QPP 40: Laura Huey on “Supportive Reporting”

I speak with Professor Laura Huey about, among other things, “supportive reporting,” her essay in the Violence Reduction Project. It’s a way to have non-police agencies serve as a bridge between police departments and people reluctant to call police.

Here’s the line from Egon Bittner we were referencing: “The role of the police is best understood as a mechanism for the distribution of non-negotiably coercive force employed in accordance with the dictates of an intuitive grasp of situational exigencies.” (Bittner 1970, p. 46, italicized in original; p 131 in Bittner 1990). Great concept. Not how I would have edited it.

Audio:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/44052622

For those who like seeing these things on the youtube, here you go.

Transcript:

[00:00:03] Hello and welcome to Quality Policing. I am Peter Moskos, and I’m here today with Laura Huey, a professor of sociology at the University of Western Ontario, and she specializes in policing and mental health and countering violent extremism. And she was also one of the first contributors to my Violence Reduction Project, which is a collection of essays you can link to qualitypolicing.com.

[00:00:35] And thanks. Thanks for joining me.

[00:00:38] Thanks for offering me the opportunity to talk because you know, academics, we love to talk so to because we usually we have a captive audience.

[00:00:47] But that’s not the case with podcast.

[00:00:49] They can stop us at any time, you know, so it’s now incumbent on me as interesting as humanly possible so that people don’t click away. Whereas my students, you’re right, they’re trapped.

[00:01:01] I think what your work is very interesting. So I’m not worried about that. So you wrote of your essay is on something called supportive reporting, which is a phrase either because I’m ignorant or because I’m American. I don’t know what that meant when I first read it. Can you describe describe what it is?

[00:01:23] Absolutely. So supportive reporting is the term I read. Of course, all I like about another academic trick. We take something that had a perfectly good name the first time and we rename it so that people go, Oh, we supported reporting. I actually renamed this program. It was originally called Remote Reporting or Third Party Reporting, and it comes out of Edinburgh, actually, a former police service. They’re called the Lothian and Borders Police Service. There was a chief inspector gave us and in many, many years ago, as a re academic cop, I was in Scotland doing part of my PhD field research. And I had the opportunity to talk to Bewes was like really bubbling with enthusiasm for this new remote reporting program he had created. And the background behind it was I can’t remember exactly, but I think it was a family member of his was gay and have been talking about a series of bashings that had been happening in the LGBTQ community and that people were afraid that we’ve heard this across multiple communities. People were afraid to report to the police. And so because Buzard was hearing about this and of course, police officer and with the insight, understanding through engagement with the community, began to work with community on. Well, if you’re afraid to call nine one one or nine nine nine, what can we do to increase our awareness of what’s going on and ideally reduce some of the victimization that you’re experiencing? And what he came up with was this strategy whereby you have community groups and social service organizations that work within the LGBTQ community and are trusted by members of that community because they’ve been there for a long time and built up that relationship. Those people get special training on how to take a report that they would then forward on to the police. So this is an alternative reporting mechanism, third party policing confuse the whole thing, remote reporting, people weren’t quite sure. What does that mean? So I’ve reframed it supportive reporting because the role of the service provider is to provide that initial support to the victim and encourage them to come forward to the police and. You can come forward and one of two ways, and I think this is really important, you can come forward with the help of the service provider and say, yes, I want this person charged. I want to be involved in this case as a victim witness. Right. Or you can come forward anonymously so you can let the police know that there’s something going on within the local community so that they can start to build some intelligence on this, but without compromising your identity or being sucked into an investigation. And we can talk about the many, many reasons why people don’t report and why they might be afraid to get sucked into a police investigation.

[00:04:42] I’d like to touch on that. But I guess my first question is, does this take police off the hook? I mean, shouldn’t the focus be on police to so that people are willing to call them or. I mean or is or am I sort of picking problems here that need to be picked because we have a good solution, which I’m going to go with option number three.

[00:05:07] Here’s the thing. There are a lot of misconceptions about about policing. If you don’t know anything about policing and your only experience with a police officer is the gear talk in grade six, I think you guys get into space or getting a ticket or a police show up where you have your frat party. You don’t really understand that. Last night when the deputy chief to Vancouver posted thanking a 10 year old for calling nine one one because the 10 year old saw somebody attacking a police officer. And I said, I hope you guys make a big fuss about this kid because it’s scary picking up the phone and calling nine one one. I’ve worked with cops for 20 years. I have many friends who are our police officers, and even I would be a little freaked out about calling on one because you’re initiating a mechanism. You don’t know what the outcome is going to be. So if you are freaked out about that, if you were concerned that you might not be believed by the police and a lot of especially women are afraid to come forward because they feel that they won’t be believed. There’s been a lot of media reporting exposure, especially around sexual assault, victimization that highlights many of the reasons why women might be afraid to come forward. Same thing with domestic violence. You might also be afraid to report directly because, you know, let’s face it, in the communities in which I work, which are inner city urban communities, there’s a no snitching code. And you don’t want to be seen with the police because St. Joseph’s is going to be a hell of a lot faster than the criminal justice system. So I might want to tell the police that there’s a strong arm, there’s a series of strong arms going on in my community. But I don’t want to, like, pick up the phone. I don’t want to show up at the police station or grab a cop was walking by. So those are some of the very quick reasons why you might want to come for, but not in a conventional way.

