Investigative Checklists in Policing

Checklists are intended to improve the efficiency of people who have to perform in a complex work environment.  Dr. Cory Haberman joins the podcast to discuss his research into the effectiveness of using checklists in policing.  He also talks about the use of virtual reality tools in policing research (including a mildly embarrassing story of learning to use VR goggles for the first time).

Main Topics

•Checklists demonstrated a significant improvement in evidence collection when used by streel officers when conducting a routine burglary investigation.
•It is important to recognize when and were checklists can help in police work.
•Virtual reality tools create an immersive environment for studying the police (and it can make research fun!).

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Transcript

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.
Checklists are a cognitive aid used to ensure that all components of a particular task are
completed.
This promotes the use of best practices and prevents simple but potentially devastating
errors of omission.
Checklists are considered an aid to improve the efficiency of teamwork, promote good communications,
and decrease variability between team members or events.
Essentially, checklists can guide task performance, and they have been adapted as an important
safety innovation in many high-risk fields.
For example, checklists have become a common tool in many medical settings as well as the
aviation industry.
Medical and aviation settings aside, they are all considered complex environments, but
anybody who has worked in policing knows that these are also complex environments as well.
As I've said in the past, mostly in the classroom, policing is not hard.
Digging a ditch with a shovel is hard work.
Policing is complicated.
To discuss the use of checklists in policing, I'm joined by Dr. Corey Haberman.
Dr. Haberman is an associate professor in the University of Cincinnati's School of
Criminal Justice, where he also directs the Institute of Crime Science.
His work focuses on crime in place, crime science, police effectiveness, and the application
of virtual reality to all of these topics.
In 2019, Dr. Haberman was selected as the U.S. National Institute of Justice Leeds Academic.
Thanks for joining the podcast, Corey, I appreciate it.
Hey, thanks for having me, Scott.
I'm looking forward to talking about this work today.
Great.
So when I was reviewing the research, and I always take a look at different research
studies that are being done, I was looking at your prior work when I was looking at this
study, and you've explored crime control tactics, the use of shot spotter technology,
police retention, and science based interviewing as well.
Can you give us an overview of why you became interested in checklists, particularly the
use of virtual reality?
Yeah, absolutely.
So those interests are really separate, and then they kind of got combined, if you will.
So the interest in checklists actually came from a friend of mine, Stu Greer, who was
working in the Morristown, New Jersey Police Department.
He was working on his master's degree over in Cambridge, and he's the one who really
thought, hey, I think we can apply checklists to investigations.
Just having some conversations with him, I was really interested in the work he was doing.
He was able to pilot his study in the field, and I think he would say his results were
a little bit mixed in terms of officers using checklists for initial investigations.
And one of the challenges that he had with anything was around implementation.
The other thing that him and I talked about a lot was the fact that there's no guarantee,
if you test checklists in the field setting, that the evidence items that he was interested
in the officers collecting were actually going to be there.
So that was kind of the challenge.
Going side by side with that, I had become, and still am, really interested in virtual
reality.
I don't think the end all be all is going to solve all of our problems in terms of research,
simulation, training, and law enforcement, but I do think it has some specific applications.
And so I was kind of thinking about his checklist idea, and I thought, well, in virtual reality,
we can control all the variables, right?
Everyone will get the same exact simulation.
And if the goal of the checklist is to improve evidence collection, then we will know whether
or not they collected the evidence that we put there for them.
And so it came kind of this way to study checklists in a more controlled setting, if you will,
was really the inspiration behind the study.
Right, and that's the beauty of the technology that's available these days.
It might have been 10 years ago that there was a study done, it was in Washington state
somewhere, it might have been Spokane, but I don't remember, where they were using virtual
reality, I'm sorry, not virtually reality, but the video simulators, the shoot, no shoot
video simulators to study police officers reaction times.
And so we actually a couple of us tried to replicate that out here.
So the technology is great for those kinds of things.
Now from a broader perspective, why should the police be interested in checklists?
I mean, let's face it, as I said, policing is complicated.
But is it really as complicated as like surgery or flying a plane?
Yeah, well, that's a good question.
And we have some current work in Manchester, New Hampshire, where we're kind of testing
checklists in the field.
