What We’ve Done

The Denver Police Department (DPD) was plagued with a female dropout rate in the police academy that had reached 25% despite efforts to recruit and retain the best female officers across the country. The problem was not fitness, or ability, or any other issue that could be addressed through screening.  Consequently, the DPD turned to the CPLE for help. After a year of interviews, experiments, and surveys, CPLE researchers and the DPD collaborated on a solution.

The problem, it seemed, was that many women in the DPD Academy reported that they simply could not “see themselves” on the force. So, the solution was to implement a mentoring program where veteran officers provided those in training with a window into the future, helping new officers see how they would fit in. The DPD now boasts a 0% dropout rate of women in their police academy since the implementation of the mentorship program—and male officers report a benefit as well (the program has expanded to include everyone in an academy class). Though neither the CPLE nor the DPD would claim that no women will ever drop out again, this is the kind of data-driven intervention that the CPLE believes can work in other departments.

Recently, the Salt Lake City Police Department (SLCPD) were facing the possibility of being required to enforce immigration enforcement—as are many across the country. This, despite the objection of the majority of police executives, who argue that putting immigration enforcement in the hands of police patrols will both overburden law enforcement and provoke widespread mistrust and defiance of police¹. Seeing that the wisdom of America’s chiefs was not a convincing argument for local government, the SLCPD reached out to CPLE with the goal of provide a scientific voice to the debate around immigration policy.  CPLE researchers then surveyed residents and officers to determine whether or not the policy was likely to influence police/resident relations.

It was.  And in a bad direction.

Though most officers and a slight minority of residents favored the policy itself, a large majority of officers revealed that having to enforce immigration policy was likely to make their jobs more dangerous.  More importantly, regardless of resident’s race, immigration status, or political leanings, a significant number (nearly 50% of those surveyed) of those who said they would normally report a minor crime said they would likely decline to report that same crime were SLCPD officers required to check for immigration status. This research provides some of the first empirical evidence that the marriage of policing and immigration poses significant risks to public safety, and provided the SLCPD with scientific support for their position against policing immigration.

It is important to note that this research could have gone the other way and that social science, done right, does not privilege a political perspective. However, either way the results came out, the SLCPD was better prepared to deal with their obligations to the community they serve.

For research on the topic of immigration, please click here.

All of our partner departments are committed to providing state of the art training to their officers in order to provide the safest and most fair service possible.  Several of them approached the CPLE to see if our research findings in other jurisdictions could translate into a training to improve community policing.  In previous research projects, we have tested officers for psychological profiles, and then linked those profiles to outcomes in patrol (e.g., efficient stops, commendations, racial bias, complaints, etc.)

Armed with these research insights, we developed a series of trainings on some of the psychological factors that seem to produce community concerns about policing.  Most importantly, PD’s that use our trainings provide us with before and after-training data.  This allows CPLE researchers to determine whether or not the trainings are having the desire effect, the opposite effect, or no effect at all. Given how contentious trainings often can be with unions, residents, and command staff, CPLE feels that the least a training should offer is the ability to measure whether what it has done.