Comments on the Training Advisory Council's Recommendations on Use of Force Training
and Reporting
by Portland Copwatch
July 12, 2016
To the Training Advisory Council:
We want to begin by congratulating the Training Advisory Council (TAC) for putting out its first
comprehensive recommendations for the Police Bureau <
http://www.portlandoregon.gov/police/article/581581>. That said, it is disappointing how much
of the document has to do with how to deliver training and so little to do with how to reduce the use
of force used against Portlanders, particularly against vulnerable populations. The TAC asserts in
its Use of Force Summary Reports section that they are unable to analyze the existing data on Use
of Force because of the Committee's limited ability to conduct such analysis, and because there has
not been enough time to see trends. The TAC has been in operation for four years. The data have
been generated for three years, and have consistently shown that African Americans, people
experiencing houselessness, and people with mental health issues all receive a disproportionate
amount of force. PCW has pointed this out repeatedly. When the TAC receives updates from the
Bureau (less than quarterly, even though that is what's required in the Settlement Agreement), there
are usually very few questions and the presentation mostly focuses on how much work goes into
the reports.
The most salient section of the recommendations is the one addressing language used by the
Bureau which can perpetuate an "us vs. them" mentality and which urges officers to twist the facts
in order to justify their use of force. However, the irony of this section is that many of the
recommendations are akin to saying "don't call a person a jackass, instead call them a donkey." To
be fair, there are good recommendations here, including changing the words "application of tools"
to "use of a weapon." The suggestion to change the PPB's language that tells officers to illustrate
they used less force after getting a suspect into custody is good, but is awkwardly phrased. We
suggest the TAC change their proposed language to say "If you reduced or terminated force as you
gained compliance, note that in the report," rather than "If you can report that as you gained
compliance or domination of a suspect, you reduced or terminated force, do so."
On the other hand, the section which tells officers not to subject themselves to "unnecessary legal or
administrative review" has only been rewritten from saying "After having survived and been
victorious in a force encounter, don't later become a victim to [such review]" (PPB) to "After using
force appropriately and successfully do not expose yourself or the Bureau to [such review] by
failing to thoroughly justify your actions" (TAC). The point is to get officers to write honest and
full reports, and the broader context is that each and every use of force incident is investigated for
an After Action report/misconduct, and every deadly force incident goes to a grand jury. So legal
and administrative review are generally happening anyway, it's not clear why they would be referred
to as "unnecessary" or why the officer is asked to "justify" his/her actions rather than to explain the
thought process behind them. There are many other examples, including statements that officers are
"required" to use force in some situations, asking officers to judge whether a witness makes a
"negative report" that they "don't feel is accurate" (rather than just taking statements and letting
other people decide on the credibility), and uses the term "customer service" when, as we've noted
many times before, people do not go into the "police store" and ask for help picking out a pair of
jeans. Officers usually come upon people and assert themselves in ways that are intrusive and
unpleasant. Why not use professional and polite policing or some other term?
We also want to highlight the discussion about the Department of Justice's own analysis of the "us
vs. them" mentality and the TAC's asking the Bureau to stop using both analogies of the public as
sheep and the police as sheepdogs, and the term "warrior mentality." PCW has seen these analogies
in the Portland Police Association newsletter, but did not realize they were actively part of the PPB
training as well.
It was interesting to learn that until the group working on the language issues was put in place, the
TAC never had full access to Training Division documents. Having signed confidentiality forms,
they were asked to examine documents at the Bureau and leave their notes behind. It's no wonder
we haven't seen any meaningful recommendations until now.
The second most important section is the one on the Use of Force Summary Reports.
Unfortunately, the TAC did not take the advice that Portland Copwatch offered* and left information about the content of the reports buried deep in their
recommendations in this section. The recommendations ask the Bureau to create charts about how
accurate and complete their data are, which is interesting but should be an appendix to a report on
how often force is used, what types, and against whom. The TAC makes an interesting
recommendation for the PPB to separate out how often force is used on officer-initiated calls versus
ones that come from the public. PCW would support that addition to the reports.
This section and the ones on coaching trainers and evaluation are also full of the kind of technical
jargon PCW cautioned against in our previous comments. Here's the first recommendation as an
example (_underscores_ around jargon): "TAC recommends that the Training Division support a
possible re-institution of Use of Force summary report review among officers with newly created
_ancillary training materials._ TAC suggests transferring and adapting key Use of Force learning
activities, _visualizations_, games and _focused conversations in bound flashcard sets_ for quick
review during shift changes across precincts. TAC members have _learning product examples of
'Toolbox Talkcards'_ for consideration." What?