[00:07:12] The supportive reporting cover other that type of crime. And witness, you just talked about it exclusively focused on LGBT communities.

[00:07:22] And so if you go to a police escort, I went through a major reformation in the two thousands and all the regional police forces were amalgamated. Some police Scotland. If you go to the Police Scotland website, what you’ll see is a Web page full of different types of community groups who are involved in supportive reporting. One of the ones that I was blown away by, but I thought this is fantastic, the deaf community. So anti attacks against people who are deaf or other abled or there’s also different ethnic groups, different religious groups, it basically can be used by any community that is disproportionately the victim of crime and might have hesitancy about coming for it. And we certainly see this among immigrant communities, particularly communities where you come from, a place where you don’t want to be involved with the police.

[00:08:25] So this very much relates to the concept of police legitimacy, obviously, do you phrase it in that context or is there some some academic feud or some some weird schism? I don’t even know about? How does it fit into that?

[00:08:39] I don’t see it as a police legitimacy issue. I can understand why a lot of academics and some police officers might see it that way. But the problem is we and I have 20 years of talking about this. We treat policing as a one size fits all solution for far too many social problems. And the reality is you can you can just shop. That’s a little term for anybody that likes to watch those shows where they make people over. You can just shop the police as much as you want and make them off all officer friendly and so on. But at the end of the day, you are still going to have communities that will be underserved by the police for historical, social, economic and other reasons. You can I’ve seen police agencies work tremendously hard at building up relations within those communities. But I’m telling you, the community, I know that the best is what’s called Skid Row. And I’ve seen police agencies, Vancouver. I know a lot of activists are now clicking away from this discussion. But in the 20 some odd years that I’ve watched Vancouver in dealing with the Downtown Eastside, which is a real community in Vancouver, they’ve made tremendous attempts at trying to bridge some of the gaps with that community. But if you’re dealing with street based communities, whether it’s Skid Row, whether or not it’s gang territories and so on, there’s only so much police legitimacy that is going to cure the lack of reporting problem that we have.

[00:10:19] Well, it strikes me as a big difference and a big improvement from. Well, I don’t even want to say similar programs, but programs that come to my mind dealing with some I don’t want to have a group of violence interrupters because the different forms of it. But it strikes me as ironic and somewhat counterproductive that the same people that say that talk about the need for greater police legitimacy, legitimacy, sometimes work to undermine it by setting up a parallel system in which the organizations are specifically, you know, formed and operated to not interact with the police. And I’m not enough of an ideologue.

[00:10:59] Like if it works, fine, OK, you know, I can let go of my sort of theoretical objection, but it seems like a weird vision. At some point you have to bring these commute, you have to bridge the gap and not work to, in fact, reinforce it, which I think a lot of these sort of alternative systems do. So the I like the idea that, yes, we’re here to help you, but then we do give then we give the report to the police because this is what they do. And that seems like a very useful, well, useful distinction. And in doing this is bringing people into the system.

[00:11:33] Well, one of the things that’s really interesting about the Edinburgh system when it was developed was that and this is going to vary by city. I get it. But Edinburgh worked really tremendously. The police in L.A. were tremendously hard at building up community policing within their very inner city areas.

[00:11:55] And I know everybody goes on to say, I’m sorry, you said LMB, I have to do an outline.

[00:11:59] Check will be an important police service. Thank you. Have you ever been to Edinburgh?

[00:12:05] I have. I have. I went there for the Fringe Festival. This is a gorgeous little gray, but it’s gorgeous. It’s got so I want to match the gray sky and super friendly people.

[00:12:16] Exactly. So you were probably on the Royal Mile and you saw the castle and you saw that. So did you go to an area called Kalbi or the grass market?

[00:12:26] I don’t remember, but I generally when I travel, I make a point to go to the to what is considered the bad part of town. So I think I probably did it so.

[00:12:36] Well, it’s not it’s not that far from the Royal Mile and went on the very first time I went, I went to the tourist bureau and said, hi, I hope I’m looking for like some of your worst neighborhoods. Could you tell me where if I was interested? What’s wrong with you and this woman? She’s like, just got her supervisor to come out and then ask me what? What like what exactly are you doing? And they sent me to the Kalbi grass market area of Edinburgh. Most people are when we think of cities like that, we don’t think of them typically unless we’re criminologists. We don’t think of them in terms of like the parts of the town. But all cities, of course, have those. And within the within the worst places they make conscious, they actually in the late 1990s switched their police response from this is going to blow your mind, 60 percent community, 40 percent response. In other words, 60 percent of their frontline personnel were doing community work and 40 percent were in cars responding to calls. You imagine that happening in the United States and somewhere like Philadelphia?

