The CopDoc Podcast Ep009 - Dr. Jay Albanese - Virginia Commonwealth University

Steve interviewed Dr. Jay Albanese from Virginia Commonwealth University. Jay is an expert in Transnational Crime, Ethics in Policing and Organized Crime.  Jay was the Director of the National Institute of Justice,  He served as President of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.  We talked about teaching in Criminal Justice, the state of policing today and leadership in police organizations.

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Website: www.copdocpodcast.com

If you'd like to arrange for facilitated training, or consulting, or talk about steps you might take to improve your leadership and help in your quest for promotion, contact Steve at stephen.morreale@gmail.com

Transcript

[00:00:00.403] - Steve Morreale
I have known my next guest for several years, and I was very excited when he agreed to come on and talk about policing and leadership and the state of criminal justice. So hello, Jay, welcome. Please introduce yourself to the audience,

 [00:00:12.173] - Jay Albanese
Steve. Very good to be here. Yes, I'm Jay Albanese. I'm a criminologist. I was actually the first graduate of the Rutgers University School of Criminal Justice. And I've done a lot of research and writing over the years, consulted for a lot of organizations, spent four years with the federal government at the National Institute of Justice. And I directed the research center there. I applied for that position right after 9/11. I figured if I'm going to be doing public service, this is the time.

 [00:00:38.753] - Jay Albanese
And they hired me. And what happened then? We did the first ever I'd say development of a research portfolio on terrorism. We had just gotten into human trafficking because the human trafficking law passed in 2000. Of course, 9/11 occurred in 2001. Transnational organized crime was a new thing. So it was a very exciting, invigorating time to be doing that work.

 [00:01:01.613] - Steve Morreale
How did you parlay that?  Were you coming from academia before you took that job and then went back?

[00:01:06.923] - Jay Albanese
Yeah, the only reason I got an interview, I think I had written quite a bit on organized crime and done quite a bit of work there from my forward. And they were interested in that in terms of how terrorism and organized human trafficking is organized crime, what are the similarities and differences among all those kinds of things? So that's probably why they took a chance on me. It was an IPA Intergovernmental Personnel Agreement where the university let me go to the government for two two-year terms at the end of my four years and asked me to stay.

[00:01:41.033] - Jay Albanese
But I would have had to give up my faculty position that VCU and I had been a faculty member, at Virginia Commonwealth University for too long. And it turned out to be a very, very good decision. Very quick story about that. When I got the offer, I went to meet my Dean afterwards at the university and I said, I've got good news and bad news. The good news is I can get you my full salary and benefits in cash.

[00:02:02.993] - Jay Albanese
The bad news is I will be in Washington, so I won't be around for a few years. And he said, Jay, I'll take the cash.

[00:02:11.153] - Steve Morreale
Isn't always the way, we can do without you? We need the money.

 [00:02:15.293] - Steve Morreale
Well, so as you got into the research and directed the research and such, especially after 9/11, I would think that, like you said, your knowledge of the international and the cross-border issues that were going on clearly smack us in the face with 9/11 and with those people who were the terrorist. One of the things I talked about with somebody else who is a researcher was talking about translational research and other research. Once you do it to make it consumable for law enforcement organizations, not just for academics.

[00:02:47.543] - Steve Morreale
Did you play a role in that?

 [00:02:48.743] - Jay Albanese
Yeah, I think so. The interesting thing, as you know, as a former practitioner and an academic, academics tend to write for each other. The journal articles tend to be impossible to read. There's no adjectives. It's horrible. So the only people reading them are a few other academics and graduate students under duress. No one else reads that. So the issue is, how do you go about translating field relevant research studies for the practitioner world who you want to actually see this and use this?

 [00:03:17.843] - Jay Albanese
And what we did at the beginning, it najai recognizing that is we asked the investigators at the end to write a publicly consumable summary of their two hundred page report, and in a large number of instances, the actual people could not do it. In other words, that were so used to writing in that academic technical tone, jargon, all that sort of stuff, that we actually had the communications team. We had professional writers at NIH who would actually write to consumable studies.

