December 12, 2023 • 44 mins
TCD Podcast - Season 6 - Episode 118
What does it truly mean to be a police officer in today's America? Can police departments adapt, innovate, and transform their culture to better serve their communities? Join us as we explore these questions with Dr. Neil Gross, a sociologist from Colby College and a former short-term law enforcement officer in California. We talk with him about the changing landscape of policing, spotlighting innovative police departments across the United States - from Stockton, California, LaGrange, Georgia, to Longmont, Colorado.
In our chat, we discuss police and academia, tracing the evolution of this complex relationship over time. Neil takes us behind the curtain, revealing how social scientists have observed policing since the 50s and 60s, and the pervasive feeling of stigmatization within the police force. We also talk about the parallels and self-selection processes in both academia and law enforcement, and the reasons why professors and scientists may lean more liberal.
In our chat with Dr. Gross, he shares some laudable efforts of police chiefs like Lou Deckmar, who transformed the LaGrange, Georgia police department with a steadfast commitment to the rule of law, equity, and professionalism. We also draw insights from Neil's experiences teaching sociology to undergraduates, sparking critical thinking and fostering open discussions about policing. This conversation is a great listen for anyone eager to grasp the complexities and opportunities within police departments today. Tune into The CopDoc Podcast!
Contact us: copdoc.podcast@gmail.com
Website: www.copdocpodcast.com
If you'd like to arrange for facilitated training, or consulting, or talk about steps you might take to improve your leadership and help in your quest for promotion, contact Steve at stephen.morreale@gmail.com
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Intro-Outro (00:02):
Welcome to The Cop Doc Podcast.
This podcast explores policeleadership issues and innovative
ideas.
The CopD oc shares thoughts andideas as he talks with leaders
in policing communities,academia and other government
agencies.
And now please join Dr SteveMorreale and industry thought
(00:25):
leaders as they share theirinsights and experience on The
CopD oc Podcast.
Steve Morreale (00:32):
Well, hello again everybody.
This is Steve Morreale, comingto you from Boston today, and
today we're shooting to centralMaine, to the beautiful area of
Waterville, Maine and ColbyCollege, and a colleague
professor of mine, Dr Neil Gross.
He is a sociologist working atColby College.
Good morning to you, Neil.
Good morning Stephen.
Thanks for having me on.
Thanks so much for being here.
(00:53):
You caught my eye when youwrote a book.
You do an awful lot of writingfor the New York Times and
you're teaching occasionally inthe police sector about policing
and sociology of policing andthe American city policing.
I want to ask you to tell us abit about how you ended up in
the police arena.
I know, but tell the audience.
Neil Gross (01:12):
Yeah, sure, happy to talk about it.
So I didn't originally expectto become a social scientist,
teach sociology at Colby College, like you said, and I'm
thrilled thrilled to be here anddoing this job.
But it wasn't my originaloccupation that I chose.
I grew up in the San FranciscoBay Area in the 1980s, graduated
high school in 1989.
And in high school andthroughout college I set my
(01:36):
sights on a career lawenforcement.
That's what I wanted to do.
So I did all the things thatone does on the rate of that
kind of a path.
I was an explorer.
I worked as an explorer for theBerkeley Police Department.
I went off to UC San Diego froma first year of college and
worked as a community serviceofficer for that department and
then a dispatcher, ended uptransferring back up to UC
(01:56):
Berkeley and worked part-timefor Berkeley PD as what was
called a police aids, kind oflike a uniformed intern position
and then graduated fromBerkeley and got hired by
Berkeley PD, set to the PoliceAcademy in Sacramento.
I went through that academy andgraduated and worked on the
street Now not for very long.
I ended up leaving after about11 months, but that was my
(02:18):
original thing that I wanted todo and so I went to academia
thinking I'm going to researchpolicing, do some work to
improve the profession, improvepublic safety, end up going in a
completely different directionin my research career for like
20 years, 25 years, and onlycame back to it recently because
there's so much talk about datapolicing in the US and I wanted
to dive back in and see if Icould make some kind of a
(02:39):
contribution.
Steve Morreale (02:40):
So you write an awful lot, but one of the most
recent books that you wrote wascalled Walk the Walk how three
police chiefs defied the oddsand changed cop culture, and I
have begun to look through itand what I find very fascinating
about this is that it is astory.
It is certainly not empirical,it's more qualitative.
And what I really like aboutthis, neil, is when I first got
(03:04):
the book I thought, yeah, well,he's in California, he's going
to just talk to three policechiefs that he knows and let's
see what happens.
And indeed you did not do that.
You spread it around thecountry, stalked in California,
lagrange, georgia and Longmont,colorado, and that's interesting
.
Talk about how you thoughtabout this, how you conceived
this and how you went aboutfinding people who you would
(03:26):
like to sit, observe and chatwith.
Neil Gross (03:29):
Well, I'll tell you, the idea for the book comes out
of a larger interest in mind inthe question of how do you make
institutions as good as theycan be.
And I think we're at a momentin the history of our country
when there is tremendouscriticism of existing
institutions, but often lessinterest in actually fixing them
and getting them right thanjust in criticizing the
(03:51):
institutions.
And a really important thing todo if you want to make an
institution be as good as it canpossibly be is to look for
examples of where thatinstitution's doing things right
.
And so, in the realm ofpolicing, I thought well, look,
there's a lot of policedepartments in the US.
You know 15 to 18,000,depending on how you count.
You know clearly there are somethat are having some problems,
but there must be others thatare really innovating, excelling
(04:13):
, doing things exactly ascitizens most citizens would
want them to be done.
Rather than look for policedepartments that were especially
problematic, I set out lookingfor police departments that were
really innovative, again, doingthings really differently.
So I cast the net widely, didyou know?
Had lots of interviews withpeople, you know lots of
crunching numbers to try to findagencies where things look like
they were going well, and theseare the three that fell out.
(04:33):
Among my criteria was not onlythat they be agencies that had
worked hard to kind of reinventpolice culture in different ways
, but the agencies had to alsobe willing to talk to me.
There were a couple inparticular that I initially set
my side on and spent a lot oftime there, but they wouldn't,
they weren't transparent at all.
Everything that I tried to getaccess to had to be through
their like PR team, and that wasnot going to work for me.
(04:53):
So so I'm selecting theseagencies because they're they're
really different.
The chiefs are.
They have really differentpolitics.
What they've done in thedepartments are really different
.
The cities are really differentStockton's like 320,000,
serious gang violence problem.
Longmont's becoming more of asuburb, about 100,000.
Out of 10, sure, Yep, Yep, Yep,yeah.
But near Denver, the grains,Georgia, you know city about
31,000, half black, half white,a very different and a very
(05:17):
conservative community.
So they're differentdemographically, they're
different terms of their crimeproblems and the chiefs are all
really different in terms ofwhat they, what they tried to do
.
But they all innovated in animportant way and I wanted to
highlight that.
And the idea is here's someways in which departments can
innovate.
There's lots of other ways thatdepartments can innovate, but
maybe if people read about theseinnovative departments and the
challenges that chiefs face,challenges that cops face in
(05:37):
those agencies, that mightinspire citizens to get more
involved and help me to givetheir departments the resources
they need to innovate in perhapssimilar ways in their
communities.
Steve Morreale (05:45):
Thank you, and I truly believe that in many,
many circumstances, that oneperson can make a difference,
but they can't do it alone.
In other words, they've got tobring the rest of the people to
get a buy in, and it can't justbe the police department, it has
to be the external stakeholders, from the community itself to
the city or the town that theywork for, and it's a formidable
job, as you well know.
(06:06):
So, going back for a moment, oneof the things that popped
through my mind is you havewritten things and landed in the
New York Times with op-eds, andone of them had to do with if
you want to criticize, here'sone thing you can do Become a
cop yourself, take some of theprogressive ideas you have and
see what you can do to make adifference instead of
complaining from the side.
And I find that very, veryinteresting, because it's very
(06:28):
easy to complain until you havedone it.
And so my question would beyour time in the police academy
has to change your perspective,and your time in the police
department has to change yourperspective about what can be
done, who works there, thetrials and tribulations of that
kind of job, the discretion thatis availed to police officers.
(06:49):
How did that sort of frame yourview on policing?
Neil Gross (06:53):
It's a great question.
I'll say at the outset thatwhen I first started the
research for this project and Iwent back and it was the first
time that I spent time in policecars in decades and I was
struck by how much it changed.
There were no computers inpolice cars when I was doing it.
Well, they had just startedwith laptops, but it wasn't
really very functional at thatpoint.
You know, certainly we didn'thave cell phones.
A lot of the tech was different, but there was a lot that was
(07:16):
the same or similar.
Just the dynamics of how youdeal with disputes among people,
whether it's domestic disputesor fights among neighbors,
dealing with people who arereally struggling, dealing with
people who have committedserious offenses, dealing with
victims of crime.
There's that human side of it,the side of conflict and all
that.
That is really the same.
(07:37):
So I think, to answer yourquestion, one thing that really
stood out to me when I was onthe job, and for a very short
time and over the years, is justhow complicated the policing
job is, how emotionally fraughtit is, how oftentimes it's not
exactly clear what it is youshould be doing or maybe it is
clear, but it's not clear in themoment, just the incredible
(07:58):
complexity of the job and howdiverse it is in terms of the
number of situations you have todeal with.
I think that if you're outsidepolicing, it's easy to
stereotype the occupation and toimagine that the cops are all
they do sit around all day,drive around and stop and harass
people.
And anybody who's been in knowsthat there's this other side to
pretty much every town, everycity, where people are really
(08:20):
struggling, hurting one another,all that sort of thing, and the
cops are there to deal with it.
I just am always impressed byhow challenging the position is
and, in some ways, howill-prepared most young officers
are to really do the work.
So I think that's one thingthat stuck with me.
And then if you have a policedepartment that can really
adequately train officers andcreate a culture in which
(08:40):
they'll be oriented toward doingthe job as the community wants
them to, those are all goodthings.
Steve Morreale (08:45):
Was it helpful, as you were introducing yourself
as Dr Gross, but a formerpolice officer Did that help?
Neil Gross (08:53):
at all.
It's hard to say.
I did the job so long ago thatI don't think anybody that I
spend time with, or any of thechiefs, really thought of me as
anything to do with lawenforcement.
I think they just thought of meas someone doing some research.
It helped to build a little bitof trust.
I mean, I think, as much as somedepartments are open and want
to be cooperative with theresearch community, I think
(09:14):
there's a lot of, or at least afair bit of, suspicion about
what academia is like andwhether people studying the
police are basically just out toget them.
And so I think, if anything, Ithink maybe the fact that I had
a background in law enforcementat least gave cops the belief
that I wasn't out to get themand then actually doing exactly
what I was said I was going todo, which was to write a book
(09:34):
about a book that's in any waykind of inflates what I saw,
benefits of what I saw, but thebook that would just be a
straightforward account of whatit looked like in three
departments that had reallytried to move the needle on
police culture and, again, thechallenges that they faced, and
so I think there was a baselinelevel of trust.
But I have to say one thingthat was intriguing.
I really thought when I firststarted hanging out with the
cops and doing research Ithought they'd be really
(09:56):
resistant to me recording thembecause I wanted to get
transcripts of what they said.
And they were surprisingly okaywith that.
And the reason they said thatthey were okay with it is
because they say you know, we'rerecorded all the time.
Steve Morreale (10:07):
I was just going to say that it's a completely
different world than you and Igrew up with, for sure,
Absolutely.
