How Do You Prevent Another George Floyd Incident From Happening? Joe Asks a Police Psychologist

Yeah, there's a stigma. There's a, do I really need this? It just is hard to pick up and. You don't wanna be the person that wants help all the time. Like, hey, figure it out yourself. And can this person really help me? Who's this gonna be? How do I find it there? But that's the most frequent question I get from my friends and family. People are thinking I might need to see someone. Like, how do I go about doing that? Get the question all the time. So yeah, for cops it's even bigger because of that whole control thing. And also, like I said before, their job is on the line. Of course. So for these cops that are in that situation. So when they say, look, I need to take some time off, you basically just leave Malone and say, if you want these resources, here they are. Or do they, I mean, is what? Again, it's gonna vary by department. That is not kinda crazy that it does vary by department. Yeah, drives me nuts. And has this discussion been had, like nationwide? There's so many good things and pieces of advice and recommendation out there. One of the things that's kind of painful right now is, every morning I get a news recap from the International Association of Chiefs of Police. They send this email out to all the members of there and they have the Psychological Services Group. And so you get these updates and I usually just kinda pass them over. But lately with all the police reform, so it's just headlines from around the country. And the piecemeal randomness of, this city's doing this and this city's doing this and this city's doing this and this city, and it's all over the place. That's driving me nuts, because I'm like, there's already been groups that have studied and reported and told us what we need to do to help the world of policing rise up and do better. That information's out there from wonderful, brilliant people who've come together and have laid it out for us. It's there, but yet we don't have that national standard. Each state has certain, most states have a group. Like in California, it's the California Post. It's the Police Officer Standards and Training. So they set all the rules for training, minimal training requirements for all the departments in California. So all the agencies, police agencies here in this state are need to comply with all of the post recommendations, but they're all, it's a minimum standard. And our post, California Post, is kind of heads and tails ahead of most of the country. Some states don't actually have that organization. Most do have something similar to like what we have. So they do set some standards, but there's so many things that are not included in that. And so it is a bit random. It's hard, I think, to make a one size fits all. Everybody must do this, because if you think about it, I think there's about 18,000 different police agencies in the US. And I think I read about 50% of those have 10 or fewer full-time officers. So when you've got a tiny little town in the middle of the Midwest in a very rural county, that's a whole lot different than LAPD. So it's hard to have everybody on the same standard and the same expectations when we've got a lot of different makeups for a lot of different departments. That said, there are some fundamentals that I think every department should be held to. And one of those is the debriefings after an incident. And the one that almost no one is doing that's been talked about for a while is regular mental wellness checks. At this point, you get a psych eval when you're hired, or before you're hired. And if you're in a critical incident, you may or may not get one, more are starting to do that. And then the only other time you're gonna be required to see the psychologist is if you have messed up and you're in trouble and you're referred for a fitness for duty evaluation. And at that point, your job is on the line. Someone is saying that they think you're not fit for duty. And that is a scary evaluation to have to be a part of. Because then you're going in and yeah, if the psychologist judges and decides that you are not able to go back out, then you're off duty until you can fix whatever that problem may be. Right, well, also, just for the public's health and welfare, it's important to do that. Sure. I mean, there clearly are a lot of police officers that are unfit for duty. How do we stop what happened in Minneapolis? How do we stop that from happening, or at least mitigate it? So, I mean, again, I see everything through my lens as a psychologist, as a police psychologist. So I'm sure there are things beyond my realm that also answer this question. But for me, the things that I think we could be doing different that would really make a difference are the regular, annual mental wellness checks. If, from my perspective, when I look at people like, you know, Derek Chauvin, the officer that murdered George Floyd, and we see what happened there, he, I would say, I would be willing to guess. And I don't know him, I've never met him. I don't know much about his career other than what I've read in the news and whatnot. Police officers that get to that place become that. They're not that when they're hired. To get hired as a cop, you have to go through what often takes a year-long application process where they are digging and poking into every aspect of your background, your life. Let's be clear, though, that's in some places. In other places, it's pretty easy. Again, smaller departments that don't have the resources, probably so. I shouldn't say pretty easy, in comparison. In comparison, yeah. But the vast majority of departments have a pretty, have a similar process in that you're gonna go through the application, you have to pass a written test, there's gonna be a background investigation, which really, I think, is a hugely powerful key part, that it should be a well-done background investigation. They're talking to people who you know, people from your past, your landlord, your ex-wife, your girlfriend, your boyfriend, your boyfriend. They have the resources to do that for every single candidate? They do, now, some agencies take far more care than others. The wide variety of people that I see that have passed their backgrounds, some agencies I work for send me the most amazingly clean candidates and others that are trying to hire a lot, squeaky clean, but they've all gone through and it has gone through this background. They also do a polygraph. They do social media checks. They make you list all your tattoos, so they're looking for. If there is somebody who is