 [00:03:45.893] - Jay Albanese
But that whole thing of research is useless if it can't be used by the people at impact and taking the field a long time to realize that, yeah, it's almost a different, completely different skill.

[00:03:55.823] - Steve Morreale

And that's interesting. Let me ask about that, though. If you had professional communications group, were they sitting down with the researchers and trying to glean from them or ask questions so they could write it or after reading it, how did that come about? Were you a part of that?

[00:04:09.383] - Jay Albanese

Yeah, they would we would make them read the full report and then they would write a summary. Then we would get back to the researcher to make sure that they didn't say think things were mischaracterized. The problem is the researchers never say anything specific. In other words, you say, well, I can say this with eighty five percent confidence. Right. Well, that's not how the real word thing. If you're eighty five percent sure, you're sure.

[00:04:31.793] - Jay Albanese

So all the conditionals in academic writing, you drop out, say things like this just to make it readable, and then realizing that the real world needs shorter material, supervisors agency heads, even line people. We have limited time and people are not going to read ten, twenty page reports and you learn it very quickly. One quick anecdote. But while I was there, again, as I said, human trafficking was still new on the agenda. And occasionally you would get these inquiries like DOJ, National Institute of Justice is within.

[00:05:00.223] - Jay Albanese

So, the head of the human trafficking unit wants to know what do we know about human trafficking by COB being an academic? I didn't know what COB meant being in academia. If you can get faculty to read an email by the end of the week, you're lucky. But by COB meant by close of business. So you drop everything, but you learn that's a maximum two-page memo. That's all they got time to read. So crafting that two-page memo would take you all day because you're trying to get it all in there.

[00:05:27.043] - Jay Albanese

But the science, bullet points? That's how the real world works because they're busy running the real world.

[00:05:32.433] - Steve Morreale

Very interesting you say that because one of the things that I do in my classes and you might be doing the same thing, is to teach people how to write executive summaries and they have no clue what that means. But it is about the budget. You need to be quick to the point, get your point across and get out, because that's what an executive has. So let's start talking about leadership and leadership and police organizations starting in your career that you've spoken.

[00:05:53.533] - Steve Morreale

You've had students who are law enforcement executives, rising executives. And with what's going on in the world of policing, what kind of advice are you giving the field about what they should be doing to sort of recapture trust?

[00:06:07.543] - Jay Albanese

So much to talk about, let's say, or maybe it's three points. But let me start by saying a fourth that you're well aware of. First of all, the organization of policing in the US is very unique and very unusual. When you look around the world, we have approximately, what, seventeen, eighteen thousand separate police agencies in the U.S. That is a crazy number. And the reason it's crazy is because we look around the world in the U.K., what there is 40 some odd total police agencies in Australia, there's about 20.

[00:06:33.613] - Jay Albanese

In Canada, there is less than two hundred. And we have we're pushing eighteen thousand. How do you how do you do that? And that's, of course, due to the founding of our country. We were individual states first. And so states retained quite a few. Right. When you look when you explain to people overseas, well, we have 50 state criminal codes and a federal criminal code. There's very few analogies around the world for that.

[00:06:54.313] - Jay Albanese

You go to law libraries in other countries, they're much smaller because they don't have all these fifty-one different court systems operating in giving opinions. So it's a bit crazy. So if we could wave the magic wand, I think if there were fewer police departments, that is there was a little bit more regionalization, more county-level police, that kind of thing. Because when you look at the numbers, it's shocking when you see the percentage of local police departments that have less than 10, I believe it's a third, don't have the number in front of it.