Neil Gross (10:11):
You know, policing is such a more like public
occupation in a way than it wasback whatever 30 years ago for
me, so that was a remarkablechange to observe.
Steve Morreale (10:19):
You know it's interesting.
A little while ago you saidsomething and it was about
trying to see what people aredoing, right?
I remember having a professorcome in as the chair of the
department professor came in andsaid Steve, I want to do a
special topics, and you knowwhat a special topic is.
I just kind of want to explore.
It's not a course, but I wantto kind of go down a road.
I said, okay, what's it goingto be called?
And he said I want to talkabout doing things right and
(10:40):
policing.
And I looked at him and I saidwhat?
the hell is that?
And I literally thought myselfthat I shouldn't have been so
negative, but I said well, waita minute, wait a minute, tell me
about what you're talking about.
And he told me that when he wasa graduate assistant, as a
doctoral candidate, he wasteaching classes at night out on
the West Coast in Washingtonstate.
And he said there were peoplewho related to me different than
(11:03):
the professors, who were a fulltime and felt comfortable
saying things to me that theyprobably weren't with others.
And he said I remember talkingabout the things that were
bringing down police departments.
And somebody raised their handand said you know, with all due
respect, john, I'm sick andtired of coming to school being
told what police do wrong.
When are we ever going to betold what we do right?
(11:24):
And he said at that moment Isaid I want to do a class on
what police do right.
And at that moment it was thelight bulb that we all have
Sometimes.
I said, oh my God, that isbrilliant.
I want to work with you on that.
And so you understand thatthere's this pushback sometimes
from people who and we talkedabout this before we started
about the view of academia fromthe outside and especially in
(11:48):
policing, that they see in manycases that academia has become
way too liberal and way too downon policing.
You've done some work on that.
Talk a little bit about that.
Neil Gross (11:59):
Yeah, there's a lot there to dive into.
You know, I understand whyofficers feel that way.
There aren't a lot of otherprofessions where there's
perhaps this level of scrutinyright now and this level of
criticism.
I get that.
On the other hand, it's alwaysbeen a unique occupation in the
sense that policing is the powerof the state to inflict
(12:21):
violence on people in order toensure that the law is respected
and that people are brought upbefore judges if they're
suspected of committing crimes.
So it's always been a very highstakes occupation.
So I get why cops are worriedabout the level of scrutiny.
On the other hand, it kind ofis part of the territory.
The other thing that'sinteresting is that, doing
(12:42):
research of this book, I wentback and looked a lot at the
history of policing and a lot ofthe history of research that's
been done on policing over theyears, all the way back into the
50s and 60s.
There's a period when therewere lots of social scientists
who were hanging out with thepolice and trying to observe
them.
One thing that's interesting tonote is even back then, I think
in a period when lots of copsyou know the cops had so much
respect from the citizens andeveryone loved the police.
(13:04):
Yeah, the cops back thenthought of themselves as a
stigmatized occupation.
They thought that everyonehates us, they don't want to be
friends with us, they're afraidwe're going to arrest them if
they get drunk in public orwhatever.
So, even back then, part of thereason that policing has always
been this closed communitywhere people look out for one
another is that there was thesense that there was the police
and there was the rest ofsociety.
Yes, yes, it's the yes versusthem problem.
(13:25):
Yes, so a lot of things that wethink of as modern day things
like it's just happening rightnow, are just kind of built into
the structure of the occupationand have kind of always, always
been there.
So I understand why police feelthat way, you know.
The other thing I know aboutpolicing, though, is that,
despite all the grumbling, youknow cops want to want their
departments to do as good a jobas possible.
You know most of them want todo as good a job as possible,
(13:46):
and so you know if there'sresearch that academics, who are
doing it in good faith and havesome really sophisticated
research methodologies, canbring to bear to help policing
get as good as cops wanted to be, you know, that seems like
something that people should bewilling to embrace.
So again, I understand thatthat level of suspicion, and
it's hard to be an occupationthat's being criticized all the
time.
But again, if you can make theoccupation better, you should.
(14:07):
But see, there's one last pointI want to make is an
interesting parallel there, Ithink, between what's happening
in policing and what's happeningin academia, right?
So think about how much folkson the left criticize policing
these days, but think about howmuch folks on the right
criticize academia.
Is almost a really interestingparallel there.
And one thing that I've alwaysbeen intrigued by is the ways in
(14:28):
which criticism of academiafrom the right Ironically helps
to make academia even moreprogressive.
Because if an occupation issuper Criticized by one side, by
the right for example, thenpeople who might consider going
into the occupation, who areconservative, would say I'm
never gonna go into academia,that's a terrible occupation,
it's not for me.
And so you get a lot moreself-selection of liberal folks
(14:48):
into academia on the other side.
I think in policing, if folkson the left are constantly
criticizing policing, sayingit's horrible, it's racist, that
kind of thing, you're gonna getfewer folks on the left who are
going to go into policing andso you get this.
It's kind of this weird likepolarization dynamic where the
more one side Criticizes aninstitution or occupation, the
more it becomes associated withthe other side.
So it's this kind of ongoing,ongoing dynamic.
(15:10):
So I've always been intriguedby the kind of weird parallels
between policing and academia inthat regard well as a second
career, academic.
Steve Morreale (15:18):
I would say to you that my experience has been,
first of all, adapting toacademia is not an easy thing.
After being in policing for 30years, you need to tone it down,
you.
You need to adapt to the newclimate and the new organization
and the new culture.
But very often I find that Ihave to tone down or Tamp down
my own opinions because they donot relate to most of the people
(15:42):
on Campus.
So I just kind of keep tomyself, do what I have to say.
I've been accused of being anapologist for police.
I've been told to take my cophat off in faculty meetings,
which just blows my mind and inother cases I've had to defend
Students and even in sometimesmy students feel very
uncomfortable in other classeswhere they are being asked by
(16:03):
certain Professor certainly notall to think like them, to write
like them, and that they're notvery well seen because they're
seen as future police officers.
Now, criminal justice isabsolutely.
We're not a cop shop, right,neil?
And by the way we're talking,neil Grossi is a professor up at
Colby College in Maine and heis most recently known for a new
(16:24):
book called walk-to-walk howthree police chiefs defy the
odds and change cop culture.
But my point is that I've hadto modify me with my behavior
and certainly even when I was inpolicing.
You have to modify behavior.
You don't, you can't say whatyou always feel.
You have to keep some of yourpolitical thoughts or your
thoughts about what you see infront of you and Maintain some
(16:44):
form of professionalism.
But you wrote something andthis is what I want to say.
You wrote something a while.
Why are professors andscientists so liberal?
What caused you to go in thatdirection?
Neil Gross (16:52):
I feel a little bit not strange answering the
question, but I'm gonna give itmaybe a different answer than
you would expect.
I really am of the view that,well, it's probably inevitable
that social scientists bring youknow Some of their values to
bear on the kind of questionsthey take up, and so on.
I mean, I really am of thestrong position that if you're
in the sciences whether it's thesocial sciences or the natural
(17:13):
sciences you know you should doyour best to make sure that the
answers you give to questionsReflect the actual nature of the
world and not just yourpolitical opinions.
So I took up that topic of whyare professors liberal, not
because I had a particular Dogin that race that I was worried
about, but because it's just aninteresting social science
question, you know.
(17:34):
So the answers that I came upwith weren't because of my own
kind of political views.
They were, you know, afterdoing a ton of research using a
whole range of methodologies,and you know, I think there's
lots of explanations.
It kind of in the same way thatthe policing has been the
stigmatized occupation for years, academia has been a pretty
liberal occupation for for years, at least since the 1950s,
there's always been more liberalacademics than there are folks
(17:56):
who are progressive in thecountry as a whole, you know.
So I looked at lots ofdifferent possible explanations.
Is it because of discriminationagainst conservative professors
trying to get it, get a job?
Is it because of something todo with psychology?
You know something aboutparticular kind of mindset that
maybe makes people both moreliberal and more inclined to go
into academic work.
You know, is it because ofclass interests?
(18:16):
Thought a lot about that right,like if you're your professor
and you're doing research, youyou want a lot of research
funding from the state and somaybe, maybe that makes you
supportive of the party thatwants a bigger state, namely the
Democrats.
None of that stuff really holdsa lot of water empirically.
Problems with all those claimsand what I eventually came down
to is the idea of self-selection, and that is that.
You know.
(18:36):
I think many, many years agoactually write the founding of
research universities are nottoo long thereafter.
Through some fairly Randomreasons, academia started to get
a reputation as a place where,if you were smart and had kind
of left Sensibilities, where youcould do your work without
getting in too much trouble, andthat reputation kind of grew
and developed over time.
And now I think if you're reallysmart, academically motivated
(18:58):
and your young person graduatedfrom college and you're on the
left, you might think toyourself yeah, academia, it's a
perfect career for me.
I could really see myself there.
If you're smart andacademically motivated on the
right, I think you'd think toyourself I would never go into
academia, that's not a careerfor me.
And you see that all the waythrough.
If you look at the proportionof, if you look at
undergraduates who say theyaspire to career in academia
(19:20):
huge disproportion of folks onthe left to folks on the right.
Do you look at graduatestudents, huge disproportionate
folks on the left, folks on theright, assistant professor same
thing all the way up the ladder.
So I kind of think it'sself-selection all the way
through.
I think that's kind of thebiggest explanation,
self-selection driven by theongoing reputation of the
profession.
So that's kind of what I foundafter poking around and doing
doing a whole lot of research.
Steve Morreale (19:38):
Yeah, well, I mean for those who were
listening when you're doing someof this research.
So you've got to start with aquestion what's your research
question and what yourhypothesis and and as you go
through, and when am I gonna usemy, where am I gonna find my
sample, what kinds of questionsam I going to ask and how am I
gonna get that information?
It would be survey or will beinterviews, and I understand all
of that and what I like whatyou said and what I say very
(19:59):
often to doctoral students who Iam supervising is Simply, and I
understand.
So you might have a cop or youmight have a teacher, you might
have a firefighter, and theybring with them that experience
and one of the things I have toremind them that I Don't care
who you were.
You are here as a researcherand you have to take that hat
off and be a researcher and Payattention to the rigor of a
(20:22):
scientific investigation,without your own biases or
without injecting your ownexperience.
Let the data talk, let thepeople talk, and it sounds like
that's what you were doing.
Neil Gross (20:33):
Yeah, that's what I, that's what I tried really hard
to do and and you know we uselots of different kinds of data
a huge nationally representativesurvey of the faculty.
They wanted studies where wepretended to be, you know,
conservative or liberal peopleapplying to graduate school to
see you know what kind ofresponses we got from different
departments, tons of interviewswith people around the country.
So it was a very multi methodkind of approach.
You know, one thing I'll say,steven, is that you know, a lot
(20:54):
of cops have to do somethingsimilar, right?
I remember talking to one ofthe chiefs who was a Republican
and quite conservative and hesaid you know, I'm a
conservative and a Republicanbut I'm a police chief first,
and I think that's true.
For you know, for most cops,like whatever their, whatever
their political views, they haveto kind of check it at the door
and be law enforcement officersfirst.
So I think you know people knowwhat that's like and it can be
challenging.
It takes a lot of work and it'seasy to fall into the trap of
(21:18):
letting your own views orwhatever Influence the way you
behave.
And you know some of thatinfluence is inevitable.
But you know, the more you cando to create a culture where
everyone's trying to put thosebiases behind them, the better
off things can be.
