The Ethics of Evidence-Based Policing

Dr. Renee Mitchell joins the podcast to discuss evidence-based policing, and that law enforcement agencies have an ethical obligation to institute, whenever possible, policies and programs that are sound and supported by research.

Main Topics

• Medical research provides empirical evidence to support a doctor’s decisions; it’s not guesswork.
• Appling evidence-based research to policing has shown success in crime prevention tactics.
• Policing should, at the very least, try to “not make things worse.”
• Implementing evidence-based programs is necessary to move policing toward a true profession.

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Transcript

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Welcome to the Police in Service Training Podcast.
This podcast is dedicated to providing research evidence to street-level police officers and
command staff alike.
The program is intended to help the police and law enforcement community create better
programs, understand challenging policies, and dispel the myths of police officer behavior.
I'm your host, Scott Phillips.
Evidence-based policing is grounded in the work that came from evidence-based medicine.
Simply stated, the field of medicine tested and retested its assumptions about what treatments
worked to heal something or at least reduce a physical ailment.
Evidence-based policing takes the same basic approach by applying the test and retest strategy
to crime prevention and other policing policies.
Just to be clear, evidence-based policing is not an alternative approach to policing.
It's a mechanism to test policing tactics and strategies.
Just like evidence used in court, evidence-based policing is an approach to show that something
is more likely than not to be true.
A thorough discussion of evidence-based policing could take multiple podcasts, but we're going
to focus on one aspect of evidence-based policing today.
Specifically, evidence-based medicine has an ethical component.
That is, if the scientific evidence is used to support a particular treatment to deal
with a particular problem, doctors have an ethical duty to apply that approach as well
as a duty to give the patient information about options that are available.
Put it this way.
If you went to the doctor because you weren't feeling well and the doctor pulled out a jar
of leeches, the doctor is clearly behind the times in violating his or her ethical obligations
to apply the best medicines that are available.
The same perspective is now being applied to the police.
The past several decades have provided the field of law enforcement with a sizable body
of knowledge about what works, what kind of works, and what doesn't work.
For example, the research evidence is very clear that gun buyback programs do not reduce
violent crime.
It may be a good public relations move for a police agency, but if a police chief frames
a buyback program as a crime prevention tool, this would essentially be an ethical violation.
Joining us this week to better understand this under-discussed aspect of evidence-based
policing is Dr. Renee Mitchell.
Dr. Mitchell served for 22 years with the Sacramento Police Department.
She graduated from the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law and has a Ph.D. in
criminology from the University of Cambridge.
She was a Philbright Police Research Fellow where she attended the University of Cambridge
police executive program and worked with the London Metropolitan Police Service.
She is the, I believe, the interim executive director, and she'll correct me if I'm wrong,
of the American Society of Evidence-Based Policing.
And since we have a limited amount of time, I'll stop there.
Thanks for coming on the podcast, Renee.
Thanks for having me.
All right.
So clearly you have a full background, including a police officer and having a law degree.
What drew you to evidence-based policing?
It was actually a happenstance.
I was at a conference and I met Jim Beerman, who was the chief of Redlands at the time.
And I was about 11 or 12 years into my career and kind of prided myself on being well-read.
I had my law degree, you know, felt like I kept up on things.
And when he started explaining like evidence-based policing to me and the research behind policing,
I really felt like, oh, I didn't know there was this whole field behind this.
So when he explained that to me, I also, like I said, it was kind of all happenstance, happened
to be going to London to do the Fulbright.
And he was friends with Larry Sherman over at Cambridge University.
And Jim basically said, if you would like to learn more about evidence-based policing,
I could connect you with Dr. Sherman and his program over at the University of Cambridge.
Would you like to do that?
And I was like, well, heck yeah, I would love to do that.
Not exactly my words, used a different word, but you know, so spending, when I did the
Fulbright with the London Met, I spent two weeks with Dr. Sherman's evidence-based or
his management program, his leadership program over there, but he had the research component
of it was really intertwined with their management program.
