WHAT DID WE LEARN?
The United States Department of Justice recently released the “After-Action Assessment of the Police Response to the August 2014 Demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri.” This governmental evaluation provides insights into the lessons learned concerning the regional police response to the mass demonstrations that followed the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri one year ago.
Six key themes emerged regarding the police response during the first wave of the protests:
- Inconsistent leadership
- Failure to understand endemic problems in the community
- A reactive rather than proactive strategy
- Inadequate communication and information sharing
- Use of ineffective and inappropriate strategies and tactics
- Lack of law enforcement response continuity
The report details 48 findings and reviews more than 100 lessons learned as a result of the findings. The importance of these findings and the lessons learned should weigh heavily on law enforcement agencies throughout the United States. The memory of the fatal shooting of Michael Brown last summer, and the many similar incidents since, still resonates acutely throughout the United States. Unrest on the anniversary of the events in Ferguson resurfaced and again pushed the issues between local law enforcement and the communities in which they serve to the forefront of the news.
HOW CAN WE FIX WHAT IS BROKEN?
The national implications are amongst the most important considerations contained in the report. “History informs that a critical incident can happen anywhere and at any time. With this knowledge, law enforcement must always remember that the ability to respond to an incident effectively is formulated long before an incident occurs through investments in leadership, community engagement, training, and communication. Ferguson is a vivid reminder that law enforcement agencies must continually analyze their policing practices in relation to the communities they serve” (xxii, “After-Action Assessment of the Police Response to the August 2014 Demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri”).
Remedying the mistakes of the past requires local safety, security, and policing agencies to address the findings of this after-action report and truly analyze their practices. SDR® Academy’s methodology and trainings address many of the key themes presented in the Ferguson report.
SDR® equips its trainees with the tools they need to better understand their environments and heighten their awareness, thereby providing them with the nuanced capability to distinguish when a person’s behavior signifies a potential threat, and when it does not. Such nuanced understanding, along with SDR® communication skills can prevent both false positives and false negatives. The SDR® trainings are based on local behavioral indicators and operational auto-critique tools which negate discriminatory ethnic profiling in policing.
Furthermore, SDR® focuses on proactive prevention of – rather than reaction to – harmful events and security threats. Proactive prevention in the SDR® methodology and training highlights the importance of making knowledge-based decisions rather than simply relying on pre-emptive measures that often rely on knee-jerk reactions (often influenced by individuals’ biases). The unique operational tools learned through SDR® training allow trainees to better understand human behaviors, focusing on behavioral abnormalities and therefore inherently negating ethnic profiling. In this way, SDR® is working towards bridging the gap between conventional policing and the communities these agencies serve. Proper training of students how to differentiate between actionable behaviors and innocuous ones is at the core of SDR®.
By restoring the trust between the community and the local police force, SDR® also promotes social cohesion, ameliorating the overall safety environment in a given area. The population must feel that they can turn to their local law enforcement without fear of bias, trusting them to act according to ethical guidelines and local laws, procedures, and protocols.
In the wake of Ferguson and other similar events that transpired this year, policing practices need to change. They must incorporate the findings of the after-action report recently released, and perhaps look to incorporate new trainings and procedures to improve the state of the art.
RAN COHEN 