Earlier this year, activists opposing the war in Gaza marched onto the Golden Gate Bridge and Interstate 880 in Oakland. They blocked traffic for hours, some chaining themselves to vehicles or cement-filled drums. Twenty-six were arrested and charged.

Similar scenes played out across the country—perhaps most controversially on college campuses, where students found themselves banned, suspended, and expelled—in this latest chapter of the global “age of mass protests.” Participants in historic uprisings from Hong Kong to Paris to Sidi Bouzid have braved tear gas, rubber or real bullets, imprisonment, and even set themselves on fire while standing up for their beliefs.

Headline-making demonstrations raise questions about what protesting requires of us: Are huge risks necessary to engender social change? Do I personally need to step in front of moving cars, spend a night in jail, or launch a hunger strike to advance the causes that matter to me? Does my social media post, bumper sticker, lawn sign, signature on a petition, or attendance at a peaceful rally still make a difference?

According to social science, strenuous and risky protest does tend to make a bigger impact than protest involving lower effort and risk. But studies also show that slacker activists—slacktivists, who stick to low-cost, mostly online activism—play key roles in successful movements.

Costly protest, like when demonstrators suffer violent repression, sends a strong signal to the media, voters, and power holders that activists mean business. If someone is willing to spend hours of their time, endure discomfort, and even put their life on the line for a cause, their grievances come across as more genuine than those of someone who spends a few seconds typing “#MeToo” or “#BlackLivesMatter.” (One caveat is that violence initiated by protesters, albeit costly, almost always backfires—nonviolent campaigns across the 20th century were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts.)

Some protesters bear significant costs simply by virtue of their social identities. Demonstrators from minority groups frequently endure harsher repression than their white counterparts; women face backlash for daring to speak out against the patriarchy; and low-wage hourly workers pay a higher economic price relative to their income (in foregone wages, transportation expenses, etc.) to attend a protest than salaried professionals with flexible schedules. Though unfair, these disproportionate costs also empower protesters by amplifying their messages. Research by political scientist LaGina Gause reveals an “advantage of disadvantage” whereby lawmakers are more likely to support the preferences of low-income and minority protesters than the preferences of more privileged protesters. Gause highlights how protests concentrated in minority and low-income communities of L.A. after the acquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King exerted electoral pressure on Southern California Republican Congressman Jerry Lewis. Lewis, whose Inland Empire district sat just east of L.A., switched his normal voting behavior to endorse the Dire Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act of 1992, a Democrat-sponsored bill to fund relief for businesses destroyed during the protests.

While costly protest packs a punch, scholars also emphasize that activism is not all or nothing. “Slacktivists” strengthen movements in two critical ways.

First, they provide numbers. Hardcore veteran activists (the type who block traffic or take a rubber bullet) are exceptional. Usually, they cannot fill the streets on their own, so they must recruit greener activists into their ranks. One study of the Arab Spring showed that turnout by “peripheral” protesters with few previous activist connections contributed more to rising protest rates than turnout by “central” protesters with numerous Twitter followers. Movements, like viruses, need “fresh blood” to spread.

Second, including casual activists in a protest or movement helps to generate common knowledge about shifting social norms. If even your politically apathetic cousin starts posting “#BlackLivesMatter,” it becomes more socially acceptable for others in their network to endorse that cause—and eventually awkward not to. While support for Black Lives Matter in the general population has dipped from its high of 67% in 2020, a majority of Americans continue to support it. Ideas that were once fringe, like gay marriage and universal healthcare, became mainstream in part through ordinary internet users normalizing them, often from the comfort and safety of their couches.

A common concern is that slacktivism breeds complacency: If people are content to blast words of solidarity with their phones, they may never feel compelled to take up more demanding modes of activism that movements also need to meet their goals. “Someone still has to go to prison,” argued techno-critic Evgeny Morozov in The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom.

Fortunately, evidence from multiple countries indicates that dipping your toes in online activism makes you no less likely to perform costlier gestures such as demonstrating, attending political forums, or donating to charity. Slacktivists are not destined to remain slacktivists. Online activism can open a gateway to protesting in real life and to deepening one’s investment in a cause.