Steve Morreale (21:30):
Yeah, we talked a little bit about some of the
things that I'm working on, orUnderstanding the
socio-political risks that thosein criminal justice, especially
police chiefs, have to dealwith, and we also talked about
just before that.
You know, I have this inklingthat, while police departments
are accused of implicit bias andand forced sometimes but
encouraged to take implicit bias, training there is, and again,
(21:53):
this is my own Thought.
It's the question that I wouldpose, and that is is there
implicit bias against criminaljustice programs on campuses?
And it's for another day toexplore, but I just posed that
question.
I want to focus, neil, on thebook, the most recent book again
, and you began to talk aboutone of the three police chiefs,
(22:13):
and we're talking Neil Gross.
He's up at Colby Collegegetting ready to start the
academic year soon and that's inWaterville, maine.
But the three chiefs that youhad the opportunity to sit and
talk with, different people,talk about what you took away
from being able to visit theirorganizations, talk with their
people, but also talk with them.
Neil Gross (22:33):
Yeah, thanks.
I want to start just quickly bycoming back to that implicit
bias point because I think it'sInteresting and it speaks to you
the ways in which you knowsometimes there isn't enough of
a connection between Lawenforcement and rigorous social
science research.
Among social scientists.
I think the evidence is prettyclear that Implicit bias
training does not work.
That's true in the realm ofpolicing.
(22:53):
There's pretty good evidencethat it doesn't work in the
corporate sector either.
In fact it often makes thingsworse because people who
actually have biases are reallypissed off by having to do the
training.
So, despite the fact thatthere's really very little
evidence of its effectiveness,you know it's been mandated for
so many departments and I thinkthat you know maybe if there
were tighter connections betweenlaw enforcement and you know
segments of academe that were,you know, doing kind of serious,
(23:15):
rigorous work, you know maybethere'd be some reason to pull
back on some of that training.
But as to the three policechiefs, they're all really
different.
The guy in in Stockton is nowretired Actually all the chiefs
are now left was a guy namedEric Jones who was a long time
Stockton cop.
I said earlier, stockton is acity with very diverse city,
really serious gang violenceproblem and he took over the
department back in in 20.
(23:35):
12 after heaven worked his wayup the ranks.
Stockton is kind of a bluecollar city in California, in
the Central Valley.
At the time Stockton wasreeling from the financial
crisis.
There have been tons offoreclosures there.
It was one of the first citiesin the country to declare
bankruptcy.
When Eric Jones took over thedepartment, the city was facing
this huge, huge budget shortfall.
(23:57):
They ended up having todepartment about 400 plus
officers.
They ended up having to eitherlay off or force into early
retirement about 100 of theircops.
So a fourth of the departmentwent away.
As you might imagine, homicidesshot up during this time.
Jones' first task wasn't reformor anything like that.
It was just how can we try totamp down this level of violence
(24:18):
and bring offenders to accountfor what they've done?
So we got involved in a seriouseffort at addressing it.
He actually got involved with aprogram that you'll know from
your Boston days, a programcalled Operation Ceasefire,
which originated in Boston andinvolves really targeted efforts
at deterrence, where you bringgang members in others who are
at serious risk of committingoffenses or serious risk of
(24:40):
being victims of violence.
And you say look, we'rewatching you closely, I think
you do.
You step out of line for asecond.
We're going to be there, butalso here's some carrots.
Would you be willing toconsider stepping out of this
gang life?
So they tried that once beforein Stockton.
It worked pretty well.
Eric Jones tried it.
No one would come talk to him Avery few people come talk to
the department, because no onehad any trust in Stockton PD.
(25:02):
And the reason was thatStockton PD had a pretty
terrible reputation in thecommunity as a department that
was quite violent and quiteracist.
And so Jones kind of realizedthat if he wanted to actually
work successfully at reducinglevels of violence he needed to
build trust between thedepartment and the community,
especially the Black and Latinocommunities and also the Asian
communities in Stockton.
And so that's when he kind ofgot the idea that he needed to
(25:24):
work on changing the culture ofthe PD.
He wasn't motivated by somekind of political, it was just
like how can we bring down gangviolence?
Lots of ways we do it.
We need better staffing, weneed more effective staffing,
traditional things, but also weneed to improve the culture of
the department.
And he set out to do it and wasrelatively successful.
I mean it's not like it's a sayin the book, it's not like
Stockton's become a policingnirvana, it's still a rough and
tumble town.
(25:44):
When I spend time with officersthere they say it's not really
part of the Bay Area and theywould say the difference between
us and the Bay Area is inStockton you go hands on and
they go hands on a lot.
But he was able tosignificantly shift the culture
of the department in ways thatcitizens noticed surveys show
that and that really improvedthings.
Other chiefs were different andhappy to talk about those.
But Stockton is the biggest ofthe three cities and in many
(26:05):
ways the one that is closest tokind of the problems that many
other large cities face.
Steve Morreale (26:10):
To get this book out and to pull all of this
stuff together and to do all ofthe background work to figure
out who will I focus on, whatdepartments are showing
progressive ideas, the change inculture.
I understand that it takes anawfully long time, sometimes
several years.
And there's another issue thatthe difference between action
research and longer research.
(26:32):
We in academia sometimes takean awfully long time to get
through from start to finish andpolice are looking for answers
today, not answers for threeyears from now.
But once you figured out thethree organizations you were
going to look at and looked toopen the door, let's talk a
little bit about Georgia.
What a completely differentplace than California.
Neil Gross (26:54):
Yeah for sure.
So LaGrange, Georgia, like Isaid, it's about an hour outside
of Atlanta, it's near theAlabama state line and it's a
community of 31,000.
It's majority black, sort ofhalf black and half white, a
relatively small Latinocommunity there, and it's a
former mill town.
Georgia has tons of countiesand it's in, let me say still it
(27:14):
has really a lot of countiesand it's in Troupe County.
Troupe County, if you go wayback, Troupe County, was the
fifth largest slave holdingcounty in Georgia and then, as
the end of the 19th centuryrolled around, LaGrange became a
mill town.
People who were pre-roll weremilling cotton and it became a
sort of industrial center and abit of a cultural center for the
(27:35):
local community.
So really different set oftraditions and issues than other
places that I looked at.
Lagrange has quite a high rateof poverty and again, there's
this really long and troubledhistory.
So the chief there is a guynamed Lou Deckmar, and Lou
Deckmar's not from the south,from New Jersey, originally grew
up in Oregon and then worked inWyoming in law enforcement for
(27:56):
many years before deciding tomove to Georgia and he inherited
the department several decadesago and it was a mess, you know,
as he describes it.
There were officers underinvestigation for a whole range
of offenses.
The district attorney's officewould routinely throw out cases
because the officers eitherwouldn't send over case files or
didn't do a good jobmaintaining evidence.
Training was terrible and thelevel of racism in the
(28:16):
department was remarkable.
I talked to one retired blackofficer who joined a long time
ago and he said you know, whenhe first came on he was not
allowed to stop white people.
It was just not allowed.
I mean, this was a city thathad de facto segregated swimming
facilities for black and whitekids up until the 90s.
Steve Morreale (28:33):
Oh, my goodness.
Neil Gross (28:34):
Imagine that you know very, very different kind
of place.
So Deckmar came in, like I said, a conservative guy, and set
out to kind of remake thedepartment and he's a big
advocate of kind of rule of law,equity and just really strict
professionalism and so he setout to change the culture of the
department and make it muchmore rule based.
That was, I think, his big, hisbig thing.
(28:55):
And then, as I described in thebook, really interesting thing
happened.
He made a bunch of changes inthe department up the training,
implemented a whole host ofrequirements for filling out
forms, we got the departmentaccredited with Kalea, which a
bunch of your.
That's a big deal.
Yeah, it's a big deal.
He did all that and then heheard about something that he'd
never explored before, and thatwas that back in 1940, the
(29:16):
department had played a role inthe lynching of a young black
man named Austin Callaway, andhe decided to start finding out
more about this in conjunctionwith efforts that were already
underway in the community, andhe ended up in 2017 apologizing
in a big public forum for hisdepartment's role in that
atrocity, and he ended up being,I think, the first Southern
police chief to apologize forhis department's role in a
(29:38):
lynching and, you know, got somepushback from his cops and from
some folks in the communitysaid look, how can you be
responsible for something thathappened so many years ago?
But he thought it was just animportant thing to do to restore
trust and, to me, convincepeople that his department would
never again engage in that kindof an activity.
So he ended up basicallyshifting the culture of the
department in a very differentway than happened in Stockton.
So a second and quiteintriguing case for me to get to
(30:01):
know the cops down there, spendsome time there and tell that
story.
Steve Morreale (30:03):
You know you just talked about history and
Bill Bratton.
When we talked to him on thepodcast, he makes an interesting
point and says it's extremelyimportant for police officers to
understand the history of theirpolice department and how they
may have had an impact or playeda role in demeaning others or
(30:24):
taking advantage of others orbeing racist or arresting slaves
that had escaped, and I thinkthere's some value to that to
understand why a greatgrandfather or a grandfather
would have some disdain for apolice department that behaved
that way even if it was 30, 40or 50 years ago.
I think it's very helpful toyoung people to understand who
(30:46):
are coming on, what the historyis and how we're working to
avoid that from repeating itself.
And so it sounds like this iswhat the chief done there in
LaGrange was doing.
Neil Gross (30:55):
Yeah, I think he recognized that it was a place
where the history of thedepartment in the community and
its reputation was.
He was making changes to theway the department was run, but
there was still this kind oflack of trust between the
department and the blackcommunity in LaGrange and a lot
of that yet had to do withhistory.
I think you're right, steve,about getting to know that
history.
Sometimes it's easy for cops tothink that that stuff doesn't
(31:16):
matter.
But history, the legs ofhistory are really long.
Sometimes you see that even inagencies where you wouldn't even
think of it.
Right Like Boston good exampleright Like segregation and
school busing and all that Ilived through it.
Yeah.
And then, even going back, youthink, well, Boston was
different than other departmentsand it's founding in the sense
that in the south we know thatsome of the police departments
(31:38):
that were formed there reallydid emerge out of these civil
guard units that were.
Their first responsibility wascapturing enslaved people who'd
run away.
We typically tell the story inthe north of like, okay, well,
but in Boston, New York, it wasdifferent, and it was different
in the sense that it reallyarose out of urbanization, the
kind of problems aroundurbanization.
But after the passage of theFugitive Slave Act in 1850,
(32:01):
there were folks who wereinvolved in law enforcement in
Boston, who were in the businessit's not the right word but who
were involved in trying toreturn fugitive slaves to the
south and met with tremendousprotest in Boston.
So even in places where youthink the history is different,
sometimes there's parts of itthat you don't know.
So, yeah, I think it's soimportant that departments
understand the history and knowthat their civil chief said to
me look, when you put on thatbadge, it's important that you
(32:22):
know that people aren't seeingyou, they're seeing the badge
and they're seeing everythingthat that badge represents to
them, including the history thatit represents to them and
you're policing against all thathistory.
Steve Morreale (32:32):
So we're talking with Neil Gross, dr Neil Gross.
He's a sociology professor atColby College, an avid writer
and a researcher, and most ofwhat we're talking about is the
most recent book, easton 2023,walk the Walk how Three Police
Chiefs Defied the Odds andChanged Cop Culture.
And the last place is Longmont.
Longmont, colorado, outside ofDenver.
(32:53):
Talk about that.