[00:07:21.013] - Jay Albanese

But there's a census of this every year. So the numbers are out there at the point of it is. And as you know well, if you're going to have one officer on duty at all time, you need you have to have five officers. Right? You've got to have twenty-four hour shifts. There are three people for three eight hour shifts, plus any coverage of weekends and vacations and people on leave. And you end all up.

[00:07:39.883] - Jay Albanese

You need about five people to make sure you have twenty-four hour coverage. So on and off, the police department has 10 officers. That means there's usually no more than two people on duty at any one time. This is a very small police agency, so it's not efficient. It's more expensive than it needs to be. It makes recruitment very difficult to get the kind of people you want. So the Organization of American Police does work against at the university.

[00:08:02.743] - Jay Albanese

We have police agencies from all over the country coming in. Recruited last year we had the Dallas Police Department come recruiting and I said, what the hell are you doing here? I said, we're two thousand miles away from Dallas. And he said, we just can't get the pool that we're looking know a rich enough, deep enough pool in our local area. So we're reaching out. Well, you multiply that by a factor of hundred. How many large police departments are?

[00:08:26.383] - Jay Albanese

There's a lot of them, too, as well. So the issue becomes recruitment immediately becomes a problem. So to get to your question, to me, there's three things. And of course, it doesn't just apply to police recruitment, it's supervision and it's training. To me, those are the three things that have to get better. And when I say those words, I say they have to get better at universities, too. It has to get better in most government agencies.

[00:08:47.323] - Jay Albanese

That's to get better in private companies. But the reason we talk about police so much as you know, is because police is really the only government representative that the average citizen ever sees. So when a police officer walks up to your door, well, you and I see cops all the time, but most people don't. But that person represents the government to the average citizen. So the police officer is carrying a lot of baggage that they might not want to carry.

[00:09:07.843] - Jay Albanese

But that's why one of the reasons why their activities are scrutinized so closely, because they're representing everything a person feels about the government is the embodiment of that officer there. And and, of course, a lot of people are unhappy about the government. They're unhappy about their taxes and all the others, other schools. And there's the police officer standing there. So a lot of times they get a lot of extraneous noise in their direction. But you can see why that happens, because most people feel powerless.

[00:09:32.683] - Jay Albanese

They feel like, well, the government's operating, doing some things. I like a lot of things I don't like. And here's a police officer now about some completely separate issue. And you get some of these crazy reactions.

[00:09:42.193] - Steve Morreale

When you talked about the number of police agencies that we have in America, clearly, especially here up in New England or in the north, the north, the northeast. I think it has a lot to do with local control and how much that we want local control. We don't want to have to travel 30 miles, 50 miles to go and talk to the police chief. So that may very well be one of the.

[00:09:59.653] - Steve Morreale

Since we have so many different agencies here, but I also I'm curious to know how you feel about national standards, it seems to me that when you're dealing with police agencies from state to state, like there are different codes, there are different requirements, training requirements, and there's no set standard requirement like there are and minimal expectations of school departments. And I wonder whether that plays against the police industry.

[00:10:21.463] - Jay Albanese

Yes, it does, especially with regard to police pay professionalism. When you look at many other professions, accountants, nurses, chemists, all of these all of these groups have completely professionalized. That is, if you're an R.N., a registered nurse in Boston and you have to move for some reason to Chicago or L.A. or anywhere else in the country on our end means something. If you have an R.N. with X years of experience in intensive care or whatever your specialties are, that means something.

[00:10:46.093] - Jay Albanese

But you don't go to Chicago and start at the bottom of the place. And we've never done that with police. To me, a sergeant in Boston should mean the same thing as a sergeant in Chicago or sergeant anywhere else, if that is what I mean by standard and that's what professionalism gets you. And because we have all of these scattered police departments over a 50 state, that's never come about, there's been a lot of national commissions that you know about that have talked about that.

