The Minneapolis Uprising Two news article grabbed my attention this week. The first came from The Marshall Project which is an outstanding source for criminal justice issues. The Report asks the question I have continued to ask about police reform and improvement, “Why does change come slowly, or not it all, to American policing?” For example, what has happened after George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis? For the most part, the answer is not reform, but retrenchment! From The Marshal Report: “It’s been four years since the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers. Some justice refo ..read more

[Back in the old days before Madison Police learned from their past experiences.] [The first test for Madison Police under my command was the historically violent Spring Mifflin Block Party. Our new approach worked and continued to work for twenty years of protests and large crowds!] The Madison Method of Handling People in Crowds and Demonstrations 1: Always begin with a “soft” approach and plenty of dialogue. If possible, we begin speaking with the organizers of a demonstration before the event. A soft approach means that officers do not wear hats, appear relaxed and friendly, and openly t ..read more

Once again, citizens have taken to our streets and campuses, occupied buildings, camped out and protested a major world event. What has happened, my friends, is America — that’s our right, who we are, and what we do. It is a legal, guaranteed right, in the first amendment to our Constitution. We have a right to “peaceably protest” when we feel grieved by our government. And it’s called democracy! Fifty years ago, we in Madison, Wisconsin decided there was a better way for police respond to the protests that raging at our university. After observing, policing, protesting segregation and the wa ..read more

New York Times, May 15, 2024. Tracking Violence By Robert Gebeloff [Some excerpts from his article… my emphases] “To document the toll [during the pandemic], we plotted every fatal shooting on a map and then compared the four pandemic years with the four years that came before. Not only were more people killed, we found, but the boundaries of where these killings took place expanded. By the end of last year, one in seven Americans lived within a quarter mile of a recent fatal shooting, up from one in nine before the pandemic. “Why did shootings surge during the pandemic? Americans bought ..read more

A subculture is a group of people within a cultural society that differentiates itself from the conservative and standard values to which it belongs. Policing is a subculture. When I first read today’s guest essay in The New York Times by Dr. Carl Elliot I was immediately transformed back into my days of policing. For the kind of overwhelming power of medical professionalism, I also see and have experienced in policing. Perhaps you have, too. Dr. Elliott teaches medical ethics at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of the forthcoming book “The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Exp ..read more

Let’s cut to the chase! Our nation’s police will never improve until the following factors are in play — SERVANT LEADERSHIP TENURE (job security) ACCOUNTABILITY. Servant Leadership is helping others to grow. It is dependent upon the practitioner having strong Emotional Intelligence. Tenure means job security; security from the wims of partisan politics. It also means having an employment contract. In order for lasting and meaningful change to occur within a police agency the leader needs to be there for at least a period of six to eight years. Accountability means the practice of Community-Or ..read more

[Note: The national focus after the death of George Floyd in 2020 to have shifted once again to our nation’s campuses. We have now come back to the campus protests of the 1960s which was a major part of my early police experience. Yet we must remember we are in a different protest era fueled today by social media. Is mass protest an effective political strategy? After all, didn’t the campus anti-war and civil rights protests of the late 60s and early 70s result in a most conservative backlash? But whether protests politically work or not, they quickly become the realm and responsibility of po ..read more

[Protesters at George Washington University by Jordan Tovin for The Washington Post] ___________________________________________ “Congress shall make no law respecting…the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”  — U.S. Constitution, First Amendment. ______________________________________________ In a totalitarian society, the policing of dissent is straightforward and predictable — it is the swift use of force and arrest. Training and outfitting this method is not complex. Not so in a free society; a free society, nee ..read more

Fatal Police Shootings It is time to “Raise the Bar!” As the years go by, I continue to ponder this question, “Why don’t the number of persons killed by police in America go down?” So I read the news, reflect on my experience in policing, stay connected with my primary professional organization, PERF – The Police Executive Research Forum, and write this blog. I was an early member in the late 1970s. At that time, we were a small organization of college-educated, forward-thinking police leaders. PERF continues to take on the issues like we did in the 1970s when we were part of a national ..read more

[Note: The following troubling article comes from the Arizona Republic. What is the role of local, community-oriented police in these matters? Some would say “response.” I would say “prevent” and work closely with school and mental health professionals. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I think of school resource officers, even the DARE program. Not necessarily to keep kids away from drugs, but to provide a mature, respected, caring authority figure in our schools. These recent investigative findings reveal what many of us already are thinking — emotional distress and bullying is a major prob ..read more