HS police undergo refresher course
All Hot Springs police employees, including sworn and civilian personnel, underwent a refresher course this week on treating people with dignity and “giving them a voice” as part of a training program out of Texas the department has participated in since 2016.
Each employee completed a four-hour class, held in six sessions from Monday through Wednesday, taught by Keene,
Texas, Police Chief Emmitt Jackson and Lake Dallas Police Chief Dan Carolla, co-founders and owners of Next Generation Policing, which offers lessons in a variety of subjects but “this time we focused on procedural justice and police legitimacy,” Jackson said Wednesday.
“This is basically a curriculum on treating individuals with basic human dignity and giving them a voice in the enforcement actions you take, hearing their side of the story and being impartial in your decisions,” Jackson said.
“One of the tenets we emphasize is that we as a profession need to move away from outcome-based policing and focus on process matters. How we get from point A to point B is equally important as what the outcome is,” Carolla said.
Jackson said the concepts they teach “are the same for front desk personnel or dispatchers,” noting that a dispatcher has to find out what the caller’s story is, “how they’re feeling and what’s going on. Someone may have called 911 20 times but I’m going to treat it like it’s the first time they’ve called and not just assume what’s going on.”
“The records clerk is just as important as the police chief because that may be the only person (the citizen) talks to that day. They are going to experience the police department through that one person and that is their world view from that point on,” Carolla said.
Jackson said they start each session by reminding officers “all their power and authority is voluntarily given by the citizens they serve. The very badge on their chest is really kind of borrowed from a longer legacy of police officers.”
Carolla stressed “we’re not instructors or teachers, we’re facilitators. Instead of standing up and lecturing, which has a short-term effect, we want the people in class talking to each other. We suck the fear out of the room and do exercises so people in the room trust each other and can open up about their experiences.”
Jackson said he was really impressed that in the very first session one person commented, “This class is good, but when they leave we need to continue these discussions amongst ourselves. What did we learn and where do we go from here?”
He said they spend an hour near the end of the session discussing the so-called “Ferguson incident” and the conditions that created it.
On Aug. 9, 2014, an 18-yearold African-American man was fatally shot by a white police officer in the city of Ferguson, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis, which sparked protests and riots and led to a debate about the relationship between police and African-Americans, use of force and other topics.
Asked what some of those conditions were, Jackson said, “A lot of police departments look at citations as a revenue generator. But the Department of Justice concluded Ferguson was so dependent on fines and fees it actually budgeted for them before they even occurred. It was a situation where the citizens were seen more as a taxing entity than as citizens to be served.”
“Socially they had withdrawn from the community,” Carolla said. “Their court ran a debtor’s prison. All of these things over time eroded their legitimacy in the eyes of the public.” He said the social contract between police and citizens involves citizens giving police the authority and power to police them but they expect police to “use the power responsibly, to be fair and be accountable for it.”
Jackson said it was a testament to Hot Springs Police Chief Jason Stachey that the concepts of procedural justice were seen being used internally by the command staff which made it easier for the employees “to mirror those behaviors outside these walls.”
Stachey said he first heard about the concepts of procedural justice six years ago and saw it as “something we really needed within all ranks of the department. It’s important from the chief to the newest officer that just joined the force. When you pull back the peel, the very core of it is essentially respect and customer service. Treating others as you would want to be treated.”
Stachey said because of the high call volume they see in Hot Springs, “it’s easy for officers to go from call to call to call and really not sit there and empathize with the person they’re talking to. You get in a hurry, but to that citizen, it’s the most important thing to them at that particular time. You need to just slow down a little and listen to them.”
Assistant Police Chief Walt Everton noted that someone may call to report a stolen license plate, which might seem like a low priority to the responding officer, but “it’s a big deal for them. That three- to five-minute interaction makes all the difference in the world. That’s what this class teaches. It humanizes us.”
Carolla said they discuss statistical surveys that still show law enforcement ranks “very high” in terms of public faith and confidence, “sometimes above organized religion or physicians. Because you focus on the 3 percent not obeying the law, you forget the other 97 percent who still respect and support you and hold you in high esteem.”
Jackson said they “try to drill that message home because one of the worst things that can happen to a policing organization is a sense of hopelessness. Once you have officers who believe the things they do don’t matter, you start to lose them. We try to show them they are still a superhero in the eyes of the people so go forth and act like it.”
Carolla said the HSPD is “an advanced audience at this point,” having undergone the training several times now.
“This is the third or fourth time some have experienced it,” Everton said. “But this is building blocks. They get a little more in depth each time. It’s a building process that is apparently working and that’s a good thing.”
“We want to be innovative,” Stachey said. “We are a progressive department and want to stay on top of issues facing the community and policing profession.”