[00:13:52] Well, you could if you look at the police department overall, perhaps if you look at the half, I’m thinking maybe it’s a different division because they don’t have as many specialized units. I’m just thinking out loud here. I don’t know. I’m also thinking isn’t part of the fringe festival. I think I spent a lot of time here.

[00:14:10] I think that’s where all the I hate to bring to bring this up, but that’s where all the strip clubs are. I’m not sure what’s going on at the fringe festival when you were there, but the reason I bring this up is because what they did was they had cops spot and you could do this in every park cause walking beat pretty much anywhere in the downtown core. And what they did was they were tasked with specifically building relationships with community service providers. So shelter workers, the places that feed food to the homeless and so on and. As a consequence of that, the relationship, which is often antagonistic between social service agencies and the police, wasn’t antagonistic. They saw themselves as being two sides of a similar point was about Anemone am I am I correct in saying that’s what they’re doing is it’s not direct outreach, but they’re doing outreach to the agencies instead?

[00:15:11] Exactly.

[00:15:12] One hundred percent. And so. And what the and what instead of the cops going, going, hey, here’s where your friend, the agencies would be, the ones that would put forward the police legitimacy argument and and build the help build build that trust up.

[00:15:28] And that makes a lot of sense, which is not something I often find myself saying when it comes to police operations. What is internally? How does the police department, how do they judge or do do they quantify this? How do they judge success? How do they know cops are out there working? What what’s the management supervision on a program like this? Because I can see it going off the rails pretty quickly.

[00:15:57] So what we did is I was there in 2000 when this was first started up, and then I went back in about two thousand and seven, two thousand. And we did follow up on what we discovered was that the overall overall volume of of reports was not significant and the number of successes were actually pretty low. But if you just quantify it rather than also qualifying it, then yeah, it doesn’t look like it did much. But when you discovered the cases that were actually successful, we had to end in November. They had this one small gang that were targeting recent immigrants from the EU. They were strong arming them for their checks that show up, beat the crap out of them and take your checks. And everybody was so afraid to complain. Well, there were probably realistically hundreds and hundreds of victims that were potentially could have reported but didn’t. And by getting that intelligence, they were actually able to stop this gang. So in terms of quantity, it’s one success. But in terms of the quality of life of the people, it’s it’s I would argue it is really difficult to measure.

[00:17:14] But I mean, I asked not to criticize because I don’t like quantifying police work. I think, in fact, did police work can’t be quantified, but that makes it a tough sell. How do you prevent it from becoming I mean, so that usually if things can’t be quantified, it depends on the support of the top person. So how do you prevent it from being the flavor of the month and the next? What’s the head of the police force? They’re called, I don’t know, the title, the chief constable, the next chief constable. You know, one has to do his or her own thing, so they banned it. Is there any way to institutionalize it so it survives?

[00:17:52] Well, it has been institutionalized successfully in Scotland because here we are. Twenty one years later in the program and it. Right. Yeah. And I know exactly what you mean about the flavor of the month thing because I’ve seen over and over again. But once something’s been sort of part of what’s necessary to do something like this is a culture shift. And so they underwent a significant culture shift in some parts of it were successful and some parents weren’t. But once that culture has shifted, it’s very difficult to roll it back. And so it’s been and also it helps to have some decent politicians that are making the right decisions in terms of appointing the next chief on an executive team. But they were really good at showcasing what the work was all about and getting that broader community support. And the police weren’t just, by the way, involved in activities like that. They were also working with other groups to do things like to get kids that were at high, high at risk youths involved in activities like offering a hot, hot dog stand. You’re like hot dogs. Guess what it taught them about entrepreneurship. It gave them marketable skills, so it wasn’t just one piece, it was part of a larger fabric. And I’ve argued we tried to introduce this year in Canada about two thousand seven, two thousand eight. And we went to two different major police services. And I’ve written about this extensively. We went to Toronto, we went to Vancouver, and we talked to police officers of both organizations. Toronto was a little bit more of a tough sell. I don’t know. Nothing happened. Vancouver was open to it. Ironically, neither organization ended up adopting it. But in B.C., British Columbia, that’s a province for you Americans. I knew that. Thank you very much. I write about Washington State. They adopted a version of third party reporting for women who have been victims of sexual assault, who are afraid to come forward. And that’s been operating through that through the province and through the RCMP for a few years now. So we’re starting to see little bits and pieces of it. I don’t ideally, it would be great to have as part of a giant culture shift, but I think you can also take pieces of it and sustain that over time. So it was a long answer.

[00:20:26] And I want to get back to a culture shift, so don’t let me forget. But first, I want to ask, has the Scottish police, have they dealt with the same budget cuts that the police in England and Wales have dealt with over the past decade?