And that is some of the reaction that we have had from officers.
I think the big piece of this is that checklists really are it's not rocket science in a lot
of ways in terms of the checklist, if you will, although we might use them to fly a rocket.
But the real idea is that it's just to check on things you already know.
And I think that's where people have sometimes they have kind of like the wrong perception
of checklists.
And so the checklist isn't going to teach anyone, in our case, how to do an investigation.
And if you ask any officer anywhere, you sit them down and say, hey, what should be on
the checklist?
They can all tell you exactly what should be on a good checklist.
No one's surprised when they see a checklist, what's on there.
The key I see that is it really deals with the human factor.
So the reality of somebody the night before they came to work was at soccer practice late
with their kids or they wanted to watch another episode of a show, so they stayed up late
or the day before was a long one, whatever it might be, all these human factors.
And so we just make simple mistakes.
And really, the checklist in policing, I see it as just a quick reminder.
No one thinks you're going to pull out the checklist and not know that you should have
done these things, say, in our case, in our study in the course of responding to a call
for service.
But it's a quick reminder when life gets in the way, you're tired, you're stressed,
you're worn out, you just simply make a human mistake.
And it's just a quick check on your work to like, oh, yeah, I got it all.
I'm good.
I can move on to my next steps.
Right.
I was doing an evaluation of a non-fatal shooting team in Buffalo just pre-COVID.
And I was working with a guy who was out in Rochester, and we put together a checklist
based upon what they already said they did.
And we used it for them.
And it was not an evaluation of the checklist itself, but we used that and they used it.
And you're just reminding me when you said you're at your kid's soccer practice
or you stay late.
Or what I was thinking is these non-fatal shooting detectives would get a call at 2 o'clock
in the morning because nobody's on and there was a shooting that night and boom,
they're out the door.
So the checklist would probably contribute to them.
Oh, yeah, just I'm so tired.
So I'm glad I didn't forget that.
Yeah, absolutely.
Or routinized work, right?
Because for very experienced officers and investigators,
I've done some of these dozens, if not hundreds, or some people,
maybe thousands of times, right?
Certain types of calls.
And so I think it's we get in our habits.
We take our shortcuts.
And again, it's not so much that these checklists are going to surprise
somebody or wow somebody, right?
It's really this kind of just check on being human, which is most of policing,
right, at the end of the day.
So a quick follow up.
Clearly, the checklist can be used when an officer or detective is,
you know, when they have what I and this is what I call and I've been calling it
this for years, the luxury of time.
But are there any thoughts on how far these tools can go in policing
and with the reading limits?
Yeah, so that is that's a real, I'd say, kind of question or idea
that's being explored with our Manchester study,
which is a little bit different than, you know, the virtual reality study
that I think we'll probably get into in a little bit.
But yeah, absolutely.
So that is that is a huge question as when is the proper time to use the checklist?
And certainly, you know, the checklist that we've developed in Manchester,
the training has that component built into it that we don't, you know,
you're not getting this thing out before the scene is cleared, right?
You're not getting this out before you ensure that there's nobody present
with a weapon, that the, you know, the scene's not been secured,
you know, even in terms of just making sure you have appropriate legal consent
or, you know, a warrant to to start collecting evidence, those types of things.
And so in the course of investigations, absolutely, I think it's kind of
it's more of an after the fact check on work, if you will.
But I do think there are other applications that I've heard from folks
in the field where it could be a more real time piece, if you will.
So an example of that is like officers handing a critical situation
after that situation has been resolved, if you will.
You know, everybody is safe.
There's no longer a threat to anybody.
Then I think because that's a situation where maybe supervisors
have never handled that, depending on where they are in their career,
what police department, you know, where they work, those types of things.
That might be a situation where you pull out a checklist and OK, OK,
what are the next things we're going to do?
So I think that might be a case where they can be used in more real time.
But it really probably depends on what, you know, what situation
you're going to apply the checklist to and, you know, it's use case,
really, at the end of the day.
OK, so let's let's jump into the research that you did with the virtual reality.
Your study focused on one particular area of policing, a burglary investigation.
You know, after the call comes in, the burglaries over.
And this is being done by a street level officer.