[00:11:11.163] - Jay Albanese

But to me, if I'm a sergeant in the NYPD and I'm moving to Boston because my wife got a job out there, well, your job there should translate. There should be a lateral entry. And that does not exist in policing. And it should. To me, it would go a long way toward making recruitment easier, making job switch easier, because, you know, if you work in a department and you have bad leadership, you have a lot of officers who are stuck because they know, well, I can't jump to another department without losing all my seniority.

[00:11:38.533] - Steve Morreale

And so you are a prolific writer.

[00:11:40.783] - Steve Morreale

You've written 20 books or more, and one of them has to do with professional ethics. You talked about transnational crime and you've also talked about I'm going to say, OK, but Organized crime.

[00:11:50.383] - Steve Morreale

And in terms of ethics and how ethics applies to police agency and some of the things that you've watched from the George Floyd killing and some of the reaction of people is so much going on out there, cry for funding some of the skirmishes in some of the Black Lives Matter movement and such. How do we drive the idea of ethics without having police officers eyes glaze over to talk to them again about ethics?

[00:12:17.563] - Jay Albanese

To me, it's like teaching anywhere is how you present the material. The Floyd killing in Twenty Twenty is a great case. Not for the actual incident, which was horrible enough, right? Everybody saw on video the knee on the neck, almost nine-minute, difficult to defend that. And that's why the officer is going on trial for homicides. I mean, that's not interesting. Ethically, that's clearly wrong. It's evil, it's immoral and so forth. To me, the memorable part, the teaching moment, if you're training police, in my view, is from the ethical viewpoint of the conduct of the other officers at the scene to other officers, you recall helped in restraining Floyd, a third officer kept bystanders from intervening who are pleading for the first officer to take his knee off of Floyd.

[00:12:57.673] - Jay Albanese

But to me, the ethical question is why did those other officers fail to intervene when it was clear Floyd was subdued on the ground, he's in handcuffs, posed no obvious threat. Why didn't any of the other officers intervene to prevent the unnecessary killing of law? And when you think, well, why didn't they? Well, I guess we will find out as a case to unfold. But maybe they were they afraid of a more senior officer? They were afraid of violating the chain of command.

[00:13:20.203] - Jay Albanese

They were afraid to contradict the actions of another officer. But the point is, the other officers had a clear moral and also legal obligation, but a clear moral obligation to act. But they didn't. So to me, that's the ethical tragedy that occurred addition to the human tragedy. So people with an ability to stop what happened did nothing. So this shows to me that either didn't understand what their ethical obligations were or they lacked the moral courage to act on them.

[00:13:44.753] - Jay Albanese

And this is something that ethics training get you to recognize an ethical situation when you're in one. And then how do you develop the courage to act on it? Very difficult, as you know, for a more junior officer to intervene in the actions of a more senior officer. But that's the rationalization that that's your duty is to the public how you organize your ethical obligations. A quick example that I give to students in an ethics class happened to me.

[00:14:10.393] - Jay Albanese

I'm in the pharmacy buying, getting a prescription. There was a copay and I think it was twenty dollars. And I give her a, I mean, I know I give her a twenty dollar bill, but she thought I gave her a twenty dollars and she gives me thirty dollars too much change. So I asked my students, I said I was very happy about this because this gives me a chance to make a moral decision. I said what should I do in that situation.

[00:14:30.313] - Jay Albanese

It's very disheartening. They say it's her fault if the money, the drug store charges too much anyway. It's just a big corporation. They they wouldn't miss them. And I said, well, all those things are after the fact. They have nothing to do with the fact that the money is not mine. I have no there's no ethical claim on that money. And I said beyond that, I might end up getting her fired because she doesn't balance at the end of the day on the cash register or whatever it might be.

[00:14:53.323] - Jay Albanese

So a lot of people have never been trained in ethics or you don't recognize the ethical dilemma when you get it. And then how do. You reason it through, because sometimes they're a very close call to me, the George Floyd killing is not a close call, but the actions of the officers around him, that's the ethical issue. That's a very, very important issue. So you get this whole idea and we have seen it in government where misplaced loyalty inhibits the reporting of unethical conduct.