[00:20:38] Everybody’s been hit in different ways. You can up your candidate in some respects. We’ve been a bit immune from what’s been happening in the US, but not not. But that’s only because through successive budget situation and so on, we’ve been struggling.

[00:20:55] So even in preceding current events and fund, because I spent a semester at Hill, a.k.a. the National Police College when it existed, and Ramsell in twenty eleven I think. And that was just the start of a five year massive budget cut, which the reason I bring this up is because usually when budgets are cut, the things that get cut are things like the national police in college that I was at, which now doesn’t exist in that form. How does a program like this survive budget cuts? Because, you know, people are still calling 999 for police services. Right. So you you can’t cut that, God forbid. So everything all sort of all the good stuff gets cut around the edges. And I mean, the root of the problem is which is universal. And policing is, you know, roughly 80 percent of the budget goes to Labor and you can cut that through attrition. But it’s tough to cut the police budget because you’re dealing because it’s about labor. One last thing, at least in England, they did with a plan. They didn’t just vindictively cut budgets one year, you know, the Home Office set up a plan and police bitched about it. But whatever, they were able to be part of the process. But so I take it this program did survive the budget, cut magic to that, but.

[00:22:15] Oh, yeah, yeah, there is some magic to that.

[00:22:18] This is a once you get a program initially set up which involves creating training materials, training the people to take the reports, guess what? The whole thing can be run on pretty much zero budget once it’s in place, because here’s what happens. And there’s a few police services here that have been experimenting with versions of this. So say you’ve got somebody who’s off because they’ve shattered their leg in forty five places. And so oftentimes you find try to find a desk job for them. And one of the things that I want in the police service, but one of my favorite police services in Canada has done is they’ve said, you know, instead of just having people call nine one one fill out the form online, while we also had tried to come up with a system where we can take some of the lower priority calls and have the person at the desk do with that. So there’s no additional budget cost of having that person do it. You get that sense that, oh, an actual police officer called me. So you have that warm, fuzzy feeling, police legitimacy thing inside, and you kill two birds with one stone with no additional cost.

[00:23:30] And the genius I don’t want to say this is a cynical ploy, but what seems like it’s happened there is the police get other people to do their work for them. And once they do the work, but other people are filling, other agencies are filling out these forms. And so you’re offloading some of the work to other agencies were at least in America, when there’s any cooperation set up, it usually is other agencies offloading their work to police departments. So that’s a very clever gambit there by the police department to be able to do that. So, hey, will you do our paperwork for us? Know, leaving aside all the advantages of reporting and legitimacy, the culture shift, they tell me how how did it change? Was it intentional or just what was the cause and what was the effect?

[00:24:23] The the cause was. Well, there was a larger political shift in Scotland and it took place in the nineteen nineties. And essentially what happened was the Scottish the entire Scottish system sort of default from, from the UK model and you start to see a Scottish Ministry of Justice and interested in Scottish policing and interest in Scottish criminal law and so on, seeing this as an opportunity to remake the system in a way that worked better for the Scottish people. And Scotland politically tends to run a little bit more left than other parts of the UK. And so they were interested in a much more inclusive society. And part of that was rethinking how policing is done. And so that’s the traditional 3R approach, that there was a concrete plan put in place to jettison that and to move towards, as I said, a 60 40 split in terms of how frontline patrol would be deployed. Again, I want to be clear, that shifted over time, of course, is different things take place. But also the geography of Edinburgh is a little bit different than I’ve been in some US cities. And it’s like, oh, my God, it’s three hours to get from one end of town to the other.

[00:25:46] I get that Edinburgh is a three dimensional city was one of my impressions like, oh, I have to get up there in some ways the only comparable city. And it’s not as extreme. I would say there’s a little bit of that in Pittsburgh.

[00:26:01] But yeah, it’s a weird, multileveled I know you better be in good shape if you’re walking around Nampara, that’s for damn sure.

[00:26:10] You look on the map and you say, I should be there and then you realize it’s two hundred feet down, up or down.

[00:26:18] But part of it was in terms of this culture shift, I interviewed I spent time on eat with these officers and interviewed those officers. And they actually you know, I’m going to be very blunt. You know this. What the management tell you and what the frontline officers actually do are often two very different things. So they’ll tell you I was in San Francisco where it back in 2000, where Majeur was telling me how we do community policing. It’s fantastic. And in the front line, they were saying, we don’t do that shit. Are you kidding me? Right. So in in Edinburgh, that complete culture shift was bought into at all ranks and worked because they had mandatory in-service training.

[00:27:10] No, no.

[00:27:12] Mandatory in-service training does squat.

[00:27:15] You have to mention that because that was what I was assuming you would say.

[00:27:20] No, no. It’s tied to its member carrot and stick. It’s tied to the carrot side of the equation. So you used to get rewarded for good arrests, which you still did in Scotland, but you also got arrested. You got you got the carrot for building good community relations. You’ve got a letter from groups talking about how wonderful you were. Oh, carrot for you. So those things got counted. So what’s the expression? What gets you when it counts or something?

