When a white police officer shot an unarmed African-American teenager in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, last August, and when a predominantly white grand jury later declined to indict him, the resulting protests weren't just about Michael Brown's death. Instead, they were about the distrust, racism and militarized policing that contributed to the tragedy. Psychology can help counteract those forces and improve interactions between communities of color and police, psychologists said at a Nov. 12 briefing sponsored by APA in cooperation with Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.).
Psychology should be at the forefront of such efforts, said Jeffries, urging policymakers to draw on psychological science to answer such questions as why police officers view unarmed men of color as threats and how violent environments and stressful police encounters affect children.
Take the New York City Police Department's controversial "stop, question and frisk" policy, which entailed stopping large numbers of people on the street, 90 percent of whom weren't doing anything wrong and the majority of whom were men of color, said Jeffries. Something was causing the department's officers to see men of color as inherently criminal, even though the facts didn't bear those suspicions out, he said. "The discipline of psychology can help inform what was driving that behavior, implemented by tens of thousands of uniformed members of the NYPD," said Jeffries.
APA is committed to helping improve relations between police and the communities they serve, said Norman B. Anderson, PhD, APA's chief executive officer.
"As a nation, we must commit ourselves to facing the complex, difficult work of change so we can prevent these tragedies going forward," Anderson said. "That change starts with the willingness to talk honestly with each other and to have difficult dialogues regarding race relations and the persistence of racial bias."
The type of policing that led to Ferguson represents a step backward, said Ellen Scrivner, PhD, an executive fellow at the Police Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based group that works to improve policing via research and evaluation of policing practices plus training, technical assistance and other services.
Twenty years ago, Scrivner said, Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act and laid the groundwork for establishing community policing as the national paradigm. Rooted in community psychology, the approach focuses on building partnerships between police officers and the residents they serve, collaborative problem-solving and transforming police departments from the inside so that their focus becomes more about improving the quality of life and less about trying to control crime through the use of force. That shift helped bring crime to new lows in the 1990s, said Scrivner.
By the mid-2000s, however, budget cuts began to hinder police departments' ability to put community policing into practice. Then a new Department of Defense program began allowing the military to transfer equipment it was no longer using — items such as armored personnel carriers, military aircraft and even grenade launchers — to police departments at no cost. Thanks to a requirement that police use the equipment within a year or give it back, police departments expanded the equipment's use far beyond the original scope of anti-drug and anti-terrorism efforts. The resulting "warrior mentality" is what gave the world the image of tanks rolling into Ferguson with police in camouflage, said Scrivner.
Police tactics that derive from the "broken-windows" approach — focusing on minor offenses to prevent escalation — have also contributed to antagonistic relationships between police and citizens, said Tom R. Tyler, PhD, a professor of law and psychology at Yale Law School. The Ferguson incident, he pointed out, began with the low-level offense of walking in the street.
This kind of approach has led to distrust. That's particularly so among minority communities, whose members are 20 to 30 percent less likely than whites to express trust in police. Distrust leads residents to push back against authority, which can lead to spiraling violence, said Tyler. When the police distrust the community, officers rely on threat or use of force to get what they want.
"Although the police often say these policies are designed to lower the crime rate, the evidence doesn't support that," said Tyler. "There's very clear research to suggest that when police undermine trust, they promote crime." In one study, he said, young men in New York City who had experienced unfairness at the hands of police were twice as likely to engage in criminal conduct.
Tyler urged policymakers to support Department of Justice efforts to highlight the role of trust and confidence in policing and to retrain officers to see their goal as creating positive relationships with communities.
Lorraine Williams Greene, PhD, who served as the first manager of the Nashville police department's behavioral health services division, offered a look at community policing in action.
With support from the first African-American police chief of predominantly white Nashville, the department launched a program to fight racial profiling. It began by inviting community members to provide input and holding focus groups that included police, residents and researchers. The group surveyed residents about their opinions of the police. They then used that data to create training that wasn't just for police but for citizens as well.
"There was this idea of doing training with citizens so they could understand policing and why police do what they do and with police officers so they could understand the behaviors that would suggest to others that they're profiling," said Greene.
Rebecca A. Clay is a journalist in Washington, D.C.
