The Dallas Divide: A Problem Technology and FirstNet Can’t Fix

I have long been an advocate for using technology to improve government and governing, and in particular for advancing law enforcement.   I’ve been a long-time supporter of building a nationwide public safety wireless broadband network – a network for priority use by first responders for their cell phones, body-worn video, tablet computers and sensors. And we are seeing that network come to fruition in FirstNet.

But there are some problems technology and FirstNet can’t fix.   Specifically, technology can’t repair the divide between law enforcement and the black community, underscored by the events in Dallas, Baton Rouge and Minnesota.

In fact, technology probably exacerbates those divisions, as smart phone video of officer-involved shootings and use of force goes viral on social media, which itself is another feature of modern society made possible by technologies such as the Internet and the Web.

As an “old white guy” I certainly have no special expertise on police-community relations and how to repair or improve them.   But I can cite some innovations which many communities could adopt:

• Community-police academies. The Seattle Police Department and many other major urban departments have such training, which helps educate non-law-enforcement people as to how their police and sheriff’s departments operate.   Of course people have to actually sign up for these courses, and then attend them.   And often they are operated at night, at times when people may be busy with family or work.
• Ride-alongs. Most departments have a ride-along program, where a citizen can ride along with a police officer and see law enforcement “in action”.   Trust me – too often it is fairly boring, but can be punctuated with moments of terror.
• Police situation simulators. Karen Johnson of the Black Alliance of Thurston County and Austin Jenkins of National Public Radio’s KUOW (University of Washington) put themselves into such a simulator recently.   They faced real-life situations similar to those cops find themselves handling, with some surprising results.
• Better police training. Ron Sims was the longest-serving Executive (Mayor) of King County (Seattle). He was the Deputy Director of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.  He lives in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Seattle, Mount Baker.  Yet he’s been pulled over, while driving, by cops 8 times.   He’s 68.  He’s African American.  Apparently he’s “driving while black”. How many of you reading this blog posts have been pulled over 8 times?
• 

  A Dallas Police Officer protects Protesters

  Guardian, not warrior, mentality. Sue Rahr, former King County Sheriff and now director of the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Center, advocates for this change in culture and attitudes by police agencies and officers.  Certainly the behavior of Dallas Police Officers during the recent sniper attack, putting themselves in harm’s way to protect the Black Lives matter protesters, is the highest exemplar of this change in attitude.

• Better police training. Many departments, including Seattle Police, are training hard with de-escalation training and crisis intervention programs.   Crisis intervention is phenomenal, as it seeks to have police officers support the mentally ill, homeless and others in crisis by getting them the services they need rather than taking them to jail or a mental health ward.  Seattle Police, in fact, are working with Code for America to develop a new app to make crisis intervention data available to police officers on smart phones and tablet computers.
• Open up the data. The Obama Administration launched a police data initiative, which 53 cities covering 41 million people have joined.   The open data portal is powered by Socrata, a Seattle technology firm.   Amazingly, the Dallas Police Department has been one of the most forthright in opening up its data, publishing datasets on use of force and officer involved shootings, something most other departments have failed to do.  Code for America publishes a report card on which police departments have released which datasets.   The Police Foundation has pushed departments to go beyond the White House initiative in being transparent in their actions and operations.
• President Obama’s Task Force on 21^st Century Policing.   This Commission, headed by Charles Ramsey, former Chief of Police in Washington, D.C. and then Philadelphia, made a number of recommendations to improve police-community relations.  I was honored to present some recommendations to the task force which were adopted in its final report.

The Seattle Seahawks Superbowl Victory Parade, 2014, which cell networks where jammed – one reason we need FirstNet

Technology and FirstNet have significant roles to play as well.  Many of the innovations above rely upon technology such as open data platforms, apps, and training simulations.   Body-worn video, in-car video and similar technologies to record how police operate will build community trust.   FirstNet is extraordinarily important to providing real-time two-way wireless communications for not only police and other first responders, but anyone who responds to public safety issues – transportation, public works, utilities, non-profits like the Red Cross and even teachers who are often “first responders” to incidents in their schools.

All of these innovations are cool and important.  But, ultimately, it is not technology which will bring law enforcement and the black community back into balance.  It is cops getting out of their cars and talking to people in cafes and barber shops and on the streets.    It is one community meeting after another where police officers and commanders show up to hear the real problems facing real people and modify their tactics to help.