And so just sitting in on the program for those two weeks, it was all leaderships from
throughout, you know, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, India, I think Singapore at the time,
but just getting exposed to that and how many different types of research projects
there had been going on and that had been done for decades that I didn't know about
really made me think I wanted to learn more about what evidence-based policing was and
get involved with that community.
And then coming home, you know, I was introduced to a lot of the scholars out of the George
Mason program, like Cynthia Lam and Chris Kopper, David Weisberg, and that kind of led to me
getting involved in, you know, long term, doing my own research and then getting my
PhD under Dr. Sherman at Cambridge.
Very nice. Yeah, a lot of our histories, you know, are the same way that there's a lot
of just you bump into people and you meet people and it's like, well, I never expected
to do that. And it worked out for me as well.
So, OK, so back to evidence-based policing from the broader perspective, why is any kind
of research into evidence-based policing of value or relevance?
And I suspect many people are at least familiar with and have an understanding of this, but
maybe you can fill us in a little bit about what this is.
Well, that's you'd be surprised because I think the same thing, like when people hear
evidence-based policing, sometimes they compare it to like a pop approach, you know,
problem-oriented policing and or to using data.
So they'll they don't quite understand exactly where it fits.
And I always thought how evidence-based policing is the umbrella over all the other
like tactical types of policing and or, you know, programmatic types of policing,
because evidence-based policing is really about testing things in the field.
Just like the same way we mentioned with medicine, it's not that you're you're doing
something in a lab and it's not that you have a theory about things work, how things work.
It's that you want to take something into the field and through a randomized controlled
trial, you know, having half of officers do something and have the other half of officers,
you know, not do the thing and then compare the outcomes between the two.
Those are the type of things that you look at and you say, does this work in the field?
The best example that I can kind of give and don't ask me about the actual research
outcomes, because that would I'd have to go way back into my brain and remember, but
something like either the implicit bias training or procedural justice training, right?
OK. What a full decade or two, you know, of this is a good idea, right?
We should have cops that do procedural justice training and it gets integrated into our
training, like in the academy and our own service.
However, with the testing, you have to you have to test, does it change any officer's
behavior? Right.
So if you're conducting training in a police department, it's one thing to conduct the
training, have them take a survey that says, oh, I really liked this course.
It was very interesting. I learned a lot.
Versus if you're conducting a training course like procedural justice where you want
officers learn how to talk to citizens and to treat them in a different way than they
were before, then you need to test, is it actually having behavioral outcomes out in
the field? Right. And that research has been done since then.
But at the very beginning, it was kind of like this blanket, like, oh, procedural justice
training is great. But my question always was like, well, how do you know that?
You know, you you could we know that procedural we know that proceed the the pillars of
procedural justice work to get better outcomes in the field.
However, we haven't tested this procedural justice training get you better outcomes in
the field. Those are two different questions.
Right. So, OK, now, following from that, OK, so we have an understanding of what evidence
based policing is, is looking at these different different policies or programs to see if
they worked. However, we want to define work.
Your paper, which was co-authored by Stuart Lewis, takes a completely different approach.
It doesn't say a particular policy or program, but it takes that broader perspective of an
ethical aspect. Why did you consider it important to discuss ethical framework for
evidence based policing?
Well, because, I mean, evidence based policing really was founded on evidence based
medicine. So the same way we evaluate like if if a research project or research design
is at a certain level of robustness.
Right. That comes from evidence based medicine.
And when it comes to the medical field, you know, they take the Hippocratic oath to do
no harm. And the way their culture is now, you wouldn't have a doctor that isn't going
to. Well, now I have to walk that back a little bit.
Typically, like before, I don't know, this last five years or so, you wouldn't see
doctors that would go against evidence based advice.
Now, it seems to be like we do now have doctors that are more along this.
I don't know, the health and wellness kind of spectrum.