Why was this part of policing important to study?
Or was it just more or less a type of pilot study to see if checklists had use?
This resonated with us a lot because, you know, Scott, you're well aware of we,
you know, about 50 years or so, we've considered those initial
responding officers to be key in the terms of how that case goes. Right.
They are often the ones that collect the evidence or at least document
the existence of evidence that is going to influence
the rest of the direction of that investigation.
And so we really wanted to, again, because of the stress,
you know, nowadays in policing, right, when there's huge concerns over
just a number of officers that are out there, the time that's available
to handle these types of situations and so on and so forth. Right.
So I wanted to be sure that you could set up initial
responding officers in the kind of the best the best way possible.
And so main going back to the idea is a checklist is kind of a check
on that work that have you done everything you can in this call?
Are you sure you're ready to close it type of situation?
And then there's all that information to make it into your report.
And so that got us motivated for the checklist to be really about
the initial investigation and those initial responding officers.
Because we just thought that there's a lot of payoff there
in terms of the value to a case going forward.
Oh, yeah. OK.
So your study asked a very straightforward, simple question.
If police officers have a checklist, will they be more likely
to collect evidence from a crime scene than an officer who does not have a checklist?
Can you give us a quick overview of how you studied this?
Yeah. So this was this was a lot of fun to pull the study off.
So we use virtual reality.
This I want to interrupt you.
And this is where I'm going to tell people.
Yeah, nerdy research can be fun.
So I continue.
Well, my colleague, J.C. Barnes, who worked with me on a study,
you know, we like to say that we were playing video games at work, if you will,
which is not it's not really accurate at all.
But, you know, it does seem like that.
Or that's how some people see see virtual reality sometimes.
But yeah, so we had basically a standard simulation.
Basically, officers would get into the checklist or get into the virtual reality scenario.
There was a little bit of training and onboarding.
And that's actually when the concept of the checklist got introduced.
So officers are randomly assigned to our treatment group.
They would have the checklist and all they had to do is look down at their wrist,
just like a watch, if you will, and they would be able to see that checklist.
The control group, we don't ever talk about checklist.
It's basically the same exact everything about the simulation.
It's exactly the same, except the checklist functionality is not there.
We don't talk about it. They can't look at their wrist.
If they look at their wrist, all they would see is the robot hand.
Basically, so we do a little bit of orientation.
They get used to the controls, how to move around a room, how to pick up objects,
those types of things.
And then we once they felt comfortable,
they could basically click start in the simulation.
And then there would be there was an image that was like they were in their patrol car,
like the front seat of a patrol car.
They would hear the same exact flash over the radio that says,
hey, you're going to go to a burglary.
You know, basically, the flash would be that the victim's in the driveway
waiting on you and no other details.
It was purposely less vague.
Should back up and say, before we get to that point,
when they were entered into the simulation, we told them that,
you know, you're going to handle a call for service just like you would,
according to your experience and training, just do what you would always do.
So then they, you know, they get they arrive at the scene.
They're outside in the simulation.
There's basically an entire street block that they can interact with.
Several houses on the block.
But the victim more or less approaches them, goes through a dialogue, tells them,
you know, hey, I came home from work, found my house was burglarized.
There's some, you know, there's some things that are turned over inside.
I'm not really sure I stayed outside.
I was too scared to go in.
And that's it, basically.
And it's very vague information after that.
From there, then we just set the officers loose
and they navigate the house.
They can go up and down the street.
They can knock on doors if they go up to one of the neighbors doors.
You know, basically, if somebody's home, they'll answer the door
and talk to them and so on.
The only catch is that it's it's kind of scripted dialogue.
So they're they actually can't speak back.
They just kind of hear information.
So there's some limitations that we had of the technology,
but it's much farther along.
But basically, officers move through that simulation and we tracked
whether or not they collected five different evidence items.
And it turns out that basically everybody collects
the the two evidence items that were inside the home.
But our checklist folks, about 80 percent of them.
And it depends on on each of the three items.
But about 80 percent of our folks in the checklist treatment group
collected the three items that were outside the home.
Whereas 80 percent of the control group without the checklist
did not collect the evidence items.
So it's almost, you know, a flip, if you will.
