Policing in America needs to change. Trust me, I’m a cop: Renee Mitchell at TEDxOxbridge

[Applause] in policing we use evidence to solve crime imagine if we used evidence to prevent crime sir robert peel had that imagination he founded modern day policing and the london metropolitan police his primary mission was to reduce crime and disorder and whose success would be based on the absence of crime and disorder and not on police activity itself today ironically the gauge of an officer's success is that activity arrest citation searches and stops a good day in policing is when i've hooked and booked all day long but police our interventions and people's lives have impacts that are far-reaching and often have negative consequences that harm our communities our economy and sometimes our very humanity when i had about three years on in patrol my partner and i responded to a domestic violence call and when we got there the couple was on the doorstep dwayne and stephanie and because of the call and dwayne's size i took him searched him and put him in the back of the squad car and he understood he was polite and compliant and understood i was trying to keep everybody safe and i went back and i talked to stephanie and stephanie told me that her and dwayne had been fighting all day long and that the fight had accumulated with him grabbing her by the shirt and throwing her down the stairs ripping her shirt in the process stephanie showed me bruises that were in healing stages and cuts that had been scabbed over evidence that those injuries didn't occur on that day my partner and i searched the house and we couldn't find a shirt anywhere so my partner took their oldest child who was 10 to talk to him and i went back to duane and dwayne told me that yes he and stephanie had been fighting all day that they were running out of money and food and dwayne was unemployed and he had an opportunity that weekend to work a construction job but it meant going away and staying at his mom's house and stephanie was so overwhelmed raising their six kids four of which were under the age of five that she didn't want him to leave she told dwayne if he left she'd call the cops and tell us that he had committed domestic violence but because he loved stephanie and his kids he actually stayed and waited for us to arrive i went back to my partner who had talked to the 10 year old and he had said that it was verbal only so my partner and i decided that we're going to release dwayne the problem was is i'd placed handcuffs on duane and put him in the back seat of a squad car which meant he was technically under arrest and our rules in our organization i had to call a supervisor to have him released and i told my sergeant what happened and he said absolutely not our rules state that with domestic violence you shall arrest and because i have an attitude i said no it doesn't it states if i have reasonable suspicion i shall arrest and i don't have reasonable suspicion and either does my partner and my sergeant said i don't care you take him to jail so my partner and i weren't very happy about the decision but we took dwayne to jail and some might say that i had no choice but victor frankel would disagree in a man's search for meaning viktor frankl works about his time in a concentration camp and what makes humans different from animals is our ability to have control over our minds our thoughts and that we have choice so i had choice and on that day i chose my career over dwayne's freedom and i don't think this is what sir robert field wanted when he created the police i don't think he wanted officers making arrests to appease their sergeants or making arrests so they could have career advancement this thinking has returned us back to that punitive criminal justice system that sir robert peale strove to destroy because now due to tough on crime politics and the war on drugs in the united states we have steadily increasing sentence lengths and those sentence lengths because of minimum mandatory sentencing and three strikes laws we've gone from 1973 of having 350 000 people in prison to over 2 million people today and over 5 million people that are supervised by the criminal justice system on probation and parole we went from spending nine billion dollars in 1982 to over 70 billion dollars today money that could be better spent on our health care our education or even crime prevention itself because sir robert peel when he was trying to change the criminal justice system he saw it for what it was an extremely harsh and punitive system especially to the poor he worked his whole career to reduce over 200 statutes from the death penalty he introduced monetary fines instead of imprisonment for minor offenses he strove to give the working class a livable wage and then created the police and it was all to create a system that was much more compassionate and humane and peaceful than the system that we already had and you might think why do you care in the uk because the united states doesn't have a monopoly on this in the uk currently there's 85 000 people imprisoned and your numbers are also steadily increasing and these numbers aren't increasing because there's a huge increase in crime that's a minor part of those numbers it's increasing because we've increased our sentence lengths and durloff and nagin two researchers reviewed all the deterrence research and showed that increasing severity of sanctions actually has a very marginal effect on reducing crime and disorder yet we still continue down this path so perhaps we might look at something like medicine because medicine was once like policing where doctors use