On a Sunday evening in July, Robin S. Engel was watching her daughter’s basketball game when her phone rang. It was the police.
A man had just been shot, an assistant chief of the Cincinnati Police Department told her. It happened near the University of Cincinnati, where Ms. Engel worked as a professor of criminal justice. The shooter was a university police officer.
The professor’s phone beeped. It was another city police commander, this time a district captain, who also wanted to keep Ms. Engel in the loop. Before long, she learned about the victim. His name was Samuel DuBose. He was 43 years old, black, and unarmed. And he was dead.
Ms. Engel is not part of the chain of command. She has never sworn an oath or patrolled a beat. And yet, on a night when a white officer gunned down an unarmed black man during a traffic stop, an incident that was bound to draw national scrutiny, two Cincinnati police commanders went out of their way to call an academic. Why?
“Because,” she explained, “we’re partners.”
The police are a divisive force. Mr. DuBose’s fatal traffic stop was the latest in a string of vividly documented incidents in which unarmed minority citizens either have been killed by the police or have died in police custody.
Some academics have joined in protesting police brutality and calling for greater accountability. Others have chosen to study the police at a critical distance, dissecting the long arm of the law with the impious detachment of a pathologist.
Ms. Engel is part of a small but influential group of researchers who have taken a different tack, one they believe gives them a better chance of fixing the problems their peers merely study: They are working with the police.
From her post at the University of Cincinnati, Ms. Engel has played a key role in the city’s efforts to reduce violent crime for the better part of a decade. When city leaders were desperate to rein in crime in the mid-2000s, Ms. Engel used her academic training to help the police figure out exactly where the violence was coming from. She advised them on strategies for stemming it and ran analyses to figure out how well those tactics were working.
“For decades, research on the police has provided little ‘real-world’ value,” wrote Ms. Engel in a 2010 paper with James T. Whalen, an assistant chief of the Cincinnati police. “The truth is most academics know so little of the idiosyncrasies and politics operating within police agencies that their recommendations are often difficult, if not impossible, to implement.”
The Cincinnati criminologist is not the only academic who has teamed up with law enforcement officials. Jerry Ratcliffe, a professor of criminal justice at Temple University, has collaborated with the Philadelphia police to design field experiments testing the effects of different policing strategies.
In the summer of 2009, Mr. Ratcliffe randomly assigned officers to walk around neighborhoods that had clocked high rates of homicides, assaults, and robberies happening in the open. After three months, he compared the crime reports in those neighborhoods to those in comparably dangerous areas that officers had not patrolled on foot.
The foot patrols resulted in the police making thousands more stops and hundreds more arrests, while preventing about 50 violent crimes, according to Mr. Ratcliffe.
The professor published a paper on that experiment in Criminology, a top journal in his field. But he also wrote up a shorter, less jargony version and made it available to law-enforcement officials.
Journals like Criminology are read by other academics, says Mr. Ratcliffe, but not by the people who dictate how the police operate.
Anthony A. Braga, a professor of criminal justice at Rutgers University, has worked for years with the Boston Police Department as an “embedded criminologist,” including a stint as chief policy adviser to Commissioner Edward F. Davis. Mr. Braga says that his working inside the Boston police has made officials there take his research seriously.
Academics who want to have pull with police officials must “maintain ‘real-time’ knowledge of current events, whether significant crimes, arrests, or political maneuvering inside and outside the department,” according to a 2014 paper the Rutgers professor cowrote with Mr. Davis. Otherwise, “it is very difficult to be credible in strategy meetings.”
The police don’t always listen, says Mr. Braga. The politics of law enforcement often favor short-term payoffs, not long-term studies — making arrests and getting guns off the street, rather than figuring out how the guns got there in the first place, he says. And commanders sometimes misinterpret research findings to confirm their existing strategies.
Then there’s the question of objectivity. Mr. Braga was now working for the Boston Police Department. The professor insists he was an honest broker for the commissioner. By way of evidence, he points to — what else — an academic study, which he cowrote, that did “not find any support” for the view that researchers who help design law-enforcement programs are “pressured to report positive results.”