I was not expecting the difference to be to be that huge to be totally.
I had to go back and look at the data.
I was like, are we sure we didn't miscode something?
Are we sure that, you know, those were the results?
So I was I was like, wow, that's that's pretty clear cut for us.
And so again, I think it made a lot of sense in terms of the checklist
because it goes back to that they're a check on human factors
and the human factor is why would I go outside and, you know,
go up and down the street because it's more time and I'm tired
and I want to clear this call because there's another one coming on the radio.
Right. And so the results are very convincing for at least the future
and potential value of checklists in this context.
Yeah. OK. So so the virtual reality, they have goggles on.
Are they actually walking a city block?
Is it inside or is it just like a simulated walk?
You have to, you know, keep moving in that direction.
It's just really curious.
Yeah, no, I wish.
So you can.
And there are some commercial systems out there.
We had a very small budget.
We actually built this whole simulation on roughly like eight
thousand dollars was the cost of it.
So not in ours.
So in our scenario, you use a joystick to navigate around.
You had controllers in your hands. Yeah. Yeah. So
that was part of the kind of getting acclimated to the scenario
on the simulation.
So we spent time teaching officers how to use those controls and so on.
But it's like anything that the technology that gets used, it advances.
And so you're at a starting point.
So real, real quick, what was you said there were five items on the list?
Yes. Can you can you tell us what what they were?
Yes. So there was basically, if you think about it, a a blood spatter
on a refrigerator, like someone had cut their hand and kind of, you know,
there was there were footprints in a broken window.
When someone came in, you could see very clearly muddy footprints. OK.
There was an item left in a trash can.
It was basically a glove left in a trash can in the house.
And then you could go next door, the immediate next door neighbor.
There's a big there was a big camera on their house.
So if you did any looking outside, I'm talking this was not like a modern
day ring camera. This is like a 1990s like surveillance camera.
It was purposely made to be noticeable. Right.
So you see the camera, you can knock on the door and the person would tell you,
yeah, you know, I'll check my camera as I think I have some footage.
I'm going to send it to you.
And then across the street was another house
where the setting was kind of like evening time.
So the lights were on at these houses to kind of make it look like,
you know, somebody was there and entice you to to come look.
And when you knocked on that door, the resident would come out and say,
you know, basically, yeah, I saw a car over there.
It looked weird. It's not normally over there.
And so I wrote down the license plate number. Here it is.
And so those were the five pieces.
So I think I misspoke earlier.
We had three inside the house and two outside the house. Yeah. OK.
Now, real quick is after learning what you added to the list and what you didn't
add, were there things you you you either left off for some reason
or that you you might have wanted to add in?
Yeah. So the this was the kind of I think is one of the limitations of the study.
I don't the checklist is is not it wasn't exactly how I would design it for practice.
And we've actually in our work in Manchester, we've we've done a lot of work
with the officers and the detectives to understand what should go
into the design of the checklist.
So in this case, I think to be totally honest, we were kind of working with
confines of trying to program the simulation.
What was doable? What was, you know, that type of thing?
So those five items were chosen because we thought more or less,
basically, they could be pulled off.
They could be programmed.
They would be available.
And then with the idea that the inside, outside dichotomy
and kind of this, you know, canvassing of the surrounding area,
we assumed that would be kind of a high, high maintenance, high workload
piece of evidence to collect.
So that's where you might see some some value.
So, OK, so you had roughly 80 percent,
you know, did and 80 percent didn't, more or less.
Yeah, that is that is a little surprising.
Yeah, I was I, you know, but I guess kind of backing up from that,
you know, thinking a little bit about how the simulations unfolded.
I do. And this is why I'm interested also in seeing this kind of play out
and the real world setting to see if, you know, we see such such big impacts.
But, you know, officers were very into the simulations.
So, you know, we were told it was very believable.
You know, we had a situation at least one got down on their hands
and knees while, you know, while wearing the in the virtual reality,
got down on their hands and knees and turned to the side and looked under the bed.
So people were physically moving.
They were into it.
And so I do believe, you know, we could actually see them
looking at their wrists with every time they're in the they had to,
you know, lift up their wrists physically in the real world.
So, you know, it did seem that they were very into the simulation
and they believed it and bought into it.
