Representatives from diverse groups will speak to recruits.

By Sheryl Rich-Kern, Granite State News Collaborative

Two police officers are dispatched to a home in response to a call from a domestic violence victim. They are told the perpetrator remains on the scene. The cops arrive and find a bruised woman splayed on the floor, sobbing uncontrollably. Two other persons are in the house, a man and a woman. The man is taciturn and remorseful. He tells the officers, “I’m sorry; this will never happen again.” The woman, who stands next to the abused, echoes the same words. 

The officers pull the man aside and say, “Sir, can we talk with you over here.”

As a classroom of police recruits review this role-playing scenario with actors, they learn an essential flaw of the officers’ response: they left the injured party alone with the attacker. 

This scenario exemplifies how biases, based on gender or race, for example, manifest in policing, producing dangerous consequences, said Lorie Fridell, a criminology professor at the University of South Florida and founder of Fair & Impartial Policing (FIP), a nationally-recognized implicit-bias-awareness training for law enforcement in the U.S. and Canada. 

Members of New Hampshire’s Commission on Law Enforcement Accountability, Community and Transparency (LEACT) attended Fridell’s program last year to help brainstorm a new two-day seminar on implicit bias training in the Granite State that launched at the police academy on January 14. 

The expanded program for police recruits is one of 48 recommendations the LEACT committee advanced after meeting during the summer months. The 16 hours of implicit bias training draws on the philosophies from the FIP program. It also models lesson plans from Ohio’s Peace Officer Basic Training for Community Diversity & Procedural Justice.  

In the Granite State, all newly hired part-time and full-time police and state-level corrections officers are trained and certified by the New Hampshire Police Standards and Training Council (PSTC) in Concord. There are no tuition students. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, the 16-week academy is currently held on Zoom. 

Previously, NH’s police recruits received two hours of training in cultural dynamics, which John Scippa, who directs the PSTC, acknowledges has never been enough. 

Bringing diverse voices into police training

The two-day NH Community Diversity, Police Legitimacy & Procedural Justice program addresses implicit biases around race, age, gender, socioeconomic or other statuses, explaining that everyone carries them, said Scippa. The goal is to help recruits resolve disputes fairly and transparently, based on facts and circumstances, and to improve relationships between police and the public. 

Policing is one of those jobs that requires perfection every day, said PSTC instructor Eddie Edward, who was  the former director of the New Hampshire Liquor Commission Enforcement Division and a retired police chief from South Hampton. Like an airplane pilot, faulty judgements by an officer could spell disaster, he says. Policing demands neutrality and transparency 100 percent of the time, delivering, “In a big nutshell, honesty and respect” towards community members. 

The most engaging section of the two-day course, said Scippa, is the panel discussion where new hires interact with representatives from diverse groups, including African Americans, Hispanic and other non-whites as well as LGBTQ and religious constituents.

Joseph Lascaze, a smart justice organizer with the NH American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and a LEACT committee member, is one of the panelists. A social justice organizer, he helped write the materials for the class. 

“It was a huge relief, being a person of color,” knowing the PSTC was revising a course that previously “wasn’t even in the 21st century,” Lascaze said. 

Lascaze, who is Black, understands the mistrust and frustration the African American community associates with cops. At the inaugural panel session on January 15, he spoke about his own personal experience with New Hampshire’s criminal justice system in the early 2000s and the need for law enforcement officers to hold each other accountable when witnessing misconduct. 

Lascaze was serving a prison term when a corrections officer repeatedly grabbed him by the cuffs and lifted him off the ground. 

“But what was more devastating to me,” said Lascaze,  “was not what he was doing, but the four other officers standing there watching, laughing and not doing anything about it.”

His story led to a lively discussion among recruits about police culture and “the chat box was going bananas,” Lascaze said.

Frayed relationships between law enforcement and the communities they serve, particularly communities of color, escalated since the recent killing of George Floyd and other police brutalities against unarmed African Americans.

Nationally, about half of people shot and killed by police are white, but Black Americans are shot at a disproportionate rate, according to data compiled by the Washington Post. NH’s data reveals that since 2015, police officers shot and killed 16 men, 13 of whom were white and three of unknown race.

These statistics don’t evoke the outrage they might in other states: compare California, where police shot and killed 873 people, with non-whites representing three-quarters of those individuals. 

