Stop and frisk
The solution to Ferguson, Missouri, the Staten Island New York City, and the Cleveland, Ohio, issues of police tactics is not "Stopping Stop and Frisk" as the February Monitor suggests. Chicago loses $50 million and New York City NYC $100 million a year in public safety officer settlements. The solution is the public safety selection tests and fitness-for-duty assessments. No matter what police tactic employed or training public officers receive, if a government entity employs an at-risk or violent-prone individual, there will be challenges and likely future settlements.
The issue is that public safety departments are not using risk assessments as part of selection and fitness-for-duty evaluations, and if they do, the ones commonly available have area under the curve or receiver operating characteristics from 0.69 to 0.75, meaning that one of four at-risk for violence are over or under identified. The Morris Justice Project — although intellectually teasing — won't solve the issue of hiring "at-risk" public safety officers given the liability settlement facts going back decades and the well-known challenge of public safety officers committing suicides every 17 hours losing hundreds of thousands of training dollars for government entities that taxpayers pay for.
Robert John Zagar PhD, MPH
Chicago
Correction
In the February Monitor on page 78, the list of newly elected board and committee members should have included Dr. Lisa Grossman as a new member of the Finance Committee.