Neil Gross (32:54):
Yeah, very, very different kind of agency.
And there the chief gentlemannamed Mike Butler and Mike has a
fascinating kind of history andstory which I tell in the book.
A side note is that at leastseveral of the chiefs at least
two of them in particular bothstrongly religious some of their
efforts at changing theirdepartments were partially
(33:14):
motivated or maybe given supportby their religious views.
And that's partially the casefor Butler.
Although he was very muchbelieved in separation of church
and state and all that kind ofthing.
He took over the department inthe 90s.
After working his way up inBoulder PD, which is like 15
minutes away from Longmont, hedecided that he wanted to make
the police department a verydifferent kind of thing than it
(33:35):
had been there.
There was some history theretoo.
Longmont has a sizable Latinopopulation and there'd been a
police shooting.
Two young Latino men were killed, one of them shot in the back,
running away from a fight aftera traffic stop, and so Butler
set out to change the department, but he changed it in ways that
are kind of much moreprogressive than you see in the
other two cities that I profile.
So, for example, he got reallyinto the idea of restorative
(33:56):
justice, which is thisalternative model Obviously many
of your listeners will knowabout it where not appropriate
for everybody, obviously, or forall offenses.
But you've got someone who youthink like this is someone who's
committed an offense but it'sgoing to make their lives worse.
Make them more criminogenic isthe word if they spend time in
jail, if they seem appropriatefor it can steer them into a
restorative justice programwhere they're brought into a
(34:18):
circle with the people thatthey've harmed others.
A long education process.
They have to pay somerestitution, they have to
apologize for what they've done,that kind of thing.
So lots of departments havethis or lots of cities have this
.
Steve Morreale (34:29):
But I don't mean obviously I mean those who do
or don't know where it's active,and I know it's very active up
in Vermont, actually, amongother places.
But it is an alternative.
It's a community alternative toan overburdened court system
and obviously it keeps peopleout of the system and therefore
not to have a record that willlinger with them for a long time
(34:49):
.
So I just I wanted to interjectthat.
Go ahead, yeah, thanks.
Neil Gross (34:52):
Well, yeah, that's, that's right.
The thing that was reallyunusual about Longmont is Chief
Butler worked out so in Longmontthe cops could steer people
into restorative justice insteadof making an arrest.
In most places restorativejustice is a post arrest
diversion, but here it's a prearrest diversion, at least it
can be.
You've got someone like ateenager who's shop lists a
piece of jewelry.
Do you want to slap handcuffson them or do you want to try to
(35:15):
set their life in a differentcourse?
The interesting thing aboutrestorative justice is there's
really good experimentalevidence on its effectiveness,
good evidence out of the UK inparticular.
Kind of all else being equal,it produces less repeat
offending and offenses that aremore violent.
It produces less post traumaticstress disorder on the part of
victims.
You know again, definitely notappropriate for a lot of things.
There's debate about this seemsto me wholly inappropriate for
(35:38):
sexual assault, for domesticviolence, violent crimes,
violent crimes Exactly.
But you know, for some thingsit seems to work pretty well
when it's done right, when it'sdone right.
That's the key.
And Butler was really concernedabout over incarceration and so
he steered his department thatdirection.
But more generally, he tried tomove his department toward
being, I would say a more humaneagency.
That was one of his bigtakeaways, partially from his
religious sensibilities, and heworked to kind of thread that
(36:00):
model through training,recruitment and just the ethos
of the department.
But a lot of time with lawenforcement officers got to know
him really well, including acouple of domestic violence
detectives but also patrolofficers and you saw it on the
street like the way that theypoliced, amount of time they
took to deescalate situationswas just remarkable and
partially that was they had moretime because it's not as busy
(36:21):
an agency as other places are.
But it was remarkable to seeand I try to tell some of those
stories in the book of kind ofwhat that could look like.
Steve Morreale (36:28):
We're winding down talking Neil Gross, who's
up at Colby College, waterville,maine, and after this
experience, and obviouslysending pen to paper and taking
so much time to write and torewrite and to tell these
stories, were you, in yourexperience, pleasantly surprised
at the value of these changes,the hard work that was being
(36:51):
done in these particularagencies to respond and to
change the way they interactwith community.
Neil Gross (36:57):
Yeah, I left this research impressed and hopeful.
It's obviously time oftremendous political division in
our country at the state level,but especially the national
level, and sometimes theopposing camps seem to be so at
odds with one another that itseems like everything's going to
hell in a handbasket andthere's no possibility for
anything to get better.
I think if you look at what'shappening at the local level in
(37:17):
communities across the country,you see a lot of institutions
that are filled with people whoare trying to do a great job,
trying to serve theircommunities, dedicated public
servants, whether it's policingor education or whatever, At the
local level.
I think there's a lot of hope.
At the local level.
A lot of people say yousometimes have to put ideology
aside and just get the job done.
You just have to make sure thetrash is collected and the water
(37:39):
runs in the households and thatkind of thing.
So when I actually drilled downto the local level here, I saw
lots of places where departmentswere innovating, working hard
to do a good job, forging tieswith our community.
I left more hopeful, not justabout law enforcement, but also
more hopeful about the future ofour country.
I think there's a way in which,if we can put aside or tune out
some of the intensepartisanship coming from the
(38:00):
national level and kind of focuson what's happening in our
communities and just trying tomake our communities do a good
job.
Steve Morreale (38:04):
We should not pay attention to national
politics, but there's a lot ofgood that can be done at the
local level and I think that atthe local level there's lots of
great things happening in thoseplaces, and one of the things I
just wrote down and you startedthe move in that direction was
that, in my view, doing an awfullot of training and
facilitating for executives andfor high-level police officers.
I continually say, look, yourjob is you're not the
(38:25):
quarterback, you're the blockingback.
In my mind, what you're doingis to point your people in the
direction of doing the job theright way, through the noise,
and if you do the job with thebest of intention, then I will
help you move forward.
It's very, very important,because you can't do the job
without the people and you can'tdo policing without the backing
of the community, and so that'sjust a constant push and pull.
(38:49):
I appreciate that.
As we move to the end, I'mcurious to know what's on your
to-do list.
Neil Gross (38:53):
Well, there's no shortage of interesting things
to do.
I really like teaching mystudents, and so I'm eager to
jump into the school year withnew courses and new books for
them to read and work their waythrough.
Colby's a liberal arts collegeand really emphasizes getting
students to think for themselvesand think clearly, and I really
value watching my students growand develop in their views over
(39:15):
the course of their time atColby.
So that's on my immediate to-dolist.
Steve Morreale (39:18):
Finish my syllabi get my classes, me too,
my friend.
Neil Gross (39:21):
And look forward to the school year.
Steve Morreale (39:22):
Great, andy, you have a bucket list.
What are the things on yourlist to do?
You mean research and writingwise.
Anything Getting away?
Yes, maybe researching, maybewriting what's in the bucket.
Neil Gross (39:33):
I don't know, I'll let you know.
I feel like you should makeyour bucket list.
You can't really make yourbucket list until the very end.
It's like a retrospectivebucket list.
These are the things I shouldhave done.
That's good.
Steve Morreale (39:43):
Yeah, yeah, yeah , yeah, yes.
Let's finish by talking aboutthe students and some of the
things you do in teachingsociology and teaching about
policing, and I don't know thatyou can talk about sociology
without talking about cities andtowns and the many different
layers and the institutions andsuch, and I hear you saying that
you're guiding them towardsbeing more critical thinkers.
(40:04):
How do you open conversationsabout police?
Neil Gross (40:07):
Great question.
This obviously varies a lot bycampus and it may be something
unique about Colby I don't knowif it's the clean air up here or
the good water or something butI find the students are very
open-minded and very curious tothem.
Some of them have hadexperiences with policing, in
the sense of having been stoppedor having family members who've
been stopped or something alongthose lines.
(40:28):
But most don't know much aboutit other than what they've seen
in the media, whether from newsreports or just watching TV
shows or movies.
So they're curious, they wantto know more, they want to go
deeper, so found that they'requite willing to have
conversations.
People come in sometimes withstrong views and my goal in
teaching is just to expose themto more information.
Yeah, I mean it's.
(40:49):
My aim is just to get them tobe able to, whatever their views
are going to be, to be able tohave those views on more solid
grounds and be supported byevidence?
Steve Morreale (40:58):
necessarily not.
I understand and you know, neil, one of the things I will say
and certainly I have morphedinto an academic over time but I
will say to people, and I'msure you do the same thing look,
look, I don't want you to thinklike me.
In fact, some of my views nevercome out.
What I want you to do is simplythink and support, support your
views.
Neil Gross (41:16):
fair statement, yeah absolutely, and I think that's
you know that's cruciallyimportant and again, it's very
rewarding.
I'm sure you've had thisexperience but as I watch
students kind of grow anddevelop over the course of their
four years here at Colby, youcan kind of see the growth in
their intellectual maturity.
Their positions might not havechanged what they're arguing for
and I'll say you know, a lot ofthings I have my students think
about aren't things you havepolitical positions on.
(41:37):
Necessarily they're just basicsocial science points.
But you can see that they're,that they're thinking is growing
more complex, that they'rebetter able to use evidence,
they're better able to thinkabout counterarguments.
And so that's for me the superrewarding aspect of my job just
watching those students, kind oflike I said, grow and grow and
mature over time.
Steve Morreale (41:52):
Well, the last thing I will say is especially
teaching criminal justice, butyou having had some experience
in policing in a number of ways,I'm asking students to dig, to
investigate, to support and whenyou're doing your searches,
don't just look for the firstpage on Google or on Bing, but
to keep digging and looking forsupport and looking for
comparing and contrasting, andto me that's our chore as
(42:15):
professors.
Neil Gross (42:16):
That's right.
I mean, there's a joke that'soften told about the University
of Chicago and the joke is thatthe ethos on that campus is that
you walk to the campus and yousay to somebody beautiful day,
isn't it?
And they say what's theevidence for that?
Yes, and I think that's a goodmotto for many of us.
If you can cultivate that kindof curiosity and sense that like
you really need to look for theevidence and it might turn out
(42:39):
one way, it might turn out theother way.
That's a good kind of form ofinstruction you can give to
people Terrific.
Steve Morreale (42:43):
Well, thank you so much for your time.
Good luck this academic year.
I appreciate it.
We've been talking to NeilGross and he is a professor of
sociology up at a beautifulcampus, Colby College in
Waterville, Maine.
It strikes me as I go to Maineand you know, I was a police
officer in Dover, New Hampshirejust over the main line and when
you cross the PiscataquaquaRiver I'm sure you've done that
(43:04):
a few times what's the firstthing that you see on the sign
Maine?
The way life should be.
Isn't that interesting?
So you're in a wonderful place.
So thank you for your time, foryour insight.
I appreciate it.
Good luck with your futureendeavors, and how can people
get in touch with you if theyneed to?
Neil Gross (43:19):
They can just pop on to the Colby College website.
They'll find my email there andyou know the books on Amazon
and those other big retailers.
So if they want to pick one upthey can get them there.
And I'll just say just to putit in a last plug, the audiobook
I am especially happy aboutit's the voice actor that they
ended up hiring is this.
It was a former cop out of outof the Los Angeles area, Really
terrific guy.
So if you want to listen, tolisten to the book, you know his
(43:41):
voice is a lot Sounds a lotbetter than mine does, and
that's a great way to go Alsothank you for that.
Steve Morreale (43:46):
And so we're finishing up with Neil Gross,
and he most recently wrote thebook Walk the Walk how Three
Police Chiefs Defied the Oddsand Change Cop Culture.