just flagrantly racist, has been out there toting white supremacy, they're gonna see that somewhere in that digging around. The blatant racist folks are likely weeded out during a good background process. Let's say maybe they're not as openly, because we all know that people know better than to admit to such things most of the time these days, and it could be more subtle. At that point, what comes next? You've got oral interviews with police administrators, a polygraph coming along in there. Once they pass all of that, that's when they come to the last, they get their conditional offer of employment. They're basically like, as long as you get through these last two steps, you're good to go for the academy. The last two steps are the medical evaluation and the psych eval. By the time we get them, they have been heavily vetted, poked around and looked through in their past. We get a pretty clean group of people, but then we get to do more digging and we get to ask questions at this point that they're not able to ask before, so about mental health and background and psychological treatment and history. Then if they get through these evaluations, then they go on to the academy. For us, that vetting process, that psych eval is a really important place. I've had a lot of conversations with other psychologists in the past few months, like, what are we missing? I had a workshop a couple months ago for other police psychologists on some of the things we do in these pre-employments and had someone say, how do we screen out the cops who kill? And I said, we can't. And that was not a good answer, that we can't. We can't because what we're doing here is predicting the future, right? Where we're saying, how do we know who's going to be that person who does that later? Predicting the future is incredibly hard. Figuring out who may be subtly racist or biased is also incredibly hard. So that said, we do a whole lot of things. We've got our psychological test that we give. We ask a lot of crafty questions, and we dig as deep as we can to try to, again, weed out anyone who we think could potentially become that person down the road who could be a cop who kills or who is racist and biased and is treating people improperly. So that's one big thing, that we want to be very cautious and make sure we're doing a good job of screening up front. But I would say, and so much more to say about the tests and the screening, but it gets really nerdy and detailed, I would say that the officers who end up having the most problems are the ones who, once they get on, are in a department where that is the culture. That is, that those types of behaviors are acceptable. So that's bad. So as a young officer, they learn that. Have you ever seen the documentary, The Seven Five? I have not. It's a great documentary about Michael Dowd, who has been a guest on the podcast, who was a terrible cop, and talks openly about how he was corrupted and how his first day on the force, he witnessed corruption and was told to shut his mouth, and further went on to become a drug dealer and robbing drug dealers, and just, it's a crazy documentary. You would enjoy it, particularly from a psychological perspective, because he's talking about it after having time, just showing the images from the time and telling the stories. It's, the culture of each individual department is different, and some are great. There's a great video of Flint, Michigan, where these police officers, after the George Floyd death, they show up for these protests and tell these people the protesting, we're gonna march with you. We're a part of this community too. We're your friends. We are police officers, but we are not the person who did that thing, and we wouldn't do that thing, and we wanna show you that we support you, and that we're here to help. That's what really we want. It's beautiful. It's so cool to see them all march together and they're hugging. That's what we want, right? That is, and I think that one of the biggest things, how do we prevent these issues is, we need to look at the individual officer level, but, I think that is very limited because I think the racist, angry cop who kills has developed that way over time, and I think one of the pieces is the culture in the department. Is this something that's acceptable? Is there corruption in that department? And so certainly better oversight and tracking is a really important thing that should happen, but the other piece, and the one that I focus more on from my end, is the wellness. Is this somebody who is burning out? Is this somebody who has gone into a dangerous place, psychologically, that they started out and they were fine when we screen them up front, but over five or 10 or 15 years, they've seen so much, and there's some things happen in your brain that change the way you think and see and perceive the world when you do this type of work. And when you get to a place where those processes have really taken their toll, and somebody has gone down this kind of dark path, it's hard to come out of that, and the way they react to the world and the individuals that they see on a daily basis is going to be very different than what they look like when they were hired. So if we're not regularly checking in and seeing who might be at risk for going to that dark place, that bitter and angry place, we're not able to catch them before something happens. And that's where, for me, my big platform is, regular wellness checks. I'm not the first one to come up with this idea. It's been suggested by task forces and study groups and people who know a whole lot more than I do for a while now, but in reading, there was a wonderful report to Congress that was put out by the COPS, which is Community Oriented Policing Services. So they sent this 60-page report to Congress, March of 2019, and described in detail all the things that we should be doing to pay attention to officer wellness, one of which was we seem to think that some regular checkups would probably help, but the problem is no one's doing them, and we have literally zero research on, what, are they helpful? Can they prevent this? And I believe they are. So my next big thing is to go and explore and do that research so that we can show, hey, this does help. If we're touching base and we're getting people in, then we can catch the problems as they develop and before they become a major problem where someone's interacting with the community and they go awry and do something awful. Let's take care of them along the way and catch the problems before they, before they become behaviors that are problematic. Okay. Okay.