This section also has a long aside about how institutional change can take a long time after that
point has already been made, albeit using the jargon-y term "Organizational Change Management."
While PCW is sympathetic to the difficulty of people having to adopt new policies rapidly in a
working environment, it's disturbing to read how making changes to reduce use of force, improve
officer accountability and improve community-police relations are causing "fatigue" and "low
morale" among officers. The TAC's suggestion of reminding the officers that in the long term it will
make Portland a better place to work is a good one; we would add that adopting better practices will
also give officers more credibility with the community.
PCW is very supportive of the recommendation to "reinstate the section 'Total Suspects Involved in
PPB Use of Force Incidents' as per its inclusion in earlier reports as to provide regular insight into
demographic breakdowns of Use of Force incidents." This should be the #1 recommendation in
this section. We also agree that the Bureau should not tell the TAC that collecting data on certain
subjects is "unviable" because it comes from the Bureau of Emergency Communications, and, as
the Committee suggests, the PPB should help find ways to get more data rather than shut down
requests.
In the evaluation and assessment section, the TAC makes an interesting but potentially alarming
recommendation: That any advisory body to the police send their recommendations about training
to the TAC for vetting. It certainly is a good idea for the other bodies making suggestions (the
Citizen Review Committee, the Community Oversight Advisory Board, the Police Review Board
and the Community/Police Relations Committee when it exists) to bounce their ideas off of the
TAC for perspective. However, the TAC is wholly appointed by and governed by the Bureau, while
the CRC is attached to the Auditor's Independent Police Review Division and the COAB was
created to independently assess implementation of the DOJ Agreement (whether everyone agrees
on what "independent" means in either case is another discussion). PCW strongly supports cross-
communication among the advisory bodies, but not the idea of the TAC acting as a "gatekeeper."
This is particularly important since the TAC reveals (in its appendix) that one reason it did not make
more recommendations about how officers use force is that at a February Q&A session, the PPB
"satisfied" the TAC on content issues, yet nobody recorded or produced notes from that meeting.
(TAC calls this an "oversight," it seems more like a continuation of the poor communication from
the TAC to the community that's happened since day one.)
The TAC also accuses other advisory bodies of making recommendations that do not align with
best practices, but doesn't give any examples of the recommendations, the best practices, or which
bodies it's concerned about. There's a suggestion that the Compliance Officer/Community Liaison
is not pushing for the use of the "Kirkpatrick model," even though the COCL's outcomes and
assessment reports all push heavily for that method of analysis. (However, like the COCL, the TAC
talks about "level 3" and "level 4" without summarizing what those mean.)
The opening section on coaching trainers contains one of the best-- and clearest-- recommendations
in the report, though it's in the "findings" section as a summary of how the other recommendations
should benefit the PPB: "designing courses that address the balanced concerns of the Bureau and
the community."
A lot of the rest of that section begins with clear, plain-English descriptions of how the Training
Division instructors need to learn how to design their classes for maximum effectiveness, but then
devolves into jargon such as "training content development methodologies," "providing a natural
path to the incorporation of analytically derived findings into the training development process" and
"connect training developers to initial skill level and gap assessments." It also feels a bit
uncomfortable that there are TAC members who are professional trainers who might benefit from
the PPB bringing on people to fulfill these recommendations, though the suggestion specifically
calls for "a pool of local volunteer training developers" indicating perhaps no money will be
involved.
Finally, we would recommend that the TAC use better formatting in the final version of this report.
The sections are not consistent in how they present background vs. recommendations. The
recommendations are only numbered sequentially within each section-- the sections could be
assigned letters, or the recommendations could be numbered ordinally from #1-#23. The parts
where the TAC is suggesting rewrites to the PPB language could use italics, underlines,
strikethroughs or other indicators to be clear what is being added/deleted. (This is the same problem
we have reviewing proposed PPB Directives, where we have to go through line by line to see what
was being changed.)
We hope that the TAC will consider these comments and perhaps make one more version of the
report before finalizing it with the Bureau, to the extent possible given that In-Service training will
be starting soon this year. We thank you for the opportunity to comment and look forward to the
July 13 meeting where the recommendations will be discussed.
--dan handelman
--Portland Copwatch
* our comments are attached in the TAC's appendix
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