We cannot rely on police departments and sheriff’s department for all of our public safety needs.  Keeping the community safe from those who prey upon us is, ultimately, everyone’s responsibility.

Police officers are also citizens, and need to think like citizens, not as warriors.   But also, perhaps every member of our communities needs to become a police officer, or at least put themselves in the shoes of cops.

Cops and Teachers: The New Social Workers

Social Work

The social workers and case workers of the future probably reside in our schools and police stations, carry gradebooks and body-worn video cameras, walk the halls of schools and the streets of our cities.

Let’s face it, police officers and teachers have always been astute, street-wise (and “hallway-wise”) psychologists.  Few people have the guts to be locked into a roomful of 30 high school sophomores in a required math class for 60 minutes.   Not too many of us have stepped out of a patrol car to investigate an assault in a bar only to be greeted by a crowd of drunken, angry, college students.  (Having been both a police officer and high school teacher, and faced both situations, I’ll take the bar crowd any day.)

Good teachers rapidly learn to “out-psych” their students and trick them into learning.    I’m not talking about the advanced placement classes, mind you.  Anyone can teach advanced placement English or high school calculus.   But trying to teach a classroom of C and D students basic English grammar is a challenge of a different order.  Good teachers rapidly develop techniques to control the class and actually make students interested in the material.

Similarly police officers – especially detectives – develop techniques to help discover concealed information from suspects and informants – even witnesses – and use it to solve crimes.

Social work, however, is becoming a new calling for teachers and police officers.

Foster High School

The Seattle Times recently wrote about Foster High School in Tukwila, Washington, and a turn-around in its performance.    The article states:

The school’s guidance counselors serve as de-facto social workers, fielding requests for help with utility bills and eviction notices — even dealing with bedbugs and moldy apartments.

“We come in and hear hard, hard stories,” said Laura Linde, Foster’s chief guidance counselor. “We don’t always have the resources to help.”

They usually find a way.

Teachers have long recognized that effects outside of the classroom have a huge effect on learning.  Angry, abusive parents, hunger, homelessness, fear, even out-of-date (“uncool”) clothing all affect students’ ability to learn.   In the past educators and schools felt there was little they could do to affect such outside influences.

School lunch programs were an early intervention, instituted before World War II, to address the issue of hunger in schools.   Some schools implemented uniforms to reduce social inequity between students which prevents learning.

Schools such as Foster take this intervention to a new level, actively seeking those factors which distract students, and working with parents and social service agencies to address them.   Perhaps individual teachers are not becoming social workers, but certainly they are at the forefront of seeing problems with learning and helping to identify specific problems with individual students, so guidance counselors and others can intervene.

Similarly, many police departments are trying to move from a “warrior culture” to more of a “guardian” one.   Former King County Sheriff Sue Rahr, now executive director of the Washington Criminal Justice Training Commission, has been a leader in such a cultural shift.     Part of the “guardian” idea is that police officers’ jobs are not just to apprehend criminals and catch members of the public doing something wrong (speeding), but rather to help determine and correct the underlying causes of crime in individuals and families.

Seattle Police Crisis Intervention Team

The Seattle Police Department, among others, has been at the forefront of this cultural shift.  Every Seattle Police Officer has received at least 18 hours of crisis intervention training.  More than 400 officers have received 40 to 80 hours of such training.  When police officers encounter people in crisis – specifically the mentally ill or homeless individuals who are potentially at risk – they attempt to engage social services to address their physical and mental health needs.  For individuals who police frequently encounter, the Crisis Intervention Team is building an individual Crisis Intervention Plan, which includes resources such as their caseworker, social worker, concerned family members and others who can be engaged to immediately help the individual.

Every such encounter is logged.   Sometimes an individual is violent, or armed, or so mentally impaired that officers have no choice but to use force and the result is jail or a mental ward.  But less than 7% of encounters end in this fashion.

Washington DC Frequent 911 Caller

Fire departments also encounter people in real or imagined medical crisis.  One woman called 911 in Washington D.C. for medical help 226 times in a single year.  Another study found that 14 to 27 per cent of calls to 911 for medical reasons are really not emergencies and could be handled in doctor’s offices or walk-in clinics.  A third study found that 1% of “frequent flyer” users account for 22% of the health care costs.

