National Law Enforcement Experts Come to Burlington to Share Ideas on Police Reform

Update, March 1, 2023: This event was postponed due to a winter storm. It has been rescheduled for 6 p.m. on March 12.

Rising crime rates. Police departments struggling with low morale and dwindling ranks. A steady drumbeat of news stories about cops who’ve abused their authority or broken the law. And communities distrustful of the people who were hired to protect and serve them.

There’s a crisis in law enforcement. Burlington, and Vermont, aren’t alone in confronting these problems. But the turmoil also provides a window of opportunity for reimagining how community policing is done in the 21st century.

That’s the belief of Sean Smoot, a national expert on police reform, who will join Yale Law School professor Tracey Meares for a free community discussion at the Flynn in Burlington on Thursday, February 23. The forum, titled “Collaborating Public Safety,” is sponsored by the Flynn and will be moderated by a third expert, Deborah Spence, assistant director of the federal Office of Community Oriented Policing Services.

Smoot, 53, is the managing partner of 21CP Solutions, a Chicago-based consulting firm that helps communities make their law enforcement agencies safer, trustworthy and more effective. He serves on teams that monitor police departments with histories of abuses, including those in Baltimore and Cleveland. Smoot served as a public safety policy adviser to the Obama-Biden presidential transition team.

Meares is an expert in urban policing and served with Smoot on president Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, created in December 2014 to address, among other things, the police culture that led to the deaths of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and others at the hands of law enforcement officers.

Smoot spoke with Seven Days by telephone last week.

SEVEN DAYS: There’s a sentence in the presidential task force’s final report from 2015 that reads, “Law enforcement culture should embrace a guardian — rather than a warrior — mindset to build trust and legitimacy…” How do we change that culture when many of the people recruited to become cops have a warrior mindset, if not a military background?

SEAN SMOOT: That’s an interesting observation. We’ve had the opportunity to work with a number of organizations, including some that are led by and largely comprised of former Special Forces folks. They actually embrace the idea of building trust and legitimacy. These are people who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and had to build trust and legitimacy in order to do their jobs. So I wouldn’t throw the taint on the military necessarily. There are some excellent law enforcement officers with previous military experience. One problem with police recruiting traditionally has been the way that the profession sells itself.

SD: How so?

SS: If you look at police recruitment videos from seven or eight years ago, you see people flying around in helicopters, jumping out of armored vehicles and doing SWAT operations. That’s actually a very small percentage of what police do. So when someone joins the ranks, they find out pretty quickly that the job is not what the video showed. The fact is, over 90 percent of the time that police are on the street, they’ll be sitting in a car.

SD: But in many communities, the police look and feel like an occupying force.

SS: We’ve heard that. A lot of departments have toned that down, which many officers actually prefer. Some departments have gone to a uniform of golf shirts and utility pants. But sometimes military-looking gear is necessary. If police are serving a warrant on somebody who doesn’t want to go back to prison, they need protective equipment. The number of officers shot in January increased 40 percent over the number shot last January and 113 percent over the number of officers shot in 2020.

That said, I’m not one of these guys who thinks that cops need to be hypervigilant. The reality is, there are probably 2 million interactions between police officers and community members every day. More than 99 percent of them do not involve the use of force against or by the officer.

SD: Police have traditionally resisted the kind of civilian oversight that exists in other professions. Doctors and pilots have regulatory boards that can strip them of their licenses. Shouldn’t we be tracking the disciplinary records of cops and make those records available during the hiring process?

SS: Accountability is important in any profession. As long as accountability is coupled with a strong system of procedural justice, there’s far less police objection to it. One of the things that makes officers resistant to more accountability is, they don’t feel like there’s a strong system of procedural justice behind it, where they’ll have an opportunity to tell their side of the story and be judged by an appropriate determiner of facts.

SD: How do we make cops feel more comfortable about the policing of their ranks?

SS: That’s a cultural issue. Part of it is the way accountability systems work right now. It’s a blame game: Who screwed up, and how much can we punish them for it? The reality is, in other systems, like medicine and aviation, they do something called sentinel event reviews. When a surgeon operates on someone — maybe it was the left arm they were supposed to operate on instead of the right — everyone who was involved in that surgery, from the person who cleaned the surgical suite to the doctors, nurses, anesthesiologists and orderlies, sits around a table and creates a detailed timeline of the entire event. They’re focused on figuring out how to prevent that bad outcome from happening again. It’s not, “Am I going to get fired?” or “What’s this going to cost me when I get sued?” They’re allowed to have an honest, open conversation.

It’s the same kind of investigation that the National Transportation Safety Board does after a plane crash or a near miss. Once the investigation is completed, the report is anonymized and published so that every other pilot knows what occurred. The reason police don’t do this is because they don’t have a legally protected way to do so.

SD: Vermont’s police departments are grappling with serious staff shortages. Officer morale is low, and most municipalities don’t have the budgets to compete with larger cities on salaries. How do we fill those ranks but still get qualified applicants?

SS: I actually feel like we’re at a time of unique generational opportunity because staffing is so low. If you look at surveys of young people looking for their first job, money is less important than having a job that they actually like and feel is important. So, it’s not like we have to compete for the dollars. It’s important to reframe what the job of policing is all about.

SD: Should police agencies be recruiting different types of candidates?

SS: Absolutely! What you want to look at first are the criminal justice curricula at the junior college and college levels. A lot of departments recruit directly from two- and four-year degree programs but don’t ever look at the curricula because these student already have an interest in becoming cops. But what if the program isn’t that good? What if the curriculum deals mostly with incarceration and use of force? Maybe it’s not the best place to look. However, if the curriculum covers the root causes of crime, the impact of policing on communities, and the history of policing and civil rights, that might be a better program to recruit from.

The other thing is, we shouldn’t be focused solely on criminal justice majors — and nothing against them, by the way. My bachelor’s degree is in criminal justice science. I see some wonderful police officers who went to the seminary and decided that becoming a minister or priest wasn’t for them. I see officers who got their degrees in history or English. Some of them just fell into policing, and they turned out to be some of the best cops we have. Others just wanted to serve. We have to be a lot more thoughtful than we’ve been. And that’s hard right now because departments are desperate for bodies.

SD: Anything else?

SS: We need to remember that policing is a human endeavor. All my partners across the country will tell you that we have yet to find a perfect police department. There are some good things happening in different places. I don’t mean to simplify things and say, “Cops are people, too.” But the reality is, when humans are involved, there are going to be mistakes.

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity and length.

This article appears in Feb 22-28, 2023.

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