And again, that is Longmont, itis LaGrange and it is Stockton
that are the targets of thisinvestigation.
So thank you very, very much,neil.
Have a great semester, steven,you too, thanks.
That's it.
(44:06):
Another episode of The Cop Docis in the books.
Thanks for listening.
Please share if you get valuefrom listening with your
colleagues and friends.
We'll see you on the nextepisode.
Intro-Outro (44:19):
Thanks for listening to The Cop Doc Podcast
with Dr.
Steve Morreale.
Steve is a retired lawenforcement practitioner and
manager, turned academic andscholar from Worcester State
University.
Please tune into The Cop DocPodcast for regular episodes of
interviews with thought leadersin policing.
Welcome to The Cop Doc Podcast.
This podcast explores policeleadership issues and innovative
ideas.
The CopD oc shares thoughts andideas as he talks with leaders
in policing communities,academia and other government
agencies.
And now please join Dr SteveMorreale and industry thought
(00:25):
leaders as they share theirinsights and experience on The
CopD oc Podcast.
Steve Morreale (00:32):
Well, hello again everybody.
This is Steve Morreale, comingto you from Boston today, and
today we're shooting to centralMaine, to the beautiful area of
Waterville, Maine and ColbyCollege, and a colleague
professor of mine, Dr Neil Gross.
He is a sociologist working atColby College.
Good morning to you, Neil.
Good morning Stephen.
Thanks for having me on.
Thanks so much for being here.
(00:53):
You caught my eye when youwrote a book.
You do an awful lot of writingfor the New York Times and
you're teaching occasionally inthe police sector about policing
and sociology of policing andthe American city policing.
I want to ask you to tell us abit about how you ended up in
the police arena.
I know, but tell the audience.
Neil Gross (01:12):
Yeah, sure, happy to talk about it.
So I didn't originally expectto become a social scientist,
teach sociology at Colby College, like you said, and I'm
thrilled thrilled to be here anddoing this job.
But it wasn't my originaloccupation that I chose.
I grew up in the San FranciscoBay Area in the 1980s, graduated
high school in 1989.
And in high school andthroughout college I set my
(01:36):
sights on a career lawenforcement.
That's what I wanted to do.
So I did all the things thatone does on the rate of that
kind of a path.
I was an explorer.
I worked as an explorer for theBerkeley Police Department.
I went off to UC San Diego froma first year of college and
worked as a community serviceofficer for that department and
then a dispatcher, ended uptransferring back up to UC
(01:56):
Berkeley and worked part-timefor Berkeley PD as what was
called a police aids, kind oflike a uniformed intern position
and then graduated fromBerkeley and got hired by
Berkeley PD, set to the PoliceAcademy in Sacramento.
I went through that academy andgraduated and worked on the
street Now not for very long.
I ended up leaving after about11 months, but that was my
(02:18):
original thing that I wanted todo and so I went to academia
thinking I'm going to researchpolicing, do some work to
improve the profession, improvepublic safety, end up going in a
completely different directionin my research career for like
20 years, 25 years, and onlycame back to it recently because
there's so much talk about datapolicing in the US and I wanted
to dive back in and see if Icould make some kind of a
(02:39):
contribution.
Steve Morreale (02:40):
So you write an awful lot, but one of the most
recent books that you wrote wascalled Walk the Walk how three
police chiefs defied the oddsand changed cop culture, and I
have begun to look through itand what I find very fascinating
about this is that it is astory.
It is certainly not empirical,it's more qualitative.
And what I really like aboutthis, neil, is when I first got
(03:04):
the book I thought, yeah, well,he's in California, he's going
to just talk to three policechiefs that he knows and let's
see what happens.
And indeed you did not do that.
You spread it around thecountry, stalked in California,
lagrange, georgia and Longmont,colorado, and that's interesting
.
Talk about how you thoughtabout this, how you conceived
this and how you went aboutfinding people who you would
(03:26):
like to sit, observe and chatwith.
Neil Gross (03:29):
Well, I'll tell you, the idea for the book comes out
of a larger interest in mind inthe question of how do you make
institutions as good as theycan be.
And I think we're at a momentin the history of our country
when there is tremendouscriticism of existing
institutions, but often lessinterest in actually fixing them
and getting them right thanjust in criticizing the
(03:51):
institutions.
And a really important thing todo if you want to make an
institution be as good as it canpossibly be is to look for
examples of where thatinstitution's doing things right
.
And so, in the realm ofpolicing, I thought well, look,
there's a lot of policedepartments in the US.
You know 15 to 18,000,depending on how you count.
You know clearly there are somethat are having some problems,
but there must be others thatare really innovating, excelling
(04:13):
, doing things exactly ascitizens most citizens would
want them to be done.
Rather than look for policedepartments that were especially
problematic, I set out lookingfor police departments that were
really innovative, again, doingthings really differently.
So I cast the net widely, didyou know?
Had lots of interviews withpeople, you know lots of
crunching numbers to try to findagencies where things look like
they were going well, and theseare the three that fell out.
(04:33):
Among my criteria was not onlythat they be agencies that had
worked hard to kind of reinventpolice culture in different ways
, but the agencies had to alsobe willing to talk to me.
There were a couple inparticular that I initially set
my side on and spent a lot oftime there, but they wouldn't,
they weren't transparent at all.
Everything that I tried to getaccess to had to be through
their like PR team, and that wasnot going to work for me.
(04:53):
So so I'm selecting theseagencies because they're they're
really different.
The chiefs are.
They have really differentpolitics.
What they've done in thedepartments are really different
.
The cities are really differentStockton's like 320,000,
serious gang violence problem.
Longmont's becoming more of asuburb, about 100,000.
Out of 10, sure, Yep, Yep, Yep,yeah.
But near Denver, the grains,Georgia, you know city about
31,000, half black, half white,a very different and a very
(05:17):
conservative community.
So they're differentdemographically, they're
different terms of their crimeproblems and the chiefs are all
really different in terms ofwhat they, what they tried to do
.
But they all innovated in animportant way and I wanted to
highlight that.
And the idea is here's someways in which departments can
innovate.
There's lots of other ways thatdepartments can innovate, but
maybe if people read about theseinnovative departments and the
challenges that chiefs face,challenges that cops face in
(05:37):
those agencies, that mightinspire citizens to get more
involved and help me to givetheir departments the resources
they need to innovate in perhapssimilar ways in their
communities.
Steve Morreale (05:45):
Thank you, and I truly believe that in many,
many circumstances, that oneperson can make a difference,
but they can't do it alone.
In other words, they've got tobring the rest of the people to
get a buy in, and it can't justbe the police department, it has
to be the external stakeholders, from the community itself to
the city or the town that theywork for, and it's a formidable
job, as you well know.
(06:06):
So, going back for a moment, oneof the things that popped
through my mind is you havewritten things and landed in the
New York Times with op-eds, andone of them had to do with if
you want to criticize, here'sone thing you can do Become a
cop yourself, take some of theprogressive ideas you have and
see what you can do to make adifference instead of
complaining from the side.
And I find that very, veryinteresting, because it's very
(06:28):
easy to complain until you havedone it.
And so my question would beyour time in the police academy
has to change your perspective,and your time in the police
department has to change yourperspective about what can be
done, who works there, thetrials and tribulations of that
kind of job, the discretion thatis availed to police officers.
(06:49):
How did that sort of frame yourview on policing?
Neil Gross (06:53):
It's a great question.
I'll say at the outset thatwhen I first started the
research for this project and Iwent back and it was the first
time that I spent time in policecars in decades and I was
struck by how much it changed.
There were no computers inpolice cars when I was doing it.
Well, they had just startedwith laptops, but it wasn't
really very functional at thatpoint.
You know, certainly we didn'thave cell phones.
A lot of the tech was different, but there was a lot that was
(07:16):
the same or similar.
Just the dynamics of how youdeal with disputes among people,
whether it's domestic disputesor fights among neighbors,
dealing with people who arereally struggling, dealing with
people who have committedserious offenses, dealing with
victims of crime.
There's that human side of it,the side of conflict and all
that.
That is really the same.
(07:37):
So I think, to answer yourquestion, one thing that really
stood out to me when I was onthe job, and for a very short
time and over the years, is justhow complicated the policing
job is, how emotionally fraughtit is, how oftentimes it's not
exactly clear what it is youshould be doing or maybe it is
clear, but it's not clear in themoment, just the incredible
(07:58):
complexity of the job and howdiverse it is in terms of the
number of situations you have todeal with.
I think that if you're outsidepolicing, it's easy to
stereotype the occupation and toimagine that the cops are all
they do sit around all day,drive around and stop and harass
people.
And anybody who's been in knowsthat there's this other side to
pretty much every town, everycity, where people are really
(08:20):
struggling, hurting one another,all that sort of thing, and the
cops are there to deal with it.
I just am always impressed byhow challenging the position is
and, in some ways, howill-prepared most young officers
are to really do the work.
So I think that's one thingthat stuck with me.
And then if you have a policedepartment that can really
adequately train officers andcreate a culture in which
(08:40):
they'll be oriented toward doingthe job as the community wants
them to, those are all goodthings.
Steve Morreale (08:45):
Was it helpful, as you were introducing yourself
as Dr Gross, but a formerpolice officer Did that help?
Neil Gross (08:53):
at all.
It's hard to say.
I did the job so long ago thatI don't think anybody that I
spend time with, or any of thechiefs, really thought of me as
anything to do with lawenforcement.
I think they just thought of meas someone doing some research.
It helped to build a little bitof trust.
I mean, I think, as much as somedepartments are open and want
to be cooperative with theresearch community, I think
(09:14):
there's a lot of, or at least afair bit of, suspicion about
what academia is like andwhether people studying the
police are basically just out toget them.
And so I think, if anything, Ithink maybe the fact that I had
a background in law enforcementat least gave cops the belief
that I wasn't out to get themand then actually doing exactly
what I was said I was going todo, which was to write a book
(09:34):
about a book that's in any waykind of inflates what I saw,
benefits of what I saw, but thebook that would just be a
straightforward account of whatit looked like in three
departments that had reallytried to move the needle on
police culture and, again, thechallenges that they faced, and
so I think there was a baselinelevel of trust.
But I have to say one thingthat was intriguing.
I really thought when I firststarted hanging out with the
cops and doing research Ithought they'd be really
(09:56):
resistant to me recording thembecause I wanted to get
transcripts of what they said.
And they were surprisingly okaywith that.
And the reason they said thatthey were okay with it is
because they say you know, we'rerecorded all the time.
Steve Morreale (10:07):
I was just going to say that it's a completely
different world than you and Igrew up with, for sure,
Absolutely.
Neil Gross (10:11):
You know, policing is such a more like public
occupation in a way than it wasback whatever 30 years ago for
me, so that was a remarkablechange to observe.
Steve Morreale (10:19):
You know it's interesting.
A little while ago you saidsomething and it was about
trying to see what people aredoing, right?
I remember having a professorcome in as the chair of the
department professor came in andsaid Steve, I want to do a
special topics, and you knowwhat a special topic is.
I just kind of want to explore.
It's not a course, but I wantto kind of go down a road.
I said, okay, what's it goingto be called?
And he said I want to talkabout doing things right and
(10:40):
policing.
And I looked at him and I saidwhat?
the hell is that?
And I literally thought myselfthat I shouldn't have been so
negative, but I said well, waita minute, wait a minute, tell me
about what you're talking about.