Ms. Engel came to a similar conclusion in Cincinnati. “It’s not as though, because I’m a partner on the team, I’m a cheerleader,” she says. “I’m not. I’m a critical voice, still, but I’m a critical voice with context.”
Chuck Wexler, executive director of a Washington think tank called the Police Executive Research Forum, considers himself a “person of the ‘60s.” As an undergraduate at Boston University he participated in protests against the Vietnam War until he was turned off at the sight of demonstrators throwing bottles at the police. But he wanted to make a difference in the world.
So in 1974, after getting a master’s degree in criminology at Florida State University, Mr. Wexler returned to Boston and joined the Boston Police Department as an intern.
He also enrolled in a doctoral program in urban studies and planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Non-sworn and highly educated, he was a rarity for the department at the time. The 1960s had driven a wedge between colleges and law enforcement. Police officers had often stood athwart the activists fighting for causes that enjoyed a lot of support in higher education. Researchers had turned their gaze to police corruption, discrimination, and other abuses of power. If officers found themselves knocking on the doors of the ivory tower, it typically wasn’t for advice on how to do their jobs. And the police didn’t routinely throw open their own doors to researchers.
“If you were lucky you could find a police department that would let you come in to do a particular piece of research,” says Charles Wellford, an emeritus professor of criminology at the University of Maryland at College Park. But you didn’t expect them to change their operations based on your findings.
After a few years with the Boston police, Mr. Wexler was put in charge of something called the “community disorders unit,” which helped officers parse the racial dynamics of crime in a city that was struggling to desegregate. “We had to get police officers to realize that a family that moved into a home and had racial epithets spray-painted on their house, or their tires slashed — that wasn’t simply an act of vandalism,” he says.
He remembers sending a black officer and a white officer, both undercover, into a bar known for discriminating against black customers. “It sort of came out of my appreciation for research — sending people in, and controlling on one variable like race,” he says. Sure enough, the black officer was denied service. Mr. Wexler videotaped the whole thing. “We used that tape to go after their liquor license,” he says.
Still, the MIT graduate student sensed a gulf between his work in Boston and his studies in Cambridge that was wider than the river running between the cities.
Years later, a British researcher named Barry MacDonald would describe conversations between academics and the police as a “dialogue of the deaf.” Each side rendered the other in caricature: Academics were haughty idealists with little appreciation for crime-fighting. Police officers were thin-skinned soldiers with little capacity for critical thinking. They tended to talk past each other.
“University culture and police culture are very different,” says Mr. Wexler. “And I think the really effective people in this world, researchers or police chiefs, really understand each other’s culture and manage to find a way to navigate the rules of engagement.”
He was not alone. In 1970, the Ford Foundation spent $30-million to create the Police Foundation to push departments toward a more scientific approach to policing. That led to the creation, in 1976, of the Police Executive Research Forum, a membership group aimed at improving conversations between researchers and degree-holding law-enforcement professionals.
It worked. Over the next four decades, academic researchers and police departments collaborated on numerous studies and field experiments. They tested the effectiveness of drug education, prisoner-reentry programs, and gun buybacks, as well as different approaches to responding to domestic-violence calls and cooling down violent-crime “hot spots.” The research forum, which now has 2,200 members, is preparing for an experiment in Arlington, Tex., to study how officers behave when they are wearing body cameras.
“The issue of research is really important in policing,” says Mr. Wexler. “It’s the way we learn and progress.”
And yet to those mistreated by the police, it often seems as if nothing has changed. The events of the last year have bolstered the view that the police, for all their self-study, still have a serious race problem.
Officer training was very much on Ms. Engel’s mind after Mr. DuBose’s death. She emailed her contacts in police-research circles to ask who had the best training program for helping police navigate the murky waters of race, bias, and enforcement.
More than one person responded with the same name: Lorie Fridell.
Ms. Fridell is an associate professor of criminology at the University of South Florida and a former research director of the Police Executive Research Forum. These days she specializes in making police officers reckon with their biases.
