard. (We discussed bias training in a recent column, and that’s a big part of it. Bias training is needed for the police and the community.) The good news is that police officers appreciate training. If they’re not getting the training they need, they will tell us—and we need to listen.

We need to get more intentional about supervisors. Once officers are trained and go to their respective agencies, they need to work for supervisors and role models who are also well trained. Supervision is where the rubber meets the road: If the supervisor has a negative attitude toward the people they’re serving, new officers will either feel out of place or conform to that attitude. And if they conform, they’re going to pick up bad habits that will cause problems down the road.

We need a broader definition of diversity. In hiring and training police officers, we need to think beyond race and gender. Those are obvious. We need people who see and feel and experience the world in different ways (religion, sexual orientation, etc.). This is especially needed in policing diverse communities. We need to think about generational diversity. Old-school Boomers can’t supervise Millennials the same way they supervise other Boomers or Generation Xers.

Police officers in Bellingham, Washington. Image source.

Mental health support is vital. These people see so much death and mayhem. The average person cannot understand what it’s like. Over time, it takes a toll. Even if they don’t realize it’s affecting them, it is, and it impacts their reactions and relationships with people. So it’s very important that we make space for mental health support.

Police deserve to be well paid. They also deserve not to be expected to do it all. Defunding the police has become politicized. But Dr. Alexander says it’s not fair to expect police to be everything to everybody: ministers, social workers, addiction experts, etc. So it may make sense to redirect funding to some of these other areas, but we need to make sure police don’t lose jobs, resources, or have salaries/benefits cut. So yes, we do need reform. But that reform needs to be smart, methodical, conservative, and fair.

Officers need to understand that every interaction they have in the community is a chance to shift public opinion. Dr. Alexander noted that whether it’s a cat in a tree or a domestic complaint or a minor fender-bender, every contact matters. Every contact is a chance to show what being a police officer is all about. This is how we’ll change any negative perceptions that may exist: one contact at a time.

One of the most inspiring things Dr. Alexander did in his presentation was to put the challenges we’re facing—COVID and our social turmoil—in a hopeful and positive light. He said where we are at this moment is not a permanent space in time. We need to look at all that we’re facing as an opportunity to take all that we’ve learned and use it to make ourselves better. We did it after 9/11. We’ve done it throughout our history.

He firmly believes we will come out stronger as a nation: We’ll have better public safety and a new generation of police who build bridges with people in our communities. Now is the moment. Let’s join hands and work together to make it so.

Dr. Alexander will also be a featured speaker at EntreCon, our virtual business and leadership conference, which will be held Wednesday and Thursday, November 18 & 19, 2020. 

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