So it's not like it was, I don't know, maybe 10 years ago where you really were hoping
that doctors follow the evidence based.
And I have also been told that I do have like, you know, an outsider's perspective of
medicine, too, that like it's not a perfect evidence based world that even though doctors
follow what should be the evidence based medicine, that even them have, you know, they
have a hard time keeping up with like all of the research that's coming out.
So even though I could get away, doctor, and that's what I expect that from them, they
might not be because they could be just like an old school cop that wants to do what they
want to do. And they don't want to follow the new things that are coming out.
Sure. Yeah. But those are the kind of like we looked at that format for evidence based
policing in that if if doctors have this standard, right, where they're supposed to
be like ethical and that's based on evidence based medicine.
And if they didn't use those standards, that they would be seen as causing harm.
We took that viewpoint for policing the same way.
And now we have a pretty robust foundation of a lot of things that we know that work
in policing. So our view was why wouldn't we have that same kind of viewpoint of if
you're not using things that are that we know scientifically work in the field, why
is it an ethical argument that you're not being ethical if you are not using them
because you could be creating harm to either your officers or your community?
Right. Now, OK, so but that kind of leads me into my next next question.
Earlier in the paper, your paper, when you examined evidence based medicine, you
mentioned that doctors, as we hinted, have a duty to use the best research to support
their decisions. And this got me thinking about the policing world as a profession
and not to put too fine a point on it.
And I've always been criticized for this.
But policing falls a little short of the sociological definition of what a
professional is. But and this might be a leap if policing took more seriously the
argument about having an ethical duty to use the best evidence to support their crime
prevention policies. Wouldn't this be something that would promote the notion of
policing as being more closely related to a true profession?
Agreed, yes. Like that is what we would head towards is that we held policing to a
standard of here is the knowledge base of our profession.
And if you don't hold to that knowledge base, then you're violating an ethical standard.
And yes, that that that gets us towards a profession.
I think and but I don't think that's how policing use it.
OK, all right. Did that answer the question?
I know I think I think you I think you did.
Like I say, these are the kinds of things when I read these articles I see and it makes
me think beyond just what the research is telling us, just what you're studying,
which I think is what we should we have.
We have an obligation to do is when we're reading things to to look at them more
critically and say, OK, what else or where else can this go, which is why I asked the
question. But it's entirely possible that you're right, that there's a slower
progression towards accepting the the the research scholarship when the field isn't
necessarily. And I'd like to think that I don't know for sure.
Not a doctor. I'd like to think that doctors are using research because that's
the way it's been done for at least a few decades now, that policing is doesn't live
in that world. It's not an inherent component of, OK, we realize this doesn't work.
Let's do this. Research was never an inherent component of policing.
And I'm actually probably going to have a few questions about this later.
So, yes, you did answer the question.
But so I'm going to I'm going to leap forward here and mention that I found your
article interesting also because it mentioned that doctors are obligated to,
what's the quote, do no harm, but for the police.
And then these are my words, not not your words from the article.
You argue that their ethical obligation is to emphasize this.
Try not to make things worse.
And can you explain that?
So I think within our framework, because, yes, inherently within policing, there's
harm, right? We we take away somebody's freedom.
We may injure them when we take them into custody.
So the like for the American Society of Evidence Based Policing, in our
mission statement, like our vision, we talk about using the most effective, least
harmful policies and practices there are out there to promote like your
communities, health, wellness, and, you know, have the lowest possible crime
there is. So I think that is like more of the standard that we should be at is to
do the least possible harm is to try not to make things worse, because there are
things that we do in policing that seem like good ideas.
But when we test them out, we find like, no, we actually make people worse off.
And that's the thing about both in medicine and in policing and in the
psychology and sociological fields they've found, like, and then this is why
I'm such a big believer in applied research.
And that's the evidence-based part of doing the randomized control trial and
the quasi-experiments, because a lot of times as humans, we kind of have this
idea of like, oh, I think this is how humans work.