And he told me that when he wasa graduate assistant, as a
doctoral candidate, he wasteaching classes at night out on
the West Coast in Washingtonstate.
And he said there were peoplewho related to me different than
(11:03):
the professors, who were a fulltime and felt comfortable
saying things to me that theyprobably weren't with others.
And he said I remember talkingabout the things that were
bringing down police departments.
And somebody raised their handand said you know, with all due
respect, john, I'm sick andtired of coming to school being
told what police do wrong.
When are we ever going to betold what we do right?
(11:24):
And he said at that moment Isaid I want to do a class on
what police do right.
And at that moment it was thelight bulb that we all have
Sometimes.
I said, oh my God, that isbrilliant.
I want to work with you on that.
And so you understand thatthere's this pushback sometimes
from people who and we talkedabout this before we started
about the view of academia fromthe outside and especially in
(11:48):
policing, that they see in manycases that academia has become
way too liberal and way too downon policing.
You've done some work on that.
Talk a little bit about that.
Neil Gross (11:59):
Yeah, there's a lot there to dive into.
You know, I understand whyofficers feel that way.
There aren't a lot of otherprofessions where there's
perhaps this level of scrutinyright now and this level of
criticism.
I get that.
On the other hand, it's alwaysbeen a unique occupation in the
sense that policing is the powerof the state to inflict
(12:21):
violence on people in order toensure that the law is respected
and that people are brought upbefore judges if they're
suspected of committing crimes.
So it's always been a very highstakes occupation.
So I get why cops are worriedabout the level of scrutiny.
On the other hand, it kind ofis part of the territory.
The other thing that'sinteresting is that, doing
(12:42):
research of this book, I wentback and looked a lot at the
history of policing and a lot ofthe history of research that's
been done on policing over theyears, all the way back into the
50s and 60s.
There's a period when therewere lots of social scientists
who were hanging out with thepolice and trying to observe
them.
One thing that's interesting tonote is even back then, I think
in a period when lots of copsyou know the cops had so much
respect from the citizens andeveryone loved the police.
(13:04):
Yeah, the cops back thenthought of themselves as a
stigmatized occupation.
They thought that everyonehates us, they don't want to be
friends with us, they're afraidwe're going to arrest them if
they get drunk in public orwhatever.
So, even back then, part of thereason that policing has always
been this closed communitywhere people look out for one
another is that there was thesense that there was the police
and there was the rest ofsociety.
Yes, yes, it's the yes versusthem problem.
(13:25):
Yes, so a lot of things that wethink of as modern day things
like it's just happening rightnow, are just kind of built into
the structure of the occupationand have kind of always, always
been there.
So I understand why police feelthat way, you know.
The other thing I know aboutpolicing, though, is that,
despite all the grumbling, youknow cops want to want their
departments to do as good a jobas possible.
You know most of them want todo as good a job as possible,
(13:46):
and so you know if there'sresearch that academics, who are
doing it in good faith and havesome really sophisticated
research methodologies, canbring to bear to help policing
get as good as cops wanted to be, you know, that seems like
something that people should bewilling to embrace.
So again, I understand thatthat level of suspicion, and
it's hard to be an occupationthat's being criticized all the
time.
But again, if you can make theoccupation better, you should.
(14:07):
But see, there's one last pointI want to make is an
interesting parallel there, Ithink, between what's happening
in policing and what's happeningin academia, right?
So think about how much folkson the left criticize policing
these days, but think about howmuch folks on the right
criticize academia.
Is almost a really interestingparallel there.
And one thing that I've alwaysbeen intrigued by is the ways in
(14:28):
which criticism of academiafrom the right Ironically helps
to make academia even moreprogressive.
Because if an occupation issuper Criticized by one side, by
the right for example, thenpeople who might consider going
into the occupation, who areconservative, would say I'm
never gonna go into academia,that's a terrible occupation,
it's not for me.
And so you get a lot moreself-selection of liberal folks
(14:48):
into academia on the other side.
I think in policing, if folkson the left are constantly
criticizing policing, sayingit's horrible, it's racist, that
kind of thing, you're gonna getfewer folks on the left who are
going to go into policing andso you get this.
It's kind of this weird likepolarization dynamic where the
more one side Criticizes aninstitution or occupation, the
more it becomes associated withthe other side.
So it's this kind of ongoing,ongoing dynamic.
(15:10):
So I've always been intriguedby the kind of weird parallels
between policing and academia inthat regard well as a second
career, academic.
Steve Morreale (15:18):
I would say to you that my experience has been,
first of all, adapting toacademia is not an easy thing.
After being in policing for 30years, you need to tone it down,
you.
You need to adapt to the newclimate and the new organization
and the new culture.
But very often I find that Ihave to tone down or Tamp down
my own opinions because they donot relate to most of the people
(15:42):
on Campus.
So I just kind of keep tomyself, do what I have to say.
I've been accused of being anapologist for police.
I've been told to take my cophat off in faculty meetings,
which just blows my mind and inother cases I've had to defend
Students and even in sometimesmy students feel very
uncomfortable in other classeswhere they are being asked by
(16:03):
certain Professor certainly notall to think like them, to write
like them, and that they're notvery well seen because they're
seen as future police officers.
Now, criminal justice isabsolutely.
We're not a cop shop, right,neil?
And by the way we're talking,neil Grossi is a professor up at
Colby College in Maine and heis most recently known for a new
(16:24):
book called walk-to-walk howthree police chiefs defy the
odds and change cop culture.
But my point is that I've hadto modify me with my behavior
and certainly even when I was inpolicing.
You have to modify behavior.
You don't, you can't say whatyou always feel.
You have to keep some of yourpolitical thoughts or your
thoughts about what you see infront of you and Maintain some
(16:44):
form of professionalism.
But you wrote something andthis is what I want to say.
You wrote something a while.
Why are professors andscientists so liberal?
What caused you to go in thatdirection?
Neil Gross (16:52):
I feel a little bit not strange answering the
question, but I'm gonna give itmaybe a different answer than
you would expect.
I really am of the view that,well, it's probably inevitable
that social scientists bring youknow Some of their values to
bear on the kind of questionsthey take up, and so on.
I mean, I really am of thestrong position that if you're
in the sciences whether it's thesocial sciences or the natural
(17:13):
sciences you know you should doyour best to make sure that the
answers you give to questionsReflect the actual nature of the
world and not just yourpolitical opinions.
So I took up that topic of whyare professors liberal, not
because I had a particular Dogin that race that I was worried
about, but because it's just aninteresting social science
question, you know.
(17:34):
So the answers that I came upwith weren't because of my own
kind of political views.
They were, you know, afterdoing a ton of research using a
whole range of methodologies,and you know, I think there's
lots of explanations.
It kind of in the same way thatthe policing has been the
stigmatized occupation for years, academia has been a pretty
liberal occupation for for years, at least since the 1950s,
there's always been more liberalacademics than there are folks
(17:56):
who are progressive in thecountry as a whole, you know.
So I looked at lots ofdifferent possible explanations.
Is it because of discriminationagainst conservative professors
trying to get it, get a job?
Is it because of something todo with psychology?
You know something aboutparticular kind of mindset that
maybe makes people both moreliberal and more inclined to go
into academic work.
You know, is it because ofclass interests?
(18:16):
Thought a lot about that right,like if you're your professor
and you're doing research, youyou want a lot of research
funding from the state and somaybe, maybe that makes you
supportive of the party thatwants a bigger state, namely the
Democrats.
None of that stuff really holdsa lot of water empirically.
Problems with all those claimsand what I eventually came down
to is the idea of self-selection, and that is that.
You know.
(18:36):
I think many, many years agoactually write the founding of
research universities are nottoo long thereafter.
Through some fairly Randomreasons, academia started to get
a reputation as a place where,if you were smart and had kind
of left Sensibilities, where youcould do your work without
getting in too much trouble, andthat reputation kind of grew
and developed over time.
And now I think if you're reallysmart, academically motivated
(18:58):
and your young person graduatedfrom college and you're on the
left, you might think toyourself yeah, academia, it's a
perfect career for me.
I could really see myself there.
If you're smart andacademically motivated on the
right, I think you'd think toyourself I would never go into
academia, that's not a careerfor me.
And you see that all the waythrough.
If you look at the proportionof, if you look at
undergraduates who say theyaspire to career in academia
(19:20):
huge disproportion of folks onthe left to folks on the right.
Do you look at graduatestudents, huge disproportionate
folks on the left, folks on theright, assistant professor same
thing all the way up the ladder.
So I kind of think it'sself-selection all the way
through.
I think that's kind of thebiggest explanation,
self-selection driven by theongoing reputation of the
profession.
So that's kind of what I foundafter poking around and doing
doing a whole lot of research.
Steve Morreale (19:38):
Yeah, well, I mean for those who were
listening when you're doing someof this research.
So you've got to start with aquestion what's your research
question and what yourhypothesis and and as you go
through, and when am I gonna usemy, where am I gonna find my
sample, what kinds of questionsam I going to ask and how am I
gonna get that information?
It would be survey or will beinterviews, and I understand all
of that and what I like whatyou said and what I say very
(19:59):
often to doctoral students who Iam supervising is Simply, and I
understand.
So you might have a cop or youmight have a teacher, you might
have a firefighter, and theybring with them that experience
and one of the things I have toremind them that I Don't care
who you were.
You are here as a researcherand you have to take that hat
off and be a researcher and Payattention to the rigor of a
(20:22):
scientific investigation,without your own biases or
without injecting your ownexperience.
Let the data talk, let thepeople talk, and it sounds like
that's what you were doing.
Neil Gross (20:33):
Yeah, that's what I, that's what I tried really hard
to do and and you know we uselots of different kinds of data
a huge nationally representativesurvey of the faculty.
They wanted studies where wepretended to be, you know,
conservative or liberal peopleapplying to graduate school to
see you know what kind ofresponses we got from different
departments, tons of interviewswith people around the country.
So it was a very multi methodkind of approach.
You know, one thing I'll say,steven, is that you know, a lot
(20:54):
of cops have to do somethingsimilar, right?
I remember talking to one ofthe chiefs who was a Republican
and quite conservative and hesaid you know, I'm a
conservative and a Republicanbut I'm a police chief first,
and I think that's true.
For you know, for most cops,like whatever their, whatever
their political views, they haveto kind of check it at the door
and be law enforcement officersfirst.
So I think you know people knowwhat that's like and it can be
challenging.
It takes a lot of work and it'seasy to fall into the trap of
(21:18):
letting your own views orwhatever Influence the way you
behave.
And you know some of thatinfluence is inevitable.
But you know, the more you cando to create a culture where
everyone's trying to put thosebiases behind them, the better
off things can be.
Steve Morreale (21:30):
Yeah, we talked a little bit about some of the
things that I'm working on, orUnderstanding the
socio-political risks that thosein criminal justice, especially
police chiefs, have to dealwith, and we also talked about
just before that.
You know, I have this inklingthat, while police departments
are accused of implicit bias andand forced sometimes but
encouraged to take implicit bias, training there is, and again,
(21:53):
this is my own Thought.
It's the question that I wouldpose, and that is is there
implicit bias against criminaljustice programs on campuses?
And it's for another day toexplore, but I just posed that
question.
I want to focus, neil, on thebook, the most recent book again
, and you began to talk aboutone of the three police chiefs,
(22:13):
and we're talking Neil Gross.
He's up at Colby Collegegetting ready to start the
academic year soon and that's inWaterville, maine.