If slacktivists are ultimately harmless, and even beneficial, for social movements, then why do they get such a bad rap? For instance, some fans of Taylor Swift and other celebrities chose to unfollow their idols on social media for not speaking out forcefully enough about bloodshed in Gaza. Journalists branded these ex-Swifties as slacktivists indulging in empty virtue signaling rather than undertaking more meaningful action. Why did these former fans provoke such ridicule if they were not really hurting anyone?

The answer has to do with the fact that we are hardwired to judge others by the costs they inflict, or are unwilling to inflict, on themselves. This explains our instinctive admiration for courageous, selfless activists like Martin Luther King Jr. and our disdain for timid, “fake” activists who send nearly costless signals of their political commitments by, say, sporting an awareness ribbon or unfollowing insufficiently “woke” celebrities. Higher risks earn greater rewards.

However, as I elaborate in my new book, we would be wise to refrain from wagging our fingers at slacktivists. For one thing, most of us behave like slacktivists at one point or another. Michelle Obama and Malala Yousafzai took flak for tweeting “#BringBackOurGirls” after armed extremists kidnapped more than 250 Nigerian schoolgirls in 2014, but it is difficult to seriously question their activist bona fides. As First Lady, Obama spent countless hours on the Let Girls Learn initiative, and Yousafzai won the Nobel Peace Prize for promoting girls’ education in Taliban-occupied Pakistan, for which she was shot by a would-be assassin.

More importantly, shaming slacktivists can discourage them from attempting any kind of activism at all. The savvy organizer strives to make activism more—not less—accessible by sharing their wisdom with newcomers. Building a truly inclusive mass movement calls for patience and humility on the part of status-conscious movement leaders. This is its own form of sacrifice for a cause: the sacrifice of one’s ego. Community-engaged scholar Biko Mandela Gray implored fellow activists, “Let us check our egos at the door of political engagement and resistance, and remember that our wellbeing is always connected to the wellbeing of the whole.”

Some slacktivists will blossom into the next generation of devoted changemakers, whereas others will continue dabbling. And that’s OK. Both types of people have roles to play in the collective pursuit of justice.

The post Does ‘Slacktivism’ Deserve Its Bad Rap? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

These aren’t my first protests—far from it. As the child of Polish American immigrant activists, I was raised on this form of expression. Even before I understood Polish politics or why we were marching, my community taught me to fight for freedom from tyranny.

But during these protests, my community has been silent. And that pains me tremendously. I find I can no longer reconcile the values I was raised with, with a lot of what I’m seeing in my community today.

I think back to my first protests, in search of understanding what went wrong.

*

I am 8 years old. It’s December, and the wind whips off Lake Michigan and snow crunches under my cold feet. Our small group slowly walks in a circle. The adults carry signs and chant in thick Polish accents: Stop Red Terror. We are in front of a gray stone building. All the curtains are pulled closed. Round and round we go.

My 5-year-old brother walks next to me. Sometimes we join in the chants and imitate the accents: Stop Ret Terro. Every once in a while, we get to warm up inside a van, where adults give us hot tea. And then back outside, back into the circle we go.

We return often to march in front of this building. It is called the “consulate.” Polish people work in it, but they don’t want Poland to be free. The Polish flag hangs outside, but the eagle that flies on it has no crown. It’s supposed to, though, my dad tells me. “The communists took the crown off the Polish eagle,” he says.

Martial law. I see the phrase in papers. I watch grainy footage of a balding man explain why it is necessary. I overhear things when the adults come to our house at night. “Arrest” and “show trial.” The adults are angry that the balding man lies so much.

In the spring, the protests get louder. By the summer, there are so many people that I get lost in the crowd.

Someone picks me up and hoists me onto a newspaper stand. There’s a bus stop sign above it that I conk my head on. When I start crying, a woman sees me and calls out: “Don’t cry, little one. Someday Poland will be free.”

That fall, an activist priest in Poland is kidnapped and killed by three police officers who are in the “secret police.” The next protest at the gray building is silent. People hold candles, and the priest’s photo.

The priest has a kind face. I look at all the faces around me. So many are crying.

*

Stop Ret Terro. Because terror it was. Life in post-World War II Poland was grim. One-fifth of the country’s citizens—mostly civilians—had perished during the war, including 90 percent of its Jewish population. Poland’s infrastructure was devastated: the capital, Warsaw, was bombed so heavily that it was nearly leveled. The economy struggled to stabilize.