So here's my intervention.
And because I have good intentions, the outcomes should be fine.
But when we test it, we find out like, oh, humans actually don't work exactly the
way I thought they did.
And the outcomes might be worse off.
And so you don't want to be implementing, implementing a practice or a policy or
something in your agency and leave your community worse off or leave your
officers worse off than they were before.
So that's where I'm like, you know, our ethical statement is maybe try not to
make things worse or just do the least possible harm.
Right. Because despite all of our efforts to do randomized control trials, they're
still not nearly as structured.
I would again, I would argue they're not nearly as structured as the medical field
where here's the pill, here's how it's been constructed, or here's the
vaccination, here's what goes into it, here are a hundred people we'll give it to
and here are a hundred people we won't.
Our world that we live in is not identical to that.
So it's like, as you said earlier, is the training leading to less use of force
when it comes to procedural justice or de-escalation training?
The officers that are out there are still human beings that are going to function in
a way that it's not going to be exactly what the standard of the training was.
There's going to be a small amount of variation here and there.
Well, and that's so when you mentioned medicine too, that's the other, like a lot
of times when there's pushback, it's also that pushback is, well, it's not like
medicine, it's not as clean cut, right?
Right.
But there's two things like it's not always clean cut because it's not always a
pill, right?
You often have interventions in medicine that are much more about like behavior of
your patients and you have the same thing that cops have, right?
So you've created an intervention, maybe it's giving them knowledge, maybe it's
giving them like to follow up, you know, every so often about like their health
issue.
But just like cops, even though you have an intervention, your patients are
different ages, different ethnicities, different, you know, gender.
So you don't know like how that's going to affect all those different people.
And that's the argument we get with cops as well.
They'll be like, well, you have cops that have been on the street a long time,
cops that have been, you know, there for like a week, you know, you have to look
at all these factors.
So that's why like doing the randomized controlled trial, because you're kind of
trying to take all those influences together to kind of say, okay, but for all
those other things, is it the intervention that's really working in the field?
Or does it not work at all because human beings and they don't do all the things
that I thought they were going to do when they went out into the field.
But that's why I think it's really important.
And the ethical framework of that is really surrounding that you want to do the
least harm to your communities and policing, it's not like medicine where
people can actually like refuse to have an intervention.
They could say, I'm not taking the pill, I'm not having the surgery, I'm not
coming in to see you, but in policing, people often don't get a choice.
So I think that's where it's truly upon police departments to have that ethical
framework, because we are forced upon a community.
So we should be trying to implement the things that the scientific world has
shown is the most effective, the most efficient, the safest and the least
harmful practices and policies.
And like any research, it's going to be imperfect, but it's better than
just simply guesswork.
Now, in your article, you also stated, and I failed to note the page number,
so I apologize to people if they actually want to track this down.
But you mentioned not implementing an evidence-based practice that prevents
crime is a failure to protect the innocent and is no different than turning
away from a crime in progress, that's unquote.
Now, I'm not sure why, but that statement really landed with me, but you also
stated that the police leadership should begin a discussion at conferences,
symposiums, regional meetings of their duty to use evidence-based practices.
Is there evidence, and that pun is intended, that these conversations are
actually taking place out there?
Well, actually since, so this was published in what, 2017?
So since then, I think there are a lot more conversations about
evidence-based policing, like ICP, you know, that the chief's conference,
they now have a section that's like evidence that this last year, there
was like five minute presentations.
They were little short presentations, 20 of them on practitioners and
researchers presenting on their research that they had done over the last year.
So we see it discussed more, like with IACP, they're putting out research
briefs like ASCBP does as well.
We have a library of like 150 articles now that have been translated from,
you know, if they're 20, 30 page articles into a two page brief, so that the way
they're digestible for somebody that doesn't want to get in all the statistics
and that methodology, but really just wants to know what's the practice and
like, will it work or not work?
Right.