[00:15:16.913] - Jay Albanese

Well, loyalty is not a real good truth, is the real good. And so you talk about truth, which I do in some book. So the point of it is people are loyal to the wrong thing and they say, well, I'm loyal to this person. We shouldn't be loyal to the person. You're loyal to the truth or the qualities this person gives you. But if this person decides to go off the deep end of loyalty, it's often a good attribute, but it's not a virtue.

[00:15:37.163] - Steve Morreale

I think blind loyalty can get you in trouble, as you well know. But you said something that I think is interesting that we don't use an awful lot of when you're applying it to police. We think that for the most part, police are very courageous. But when you talk about moral courage, that is different than the courage and the fortitude to walk towards fire or walk towards a firefight. But that moral courage is it seems to me that in this particular case, and I certainly hope that there is some discussions going on in department over and over again to say you have a duty to intervene and this is why and you will be backed up.

[00:16:07.133] - Steve Morreale

I think the fear is that if I take some action that is inappropriate, I'm going to get slapped on probation. I may lose my job because I do that. And that's a that's an uphill battle. How do you justify that or rationalize those two things you say, but you have to do that. So I'm grateful for that. Let's talk about leadership in terms of what you would expect police chiefs to be talking about, how they communicate with the community, given all of the issues that have come up that may not touch the Richmond Police Department or the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department or the Chicago Police Department are unable to police department.

[00:16:42.113] - Steve Morreale

What should they be talking about? What should we be hearing from leaders?

[00:16:45.623] - Jay Albanese

To me, you should be hearing one, what they're doing to recruit the best people they can to training. Another downside to some of these small departments is training is underdone mainly due to cost issues. The law keeps changing, society keeps changing, neighborhoods keep changing. So in-service training is very important, especially to renew your commitment to the profession and the job. One downside of policing, you see a lot of people during bad, stressful moments and that can have an impact on you over the long term.

[00:17:15.023] - Jay Albanese

There's been many studies about that. What training does renew your commitment to the job and keep you up to date on what's going on and scenario based? Learning to me always works best with adult learners, and that's the way it ought to be done. But what police leaders should be emphasizing is, one, transparency. They're acting in the public interest. Sometimes people say, well, police are held to a higher standard than the regular citizen, and they are.

[00:17:38.423] 

And of course, they should be. To me, all public officials should be held to a higher standard because they're acting on behalf of a lot of people. When a police officer in your town takes an action, that officer is representing the government of that jurisdiction. So, yeah, you're right. I can see why people are sometimes reticent to exercise authority because it might blow back at them. But that's what good training does. It gives you confidence in what you do.

[00:18:00.773] - Jay Albanese

It's almost like when you get an analysis, you get a test back from a doctor and a physician who says, yeah, I think you've got a tumor here. I haven't seen something like this. Well, what do you do when you want to go to a specialist? Why? Because he's seen a thousand tumors and you're paying for that background and experience. That's what you get in training. So even though in your town, certain kinds of events might only come up once every now and now, whenever I think of the Charlottesville and Charlottesville is a great town.

[00:18:28.793] - Jay Albanese

It's a university town, the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. University of Virginia was there when that incident happened. There are a few years ago. It was at twenty seventeen. I guess that was a once in a generation that has never happened there before. So they were overwhelmed. So it's very difficult in those cases. Well, how do you prepare for a once a career incident? I don't know. But training certainly help being familiar with what's going on in your state, clearly, because maybe it'll show up on your doorstep one day.

[00:18:53.003] - Jay Albanese

But I just can't overemphasize the importance of leadership, the training. One other quick thing about leadership. Did a study of corruption, we going to do a lot of former prosecutors, investigators, former FBI agents, and we distinctively wanted to talk to people who had retired within the last five or eight years because they were much more open about their feelings. Interviewing people who are still working obviously get full transparency. But you talk to these investigators and prosecutors who had prosecuted public corruption cases around.

