About four years ago, in a city park in western Washington State, Joe Winters encountered a woman in the throes of a psychotic episode. As he sat down next to her, she told him that she had purchased the bench that they now shared and that it was her home. “I didn’t buy the hallucinations, but I tried to validate the feelings underneath them,” Winters told me. His strategy resembled Rogerian psychotherapy—unconditionally accepting a patient’s experience, even when it is untethered from reality. But Winters is not a roving psychologist; he is a deputy in the King County Sheriff’s Office. He had been called to the scene in response to the woman’s behavior, which nearby residents deemed disruptive. After talking with Winters for several minutes, the woman left of her own volition, without Winters having to arrest her or resort to physical force.
Policing can seem like barren ground for empathy, the experience of understanding, sharing in, and caring about another’s emotions. According to the Web site Fatal Encounters, cops were involved in the deaths of twelve hundred and sixty-one people in the United States last year, an average of about three and a half each day. A recent string of brutal arrests by officers in Missouri, New York, Texas, South Carolina, Ohio, and elsewhere has helped to drive the public’s faith in law enforcement to a twenty-two-year low. National confidence in police officers’ racial impartiality has also fallen. But, for communities of color, incidents like these are nothing new; they often confirm a longstanding perception of police as antagonists.
Many theories, both old and new, hold that empathy is inevitable and automatic. When you witness someone suffer a severe bone fracture, it doesn’t take mental gymnastics to figure out how you feel; a wave of discomfort might wash over you, the emotional equivalent of a knee-jerk reflex. In fact, though, empathy is a fragile reaction, one that often fails when it is most needed. Conflicts between groups (racial, social, or competitive) can reduce its potency. So can stress, which limits the psychological space that people have for others, and power, which can numb those who possess it to the plight of those who don’t.
Each of these factors is common in policing. From their earliest days of training, many recruits are steeped in a so-called warrior mentality, in which routine patrols resemble combat and citizens pose a potentially mortal threat. Last year, the Santa Fe New Mexican obtained a draft of instructional materials from the state law-enforcement academy that offer a striking example of this philosophy. According to the proposed curriculum, cadets would be taught that, during traffic stops, they should “assume that … all the occupants in the vehicle are armed.” Expectations like these encourage a volatile mindset, and they play directly into the tendency to see weapons where there are none, especially in the hands of black men. The warrior mentality also instills chronic anxiety. Seth Stoughton, an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law and a former police officer, told me that such fear colors the way that cops treat civilians. “If I’m worried about never making it home again, I don’t really give a damn if I offend someone,” he said. “Whatever emotional toll my actions take on them, it will feel less important than my survival.”
If you wanted to decrease recruits’ empathy, you could scarcely do better than to enshrine a warrior mentality. Recently, however, recruits in several cities—among them Cincinnati, Las Vegas, and Memphis—have begun to learn a different approach: command less, listen more. A strong example of such a program comes from Sue Rahr, the executive director of the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission. Rahr’s curriculum, which has produced about seven hundred and fifty graduates in the past two years, is designed to do away with the warrior mentality and encourage recruits to view themselves not as combatants within a community but as guardians of it. (President Obama’s Task Force on Twenty-First-Century Policing, whose final report Rahr helped shape, aims to do the same.)
One strategy that flows from Rahr’s philosophy is known as LEED, “listening and explaining with equity and dignity.” LEED teaches officers to insure that citizens feel heard and that they understand the reasons behind police behavior. This approach draws heavily from the psychology of procedural justice, which views fairness of treatment as being equally important as fairness of outcome; Rahr calls it “a Happy Meal version of a research smorgasbord.” It also looks a lot like the method that Joe Winters, one of Rahr’s trainers, used in his park-bench encounter. Rahr sees empathy as more than window dressing. “It’s a safety strategy that gives officers a tactical advantage,” she told me. “When you know why someone is acting a certain way, you also know how to best react.”
Rahr’s program supplements coursework with exercises that test recruits’ ability to communicate effectively. In one exercise, trainees arrive at a mock crime scene in which two men have assaulted a third. The victim asks for his hat, which is out of reach to him. Only if the recruit honors this request does the victim reveal that the assault is part of a gang initiation. In another exercise, recruits encounter a knife-wielding actor. If they flood the room and fixate on the weapon, the scenario escalates. If they focus on building rapport, it falls under control. The lesson: good policing requires slowing things down, listening, and meeting people where they are.
Because Rahr’s program is relatively new, its over-all effect on policing culture isn’t yet clear. She harbors no illusions, and emphasizes that she and her colleagues don’t expect to undo “two hundred years of history” overnight. Even if the program does change recruits’ hearts and minds, the changes might not last. As Rahr told me, some recruits leave the program, move to their new departments, and meet field-training officers who offer to help them “get past that touchy-feely bullshit and do real policing.”
Then there’s the scale of the problem. In Rahr’s ideal world, she said, “everyone who sees a police officer would have the initial reaction that ‘I’m safer.’ ” That world feels very distant from our own. Police violence does not reflect the failure of empathy alone, and empathy cannot overwrite racial bias and structural inequality. (The woman whom Joe Winters encountered in the park was white; if she had been black and another officer had taken the call, how might the interaction have gone?) In some cases, empathy may even make things worse. According to Steve Silverman, the founder of Flex Your Rights, an organization that helps people assert themselves during police encounters, “Officer Friendly tactics are good at getting citizens to voluntarily waive their Fourth Amendment rights.” He maintains that empathy training “must go hand in hand with respecting basic constitutional protections.”
Is it possible for an officer who starts out unempathetic to grow more caring? The knee-jerk theory suggests not. If people are helpless to stop themselves from feeling empathy, they might likewise be unable to stoke it. But the recruits in Rahr’s program provide a counterpoint; they build their empathic ability even in difficult circumstances. This jibes with the findings of a new movement in the scientific community. Some psychologists, myself included, argue that empathy is less a fixed trait, like height, than a learnable skill, like Scrabble. In one recent study, my colleagues and I found that people who believe this to be true put more work into identifying with members of other races, a tendency that would serve police officers well.
Another way to bolster caring is to emphasize empathy-positive norms, as the British psychologist Mark Tarrant found in a study in 2009. Tarrant and his colleagues told a group of college students about another student whose parents had died in a car accident. Participants felt more empathy when they believed that this victim attended their own university, as opposed to another school. Tarrant then ran his study again, but first told half the group that their own university was an unusually empathic place, high in “compassion, tenderness, and sympathy.” This simple prompt erased the empathy gap; students now expressed equal empathy for victims from their own and other schools. In the world of law enforcement, the city police department in Decatur, Georgia, seems to have adopted a similar empathic norm, as can be seen in the first seconds of its recruitment video—a stark contrast with more warrior-oriented messages offered elsewhere.
It is frustratingly difficult to draw a line between empathy-focussed police training, on the one hand, and concrete outcomes such as use of force, on the other. This is largely because police departments offer poorly structured or incomplete data about their behavior. Rahr and others are now engaged in long-term research to make up that disparity in knowledge. Still, even at this time of frayed relations between cops and communities, programs like Rahr’s offer the potential for both optimism and psychological insight, by furthering the idea that officers can learn to choose empathy more often.
