Opinion: Changing police culture won't come easy

It’s now been two weeks since video was released showing five Memphis police officers savagely beating Tyre Nichols, sparking renewed calls for police reform and racial justice nearly three years after George Floyd.

But unlike Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police — the visceral footage ignited national outrage and protests that stretched on for weeks — the Memphis attack is already fading from the headlines. Protests erupted in pockets but have since dissipated, the push for reform already tempered.

A combination of desensitization and lack of a clear racial narrative — the five officers who held, punched, kicked and robbed Nichols of his humanity, and dignity, were also Black — has comparatively muted cries of systemic racism. That the officers were quickly dismissed and charged with second-degree murder, along with swift condemnations by the Memphis police chief, mayor and political leaders across the country, is also a noticeable shift from previous episodes of police violence.

Perhaps America’s political infrastructure is adapting (condemn quickly and meet public outrage head on), but Nichols’ death also underscores what’s become an overly simplistic racial narrative. Systemic racism has deep roots in the culture of law enforcement, but there’s been no productive, national discourse on the history and causes, and certainly no political consensus on exactly how to address it.

Instead, post-Floyd demands to “defund the police” and eradicate white supremacy from our public institutions have been met with a fierce backlash. The real culprit, according to the right, is “wokeism” and the left’s persistent coloring of America as inherently racist. The sudden awakening to long-missing historical context enlightens only those who wish to be enlightened. In this void, “systemic racism” quickly bloats into an insurmountable mountain, inducing our collective paralysis. What, exactly, are we to do?

It starts with recognizing law enforcement is merely symptomatic. Yes, police culture needs to change. But how? Police departments across the U.S. are struggling to recruit and retain officers after Floyd, and proactive, deterrence-minded law enforcement is now deemed too risky by many who wear the uniform. Hence the rise in what’s known as “hot spots policing,” which allows departments to use their limited resources to target high-crime areas.

Gun violence spiked during the pandemic. Many cities, including Richmond, saw gun-related homicides jump significantly in 2021. Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis formed the now-infamous Scorpion unit (Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods) that was responsible for brutally assaulting Nichols, ultimately leading to his death, in response to an alarming rise in murders. In 2021, Memphis reported more than 300.

“There is pressure to just — do something,” explains Richmond’s acting police chief, Rick Edwards. Richmond also has a hot spots policing initiative aimed at reducing gun violence that began last year in response to an uptick in homicides (90 in 2021), the highest count in nearly two decades. Last summer, Edwards worked with the department’s crime analysts to break the city into one- to three-block areas (there are 29,000 of them) and identify those that have the highest incidents of gun-related violence. After identifying the top 25 hot spots, the department then issued a directive to patrol officers to visit these areas several times a week — not to enforce or make arrests, but to simply show up and make their presence felt. It worked: from June 1 to Sept. 5, there was a 73% drop in homicides in the 1st precinct, where 19 of the top 25 hot spots were located, and a 13% drop in nonfatal shootings. The effort has since been expanded to all four precincts.

Recent research shows the effectiveness of such policing. David Weisburd, professor of criminology and executive director of the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy at George Mason University, co-authored a study in 2021 that found hot spots policing when officers are trained in “procedural justice” tactics — during encounters, officers are taught to treat citizens with empathy and respect and take into account their explanations before any police action is taken — led to an overall reduction in crime.

The study, drawing from nine-month samplings between 2017-2020 in Tucson, Arizona; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Houston, Texas, reported a 14% drop in crime incidents in the areas policed by those trained in procedural justice compared those units that were not.

“Citizens want police, but they want police to treat them with respect and dignity,” Weisburd says. “When we took this approach, we gained really good results.”

Hot spots policing works. But with more than 16,000 law enforcement agencies in the U.S., there’s a wide variation in how such policing is conducted. Some are more enforcement-oriented (think Memphis) while others, such as Richmond’s initiative, are more benevolent. The problem is that most officers don’t undergo procedural justice training, which costs time and money when few departments have much to spare. In Weisburd’s study, officers underwent five days of such intensive training beforehand.

There’s a growing consensus that the culture of policing has to change, particularly when it comes to high-crime neighborhoods in major cities. But like everything, politics gets in the way. When crime and murders go up, the pressure to bring the numbers down through ramped-up enforcement almost always follows suit. Expecting police culture to rid itself of systemic racial bias in this environment is a fantasy.

It’s easy to watch the Memphis videos and see the problem as a few bad actors who clearly lacked anything resembling empathy for another human life. But the brazenness of the assaulting officers suggests otherwise. They viciously attacked Nichols, mind you, after turning on their body cameras. The video even recorded them fist-bumping afterward.

Five police officers should be capable of taking an unarmed, “150-pound man into custody without beating him to a pulp,” Edwards says incredulously. “I can’t imagine them thinking they could get away with this. The only thing I can surmise is that it is a cultural issue.”

Changing the culture will require an honest look at the root causes, and an understanding that policing is a symptom — not the cause — of persistent racial and economic injustice. But there are attainable goals, if the political will exists: Officers can be trained to prioritize treating people with dignity and respect. The tools exist, and it’s been proven to work. Why not start there?