Salt Lake City addressed this with a “Nurse Navigator” program – a trained nurse-dispatcher handles low-acuity 911 medical calls, attempting to find the proper resources, other than a fire department paramedic and ambulance – to address needs of some frequent callers.

As Sergeant Dan Nelson of the Seattle Police told radio station KUOW’s David Hyde: “I say all the time, police and social workers are two completely different jobs while we’re going towards the same common goal. We want this person to not be relying on the emergency rooms and jails, not have to be such high utilizers of the system, and at the end of the day we want this person to have a nice productive life.”

I’m not sure where these efforts will ultimately lead.   Perhaps every American will, to some extent, become a social worker.  This actually would take us “back to the future” – back to a time when families and communities “took care of their own” before a time when government was expected to be the first line of attack for social problems.

But I hope the new equilibrium we reach does not abandon government programs all together, but rather involves most government workers – especially teachers and cops and firefighters – as “guardians” of the social fabric, yet keeps many critical social programs such as Medicaid, food stamps, school hot lunches and housing subsidies in place.

Of course there will always be hardened criminals, and evil people, arsonists and people so mentally unbalanced that they need to be institutionalized.  We’ll still need jails and mental hospitals and professional “guardians” of our social fabric.

But, with a little bit of luck, every American will become more involved again in taking care of our neighbors.

Can Police BodyCam Video be Public while protecting Privacy?

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray launches bodycam Workshop

You have a serious car accident. The police arrive and investigate. They issue a citation and write a report. The officers are wearing body-worn video cameras and their cars have dashcam video. At the end of the event the officer gives you a code. The next day you go online to the police department’s website, key in the code and all the materials regarding the collision are available to you – the videos, with a written transcript, the officers’ reports, the citation, the sketches and photographs of the accident scene, witness statements, and perhaps a history of other collisions and problems at that intersection.

That’s one vision laid out at a body-cam video workshop hosted by the Seattle Police Department on Tuesday, June 23. The event included officers from the Orlando, Louisville and Dallas police departments, plus representatives of the Police Foundation, Code for America and Socrata, the Seattle company which powers open data portals such as data.gov and data.seattle.gov. These organizations are all participating in the White House sponsored Police Open Data initiative, announced last month by the Obama Administration.

“Policing is in a crisis,” said Seattle Police Chief Operating Officer (COO) Mike Wagers several times during the workshop. “Police are not necessarily using more force or making more mistakes,” he added, but there’s been a change in the technology available to the general public. “Two-thirds of adults in the United States will own a camera-capable smartphone by the end of this year.” Those smartphones mean there is more video than ever being taken of police-citizen encounters and uploaded to YouTube and similar sites.

What’s the real future for police video?   Can the privacy of victims, children and witnesses be protected while at the same time making this video public?   Is it possible to “redact” or blur the faces and audio of such people to protect them yet release the video to the public?

The rest of this article is on GeekWire here.

See also the previous article discussing how Seattle Police held a hackathon in December, 2014, to find ways to redact video.

Implementing a body-worn video camera program requires much more than just buying the cameras themselves – there is storage and indexing and search and making the video public and much more – here is a previous blog post discussing these issues.

Seattle Needs More Video Surveillance

Violent crime statistics tell us that Seattle is safer now than it was 10 or 12 years ago; that violent crime – even in the last year – has decreased. But statistics are cold comfort to downtown shoppers in light of the September stabbing death of a Shoreline Community College professor after a Sounders’ game, drive-by shootings like the one at the Othello Street light rail station last month and the attack on a Metro bus driver downtown earlier this year.

Both Mayor Michael McGinn and Mayor-elect Ed Murray have proposed adding additional police officers — perhaps 15 to 25 more — to the Seattle Police Department. But those numbers are tiny: Putting an officer on the street costs $100,000 a year and, in order to make sure there’s one additional officer on the street at any given time, you’d have to add five officers to the department.

Clearly the city cannot afford to buy its way to improved public safety this way.

Luckily, technology provides a cheaper option: surveillance cameras.