[00:27:51] Yeah. Yeah. You know, many years ago, again, I was doing a walk along with police in Amsterdam and the red light district. And I was asking the cop, I’m just making conversation. I was like, how many arrests did you make last month?

[00:28:10] And he had to pause.

[00:28:12] And he’s you know, he started counting is like, I don’t know, two. What about, like the whole year and he said, well, I mean, he could tell there weren’t that many, he could he could kind of remember them all. Mostly I said, you don’t keep track of it.

[00:28:25] And he said, no.

[00:28:26] I mean, he said, yeah. I mean, someone there obviously they’re there’s paperwork involved. I said, but it’s not you know, it’s not in America. If you ask a cop on the last work period how many arrests they could they made, they could tell you. And I thought that was fascinating. So No. One, I touched on that. And I said, well, why don’t you just take that out of the equation and you can change police culture. You know, wasn’t that he wasn’t doing real police work, but it wasn’t judged by arrests. What percent of the Scottish force are women? Is it you know, I don’t know, off the top of my head.

[00:29:00] But at the time, it probably would have been about, oh, I want to say between 15 and 20 percent.

[00:29:05] OK, because there’s some literature and common sense that when it hits 20 percent, there’s a culture change as well. And I was wondering if that maybe played a role.

[00:29:16] Well, I will say one thing about the reward system that I’m working on some research right now to do in policing of mental health. And my colleague who did extensive field research for like two different with two different police services. And I’m reading through her field notes. And what you see over and over again is that police officers chasing quotas because it’s expected. But really. Not feeling good about it. It’s like I have to do this to satisfy this requirement, but I don’t want to be doing this. And I wonder how much, like if we can replace the compensation or reward of a promotion system with something that actually makes better sense for the communities, would also improve police morale internally as well.

[00:30:10] Yeah, I was one of the requirements for getting promoted to sergeant as a letter of recommendation from somebody who’s in the community. And you get extra credit if it’s actually somebody once arrested. But it should be that shouldn’t be everything, but it should be part matter, as it should be in there, at least recognized if you have those connections. Yeah, the whole the quota system, I mean, I know in New York City, the brass of the department is sitting there actually right now. They’re they’re not so terrified, but generally they’re terrified the cops aren’t doing anything. How do we get them to work? And my thought was, first of all, if it’s one thing, if you’re a lazy cop, but if you’re a bad cop, it might be better if you don’t work. And if we force, then if we give you a quota and force you to do something. But even if you’re just, you know, below, you know, look, half of cops are below average, even if you’re just a below average. But decent cop and a decent person, just as a management thing, you morale is so low. Morale is always low in the police world. Right. It’s just a question of if it’s lower lowest. But you want to get the best of these officers, you know, and the best may not still be great, but at least it would be better. And the quota system is just it’s so brutal because it’s just pissing people off. And then you’ve got disgruntled employees and you’re never going to get the best out of them. But maybe that’s somehow inevitable in a paramilitary system. But I don’t think it is a lack of imagination there.

[00:31:37] I totally disagree. So, first of all, I’m going to shout and give a shout out for our Canadian police officers who I think and again, you know, I am not just being biased because I like Canada, but also I have studied policing in three different countries, a little in different cities. And which countries are those? So that would be Scotland, England, the United States and here, of course, in Canada.

[00:32:04] So I guess that’s, you know, hold your thought for one second. I just maybe I should explain, because I can be like, oh, I know British Columbia is a province. We in our special I don’t think it’s expected that everyone knows the basic political system of of the United Kingdom. So let me give a 30 second lecture on that, the United Kingdom, and correct me if I’m wrong. The United Kingdom currently consists of England, Wales and Northern Ireland. So each of those is a nation in their own way. The so the the landmass of Great Britain, there is England, Wales and Scotland. Scotland has you know, they have their own team in the Olympics or the World Cup at least. And and they you know, they share a lot of things, but they are a their own nation. And that’s a it’s it’s a little bit of a fuzzy concept of his district nation state boundaries. But so the police force in Scotland is a Scottish police force as opposed to the police force, which covers England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

[00:33:11] Exactly, but in the interrupted you and I hope you kept your until we and the other thing, too, is when I was making my shadow for policing. So here’s the thing. Most not universally, but most police officers in Canada have some level of of an undergraduate degree. Many police officers post graduate degrees. Most of them have some type of lifetime experience or life experience before they come in. We generally, you know, I think we do a fairly decent job in terms of training, recruitment and training. Of course, there’s always things that can be improved. No question. But I think, generally speaking, what I’ve spent a lot of time in the field in some really weird places, watching police officers work. And one of the things I’ve seen over and over again, especially and I’m going to. I’m going to name a name here, especially in the RCMP, you get the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, so that’s our national police force or federal police service. It also is municipal and provincial. In some places, they recruit the brightest and the best.