So I think the conversations are out there and starting, and I know a lot of
like the courses across the country.
Jerry Ratcliffe has a new one at UPenn that he incorporates evidence-based
policing into their new leadership program.
So I see it a lot more than we used to, which is great.
I don't know that anybody talks about it from like an ethical framework.
Right.
Is it just the idea of getting this, maybe not the ethical framework, but just
like letting people know, OK, we're taking this approach.
It's an evidence-based approach.
We're not just winging it anymore.
So when we're going to be implementing a policy, you know, of any kind, we've
looked into it, we've tested it as best we can with the information we have.
So I'm glad to hear you're saying that you mentioned something.
And I'm not sure if I heard you right.
I was reminded of APB applied police briefings.
That seems to be, it might not be evidence-based, but it's another
approach for getting an information digestible to people.
So it reads, OK, here's what the idea is.
And here's, did it work or not?
Yeah, is that the, is that ICP's, the applied police briefing?
Yeah, got me on the spot there, but it's, you know, I remember the APB
because, you know, points bulletin kind of, you know, plan, plan the acronym there.
So, but anyway, so I think again, thank you for letting me know that, yes, it's,
it's moving out there more that people are at least learning about it.
Yeah.
No, back to the article again, it's trying to stick with this.
There's no surprise that it talked about and there's an entire section
on police culture in that research findings can be incorporated
into so many aspects of policing.
I think we're all familiar with the notion of culture that it, you know,
eats policy for lunch.
Do you think that the shift in academy training towards, and I had a podcast
on this a while back, a little bit, not great, but a little bit, a shift towards
providing a guardian mindset rather than a warrior mindset, does that fit your
suggestion of getting this information out there?
Um, I don't know that to me is more about like, that's like a procedural
justice approach versus like an evidence-based policing approach.
Um, but it's also like a potentially like an ethical framework of how you deal
with the public and then thinking about, you know, with a, a warrior mindset,
your mindset is I'm taking people to jail.
I'm finding the criminals that are out there versus like a guardian mindset,
which is more of a harm reduction point of view, because you're looking at your
community more of I'm trying to help and not harm.
So it sets it up.
I would say the underlying values of that set it up for people to welcome
evidence-based policing versus a warrior mindset of I'm there to, you know,
what's the quote?
I came here to kick ass and chew bubble gum and I'm all out of bubble gum.
I actually have never heard that particular one.
I think I might be butchering it and I couldn't tell you what movie it's out of,
but you know, that to me was like indicative of the warrior mindset.
Right.
But that's the, that was the idea of the, uh, the podcast from, you know, a
couple of months ago, but you're trying to change the mindsets to, to, you know,
a guardian is again, necessarily, uh, uh, evidence-based, but the idea just
changes the framework.
So at least from my perspective, it makes people think that, okay, we're not just
doing it from this approach.
There might be a time for that approach.
That's the difficulty of it.
Um, and that, and that will get, since we're just slightly off your, off your
article for a second, but still the idea of, uh, of promoting evidence-based
policing, I know that, uh, the, the DOJ every three or four years on that, I
don't recall, they would put out a census, census of law enforcement agencies.
And, uh, I'm wondering, have you noticed, cause I haven't seen it lately, but are
they including questions about evidence-based policing because I know it
took them forever to change some of their questions to catch up with like
community policing or the kinds of weapons get officers used.
Have you seen any, are you aware of any evidence-based questions in that census?
Yeah, I don't think of the last one that was for 2022 is I think the
last one that came out and they're going to start collecting census
data for the 2026 then maybe the next one.
So it remains to be seen about if that becomes a priority of determining
if anybody's teaching those kinds of classes, I don't, I, I'd be curious
cause I think it'd be so small that I don't know how much data you would
capture with that versus like the other kinds of classes that you see across
the board, you know, and across the country.
So I don't know if they would add that in there.
Which is, again, this is my thinking that once you have those questions
on their agencies are looking at them and maybe it would prompt them to say,
Oh, Oh, this is something we hadn't thought of.