The communist yoke, imposed by Soviet influence, never took. Anti-government protests and strikes began in the 1950s and intensified in the 1960s and 1970s. The more Poles protested, the more the Soviets clamped down. The economy bottomed out. There were regular power outages and shortages of everything, from food to manufacturing equipment.

My parents, who were born in Poland in 1943, were raised on a regular diet of propaganda about amazing Mother Russia, and terrible capitalist America. They met at music school: My father studied piano and jazz, and my mother musical theory. Artists got special privileges, including travel to places like Siberia and Sweden. And then, to America. My dad went first, traveling on an extended artist visa in the mid-1970s, to play in Chicago jazz clubs. My mom and I followed half a year later.

Politics were heating up back home, where an economic recession threatened to throw Poland into bankruptcy. Poland’s Solidarity movement, which emerged from the first independent labor union in the Soviet bloc and became a 9 million member-strong anti-communist social revolution, was in full swing, and striking workers demonstrated in the streets. In what would be their last-ditch effort to regain control, in December 1981 the communist government declared martial law and imposed severe restrictions on everyday life: no gatherings, no protests, no inter-city travel, wire taps in public phone booths, a complete media blackout, a curfew monitored and enforced by military tanks and military units. Thousands of activists were thrown into prison without charges. Some were killed.

When the authorities declared martial law, my parents were among the first protestors in Chicago. They had earlier started an organization, Pomost, which means “bridge.” Now, people were always at our house, talking into the night about who was arrested back home, who was freed, and who the communists were spying on now.

We marched and protested for two years, until martial law was lifted and Poland was free again. For years after that, we watched the country pursue a liberal, progressive, pro-democracy and pro-EU agenda, achieving economic stability and growth. Once an adult, I went to work for the Polish Embassy in Washington, D.C., launching a social media program that was rolled out to all the Polish diplomatic missions around the world—including the Polish consulate I’d marched under when I was a child.

I made videos, unearthed never-before-seen photos of the embassy at the Library of Congress, and interviewed all the interesting people—film director Agnieszka Holland, for one—who came through the embassy. I loved sharing Poland’s history and its innovative present, and poured myself into the work.

*

Today I watch Poland—my beloved, strong homeland that suffered, and fought and fought and fought, and finally broke free—slowly become the thing it once feared and battled against. I am outraged. And heartbroken.

There’s an election in 2015, and Poland elects a strongly right-wing government. The vote is pretty close, 52 percent to 48 percent, and pretty evenly split. Urban areas and western Poland (closer to Europe) vote for the progressive incumbent, while rural and eastern Poland (closer to Russia) vote for the conservative challenger, Andrzej Duda.

Duda and the ruling party preach strongly nationalist, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, anti-woman, and anti-Other rhetoric. Their policies follow suit. Parliament proposes a strict anti-abortion ban in 2016. The ban does not pass—tens of thousands of women across Poland march in protest, holding wire hangers—but in fall 2020 the government issues restrictions on abortion anyway. Polish women around the world again take to the streets. As of this writing, they are still protesting.

Also in 2020, the loudly pro-Trump Duda declares in his re-election campaign that LGBTQ+ is an “ideology more dangerous than communism” that must be stamped out. Same-sex marriage and civil unions are illegal in Poland, but hate speech gets a free pass. Nearly 100 small cities across Poland declare themselves “LGBT-free zones.” “Beware the rainbow plague!” the Catholic archbishop of Krakow thunders.

Many people protest this, too. The EU chimes in, warning about the dangers of this rhetoric. Still, Duda is re-elected. The majority of Polish Americans with dual citizenship who participate in the Polish elections vote for him.

*

In America, we’re having our own issues. I march and protest—and this time I know exactly why and what for. As I kneel at a silent vigil for Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in Brooklyn this summer, I watch as a mother cradles her young son. Tears stream down my face as I think about the people who want to harm him because of the color of his skin.

I obsessively scour for news of any response to BLM from the Polish American community. I see nothing until May 2020, when a monument of a Polish general gets defaced in Washington, D.C.