[00:34:27] And oftentimes what happens is then they get these you get these kids are super motivated, they want to get into the community and make a difference, and then you put them in the community and tell them they have to get X number of tickets today. They are dealing with the same problems over and over again with no solutions. They are not making a difference. In fact, even basic things like filing a police report can be, and it could be because of lack of technology, lack of trust in the people in the front line people to actually do things like use their own cell phone.

[00:35:09] Right. To take photographs of the crimes being ridiculous, things like that. And so what happens is you create this demoralized police service in which people are basically coming in and then they’re like wanting to check out. And that’s the thing that Canada and the UK have in common. I heard a police senior police leader in the UK say that we should start having an idea that if we can keep people in policing for I think it was up to 10 years, that would be good. Yeah, think about that, think about the intensive amount of money spent on recruitment and training Canada’s police training budgets, probably about nine hundred million per year. We spend a lot of money on training for a 10 year career. That’s not a good investment. So we can take some of this ridiculous stuff, like with the quotas and the demoralizing aspects of policing, with chasing, you know, chasing promotions or doing stupid things, I think we’d have a better workplace and we’d have people that were actually much more creative in terms of problem solving because they’d have the space to do that. That’s why you get people like Gavin Bewes coming up with a supportive reporting program in Scotland, because he had the space and the support to do that.

[00:36:32] Presumably has lateral entry into the higher ranks or does it?

[00:36:39] I don’t know. You don’t know and so does not.

[00:36:45] Well, maybe I should say what lateral entry is in England and it’s, you know, some point just related to the class system, but it’s kind of like the equivalent of an officer in the military. But the higher ranks, they’ll do some token time at the lower level. But you’re basically hired to be an executive and that, you know, creates some resentment that these people have never actually done the job that we’re doing, say the cops on the bottom. But the idea is, well, that’s a different job. And, you know, I don’t the American in me is kind of opposed to that idea. But, you know, I don’t really have a strong knowledge or opinion of it either way.

[00:37:25] So the Canadian army said jokingly at a dinner where there were several high ranking police, U.K. police officers and people from the college jokingly said if this condition was right, y’all could hire me. So and then the head turned and they were like, really? What would you comment? As I said, no. L know I come in as chief constable of the Shire of three people and you pay me two hundred thousand pounds a year or it’s not happening. So clearly I’m still here. We do not have direct entry in the same way that they do in the UK. That said, at the police executive level, you can hire somebody from another police service to come in as an executive. And if the police services board votes and says, yes, that person is acceptable, is good. When cheating things we do is we poach people from the higher ranks and we bring them into our police executive. Doesn’t happen as often as it used to, but it can still happen.

[00:38:27] So the police board is an interesting concept. How is the board selected?

[00:38:37] Are they not elected, right, so so they’re appointed and so there’s a there’s representation from different facets of the community and it’s one of the in when I was blackbox mysteries of like, how does this actually happen? I know that the names are put forward to the province. They have some secret blackbox meetings in which they decide who’s acceptable and who’s not. And for suddenly one year you might appoint somebody and then two years later they get turfed. And I couldn’t tell you how or why or where what why that occurred.

[00:39:09] So it replaces one political system with another. And they probably both have their flaws. But it’s not just the mayor appointing the it’s not just the police chief serving it at the whim of the mayor. It’s a different there’s an intermediate body that has its own.

[00:39:24] Scandal one at the box office, who knows how those people get there and who they own their loyalties to.

[00:39:30] But yeah, it’s a little bit of a buffer between the police chief and the direct sort of the daily whims of politics and the press.

[00:39:41] A little bit of a buffer. I’d like to see a more significant offer. I’m actually a big fan of police independence. And the reason for that is because we’ve seen some very bad uses, political uses of police in very scandalous situations. And I’m thinking particularly digging myself. Nineteen ninety nine in the conference for the RCMP were basically used to occupy the University of British Columbia and led to massive what led to significant arrests of protesters for doing things like holding a sign that says free speech. There’s a whole bunch more dirty stuff that went on behind the scenes to protect the feelings of a dictator who came as part of the APEC conference. But I digress. So as as a survivor of the APEC time, I’m actually a fan of greater police independence from politicians. My thing is this, if you bring police chiefs in on two to three year contract, if you’re not satisfied with the work that they’re doing, two or three years gone.

[00:40:50] And so that’s years oversight because there are these phrases like community policing that you can’t be against. Right. And one of them is is, you know, is to keep politic politics out of policing. But then the other one is we want is accountability.

[00:41:06] And at some point you can say, know you can’t really have both. Equally, there is some sort of mini Mac situation there. But to say we’re going to re judge you in two or we’re going to put up with you for that time frame. And then the judge seems like a a decent type of compromise. I have to ask, going back to Skid Row.

