When police work becomes too routine and familiar, things go wrong, Emily Owens, professor of criminology, law and society, writes in the Washington Post. An excerpt:
Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin has been charged with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter, and three officers who were at the scene and did not intervene were fired (but not charged). The uncountable number of Americans who have seen the video of that incident — and who afterward saw police unleashing violence against protesters, including in front of the White House — may despair that police reform can ever work. Indeed, much more academic work has been done in estimating the value that policing brings to society — a review by Rand Corp. finds hiring an additional officer saves an average of $437,000 through crime reduction — than in measuring the costs of unfair policing on communities of color.
The most important reforms, of course, will arise from listening to the people who suffer from unjust police practices. But some academic work points the way to potentially promising changes to how police do their work that could lead to better outcomes. In 2018, for example, I and three colleagues published a study findingthat scheduling brief meetings between officers and sergeants, where they talked through encounters on the street, led to more measured responses to later incidents. The conversations were explicitly designed to make officers more conscious of the importance of “procedural justice” — that they should listen to each disputant, be open to correcting their own errors and keep an eye out for turning points that can escalate or de-escalate a situation.
Read her full commentary.