This general, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, was one of the good ones. In 1776, he escaped Poland and joined the American cause during the Revolutionary War, acting heroically at the Battle of Saratoga and designing the defenses at West Point military academy during the height of the Revolutionary War. He was a buddy of Thomas Jefferson who despised slavery; the two had a lengthy written correspondence, in which Kosciuszko tried to persuade Jefferson just how loathsome slavery was. In his will, Kosciuszko left his fortune to Jefferson and begged Jefferson to use it to free the enslaved people at Monticello. Jefferson, as we know, did none of that.

During anti-police brutality protests after George Floyd’s killing, some people spray paint Kosciuszko’s statue, as well as the other statues in Lafayette Park, in front of the White House. BLM tags, an anarchy symbol or two.

A Polish reporter tweets about it. He stands under the Kosciuszko monument and asks passers-by if they know who Kosciuszko is (they do not). His feed and a subsequent article race through the Polish American community—which loses its collective mind.

Not because a man was murdered by police. Not because a woman was shot to death in her own bed. Not because the president of the U.S. uses the same authoritarian tactics they once fled: tear gas, overzealous police in riot gear, a staged photo op in front of a church. Not because the people being targeted are our neighbors, our friends, our colleagues, our family.

No, Polish Americans are upset that this monument—“Our monument! Our compatriot! Our hero!”—got spray painted. They have a lot to say about it. I see countless social media posts, emails, and news articles complaining about “desecration.” There are condescending denunciations of the American educational system: “What are we teaching our youth if we aren’t teaching them about Kosciuszko and his values?”

The Polish ambassador piles on via Twitter. The Embassy of Poland in the U.S. retweets and agrees. When I worked at the embassy, I started that Twitter feed to highlight the embassy’s diplomatic work, and to share interesting Polish cultural and historical tidbits—photos from events, gorgeous artwork and furnishings from the embassy building. Now I scroll through the comments and see hatred and condemnation for the protestors. I feel nauseated as I see the n-word, over and over again.

I try to engage with people on Facebook, gently attempting to steer the conversation toward the ideals he fought for and his anti-slavery stance. But most people cannot connect what is so clear for me: Kosciuszko hated slavery. What’s happening now is an extended form of slavery. Kosciuszko would have spoken out against it. We should too.

Many Polish Americans support Donald Trump, joining a number of immigrant groups who embrace his rhetoric. Many come from communities for whom the word “communist” is anathema, and Ronald Reagan was a saint. These groups readily believe messaging that Democrats will usher in socialism—a concept which remains murkily undefined, but is irrefutably Bad and Wrong.

To me, what’s truly Bad and horribly Wrong is turning a blind eye toward the suffering of oppressed groups and individuals, and undermining the foundation of American democracy. I learned my ideals from my parents and their protester friends; from Polish scouts, Polish-language school, Polish books and movies and conversations. Truth above all. Freedom and honor. Worth based not on religion or race, but in how you move through this world. The right to dissent; the right to speak out. The courage to stand up to hatred and bigotry. The fortitude to help others: to not just empathize with those who suffer, but to help them in their struggle. To protest and march with them, like we once did. To fight against authoritarianism, like we once did.

I cannot reconcile my community’s past and its present. BLM protests continue, and the Polish American community remains silent, hiding inside that gray building, curtains tightly drawn.

Outside, people are protesting and screaming. Human rights are being trampled. But the tags and graffiti are gone from the monuments in Lafayette Park. The statue is clean.

The post The Damning Silence of Polish Americans appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

How can Californians rise from horrific local circumstances to national influence?

Two recent books offer one answer: It may help to have grown up amid the racism and institutional failures of Los Angeles in the 1990s.

The two books are both popular and compelling memoirs from African-American women and Southern Californians now in their 30s. But the authors are very different people. One is the Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors, a deeply serious activist whose memoir, When They Call You a Terrorist, quotes Nelson Mandela and Emma Goldman. The other is the TV and movie star Tiffany Haddish, a profane comedian whose memoir, The Last Black Unicorn, offers an excruciating exegesis of discovering a sex tape of her boyfriend and his mistress—and that the video time stamp is her birthday.