Yeah, it's funny that I was reading an article the other day
and talked about the the the VR simulations and the
virtual reality video rooms.
And they had done a study.
I don't remember exactly what the what the what the mechanism was,
but they found that the officer's heart rate was really like through the roof
on some of the things that they were doing.
And these are simulators and the cops knew they were in simulators.
And that's what we had.
We didn't write about it, but we had published a paper a couple of years ago
on memory recall, using that to shoot, no shoot simulation.
And the officer, one officer, I was in the room in the back watching
and he hugged the wall because there was it was in the basement of the building.
And it was a completely, you know, nicely done room.
But we're one of the one of the struts for the building itself
was was interfering with the room.
So it just like it was gave you a six.
It gave you a six inch area to block any potential danger coming from the door.
And he hugged the wall at that little six inch area.
And I was like, holy crap, they're really into this.
And this is and they know it's a simulator.
It was amazing at the things that I'm not going to.
I don't want to talk about my research because we're going to.
I want to get into yours a little bit more.
But you're right. The idea of of these.
Well, they're not real.
Yeah, we know they're not real, but these cops are treating them as serious issues.
Yeah, oh, absolutely.
I mean, the technology has come a long ways.
And so the the fully immersive headsets,
people, people believe they're in those situations.
You can see this. You can survey folks some of the work that we're doing
right now in Hamilton County Sheriff's Office.
It's a de-escalation virtual reality study.
Officers are reporting very high immersion, if you will,
into these to these these scenarios.
But also just anecdotally, we've seen people
and yet and this is a big thing.
And someone asked me, you know, we want to have virtual reality in my agency.
What should we do?
Number one thing, which thankfully cops are really good at safety
because people do believe they're in this scenario.
So they will lean up against walls.
But in the real world, there's no wall there.
So they will just keep going. Right.
Oh, or, you know, set an item down on a table or go to pick up an item.
And they expect the physical table to stop their movement.
But it doesn't anymore.
And they keep they keep going.
And so there are some, you know, it's really tragic.
If you look, you can find some out there, new stories of people
in their personal homes, you know, playing video games
and those types of things in virtual reality and having
accidents, unfortunately.
Right. Because you're because it's so immersive.
But I mean, you get hot, you sweat.
And it's what you know, it's what really convinced me that virtual reality
could have application and law enforcement was just by doing it.
I don't know if we have time.
I'll try to tell a quick story here.
I know we have some other topics.
But, you know, I when I was exploring virtual reality technology, I was,
you know, just playing video games, more or less, trying to figure out
like what was out there, what was the lay of the land?
What what does this technology look like? You know?
And so it was Friday night.
It's probably like 10 or 11 o'clock.
My kids were asleep.
My wife had fallen asleep on the couch.
And I was like, well, hey, I'm going to break this
this headset out and just mess around on it.
And I was playing this really popular virtual reality game.
It's more or less like a.
Describe it as a force on force kind of game.
It's called Pavlov.
It's like a army kind of,
you know, call of duty if people are familiar with video games type situation.
And you're basically going against another team, right, as a as a challenge
to see kind of like last last person standing, if you will. Right.
So I'm in the video game I had just played.
I didn't really wasn't really aware of the controls, I mean, but I'm playing.
And I turn around and there's a guy coming right at me and I I basically scream.
I go, oh, you know, you can guess the rest of the words and I throw a punch
to stop this guy because I mean, that's how you play the game. Right.
I throw a punch while I had gotten too close to the wall in my living room.
And I punched our TV that's hanging on the wall. Right.
So my wife springs up.
She's like, oh, my God, what's going on?
What are you doing? Right.
Right. And that was the moment where I go, wow, this stuff's like it's real.
Like virtual reality is like I had no, you know, that was my
my reaction to this combat situation in this video game.
So, yeah, yeah.
So so that actually brings up something else
when it comes to the the the virtual reality goggles.
Now, again, I'm a I'm a baby boomer.
I'm I'm I'm pretty old.
So none of that stuff.
I've never even, you know, worn virtual reality goggles.
But I just have curiosity in this.
I don't think you studied this, but you're going to, you know, generation,
you know, Zease police officers who are young.