[00:19:18.473] - Jay Albanese

They all said to a person, if agency leadership demands compliance of the rules, doesn't play favorites, plays by the rules that sifts down into the organization, those things don't tend to follow up. They tend to flow down. So leadership is very important by example, by showing you play by the rules and that there is no quick and dirty way to get yourself promoted or to the top or that part of what you're saying.

[00:19:41.723] - Steve Morreale

It's incumbent upon the leader to set expectations and hold people accountable, rather. Absolutely. Like you just said, rather than playing favor. And I also think, in my view, that leaders need to help control the narrative. Tell people what you're doing, tell people what you're thinking, tell people the training that you are. Undertaken to try to avoid something similar from happening in your agency. I don't hear a lot of people saying that to you.

[00:20:05.613] - Jay Albanese

No, I don't. And you make a very good point to me. A good police chief should be out there talking to everybody, church groups, community groups continuously to basically break the wall down, but basically say we work for the public, we work for you. So if there's stuff going on, you have to tell us we can't we can't guess. And that really opens communication as well. And plus, you show people what your expectations are.

[00:20:27.603] - Jay Albanese

Your officers see it, their families see it and the community sees it. I don't think there is really any substitute for an effective leader who demands a lot from his force. But at the same time, the community says this person knows what they're doing. They're in control of what they realize. They can't do it by themselves. They ask for help, but they're managing the best way you could possibly manage. And to me, that's almost the definition of leadership.

[00:20:50.433] - Steve Morreale

Yes, I'm glad to hear that. We're starting to hear so much the pillars that work that if we're set forth, training, oversight, wellness, and we're seeing rise in police suicides, which is extremely unfortunate, 2 from the capital event so far. Let me ask a couple of questions that will steer you in a different direction. So you're a writer, but you read what kinds of literature do you look for to have a broader understanding of the world around?

[00:21:13.933] - Jay Albanese

I read biographies. Biographies to me are the most enlightening form of reading because you see how other people lead their life and make decisions without you having to do it yourself. And it's incredible stuff. So I read Preet Bharara, the former U.S. attorney from the Southern District. His book came out a couple of years ago. He's well known to people because he was one of the first people that President Trump fired, but he was U.S. attorney there for for a long time.

[00:21:37.473] - Jay Albanese

The book is so good because he really doesn't talk about Trump at all. He talks about what ought a prosecutor be doing and he goes through cases. We have to make tough decisions to charge or not to investigate this case or not. And in New York, everything's under the microscope because you got some wealthy suspect facing big time attorneys, all this kind of stuff. Anyway, the book is so good. Now I use it in my introduction to Criminal Justice, a second book for them to read.

[00:21:59.793] - Jay Albanese

And I get more good comments about that than anything else just because it's a practitioner speaking in a very clear and concise way. What it's like to be a prosecutor dealing with cases that law enforcement brings to you, making decisions in those cases, all these kinds of things. So to me, the the biographies are just a great way to get insights into how people live their lives. And the important thing is how they made decisions because everybody comes up against walls.

[00:22:24.033] - Jay Albanese

And to me, the biography of people who've lived certain types of lives is just always fascinating.

[00:22:28.773] - Steve Morreale

I wonder what your biography will look like. Let me let me move on to another question. If you had the opportunity to sit down with somebody who is renowned, not necessarily famous, but renowned, dead or alive, who would you talk to? Who would you want to sit and chat with their brain?

[00:22:49.413] - Jay Albanese

Yeah, that's an easy one. I have a few choices, but the main choice, I would probably pick Aristotle. It seems a bit crazy, but Aristotle lived about 25 centuries ago, a few hundred years before Jesus. And you recall the Socrates first. Plato was his student and then Aristotle was a student of Plato. And his book, The Ethics, well, first of all, could make the case. And there are people who have made the case that he's the smartest person who ever lived because he wrote on a wide range of topics.

