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

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we use evidence to solve crime imagine if we used evidence to prevent crime sir robert peel had that imagination he founded the modern police force and the london metropolitan police its main mission was to reduce crime and disorder and whose success would be based on the absence of crime and disorder and not in

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itself today, ironically, the measure of an officer's success is that activity arrest citation search and detain a good day in policing is when you've hooked and booked everything the day but the 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 own humanity when I had been on patrol for about three years, my partner and I responded to a domestic violence call and when we got there, the couple was at the door, Dwayne and Stephanie, and because of the call and Dwayne's size, I took him in, registered him and put him in the back of patrol and she understood that I was polite and obedient and she understood that I was trying to keep everyone safe and I went back and I talked to Stephanie and Stephanie told me that she and Dwayne had been fighting all day and that the fight had escalated when he He grabbed her by the shirt and threw her down the stairs ripping her shirt in the process.

Stephanie showed me bruises that were in stages of healing and cuts that had scabbed over evidence that those injuries did not occur that day. My partner and I searched the house and couldn't find a shirt anywhere, so my partner brought his oldest son, 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 that dwayne was unemployed and that he had an opportunity that weekend to work in construction, but That meant leaving. and he stayed at his mother's house and Stephanie was so overwhelmed raising her six children, four of whom were under five, that she didn't want him to leave.

She told Dwayne that if he left, he would call the police and tell us that he had committed domestic violence, but because he loved Stephanie and her children, he actually stayed and waited for us to arrive. I went back to my partner who had spoken to the 10 year old and he said it was just verbal so my partner and I decided. that we are going to free dwayne, the problem was that I put handcuffs on duane and put him in the back seat of a patrol car, which meant that technically he was under arrest and our rules in our organization I had to call a supervisor to They released him and I told my sergeant what happened and he said no our rules say with domestic violence you have to arrest and because I have an attitude I said no it's not like that.

He says if I have reasonable suspicion I will arrest him and I don't have reasonable suspicion and neither my partner and my sergeant said I don't mind if they take him to jail so my partner and I were not very happy with the decision but we took Dwayne to jail and some might say I had no choice, but Victor Frankel would disagree with one man's search for meaning. Victor Frankl works on his time in a concentration camp and what differentiates humans from animals is our ability to have control over our minds, our thoughts and that we have choices, so I had a choice and that day I chose my career over Dwayne's freedom and I don't think this was what Sir Robert Field wanted when he created the police.

I don't think he would want officers making arrests to appease their sergeants or making arrests so they could have career advancement, this thinking has brought us back to that punitive criminal justice system that sir robert peale strove to destroy because now, because to the tough-on-crime policy and the war on drugs in the United States, we have increasingly longer sentences and those sentences because of mandatory minimum sentencing and three strikes laws we have gone from having 350,000 people in prison in 1973 to more than 2 million people today and more than 5 million people supervised by the criminal justice system on probation and parole we went from spending nine billion dollars in 1982 to more than $70 billion today, money that could be spent better in our healthcare, our education or even crime prevention because Sir Robert Peel, when he was trying to

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the criminal justice system, saw it as extremely harsh. and punitive, especially for the poor, worked his entire career to reduce more than 200 death penalty statutes, introduced monetary fines instead of prison for minor crimes, strove to give the working class a living wage, and then created the police and everything was to create a system that was much more compassionate, humane and peaceful than the system we already had and you might think: why do you care? in the UK, because the US doesn't have a monopoly on this.

There are currently 85,000 in the UK. people incarcerated and their numbers are also constantly increasing and these numbers are not increasing because there is a huge increase in crime, which is a minor part of those numbers, it is increasing because we have increased the length of our sentences and our durations and nagin, two Researchers reviewed the entire deterrent. research and showed that increasing the severity of sanctions actually has a very marginal effect on reducing crime and disorder, but we are still going down this path, so maybe we could consider something like medicine, because the Medicine was once like policing where doctors used their intuition or local customs or tradition when treating their patients, often ignoring scientific evidence.

Dr. Spock was a very popular pediatrician in the 1950s who recommended parents put their babies to sleep on their stomachs, and although his advice was benign because he intended no harm, the result was harmful. I couldn't see their advice individually and the outcome it had on their patients, but when they aggregated all the data and started showing that there was an increase in infant deaths, the only thing they could correlate it with was the sleeping position of the babies. , etc. The back sleeping campaign began and immediately infant deaths began to decrease today in hospitals they have evidence based practices and the culture of hospitals and doctors is to follow the science, follow the evidence, use clinical trials to find out what works and no.

It doesn't work in medicine and, like Dr. Spock in the police, we too have that Achilles heel. We are now starting to discover what works, what and what doesn't work in policing, some of which random patrols don't work to reduce. Crime and disorder We know that increasing penalties does not reduce crime and disorder Programs like Scared Straight and Boot Camps do not work to reduce recidivism, but proactive policing that focuses on a place rather than a person still works to reduce crime and disorder. Policing in which officers focus their proactivity on a small, high-crime geographic area works to reduce crime and disorder, and programs such as Project Hope, where drug offenders receive social support and immediate short-term sanctions for Dirty drug tests work to reduce recidivism, even knowing all this. and there is much more research beyond what we still have in both the US and 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 could do. What I am saying is that the police, politicians in the know and even the public should follow the evidence we should follow rather than intuition, tradition or custom, and what we think is common sense, we should actually follow what that research now shows. In Dwayne's case, I know you might think that you know he was innocent, so he was an anomaly, but the police have discretion, so we choose where to police, what laws to enforce, and who to enforce them on, so although I thought that Dwayne was innocent, another officer could do it.

I have thought he was guilty or another officer might have thought he is innocent today but he will be guilty tomorrow so I might as well arrest him today and have the police mostly patrol in socio-economically deprived areas which means the police will always impact At a disproportionate rate for the poor and especially the poor minority, an arrest and conviction will stigmatize them for the rest of their lives because they will always check a box that designates their status in society and will diminish their ability to get a job to get a job. living place. get college student loans and even vote so they always pay for their crimes.

Arrest as a response to tough-on-crime or the war on drugs is simply returning us to this punitive pre-peeling era and like Dr. Spock's officers. We need to aggregate the data so we can see what our decisions are as individual officers and how they impact society as a whole. Three days after my partner and I arrested Dwayne, a 911 call came in from a hysterical woman and my partner was not with me at the time. He was free for the night, but I recognized the address as Stephanie and Duane's address. , so I made sure to go on the call and along the way I got really angry because I was thinking, "Okay, here I am, I'm leaving." For me to be put in another really bad situation, I'm going to have to arrest Wayne again or this time Dwayne committed domestic violence and my sergeant will be right and I'm going to validate his whole theory of putting him in jail anyway.

When I got home Stephanie was in the kitchen and she was hysterical and unintelligible and the kids were very upset and I was trying to get it out of her where Dwayne was and she finally knew he was in the basement so while I went. In the basement I was thinking to myself you know what I'm going to find if he's going to get mad he's going to get mad and what I found was Dwayne hanging from the rafters and I walked up to him and looked at his face and I touched his arm to see I could save him but I couldn't, he was dead and next to his body there was a photo of his children and 35 cents and it was all the money he had in the world to leave to his children. to see the impact of my decisions and my arrest on another human being, his partner and his children, please intervene in people's lives on a daily basis and instead of following tradition, custom or individual preferences, I believe that It's time we just follow the evidence, thank you.