But, in distinct ways, the women show how to turn the pain of Los Angeles into national power. In their telling, the worst of L.A.—its discrimination, neglect, and public agencies so awful that they were taken over by other governments—helped forge strong identities. And the best of L.A.—its diversity—taught them how to speak to the broadest audiences.

Both women learned bitter and useful lessons in the San Fernando Valley. Khan-Cullors recalls growing up in a Section 8 apartment in a poor, mostly Mexican-American corridor of Van Nuys, where takeout restaurants pass for community anchors. “Ours is a neighborhood designed to be transient,” she writes. Haddish was a South L.A. kid, but she rose daily at 5 a.m. to ride a school bus to Woodland Hills.

Both are from families that fell out of the middle class during the deindustrialization and recession of the 1980s and ’90s. Khan-Cullors’s mother is abandoned by her parents when she becomes pregnant as a teenager, and one of Khan-Cullors’s fathers loses his job at the Van Nuys GM plant and never quite rebounds. Haddish’s mother is a postal service manager and property owner who is never the same after suffering major injuries in a freeway accident.

In the Valley, both must reckon with wealthy white people who are unaware of their privilege. Khan-Cullors goes to a Sherman Oaks school, where she makes a friend whose father turns out to be the slumlord who won’t repair her family’s apartment. She is arrested inside her classroom at age 12 (while the school’s white teenage drug dealer goes free). “That was the year I learned that being Black and poor defined me more than being bright and hopeful and ready,” she writes.

Haddish, also attending schools with wealthy whites, decides not to be ignored or insulted, but to emphasize, even with clothing (“poor as f—k chic”) how she’s different. This makes her popular. She also seizes the opportunity, developing a steady business providing dancing and entertainment at bar mitzvahs.

Both women give credit to their Los Angeles Unified public schools. Khan-Cullors recalls how teachers and classmates at Cleveland High introduced her to concepts of social justice. Haddish enjoys the social life at El Camino Real High (she serves as El Conquistador, the school mascot), and a teacher there helps jump-start her academically—to the point that New York University offers her admission (though not enough money for her to attend).

But outside of school, both learn the lesson that L.A. doesn’t really care much about the lives of its kids—especially black, poor ones.

Khan-Cullors watches her friends get harassed and arrested for nothing more than minor acts—tagging, underage drinking, cutting class, talking back, and, in one case, wearing the same T-shirts. She sees how the drug war, the “three strikes” law, and Prop 187 injure friends and acquaintances. And she is particularly angry at how gang injunctions are used to label kids even when they have nothing to do with gangs. “Kids were being sent away simply for being alive in a place where war had been declared against us,” she writes.

The book is particularly powerful—and infuriating—in recounting how Khan-Cullors’s brother, Monte, a schizophrenic, is charged with progressively more serious crimes (“I spent my childhood watching my brother get arrested”), even though he doesn’t physically harm anybody. Monte is beaten, tortured, and drugged in the L.A. County Jail during a time when, subsequent investigations showed, such abuse was a regular practice of the county sheriffs.

Khan-Cullors fights to protect her brother from institutions that treat him as disposable. The line to her eventual activism is clear: Wouldn’t Monte have received the care he needed, rather than abuse and incarceration, if all black lives really mattered?

In Haddish’s memoir, it is the author herself who suffers the abuse. This fact—and Haddish’s comedic instinct to make herself, not others, the butt of jokes—gives her funny book unexpected pathos. She is beaten by her mother, as well as in the foster care system, in which she spends her teens. She describes the indignity of having to beg a judge—since she had no official parent and was a ward of the state—to seize an early opportunity to appear on television.

“It didn’t feel like anybody gave two f^*ks about me, unless it was benefiting them. Unless they was getting paid,” she says, recalling that her grandmother insisted on being compensated for a stint as her foster mother. “Me just being myself was never good enough for anyone to love me.” She falls into difficult relationships with men—some of them cops to whom she is drawn because of the illusion that they provide safety. “I end up picking jealous and possessive guys, because in some sick, twisted way, I think that means they care,” she writes.

In the face of awful realities, both women conclude they have little choice but to assert themselves. Khan-Cullors builds a commune of activists and artists, defying police raids. She helps organize the first Black Lives Matter march, strategically held in Beverly Hills, to gain broad notice. She finds that having had to navigate the many different peoples of L.A. allows her to build diverse alliances—and to make Black Lives Matter a truly democratic organization. Perhaps it’s easier to be intersectional if you’re from a city with so many intersections.