But the three chiefs that youhad the opportunity to sit and
talk with, different people,talk about what you took away
from being able to visit theirorganizations, talk with their
people, but also talk with them.
Neil Gross (22:33):
Yeah, thanks.
I want to start just quickly bycoming back to that implicit
bias point because I think it'sInteresting and it speaks to you
the ways in which you knowsometimes there isn't enough of
a connection between Lawenforcement and rigorous social
science research.
Among social scientists.
I think the evidence is prettyclear that Implicit bias
training does not work.
That's true in the realm ofpolicing.
(22:53):
There's pretty good evidencethat it doesn't work in the
corporate sector either.
In fact it often makes thingsworse because people who
actually have biases are reallypissed off by having to do the
training.
So, despite the fact thatthere's really very little
evidence of its effectiveness,you know it's been mandated for
so many departments and I thinkthat you know maybe if there
were tighter connections betweenlaw enforcement and you know
segments of academe that were,you know, doing kind of serious,
(23:15):
rigorous work, you know maybethere'd be some reason to pull
back on some of that training.
But as to the three policechiefs, they're all really
different.
The guy in in Stockton is nowretired Actually all the chiefs
are now left was a guy namedEric Jones who was a long time
Stockton cop.
I said earlier, stockton is acity with very diverse city,
really serious gang violenceproblem and he took over the
department back in in 20.
(23:35):
12 after heaven worked his wayup the ranks.
Stockton is kind of a bluecollar city in California, in
the Central Valley.
At the time Stockton wasreeling from the financial
crisis.
There have been tons offoreclosures there.
It was one of the first citiesin the country to declare
bankruptcy.
When Eric Jones took over thedepartment, the city was facing
this huge, huge budget shortfall.
(23:57):
They ended up having todepartment about 400 plus
officers.
They ended up having to eitherlay off or force into early
retirement about 100 of theircops.
So a fourth of the departmentwent away.
As you might imagine, homicidesshot up during this time.
Jones' first task wasn't reformor anything like that.
It was just how can we try totamp down this level of violence
(24:18):
and bring offenders to accountfor what they've done?
So we got involved in a seriouseffort at addressing it.
He actually got involved with aprogram that you'll know from
your Boston days, a programcalled Operation Ceasefire,
which originated in Boston andinvolves really targeted efforts
at deterrence, where you bringgang members in others who are
at serious risk of committingoffenses or serious risk of
(24:40):
being victims of violence.
And you say look, we'rewatching you closely, I think
you do.
You step out of line for asecond.
We're going to be there, butalso here's some carrots.
Would you be willing toconsider stepping out of this
gang life?
So they tried that once beforein Stockton.
It worked pretty well.
Eric Jones tried it.
No one would come talk to him Avery few people come talk to
the department, because no onehad any trust in Stockton PD.
(25:02):
And the reason was thatStockton PD had a pretty
terrible reputation in thecommunity as a department that
was quite violent and quiteracist.
And so Jones kind of realizedthat if he wanted to actually
work successfully at reducinglevels of violence he needed to
build trust between thedepartment and the community,
especially the Black and Latinocommunities and also the Asian
communities in Stockton.
And so that's when he kind ofgot the idea that he needed to
(25:24):
work on changing the culture ofthe PD.
He wasn't motivated by somekind of political, it was just
like how can we bring down gangviolence?
Lots of ways we do it.
We need better staffing, weneed more effective staffing,
traditional things, but also weneed to improve the culture of
the department.
And he set out to do it and wasrelatively successful.
I mean it's not like it's a sayin the book, it's not like
Stockton's become a policingnirvana, it's still a rough and
tumble town.
(25:44):
When I spend time with officersthere they say it's not really
part of the Bay Area and theywould say the difference between
us and the Bay Area is inStockton you go hands on and
they go hands on a lot.
But he was able tosignificantly shift the culture
of the department in ways thatcitizens noticed surveys show
that and that really improvedthings.
Other chiefs were different andhappy to talk about those.
But Stockton is the biggest ofthe three cities and in many
(26:05):
ways the one that is closest tokind of the problems that many
other large cities face.
Steve Morreale (26:10):
To get this book out and to pull all of this
stuff together and to do all ofthe background work to figure
out who will I focus on, whatdepartments are showing
progressive ideas, the change inculture.
I understand that it takes anawfully long time, sometimes
several years.
And there's another issue thatthe difference between action
research and longer research.
(26:32):
We in academia sometimes takean awfully long time to get
through from start to finish andpolice are looking for answers
today, not answers for threeyears from now.
But once you figured out thethree organizations you were
going to look at and looked toopen the door, let's talk a
little bit about Georgia.
What a completely differentplace than California.
Neil Gross (26:54):
Yeah for sure.
So LaGrange, Georgia, like Isaid, it's about an hour outside
of Atlanta, it's near theAlabama state line and it's a
community of 31,000.
It's majority black, sort ofhalf black and half white, a
relatively small Latinocommunity there, and it's a
former mill town.
Georgia has tons of countiesand it's in, let me say still it
(27:14):
has really a lot of countiesand it's in Troupe County.
Troupe County, if you go wayback, Troupe County, was the
fifth largest slave holdingcounty in Georgia and then, as
the end of the 19th centuryrolled around, LaGrange became a
mill town.
People who were pre-roll weremilling cotton and it became a
sort of industrial center and abit of a cultural center for the
(27:35):
local community.
So really different set oftraditions and issues than other
places that I looked at.
Lagrange has quite a high rateof poverty and again, there's
this really long and troubledhistory.
So the chief there is a guynamed Lou Deckmar, and Lou
Deckmar's not from the south,from New Jersey, originally grew
up in Oregon and then worked inWyoming in law enforcement for
(27:56):
many years before deciding tomove to Georgia and he inherited
the department several decadesago and it was a mess, you know,
as he describes it.
There were officers underinvestigation for a whole range
of offenses.
The district attorney's officewould routinely throw out cases
because the officers eitherwouldn't send over case files or
didn't do a good jobmaintaining evidence.
Training was terrible and thelevel of racism in the
(28:16):
department was remarkable.
I talked to one retired blackofficer who joined a long time
ago and he said you know, whenhe first came on he was not
allowed to stop white people.
It was just not allowed.
I mean, this was a city thathad de facto segregated swimming
facilities for black and whitekids up until the 90s.
Steve Morreale (28:33):
Oh, my goodness.
Neil Gross (28:34):
Imagine that you know very, very different kind
of place.
So Deckmar came in, like I said, a conservative guy, and set
out to kind of remake thedepartment and he's a big
advocate of kind of rule of law,equity and just really strict
professionalism and so he setout to change the culture of the
department and make it muchmore rule based.
That was, I think, his big, hisbig thing.
(28:55):
And then, as I described in thebook, really interesting thing
happened.
He made a bunch of changes inthe department up the training,
implemented a whole host ofrequirements for filling out
forms, we got the departmentaccredited with Kalea, which a
bunch of your.
That's a big deal.
Yeah, it's a big deal.
He did all that and then heheard about something that he'd
never explored before, and thatwas that back in 1940, the
(29:16):
department had played a role inthe lynching of a young black
man named Austin Callaway, andhe decided to start finding out
more about this in conjunctionwith efforts that were already
underway in the community, andhe ended up in 2017 apologizing
in a big public forum for hisdepartment's role in that
atrocity, and he ended up being,I think, the first Southern
police chief to apologize forhis department's role in a
(29:38):
lynching and, you know, got somepushback from his cops and from
some folks in the communitysaid look, how can you be
responsible for something thathappened so many years ago?
But he thought it was just animportant thing to do to restore
trust and, to me, convincepeople that his department would
never again engage in that kindof an activity.
So he ended up basicallyshifting the culture of the
department in a very differentway than happened in Stockton.
So a second and quiteintriguing case for me to get to
(30:01):
know the cops down there, spendsome time there and tell that
story.
Steve Morreale (30:03):
You know you just talked about history and
Bill Bratton.
When we talked to him on thepodcast, he makes an interesting
point and says it's extremelyimportant for police officers to
understand the history of theirpolice department and how they
may have had an impact or playeda role in demeaning others or
(30:24):
taking advantage of others orbeing racist or arresting slaves
that had escaped, and I thinkthere's some value to that to
understand why a greatgrandfather or a grandfather
would have some disdain for apolice department that behaved
that way even if it was 30, 40or 50 years ago.
I think it's very helpful toyoung people to understand who
(30:46):
are coming on, what the historyis and how we're working to
avoid that from repeating itself.
And so it sounds like this iswhat the chief done there in
LaGrange was doing.
Neil Gross (30:55):
Yeah, I think he recognized that it was a place
where the history of thedepartment in the community and
its reputation was.
He was making changes to theway the department was run, but
there was still this kind oflack of trust between the
department and the blackcommunity in LaGrange and a lot
of that yet had to do withhistory.
I think you're right, steve,about getting to know that
history.
Sometimes it's easy for cops tothink that that stuff doesn't
(31:16):
matter.
But history, the legs ofhistory are really long.
Sometimes you see that even inagencies where you wouldn't even
think of it.
Right Like Boston good exampleright Like segregation and
school busing and all that Ilived through it.
Yeah.
And then, even going back, youthink, well, Boston was
different than other departmentsand it's founding in the sense
that in the south we know thatsome of the police departments
(31:38):
that were formed there reallydid emerge out of these civil
guard units that were.
Their first responsibility wascapturing enslaved people who'd
run away.
We typically tell the story inthe north of like, okay, well,
but in Boston, New York, it wasdifferent, and it was different
in the sense that it reallyarose out of urbanization, the
kind of problems aroundurbanization.
But after the passage of theFugitive Slave Act in 1850,
(32:01):
there were folks who wereinvolved in law enforcement in
Boston, who were in the businessit's not the right word but who
were involved in trying toreturn fugitive slaves to the
south and met with tremendousprotest in Boston.
So even in places where youthink the history is different,
sometimes there's parts of itthat you don't know.
So, yeah, I think it's soimportant that departments
understand the history and knowthat their civil chief said to
me look, when you put on thatbadge, it's important that you
(32:22):
know that people aren't seeingyou, they're seeing the badge
and they're seeing everythingthat that badge represents to
them, including the history thatit represents to them and
you're policing against all thathistory.
Steve Morreale (32:32):
So we're talking with Neil Gross, dr Neil Gross.
He's a sociology professor atColby College, an avid writer
and a researcher, and most ofwhat we're talking about is the
most recent book, easton 2023,walk the Walk how Three Police
Chiefs Defied the Odds andChanged Cop Culture.
And the last place is Longmont.
Longmont, colorado, outside ofDenver.
(32:53):
Talk about that.
Neil Gross (32:54):
Yeah, very, very different kind of agency.
And there the chief gentlemannamed Mike Butler and Mike has a
fascinating kind of history andstory which I tell in the book.
A side note is that at leastseveral of the chiefs at least
two of them in particular bothstrongly religious some of their
efforts at changing theirdepartments were partially
(33:14):
motivated or maybe given supportby their religious views.
And that's partially the casefor Butler.
Although he was very muchbelieved in separation of church
and state and all that kind ofthing.
He took over the department inthe 90s.
After working his way up inBoulder PD, which is like 15
minutes away from Longmont, hedecided that he wanted to make
the police department a verydifferent kind of thing than it
(33:35):
had been there.
There was some history theretoo.
Longmont has a sizable Latinopopulation and there'd been a
police shooting.