their intuition or local custom or tradition when treating their patients often ignoring scientific evidence dr spock was in 1950s very popular pediatrician who recommended to parents that they put their babies to sleep on their bellies and although his advice was benign because his intention was to do no harm the outcome was detrimental he could not see individually his advice the outcome that had on his patients but when they aggregated all the data and they started showing that there was an increase in infant deaths the only thing they were able to correlate it to was sleep position for the babies and so began the back to sleep campaign and immediately infant deaths started to drop off today in in hospitals they have evidence-based practices and the culture of hospitals and doctors is to follow science to follow evidence to use clinical trials to figure out what works and what doesn't work in medicine and like dr spock in in policing we too have that achilles heel we're now beginning to figure out what works and what and what doesn't work in policing some of which random patrol policing doesn't work to reduce crime and disorder we know that increasing sanctions doesn't reduce crime and disorder programs like scared straight and boot camps doesn't work to reduce recidivism but yet proactive policing that's focused on a place rather than a person works to reduce crime and disorder hot spot policing where officers focus their proactivity on a small geographic high crime area works to reduce crime and disorder and programs like project hope where drug offenders are given social support and immediate short-term sanctions for dirty drug tests work to reduce recidivism even knowing all of this and there's much much more research besides that we have yet in both the u.s and in the uk to institutionalize evidence-based practices now i'm not advocating that we stop arresting because obviously i wouldn't have a job but what i might what i am saying is that the police the politicians you know and even the public that we need to follow the evidence that we need to follow instead of intuition or tradition or custom and what we think is common sense we actually need to follow what the research shows now in the case of dwayne i know you might think you know he was innocent so he was an anomaly but police have discretion so we choose where to police what laws to enforce and who to enforce them on so although i thought dwayne was innocent another officer could have thought he was guilty or another officer could have thought he's innocent today but he'll be guilty tomorrow so i might as well arrest him today and police for the most part patrol in areas that are socioeconomically disadvantaged which means that police will always impact at a disproportionate rate the poor and especially the poor minority an arrest and conviction will stigmatize them for the rest of their lives because they will forever check a box that designates their status in society and it will diminish their capacity to get a job to get housing to get college student loans and even to vote so forever they'll be paying for their crimes arrest as an answer to tough on crime politics or the war on drug is drugs is just returning us to this pre-peeling punitive era and like dr spock officers we need to aggregate the data so we could actually see what our decisions as individual officers how it impacts society at large three days after my partner and i arrested dwayne a 911 call came in from a hysterical female and my partner wasn't with me at the time he was off for the night but i recognized the address as stephanie and duane's address and so i made sure that i went to the call and on the way there i was really upset because i was thinking great here i am i'm going to be put in another really bad situation i'm going to have to arrest wayne again or this time dwayne's committed domestic violence and my sergeant's going to be right and i'm going to validate his whole entire theory of just take him to jail anyway when i got to the house stephanie was in the kitchen and she was hysterical and unintelligible and the kids were really upset and i was trying to get out of her where dwayne was and she finally got out that he's in the basement so as i was going down the basement i was thinking to myself you know what am i going to find is he going to be angry is he going to be upset and what i found was dwayne hanging from the rafters and i went over to him and looked at his face and touched his arm to see if i could save it but i couldn't he was dead and next to his body was a photo of his children and 35 cents and it was all the money he had in the world to leave to his kids i got to see the impact of my decisions and my arrest on another human being his significant other and his children please intervene in people's lives on a daily basis and rather than following tradition or custom or individual preference i think it's time we just followed the evidence thank you [Music]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 269,146

Keywords: timeless ideas, tedx, tedx talk, fulbright, University Of Oxford (College/University), ted talks, ted, tedxoxbridge, Sacramento (City/Town/Village), ted talk, police, english, Psychology (Medical Specialty), nelson mandela lecture theatre, Saïd Business School (College/University), United Kingdom (Country), uk, Police Officer (Occupation), ted x, University Of Cambridge (Organization), Fulbright Program (Award Presenting Organization), Oxford (City/Town/Village), seargent, tedx talks

Id: pejPe3DjkcQ

Length: 12min 51sec (771 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 19 2013