“We have built a decentralized movement that encourages and supports local leaders to name and claim the work that is needed in order to make their communities more just,” she writes, noting that her own name remains little-known. “This is monumentally difficult in a world that has made even activism a celebrity pursuit.”

Haddish has to fight racism and sexism as she breaks into comedy, with only a day job at an LAX ticket counter for support at first. She is cheated and propositioned by producers. But she is lucky in that her unlucky childhood has made her fierce and uncompromising. In 2017, she breaks out in the film Girls Trip, and by this spring, she was a presenter at the Oscars. Toward the end, Jada Pinkett Smith, alongside her husband Will Smith, hilariously enters the narrative playing Henry Higgins to Haddish’s Eliza Doolittle, who needs to be cleaned up so she isn’t “too street” for stardom.

Ultimately, both books make the same timely point: You can’t negotiate or compromise with people or places that discriminate against you. The best you can do is confront that discrimination—and use that experience to build your voice.

As it happens, that is also a strong point in the USC sociologist Manuel Pastor’s new State of Resistance, the best book so far about California in the age of Trump. Pastor argues that the story of California of the past 20 years is how younger Californians, many of them immigrants and minorities, got tired of being victimized. After realizing that complaining doesn’t work, they built institutions and alliances (Black Lives Matter among them) that have protected immigrants and other at-risk people—and took over state politics in the process.

Black Lives Matter and its allies are often criticized as advancing “identity politics.” That’s backward. Khan-Cullors and Haddish each show how forging a strong identity—even through suffering—can allow you to advocate for universal values. The power is in the pain.

“That’s why my comedy so often comes from pain,” Haddish writes. “In my life, and I hope in yours, I want us to grow roses out of the poop.”

The post The Pain of Surviving the San Fernando Valley Can Make You Powerful appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

By way of comparison, if everybody would express their opinions about how to improve the medical profession, we as the larger public would not be so accepting of everyone’s opinions. Many of us would vigorously challenge anecdotal accounts and “solutions” based on personal experience and videos seen on the Internet. Because we see medicine as a real profession, with nationally accepted professional standards, we tend to leave it to real experts to express their views on how the profession might be changed.

Treating policing as some sort of haphazard trade, about which everybody can have a valid opinion, is not helping policing or our current national conversation about it. Indeed, it aggravates the problems faced in policing. As a former police officer and somebody who has written many books and articles about the police profession over the decades, I resent the current rush-to-judgment environment and the ubiquitous pontification about the solutions. The overwhelming majority of police officers in this country mean well and take their jobs seriously, risking their lives to protect others, most of the time for meager pay. They certainly deserve better tools to hone their skills and much respect from the public they serve.

It is remarkable that very few academics who actually study policing and police-community relations are part of the discussion in public and in the media. We academics hear public officials quote out-of-context statistics, repeat catch phrases like “community-oriented policing,” and fuel the anger. For example, national and reputable media outlets often quote the number of people killed by police officers in a given year as an example of police use of force or brutality—an alarming figure, but one that would also include homicidal criminals like Micah Xavier Johnson, the Dallas sniper who killed five officers on duty at last week’s Black Lives Matter protest.

Almost 20 years ago I started teaching a course about police training, and the scarcity of available resources prompted me to write my first book, Critical Issues in Police Training. Published in 2002 and based on years of fieldwork and research, I identified five main areas that are extremely problematic for policing: recruitment, selection, training, supervision, and discipline. And I outlined four topics to address these problems: leadership, an approach to police-community relations called “Open Communication Policing,” multicultural policing, and stress management for law enforcement.

Fast forward almost 15 years, and we are now talking about all the same problems and topics—as if they were new and we still need to study them and create commissions to identify what needs to be done. This is wrong and a dangerous waste of time for both officers risking their lives and communities living in fear of their local precincts. Research is clear: we know quite a lot about what needs to be done—we need to transform the way police organizations operate. We just need to do it.

It’s gratifying to hear so much in the conversation about the need to change how we train police to reduce violent encounters with citizens. But I can’t help but stress that how we recruit and select officers should come first, before training.