And this is just they grew up on this.
So not just the age, it would be one of those things you'd have to ask.
OK, you know, how old are you?
And you can assume that they played video games or not.
But it almost might it might be one of those variables.
Have you ever played video games?
Just just maybe it makes sense to include that.
I don't know. But the idea that you might get a different response
from somebody who did because they're so used to it.
Yeah. So we didn't have much difference in our sample of that.
We were actually surprised. I can't remember the exact numbers.
There were a fair number of folks who actually reported virtual reality
experience and a couple of people anecdotally told us,
oh, my kid has one of these headsets.
I, you know, I was trying it out.
We did. We did not.
I don't remember the exact number.
We did not control for it because it was relatively balanced
in our treatment and control group.
And we had an experiment.
But I do think that that's the case.
But I also think there's
there's potentially an opportunity there because.
You know, as you recruit younger folks into the workforce
and typically patrol officers are young folks, right?
There's a time in my career, I was the same age as patrol officers.
And now most of them are younger than me.
They may that may be attractive to them, right?
That may be an opportunity for training and in some ways,
you know, like it allows people to train on their own time, potentially,
depending, you know, as long as the curriculum is set up
and they're training on things you want them to train on and so on.
So I think it's there's opportunity there.
In our study, we didn't have any issues with any.
We only had one issue with somebody who was couldn't
basically navigate the virtual reality system.
They had some challenges.
They more or less never really got into the simulation.
I think we footnote that they are they're not included.
Their data is not included in the in the study.
But so we only had that come up one time.
But I do also think the commercial systems,
and it doesn't matter, you can pick any of them, are pretty
are pretty good and pretty user friendly.
So I think that that won't be as big of a barrier moving forward.
OK, so based on the research you did and maybe
maybe based upon your understanding from the extra study
that you're doing in Manchester, you said?
Yeah, yeah, Manchester, New Hampshire.
So based on your study in Manchester, New Hampshire, or,
you know, this study that you did that when you published already,
when I was before I talked to you, I did some exploration
about the checklists in aviation and medicine.
I didn't dig deeply, but I found some barriers to the acceptance.
Are you seeing any of that in policing?
You hinted at that earlier a little bit.
So the one of the pieces of feedback that we had from the pilot
use of the checklist in Manchester was effectively
a lot of people felt like, you know, this was not new.
Like they would get the checklist and they would say, yeah,
I know I'm supposed to do all these things.
Our pilot was with day shift officer officers
who were actually quite experienced, right,
because they have the seniority to select a day shift.
And so many of them would say, like, hey, you know, I've got 10 years.
I've got 15 years, whatever it is on the job.
Like, I know I'm supposed to do this.
And so the the that was that's the barrier, the counter argument.
And we we adjusted the the training a little bit that went out when
when the training went when the checklist went patrol wide was
we we actually expect that to be the case.
We actually know you guys know.
And actually, the checklist was the one that we're using in Manchester
was more or less designed by their patrol officers and their detectives.
It's not like this externally imposed thing by by research,
which I don't think research should ever ever work that way.
But and so we say, yeah, we want you to know this.
This is really a check, like we said at the kind of the beginning of the podcast
was the check on those days when you're just human and you forget more or less.
And that's the and that's the idea.
So there are some concern.
I do have some concerns
of if if that will be like a stigma attached to these checklists.
And I've heard anecdotally from another agency,
checklists were not
well-liked by the supervisor who really adhered rigidly to them.
And and so people felt like it was like this performance measurement
that they could never get right, because there was always something missing
from the checklist. Sure.
All right. So we've got a few minutes left.
What are two or three implications for police practice, personnel
or even police leaders when it comes to using checklists?
Well, I think I think we're still kind of in our infancy.
So I think the the number one is I think that they're viable
and potentially usable.
I do believe that they have to be designed with the end users,
you know, in concert, so it's not something that should be developed
and then, you know, pushed down on the folks.
I think you've kind of got to get their fill and their take
and bring them along through the through the process of designing a checklist.
We will see.
I'm not sure, you know, we'll find out if they are impacting investigations.
These initial investigations in in Manchester will be able to see
if there's more evidence collected
or even just how the report writing changes over time.