The professor’s consulting company, called Fair and Impartial Policing, holds training courses that draw on psychology research to teach officers about the inevitability of bias, especially racial bias, and how to avoid letting it affect their work. She is determined to push the conversation between the police and their critics in a more enlightened direction.
“Our discussion in this country, certainly since the issue re-emerged in the late 1990s, is to assume that bias in policing is produced by officers with explicit bias — which is like a racist,” says Ms. Fridell. But the professor believes that most officers are well-intentioned.
Her company’s training programs focus on “implicit bias": the kind that people don’t know they have. Psychology research suggests this kind of bias is common, says Ms. Fridell. In the workshops, trainers explain the findings of some of those studies and encourage the officers to grapple with their own subterranean prejudices.
Tact is key. “When we walk into a group to train, generally we’re walking into a room of people who are somewhere between defensive and hostile,” says Ms. Fridell. But once they start hearing about the science of implicit bias — how it’s a human flaw that affects even the well-intentioned — the officers tend to open up, says the professor. By design, the trainers who lead the workshops are always fellow officers.
Demand for her company’s services has increased in recent years, especially since the Ferguson protests. Ms. Fridell’s trainers have been called in to educate officers in St. Louis County, Las Vegas, Detroit, and elsewhere.
“There were many dedicated chiefs and sheriffs out there who were looking for, quote, the right answer,” she says.
Is anti-bias training the right answer? Police officials hope so. But it is hard to know if bringing officers up to speed on psychology research can change the dynamics of law enforcement in neighborhoods where the cops are seen as just as dangerous as the criminals.
Last year, the Baltimore Police Department put hundreds of its officers through workshops developed by Fair and Impartial Policing, according to The Baltimore Sun. In January, Ms. Fridell’s team returned to train department leaders.
Then, in April, a 25-year-old black man named Freddie Gray was dragged wailing into the back of a police van. He was soon dead of a mysterious spinal-cord injury he suffered while in police custody. His death sparked protests, leading to clashes with the police, injuries, looting, hundreds of arrests, and a near-total implosion of relations between local law enforcement and the black residents of West Baltimore.
The anti-bias workshops had been a good step in theory. But against decades of fear and frustration they may have been merely academic.
“The concerns on the part of the community members in Baltimore, similar to the complaints we heard in Ferguson, were of abusive policing,” Ms. Fridell says. “Abusive policing is inherently biased.”
In other words, training may help “well intentioned” officers do their jobs, but it may be hard to reach others who are not receptive to discussions of implicit bias. “I don’t believe that officers who are at war with the community are going to be changed by our training,” she says.
Several weeks after Mr. DuBose’s death, the president of the University of Cincinnati promoted Ms. Engel to vice president for safety and reform. Part of her new job is to oversee an inquiry to the university’s police force and to figure out what changes should be made. Ms. Engel says she wants to “better understand the training that our officers have and whether or not it’s sufficient.” She says she has been in touch with Ms. Fridell.
But research and education can only do so much to keep the peace.
Ms. Engel did not just cultivate data when she worked with the Cincinnati Police Department. She also cultivated relationships — not just within the department but also with local politicians, church leaders, and other influential figures.
In the aftermath of Mr. DuBose’s death she worked the phones, asking those community leaders to help keep the peace while the city police investigated the incident. Two days after the shooting, she and the university police chief sat down with members of the DuBose family, who were heartbroken and confused. “It was heart-wrenching,” says Ms. Engel. “There’s just no other way to describe it.”
All the research in the world cannot give police departments control over every interaction between its officers and citizens, she says. And it takes only one Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, or Samuel DuBose to remind people where the police stand relative to their own senses of safety and justice.
“You work not just with the numbers, but with the community,” says the professor, “so, when the bad incident happens, you have trust.”
Steve Kolowich writes about how colleges are changing, and staying the same, in the digital age. Follow him on Twitter @stevekolowich, or write to him at steve.kolowich@chronicle.com.