For over two decades, research has shown a direct correlation between the emotional maturity of officers and their problem-solving capacity. Yet, as if deliberately ignoring the scientific research finding, most police departments in the United States continue to recruit and select their officers at the very young ages of 19 or 20.

In their late teens and early 20s, these men and women are expected to display wisdom, maturity, judgment, and social and emotional intelligence that most of us do not display until our late 20s and beyond. In some departments, some recruits are even exempt from the basic requirement of finishing high school if they possess some characteristics that would qualify them for special waivers. (Albuquerque, New Mexico is one such department).

Instead, we should be identifying the highest standards for recruitment and selection of officers. These standards must be expressed in something the U.S. has never had for its police: a standardized, mandatory curriculum of training for all our law enforcement agencies. This would cover not only the use of force but also other essential tools of effective and impartial policing like leadership, multiculturalism, stress management, and open communication. Each department would then be free to add as much or as little to this mandatory template, based on their needs.

This training must cover a minimum number of hours that will approximate, at the very least, a two-year college degree. Don’t we owe it to our communities to give the officers we charge with guarding our lives at least as many hours of training as beauticians and hairdressers?

We would not have to invent such standards. We already have the templates, primarily from other countries. Take, for example, Finland, which has the sort of comprehensive standardized training that makes experts like me envious. The Police College in Finland offers bachelor’s and master’s degrees for its police force. Completed in about three years, the bachelor’s degree is composed of 180 credits and qualifies the person for the position of police officer—or to act independently as an expert in police work. And the program is just the beginning of lifelong study that encourages police officers to seek new approaches and best practices in their profession.

While we have some police departments trying to transform recruitment, selection, and training (Dallas PD is one of them), we have close to 18,000 different law enforcement agencies in this country, most of them smaller than 50 sworn officers. The IACP (International Associations of Chiefs of Police) does much to further the culture of training but, unfortunately, it cannot mandate a standardized training. It can only recommend. And the time for recommendations has passed. We need mandates. Teaching de-escalation techniques at the NYPD or the Dallas PD academies did not change the behavior of officers in Louisiana or Minnesota. If we want change nationally, we need to institute a standardized mandate for all.

So, who and what are standing in the way of this change? The obstacles are federal and local. On a federal level, a transformational change would require revisiting the autonomy of the states to determine their own standards for police forces—the sort of changes politicians don’t want to touch. On a local level, sometimes unions oppose raising the standards. (Last year, I testified in front of the local council in Suffolk County, New York in favor of requiring a bachelor’s degree for its force, but was very strongly opposed by the union). Sometimes local politicians fear they will lose control over the hiring process. And many times, there are concerns about the lack of money; most of the police budget is allocated to salaries and there is very little left for recruitment and training.

Yes, many police departments around the country have gotten better at recruitment of ethnic and racial minorities, but diversity is not a stand-in for emotional maturity. Nor does having a department where members of minority communities are in the highest leadership ranks of the police, as in Dallas, change the perception that policing is a profession that is inherently racist and discriminatory in its application of the law.

It is impossible to convey here, in a short essay, the importance of perceptions about policing that are based, at one end, on centuries of oppression going back to the Southern Slave Patrols, and, at another end, a tsunami of social media visuals—of beatings, shootings, and victims’ dead bodies. Such visuals, with enough repetition, become etched in people’s minds not as a single event but rather as a series of events that represent a norm. Opinions are then derived from these perceptions, and actions from these opinions. In the absence of uniform policing standards based on scientific evidence, it is easy to misinterpret legitimate uses of force that from time to time accompany police officers’ day-to-day interactions with an error of judgment or actual abuse of the rights of their office.

It’s also easy to mistake the relative success of a few departments in training and recruitment with the nationwide sea change we need. I don’t know about you, but I cannot live with the notion of the authority to use coercive force against me being discharged by people who are not recruited, selected, and trained to the highest possible standard. The promise of this moment is that we can raise those standards, and reach the goal that any use of force must be necessary.

But to get there, we can’t rely on opinions. We need to start with the many things we actually know about policing. We need to let the real experts in this field drive the transformations of policing. And then we need to pray for the right leadership to enable these changes.

The post Not Everybody Is an Expert on Policing appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.