Nonetheless, NH’s tamer numbers do little to prove the docility between law enforcement and the state’s minority population.

Attorney Donna Brown of Manchester said that criminal defense lawyers have been trying to educate law enforcement about racial bias since the 1980s because “we’ve had a front row seat to it.”

In her testimony to the LEACT committee, Brown cites at least four instances where the N.H. State Police Mobile Enforcement Unit (MET) detained drivers because of their race. 

“As one of the troopers from that unit described it,” Brown wrote, “the unit is a ‘proactive policing unit [where they] basically try to stop crimes before they actually occur.’ This is the motor vehicle equivalent of ‘stop and frisk’ that was outlawed in New York City due to its misuse as a tool for racial profiling.”

The goal of implicit bias training is to get individuals to reflect, interact and talk with each other, said Fridell, the national expert . People typically enter the training feeling defensive and sometimes “outright hostile,” she said. They may believe that biased policing is a fiction produced by the media. Yet after a series of dialogues and role-playing, they realize “implicit biases can lead them to be over vigilant with certain groups or maybe under vigilant.”

Is bias training effective?

While efforts to prevent cops from making bias-based judgements have taken root, questions about the proof of such training lingers. 

A study commissioned by the New York Police Department  and published in July 2020 sought to analyze the effectiveness of a $5.5 million contract with Fridell’s company, which began in 2018 and ended in 2019. 

The report suggested the eight-hour training enhanced officers’ awareness of and knowledge about their own unconscious biases and how to manage them. However, the evaluation did not detect a change in behaviors. 

“I don’t believe that,” said Clayton Harris, curriculum commissioner for Ohio’s Peace Officer Basic Training for Community Diversity & Procedural Justice and police chief at Cuyahoga Community College.

Training must proceed, he said, alongside a police department’s policies, rules and regulations. Training also has to be repeated on an annual or semiannual basis to influence significant change, he said.

Fridell reiterates the training “can’t be a one-off.” She points out that altering attitudes is an important first step to encourage recruits to open up, listen and assimilate the skills. 

Measuring the effect of a single training curriculum on officers’ decisions is not easy to detect, said the study’s author, Rob Worden of the John F. Finn Institute For Public Safety, an independent, non-profit social research organization in Albany, New York. At the time of the training, NYPD was also initiating multiple reforms. “It’s very difficult to tease out from all of the myriad influences on officers’ street-level decisions, the impacts of a single one-day training.”

Worden said the study demonstrated the officers realized benefits after the training, with 70% gaining a better understanding of implicit bias and more than two-thirds learning new strategies they could apply to their work.

He speculates that implicit bias training may have a greater influence in less diverse communities such as in New Hampshire. Finn Institute researchers interviewed members of the NYPD force and found they often grew up in multiracial, multiethnic neighborhoods, frequently interacting with people different from themselves.

“These are people who arguably benefit less from the training content than officers whose upbringing and prior experience is much less diverse than those of many NYPD officers,” he said.

Curriculum commissioner Harris said that to ultimately improve policing, the profession needs a smarter, connected and more diverse force. Unfortunately, the negative depictions of police are turning away young people, making recruiting difficult. “That's been a challenge for the last decade or so,” he said. 

Recruitment efforts also need to focus on reflecting the communities they serve, including minorities. That’s another challenge for the Granite State, which is less diverse than other parts of the country. However, since 2000, the non-white population in New Hampshire has doubled in size, representing ten percent of residents. 

Scippa agrees about the importance of increasing the diversity of law enforcement in New Hampshire. One obstacle is that salaries in the Granite State pale compared to more ethnically-diverse regions in Massachusetts, where he was previously a police academy director. 

For now, his focus is on continually refining the two-day implicit biases course and creating an online two-hour version which in-service officers can review at their own pace. 

Scippa said he is giving new recruits the tools to be excellent guardians of the community and the Constitution. 

“This training sets them up to be more empathetic and effective,” he said. 

However, there’s always more he would like to include. 

“Presently we're trying to put 10 pounds in a five pound bag here,” Scippa said.

Against nationwide anti-police protests, much of it justified and documented on video, the need to rebuild community trust in the blue badge is fierce; public safety depends on it. 

These articles are being shared by partners in The Granite State News Collaborative. For more information visit collaborativenh.org.