[00:41:29] And I wouldn’t you say Skid Row in a police context, I always think of Egon Bittner’s classic piece on Skid Row in which he he kind of in some ways, like a lot of sociology, was the sociology of the obvious. But someone’s got to say it. And he talked about police discretion and and how that was an essential part of policing, which I think right now is more timely than ever. But it came in the history of the literature and it came after a movement similar to what we’re having now, which is to limit police discretion. And this came out of the late 60s in the civil rights movement. And a lot of legal scholars that kind of, I think, proposed an unrealistic concept that police were simply neutral arbiters of of the law. And Bittner said, no, no, hey, that’s impossible. Maybe it’s undesirable. We want police to use their discretion. We want them to change behavior. We don’t want them writing tickets and arrests to everyone who is who they possibly could. These are, you know, at that time less trained. But they’re they’re trained professionals. And we want them to know the area and and have responsibility for. Does that. How do you think of that of that concept when when you’re dealing with dealing with the communities that you’ve dealt with and the supportive reporting concept, somebody has never read my book.

[00:43:02] I read your article you wrote for you.

[00:43:06] I am very non famous for a book that was published in Two Thousand and Seven on Skid Row. And basically my argument is an updated version of Bittner that I was feeding you a softball question if you say OK, but basically I said the same thing as Bittner. I compare Skid Row policing in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, San Francisco’s Tenderloin and Environs, Cow Gate and grass market district. Three liberal cities in three and three impoverished neighborhoods with the same type of socio economic addiction, mental health and other issues. Right, ostensibly totally comparable, but three very different political styles. And when I conclude at the end of the book is and I got man, there was a there was I mean, the very big name academic who crapped all over me when I said this. But basically communities get the policing that they want. And when I say that, I don’t mean every single person in the community gets it. I say that the majority of the community gets the type of policing they want, which is why policing in Vancouver looks very different. There’s the sound of my husband coming home, even though I told him not to come home before June 30.

[00:44:32] So that humanizes people. It’s good.

[00:44:36] Well, there you go. But the bottom line is in San Francisco, it looks very different. It is very like us neo liberal style. Oh, actually, it was better. Here’s what the husband got something. But yeah. So that’s that’s why you get these three very different types, even though I mean, I picked three cities that are attached to water. I attach three cities where the inner city area was very dense, like I mean, I pick three cities that go like there should be no difference. But there are huge differences because socio culturally cities have different sets of attitudes, beliefs, biases and so on. And that gets reflected in the style of policing. When people say, well, I say bullshit because there’s a reason why LAPD was the way it was in the nineteen nineties.

[00:45:42] There was enough people that wanted that really sort of paramilitary go in tag names.

[00:45:50] There were was the epitome in the crash and burn of Wilson and Cullings professional model of policing going back to. It’s a model that comes from the progressive movement and somehow in the course of the century got co-opted by conservatives. So you go from Volmer to Parks to to to Daryl Gates and then a city in flames and so and then so then we see another shift take place.

[00:46:20] But it doesn’t we see these shifts in cities. But I always note that over time they sort of revert back to whatever their middle typical middle ground is. So, you know, we’re going to go through this defunding and we’re going to see certain cities like San Francisco where we’re going to do this on the other thing. Mark my words, 10 years from now, we’re going to be talking about remember back when San Francisco did all that and then the did all that, because that’s just the that’s just how these things roll.

[00:46:45] But Bittner is a God.

[00:46:49] He in nineteen sixty seven writing about peacekeeping on Skid Row. Basically I am still talking about stuff that he said in sixty seven here in twenty, twenty one is still as relevant today as it was that I’m one of those aspects has to do with that police discretion.

[00:47:11] You know this is a podcast about policing and to academics. Let’s talk about Bitner damn it. We can do that into my podcast. So the other piece, The Nabalco. Let me preface this by saying I actually don’t like Bittner’s writing. Stylistically, I warn people that it’s a it’s a tough read. And I kind of it bugs me that he wrote in the style he did. But that said, his concepts are good. And I it is surprising how they’re more relevant than other one was policing on Skid Row about discretion. But the other thing he’s famous for, probably more famous for his general argument about the function of police in modern society in which he defines police. And he was writing when in the late 60s, early 70s. I forget when the stuff he he defines police and he has a horrible way to phrase it, but basically they’re defined by their use of force and or potential use of force. I want to add, it’s not that they’re defined by beating people up, but if you don’t if there’s not the potential for the use of force, it’s not police work and you don’t need police to do it. And I think that’s important, particularly today, because with the a lot of the reform movement from, say, 20 from Ferguson until this year, it was based on a model of deemphasize that you set a perimeter perimeters and you could voluntary compliance. And it always bugged me because at some point you got to grab the motherfucker. And whether you do that sooner or later is up to you. But usually doing it sooner is better because there’s a you know, the longer something drags on, the more chance something goes wrong. And that may be keeping it bednar at some point. We have cops to use. Force and force can be ugly. But if we deny that basic premise or pretend it’s all touchy feely, do good community policing, officer friendly, we’re fooling ourselves on that. And that doesn’t mean I’m not saying that the force shouldn’t be regulated, accountable and legal and constitutional or whatever, but that’s a part of the job. And Bitner frame that argument. But you know better than I do.