But I think, you know, I think that it's but there's a lot of potential there.
I also think there's potential for later steps in the investigation as well.
And then there's a whole bunch of other areas that I think that we probably
could use checklist, but we don't know for sure. Right.
So if I put on my, you know, I'm a professor.
I'm going to, you know, advocate of evidence based policing.
If I put on my my evidence based policing hat, I don't think we know.
And I think that's where, you know, the synergy between researchers
and practitioners, we can we can start to figure this out because my hunch
and the way I typically, you know, work in terms of research is
it's usually not my idea.
You go to the field and the folks in the field will tell you
what is a good idea, what should be researched.
And I think we just need to hear from folks in the field like, oh, yeah,
I think I would want to checklist in this area.
OK, let's find out if it has the the impact that you think it does.
And then if and so I think I would leave it more to the field
in terms of where we're going to use them.
But I think there's a lot of potential.
Absolutely. But it's still pretty early.
OK, with a few minutes left, tell us more about if you if you can,
if you're comfortable telling us about Manchester.
Yeah, so that's a Bureau of Justice Assistance, Smart Policing Initiative
Grant working with Lieutenant Barter, Matt Barter, who's
National National Institute of Justice lead scholar,
somebody who really believes in improving the field through science.
And and he's kind of leading the implementation of that.
We're working together on the evaluation.
In that case, we have a checklist that's being applied
mostly to kind of property or property adjacent crime.
So burglary and robberies.
Some people go back and forth as that violent as that property.
And then it's also being applied to their their aggravated assault.
So so there's our violent crime, if you will.
But that this checklist is for the initial responding officer.
And it's basically it walks them through an entire initial investigation.
There's actually some stuff on there that's more preliminary, if you will.
So just that they probably will not.
They will do before they get the checklist out, quite honestly,
like securing a scene and so on.
But it has kind of these checks that just to make sure.
And then there's some, you know, some stuff on there about making sure
they have the appropriate legal authority before they start collecting evidence.
But it basically walks through
the notion of identifying and documenting the people involved,
you know, victims, witnesses, that types of thing,
photographing the scene, making sure that they get all the photographs
at the right distances, you know, close up, medium, long distance, if you will,
documenting and labeling evidence, you know, tagging or calling someone
in to collect it, depending on what the evidence and then canvassing
and kind of documenting that canvas, which I think there
is a lot of value in, because sometimes if a patrol officer documents
a canvas or, you know, canvases, nobody answers or so on.
Right. And it may not get documented because it's not helpful in this case.
But actually, it is for the detectives to know that somebody did or did not answer
the door and those types of things.
So that's kind of the gist of the checklist.
There's specific items on there.
And then as the as the investigation wraps up, there's some items on there
about whether or not they need to issue any information to the rest of the department.
Emails, intelligence, you know, bolos, that type of thing.
So that's that's the gist of it.
We are looking at whether or not evidence collection,
particularly by initial responding officers, is increasing
before and after the checklist was implemented.
So we're not this this is not a randomized control trial.
So it's a kind of pre post design.
But our hope is that, you know, you'll see evidence
either collected or in the reports, you'll see them talk about attempts
to collect it, but we're unable to because it didn't exist.
And then some of the other outcomes that we're looking at is how it's impacting.
It will impact call for service time.
Are they on the calls for or, you know, shorter or longer time, that type of thing.
So it's still in its infancy where we've we've rolled out the pilot
and then we've talked to done interviews with the pilot officers.
I think it's very promising.
But as a true scientist, we don't know until we run the run the data.
Well, it's it's for the report at some point.
Yeah, and it sounds ambitious.
It's really good that these things are going beyond just, OK,
we we've got the initial research and then people will stop and they won't.
And again, sometimes, you know, you're in a position where you're at Cincinnati.
You can get those grants.
Other people are positions where they just can't do that.
But it's great to hear it, Corey.
This was really interesting information.
And I'm really glad you came in the podcast.
Well, I appreciate you having me.
I enjoyed talking about it and happy to talk checklist
of virtual reality with anyone who's interested.
Very good. Thanks, Corey Haberman from the University of Cincinnati.
I appreciate your time.
Thank you. Have a great day.
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