Read the rest of this article on Crosscut here …

– Higher Tech Policing

Dubuque Police Department

Updated:  18 June 2011
Original Post:  2 August 2009

A long time ago in a city far far away I was a street cop. A police officer working the beat. It wasn’t a large city – Dubuque, Iowa – 65,000 people and probably 60 or 70 policemen. Yes “policeMEN”. The first women were hired into the Dubuque PD while I was there, and I – at 5′ 9″ and 170 pounds – was one of the smallest cops on the force.

In those days, technology was not really part of an officer’s life. Times have changed, they REALLY have changed. The Seattle Police Department has just implemented a new Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system which is fundamentally altering policing at the City of Seattle – the “SPIDER” project. Technology is now – literally – at the right and left hand of virtually every cop – and firefighter and emergency medical tech.

When I was on the street, my primary technology was the radio in my police cruiser. The voice radio was (and still is) the lifeline for public safety officers on the street. But, in the 1970s, when I walked out of the car, I also walked away from that lifeline. We didn’t have handheld or portable radios, nor did cell phones exist. If there was a problem when we were away from the car, we depended upon each other to “drive by” and check on us (and cops still do that), or on a citizen to use a land-line telephone to notify dispatch. That was scary.

Now police officers carry a handheld radio, and a lapel mike, and every Seattle radio has an emergency button which, when pressed, alerts dispatch center that the officer is in trouble. The emergency alert triggers a display of badge number on the dispatch console. The radios can communicate with officers throughout the region. And automatic vehicle location (AVL) shows the location of every police and fire apparatus in the City. All of this tech doesn’t mean policing is easier or safer than it was in the 1970s – on the contrary, there are new issues and dangers, which I’ll mention a little later.

We did reports by hand, on paper. We filled out index cards for car stops. And every call to police/fire emergency was logged on a card with a timestamp. When we wanted to get information about a license plate or driver’s license, the dispatcher looked up the info in a set of file cards or – this was really high tech in the 1970s – typed the request into a teletype machine for someone in some far city (like Des Moines) to look up on their index cards.

Now, things are much more high tech. First, people call 911 for emergencies. 911 is virtually ubiquitous in the United States, but barely existed in the 1970s. The police call-taker immediately sees the ANI/ALI (automatic number identification / automatic location identification) associated with your number. The call taker immediately enters all the information about the call into the Seattle Police Department’s new CAD (software written by Versaterm). [Fires or emergency medical calls are “hot transferred” from a police call-taker to a fire dispatcher, who enters the information into a Seattle Fire CAD, and you can actually view some real-time information about Fire 911 calls online here].

Dispatchers then dispatch the 911 call to an available police unit. An electronic map shows the location of every 911 call which is in-progress or waiting, the locations of police units and their status (free, working a call, etc.). A double click on a map icon brings up information about the call or the unit. Records management (also by Versaterm) is similarly automated, with reports now written electronically on laptop or in-vehicle computers directly by officers. A wide variety of information (e.g. address) is automatically verified, and the report is uploaded wirelessly.

The state-of-the-art in Seattle Police is even more high tech. Every patrol car has a digital video camera; every car stop is recorded, including the audio of the conversation from a wireless mic carried by the officer. Special license-plate-recognition vehicles (wirelessly connected to national databases) cruise the streets looking for parking scofflaws and stolen cars. Officers with BlackBerrys or their in-car vehicles can easily search for online information – a far cry from that teletype machine.

We are actively working on even higher speed wireless networking in the 700 MHz spectrum, which should allow two-way high-quality video transmissions to/from field units, including video from private security cameras in banks and stores. Fire units already carry electronic versions certain sorts of building plans, but in the future those building plans could be quickly updated to show the locations of hazardous materials or the detailed configuration of a school.

I’m certain high-tech has increased public safety through more rapid sharing of information, and has improved communications and therefore officer safety. This comes at a price, of course, and not just in dollars.   I’m not quite sure how dispatchers and police officers and firefighters stay current with the skills required to dispatch, provide policing, fight fires and provide emergency medical, AND also learn all this technology.  It is a challenge!

And officers today face dangers on the street which I never dreamed of in the 1970s – significant drug use, gangs, potential terrorists, and criminals who specialize themselves in using technology for identity theft, stalking, and crimes against children. I’m glad my experience as a police officer is behind me – I’m not smart enough or quick enough on my feet to face the challenges of the street today. But I hope – by continued wise application of technology – we can make cops, firefighters and the people they serve a bit safer.