[00:49:19] I’m sure you drive me crazy on social media. So this is what happens on innocently minding my own business, doing scrolling through Twitter. And then there’s Peter posting all these ridiculous stories out of New York about people that are getting shot, beaten to death and everything. And then some moron pipes up and says, we shouldn’t have violence interrupter, go in and teach them about anti Asian bigotry. And now we’ll stop them all dudes bleeding out because he’s been stopped at a certain. This is why drive me crazy, because I’m I want to make sure the computer and just start shaking people and say, are you kidding? At this point, this person’s been stabbed. No amount of training is going to help that stop person.

[00:50:04] Right, till I get on Twitter today because a third person was shot on the Woodside Houses. And we’re we’re just we’re recording this on March twenty fifth twenty twenty one. Happy Greek Independence Day to all the Greeks out there.

[00:50:20] So my point with this is that it is if you want to carveout to what police do, who they are, Bittner says calling the cops is the ultimate expression of who police are and what they do.

[00:50:40] And I actually like that, that. Then the use of force terminology, because it also encompasses coercion when I don’t want to deal with something because I don’t want to go out and start screaming at my neighbor for X, Y and Z. I call the police who will come and then use the threat of something and their very presence can be a threat of something and that resolves the situation peacefully. And so if we want to hear back into the policing role, I think going back to that sort of sense of we need the police to do these types of things. Is a good place for us to start.

[00:51:19] Yeah, the police role ultimately is getting people to do what they don’t want to do or to not do what they want to do. Now, ideally, you can use the old Jedi mind tricks and convince people it’s their own choice to do what you want to do. But it is about coercion and part of coercion. And I mentioned this, again, just to be honest, not to stress it. But, yes, there’s an element of oppression in that you want to do something and I’m saying you can’t do it. Hopefully you’ll change your mind and we can all be friends. But ultimately, no, you can’t do it. And that is not that. That’s a.

[00:51:57] Oh, yes, it’s funny, I want to say no one can be against community policing, but often is community policing, it’s great. I know we do.

[00:52:04] I mean, I don’t want to say that because you sound foolish, because everyone thinks you’re hating on, you know, the flag and apple pie. Right.

[00:52:13] Or advocating a repressive model of policing, which I’m not even when I say policing involves repression that. But yeah, the reason I said the reason we are so down on community policing in part is because we know that have been around for 40, 50 years as a concept and always it means everything to everybody. And it ends up nothing. Nothing.

[00:52:37] Yeah, yeah.

[00:52:40] I don’t know. I personally think, you know what, at some point you and I probably hopefully at ASC, if we ever get there, should sit down,.

[00:52:49] Which is the criminology conference,.

[00:52:51] Reconceptualize the police for 2021. And then we should be like some of our colleagues and we should create a training package.

[00:52:59] You know, that sounds like real work terrifies me.

[00:53:05] I know but I have handbags to buy.

[00:53:11] Anything else on that. I this has been great. We’ve been at it for almost an hour. So I’m thinking, as you can tell from the tone of my voice, of wrapping it up. But anything else you want on the top of your mind?

[00:53:23] No, I have to say this was fine. This was like, you know, I like these ones where we tell you a little bit here and a little bit there. And at the end of it, I feel like that’s exciting. I might be interested in doing something with that. So I’m now going to go back and read some more econ. Bitner thought maybe I should, too.

[00:53:40] I got this book right over there. I can look at it and maybe I’m as I’m older, it’s I won’t find it so frustrating to read his writing, but he’s yeah. He’s one of the the classics, the functions of the police. What is the title of your book that I haven’t read?

[00:53:59] I think it’s called Policing. Skid Row tells you how to do it. That I am. I don’t even remember.

[00:54:03] Why do you still use the term Skid Row in Canada like it’s not a bad term? We just don’t use it anymore.

[00:54:09] Well, you do in Los Angeles, where you actually have signs that say, well, there is growing. It’s considered not politically correct. However, I’ve made the argument and I think it’s valid that you have to retain that because it means something. And whether we try to, like, dress it up and make it sound pretty and nice and talk about it, it’s a community and so on. Ultimately, it’s a place of heavy marginalization, exclusion and stigma. And if you don’t talk about it that way, then you’re not invoking all of that. And I don’t believe in sugarcoating stuff.

[00:54:47] Not only or not invoking it in a way, you’re ignoring it. It’s you can’t we you we invent a new term that’ll get stigmatized the same way.

[00:54:54] Probably won’t even one hundred percent. So, you know.

[00:54:58] Well, thank you so much.

[00:55:00] I am Peter Moskos and I am with Laura Huey, a professor at the University of Western Ontario and a contributor to my Violence Reduction Project, which is a collection of essays on basically short term, medium term solutions to reducing violence.

[00:55:21] And more can be found at the website qualitypolicing.com, which links to this podcast and to the Violence Reduction Project. And thank you so much. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation.

[00:55:37] So did I. Thank you.