Maybe we should start including this in our Academy training.
Right.
Or in the police agency, there's at least a component to it.
True.
I also, I thought it was quite original when you mentioned in the article that
when new technologies are proposed, police leadership need to require that
the, that the, find a way to use it like any new medical device, you know,
you got to test this thing.
I was thinking about artificial intelligence as I've read that passage.
What about smaller police agencies?
Now, if this is off topic, don't worry about it.
We can always cut this out, but should they be relying, relying on the larger
agencies are doing when it comes time to like use evidence-based, you know,
policing, I'm sorry, when it comes to use artificial intelligence?
So yeah, that's a hard one.
Cause one, when you're a small agency, you can't test your own things.
You know, you, you do have to kind of rely on other agencies to test things out.
And like on AI, Ian Adams, Matt Barter, like they test it out, like the AI
on Axon draft one, and then you have some testing that's occurring, I think
like on Trulio's AI products for like body worn cameras, same with Polis solutions.
So you have, you have agencies out there that are big enough to test products in
the field, that's where, when you're a smaller agency, you probably one don't
have the funding to test something.
And two, the other part, and this is the hard part of testing things.
A lot of times your small agencies are actually the ones that have the
ability to be innovative because, you know, if you have a smaller agency,
you have under a hundred cops.
One, that chief could be a lot more, um, influential because he or she can
almost meet with everybody in their department and share like, Hey, this
is what we're doing.
We're going to try and experiment.
You know, I want to test X, Y, or Z out.
And this is why we're doing it.
I worked with a police department, uh, Burlington, North Carolina.
Then Alan Balog was exactly that person.
Like, you know, went to every roll call, like met with all those people.
But when you test in the field with a small agency, because they're
smaller, they have less data.
So their crimes lower.
And a lot of times, like with a randomized control trial, you're really
looking at this difference between the treatment group and a control group.
And you're looking at the difference between the means of those two groups.
So if they already have low crime or, you know, a particular type of crime
and you're doing an intervention, it's really hard to see those differences.
And you can't ask a police chief to power the study correctly.
You can't ask him like, Hey, can I run this study for two to three years?
One, yeah, it'll just, it wouldn't sustain itself.
It would get messed up somewhere along the way.
And two, that's just an impossible task.
So I do think the smaller agencies really kind of have to go based on what some
of the bigger agencies do, but also take into consideration, like their
own culture and their own needs.
Um, but yeah, that's as far as where the research comes from.
And the good thing about, I think the place that we're at with evidence-based
policing is you have a lot of pracademics now, so cops that have become researchers
or even like Matt Varder, um, who did the, the draft one research, you know, he's
a lieutenant, so working in the field, but he has been trained and he really
understands how to do good randomized control trials in the field.
So he's great to work with because one, you know, that your data is good and
your randomization is going to be conducted, um, with fidelity.
So you usually get really good to research project.
So that's the nice thing is that with AI coming out, I think you'll see a lot
more testing of the products by both academics, pracademics, and the
practitioners in the field more, more rapidly or more quickly than you would
have seen it in the past.
Okay.
So we're, we're starting to run out of time.
Getting back to the article regarding the ethics of, of using evidence-based
policing, are there any implications that, that you like to mention regarding,
uh, the, the ethical aspects in policing?
I think honestly, like with the ethical component of it is if, if we know these
things work, we should be held to a standard, right?
Like that's the whole point of like becoming a profession is that there's
a standard that we're held to across the country and across the world,
just like medicine is.
So if you're either like ignorant to those things or refuse to use those
things, that should be like an ethical violation, right?
You, you should be as a police chief or police leadership wanting to use what
we know is the best possible policy and practice to create the most effective,
least harmful policies and practices to your communities and to your cops.
Well, thank you very much, Renee.
I appreciate your time and thanks for coming on the podcast.
Thanks for having me.
Have a great day.
You too.