Two young Latino men were killed, one of them shot in the back,
running away from a fight aftera traffic stop, and so Butler
set out to change the department, but he changed it in ways that
are kind of much moreprogressive than you see in the
other two cities that I profile.
So, for example, he got reallyinto the idea of restorative
(33:56):
justice, which is thisalternative model Obviously many
of your listeners will knowabout it where not appropriate
for everybody, obviously, or forall offenses.
But you've got someone who youthink like this is someone who's
committed an offense but it'sgoing to make their lives worse.
Make them more criminogenic isthe word if they spend time in
jail, if they seem appropriatefor it can steer them into a
restorative justice programwhere they're brought into a
(34:18):
circle with the people thatthey've harmed others.
A long education process.
They have to pay somerestitution, they have to
apologize for what they've done,that kind of thing.
So lots of departments havethis or lots of cities have this
.
Steve Morreale (34:29):
But I don't mean obviously I mean those who do
or don't know where it's active,and I know it's very active up
in Vermont, actually, amongother places.
But it is an alternative.
It's a community alternative toan overburdened court system
and obviously it keeps peopleout of the system and therefore
not to have a record that willlinger with them for a long time
(34:49):
.
So I just I wanted to interjectthat.
Go ahead, yeah, thanks.
Neil Gross (34:52):
Well, yeah, that's, that's right.
The thing that was reallyunusual about Longmont is Chief
Butler worked out so in Longmontthe cops could steer people
into restorative justice insteadof making an arrest.
In most places restorativejustice is a post arrest
diversion, but here it's a prearrest diversion, at least it
can be.
You've got someone like ateenager who's shop lists a
piece of jewelry.
Do you want to slap handcuffson them or do you want to try to
(35:15):
set their life in a differentcourse?
The interesting thing aboutrestorative justice is there's
really good experimentalevidence on its effectiveness,
good evidence out of the UK inparticular.
Kind of all else being equal,it produces less repeat
offending and offenses that aremore violent.
It produces less post traumaticstress disorder on the part of
victims.
You know again, definitely notappropriate for a lot of things.
There's debate about this seemsto me wholly inappropriate for
(35:38):
sexual assault, for domesticviolence, violent crimes,
violent crimes Exactly.
But you know, for some thingsit seems to work pretty well
when it's done right, when it'sdone right.
That's the key.
And Butler was really concernedabout over incarceration and so
he steered his department thatdirection.
But more generally, he tried tomove his department toward
being, I would say a more humaneagency.
That was one of his bigtakeaways, partially from his
religious sensibilities, and heworked to kind of thread that
(36:00):
model through training,recruitment and just the ethos
of the department.
But a lot of time with lawenforcement officers got to know
him really well, including acouple of domestic violence
detectives but also patrolofficers and you saw it on the
street like the way that theypoliced, amount of time they
took to deescalate situationswas just remarkable and
partially that was they had moretime because it's not as busy
(36:21):
an agency as other places are.
But it was remarkable to seeand I try to tell some of those
stories in the book of kind ofwhat that could look like.
Steve Morreale (36:28):
We're winding down talking Neil Gross, who's
up at Colby College, waterville,maine, and after this
experience, and obviouslysending pen to paper and taking
so much time to write and torewrite and to tell these
stories, were you, in yourexperience, pleasantly surprised
at the value of these changes,the hard work that was being
(36:51):
done in these particularagencies to respond and to
change the way they interactwith community.
Neil Gross (36:57):
Yeah, I left this research impressed and hopeful.
It's obviously time oftremendous political division in
our country at the state level,but especially the national
level, and sometimes theopposing camps seem to be so at
odds with one another that itseems like everything's going to
hell in a handbasket andthere's no possibility for
anything to get better.
I think if you look at what'shappening at the local level in
(37:17):
communities across the country,you see a lot of institutions
that are filled with people whoare trying to do a great job,
trying to serve theircommunities, dedicated public
servants, whether it's policingor education or whatever, At the
local level.
I think there's a lot of hope.
At the local level.
A lot of people say yousometimes have to put ideology
aside and just get the job done.
You just have to make sure thetrash is collected and the water
(37:39):
runs in the households and thatkind of thing.
So when I actually drilled downto the local level here, I saw
lots of places where departmentswere innovating, working hard
to do a good job, forging tieswith our community.
I left more hopeful, not justabout law enforcement, but also
more hopeful about the future ofour country.
I think there's a way in which,if we can put aside or tune out
some of the intensepartisanship coming from the
(38:00):
national level and kind of focuson what's happening in our
communities and just trying tomake our communities do a good
job.
Steve Morreale (38:04):
We should not pay attention to national
politics, but there's a lot ofgood that can be done at the
local level and I think that atthe local level there's lots of
great things happening in thoseplaces, and one of the things I
just wrote down and you startedthe move in that direction was
that, in my view, doing an awfullot of training and
facilitating for executives andfor high-level police officers.
I continually say, look, yourjob is you're not the
(38:25):
quarterback, you're the blockingback.
In my mind, what you're doingis to point your people in the
direction of doing the job theright way, through the noise,
and if you do the job with thebest of intention, then I will
help you move forward.
It's very, very important,because you can't do the job
without the people and you can'tdo policing without the backing
of the community, and so that'sjust a constant push and pull.
(38:49):
I appreciate that.
As we move to the end, I'mcurious to know what's on your
to-do list.
Neil Gross (38:53):
Well, there's no shortage of interesting things
to do.
I really like teaching mystudents, and so I'm eager to
jump into the school year withnew courses and new books for
them to read and work their waythrough.
Colby's a liberal arts collegeand really emphasizes getting
students to think for themselvesand think clearly, and I really
value watching my students growand develop in their views over
(39:15):
the course of their time atColby.
So that's on my immediate to-dolist.
Steve Morreale (39:18):
Finish my syllabi get my classes, me too,
my friend.
Neil Gross (39:21):
And look forward to the school year.
Steve Morreale (39:22):
Great, andy, you have a bucket list.
What are the things on yourlist to do?
You mean research and writingwise.
Anything Getting away?
Yes, maybe researching, maybewriting what's in the bucket.
Neil Gross (39:33):
I don't know, I'll let you know.
I feel like you should makeyour bucket list.
You can't really make yourbucket list until the very end.
It's like a retrospectivebucket list.
These are the things I shouldhave done.
That's good.
Steve Morreale (39:43):
Yeah, yeah, yeah , yeah, yes.
Let's finish by talking aboutthe students and some of the
things you do in teachingsociology and teaching about
policing, and I don't know thatyou can talk about sociology
without talking about cities andtowns and the many different
layers and the institutions andsuch, and I hear you saying that
you're guiding them towardsbeing more critical thinkers.
(40:04):
How do you open conversationsabout police?
Neil Gross (40:07):
Great question.
This obviously varies a lot bycampus and it may be something
unique about Colby I don't knowif it's the clean air up here or
the good water or something butI find the students are very
open-minded and very curious tothem.
Some of them have hadexperiences with policing, in
the sense of having been stoppedor having family members who've
been stopped or something alongthose lines.
(40:28):
But most don't know much aboutit other than what they've seen
in the media, whether from newsreports or just watching TV
shows or movies.
So they're curious, they wantto know more, they want to go
deeper, so found that they'requite willing to have
conversations.
People come in sometimes withstrong views and my goal in
teaching is just to expose themto more information.
Yeah, I mean it's.
(40:49):
My aim is just to get them tobe able to, whatever their views
are going to be, to be able tohave those views on more solid
grounds and be supported byevidence?
Steve Morreale (40:58):
necessarily not.
I understand and you know, neil, one of the things I will say
and certainly I have morphedinto an academic over time but I
will say to people, and I'msure you do the same thing look,
look, I don't want you to thinklike me.
In fact, some of my views nevercome out.
What I want you to do is simplythink and support, support your
views.
Neil Gross (41:16):
fair statement, yeah absolutely, and I think that's
you know that's cruciallyimportant and again, it's very
rewarding.
I'm sure you've had thisexperience but as I watch
students kind of grow anddevelop over the course of their
four years here at Colby, youcan kind of see the growth in
their intellectual maturity.
Their positions might not havechanged what they're arguing for
and I'll say you know, a lot ofthings I have my students think
about aren't things you havepolitical positions on.
(41:37):
Necessarily they're just basicsocial science points.
But you can see that they're,that they're thinking is growing
more complex, that they'rebetter able to use evidence,
they're better able to thinkabout counterarguments.
And so that's for me the superrewarding aspect of my job just
watching those students, kind oflike I said, grow and grow and
mature over time.
Steve Morreale (41:52):
Well, the last thing I will say is especially
teaching criminal justice, butyou having had some experience
in policing in a number of ways,I'm asking students to dig, to
investigate, to support and whenyou're doing your searches,
don't just look for the firstpage on Google or on Bing, but
to keep digging and looking forsupport and looking for
comparing and contrasting, andto me that's our chore as
(42:15):
professors.
Neil Gross (42:16):
That's right.
I mean, there's a joke that'soften told about the University
of Chicago and the joke is thatthe ethos on that campus is that
you walk to the campus and yousay to somebody beautiful day,
isn't it?
And they say what's theevidence for that?
Yes, and I think that's a goodmotto for many of us.
If you can cultivate that kindof curiosity and sense that like
you really need to look for theevidence and it might turn out
(42:39):
one way, it might turn out theother way.
That's a good kind of form ofinstruction you can give to
people Terrific.
Steve Morreale (42:43):
Well, thank you so much for your time.
Good luck this academic year.
I appreciate it.
We've been talking to NeilGross and he is a professor of
sociology up at a beautifulcampus, Colby College in
Waterville, Maine.
It strikes me as I go to Maineand you know, I was a police
officer in Dover, New Hampshirejust over the main line and when
you cross the PiscataquaquaRiver I'm sure you've done that
(43:04):
a few times what's the firstthing that you see on the sign
Maine?
The way life should be.
Isn't that interesting?
So you're in a wonderful place.
So thank you for your time, foryour insight.
I appreciate it.
Good luck with your futureendeavors, and how can people
get in touch with you if theyneed to?
Neil Gross (43:19):
They can just pop on to the Colby College website.
They'll find my email there andyou know the books on Amazon
and those other big retailers.
So if they want to pick one upthey can get them there.
And I'll just say just to putit in a last plug, the audiobook
I am especially happy aboutit's the voice actor that they
ended up hiring is this.
It was a former cop out of outof the Los Angeles area, Really
terrific guy.
So if you want to listen, tolisten to the book, you know his
(43:41):
voice is a lot Sounds a lotbetter than mine does, and
that's a great way to go Alsothank you for that.
Steve Morreale (43:46):
And so we're finishing up with Neil Gross,
and he most recently wrote thebook Walk the Walk how Three
Police Chiefs Defied the Oddsand Change Cop Culture.
And again, that is Longmont, itis LaGrange and it is Stockton
that are the targets of thisinvestigation.
So thank you very, very much,neil.
Have a great semester, steven,you too, thanks.
That's it.
(44:06):
Another episode of The Cop Docis in the books.
Thanks for listening.
Please share if you get valuefrom listening with your
colleagues and friends.
We'll see you on the nextepisode.
Intro-Outro (44:19):
Thanks for listening to The Cop Doc Podcast
with Dr.
Steve Morreale.
Steve is a retired lawenforcement practitioner and
manager, turned academic andscholar from Worcester State
University.
Please tune into The Cop DocPodcast for regular episodes of
interviews with thought leadersin policing.
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