[00:23:15.513] - Jay Albanese

He wrote on everything from biology to laying out what Western ethics looks like. All we all know about ethics, you can trace back to him. So he was extremely bright and and he was right on a lot of things. He was wrong. And if you think he was right on a lot of things. So I lied because to me, the only thing he knew a lot about, a lot of different things, but he was always asking questions.

[00:23:34.903] - Jay Albanese

And in that Socratic method, rather than continually make statements, make declarative statements which academics are prone to make, you would ask a question, what do you think about this? And that's why we have the Socratic method. But the best way to get you to a point of better understanding is to keep you answering questions and to see where that will take you. And so, anyway, he would be number one on my list right now.

[00:23:58.443] - Steve Morreale

That's great. So as you're talking about questions, one of the things that I like to chat with leaders about is to work on their ability to lead through questions in that same way, no different than perhaps you teach by the Socratic method by asking questions. And I'm hoping that can catch on, because I think making people pause and ponder and reflect and think can be very valuable rather than dictating or showing you the way I find the way. But what are the courses you're teaching now?

[00:24:26.613] - Steve Morreale

And may I ask what your favorite course?

[00:24:29.073] - Jay Albanese

Oh, the ethics course? I teach a graduate ethics course and I'll be teaching undergraduate ethics course for criminal justice students in the fall, which is a new course in our curriculum. But to me, ethics is the favorite course of mine because ethics provides a way to see that there's greater purpose in life than self-interest. And we live in an age where self-interest is increasingly at the center of people's vision. And it helps people to recognize that we're moral agents, we have more responsibilities and there's methods to evaluate and defend our positions and our actions.

[00:24:56.703] - Jay Albanese

Just think corporate bribery and. Is this which we talk a lot about in recent years, was acceptable for many years, it wasn't until nineteen ninety nine that the OECD convention was signed that prohibited companies from taking bribes off their taxes as a tax. But that's only what 20 years ago forgot to say. So. So there's been a sea change. The World Bank, for example. Right. That exists to reduce poverty through development projects and loans and things like that.

[00:25:20.523] - Jay Albanese

It took a long time for them to realize we're throwing too much good money after bad, realizing that corruption is really the underlying issue here. If we don't address corruption, we're not really solving the problem. And it took a former president of the World Bank, Wilson Wolfensohn, who said the World Bank has to get into the corruption, anti corruption business. So to me, ethics, integrity, accountability at the individual level is where it all began.

[00:25:43.533] - Jay Albanese

You can talk about structural things, you know, departments and bad governments and other influences, social media. Sure, that's all relevant. But the ethics, integrity and accountability of the individual is where it all begins, because there are people years ago when I taught course criminology, I use the autobiography Lord Brown Manchild in the Promised Land that used to be required reading back in the day. And here's a kid growing up in Harlem, but it was at its worst and most of his friends died of heroin overdoses.

[00:26:11.713] - Jay Albanese

A big chunk went to jail or prison, but he came out fine. So I was fascinated by work like that. Well, how did he make it up? The odds were very much stacked against someone like that. And you want to avoid putting people in those circumstances because a lot of them aren't going to make it up. But to me, the whole idea of your personal ethic, your personal integrity, your personal accountability to me is where it all begins.

[00:26:31.653] - Steve Morreale

So this is the last question as we wind up. If you were to give some advice to maybe your graduate students who are who are in the workforce, what what three things would you suggest? And it sounds like you've already mentioned a few of them, what three pieces of advice to give them as they move into not just policing, but into the criminal justice field, into the work world?

[00:26:53.073] - Jay Albanese

A few things. First of all, communication. If you can't communicate, you're not going to make it in the working world, especially in the government world where communication is required because you're representing all bodies of people. So you have to be able to communicate. You have to be able to communicate both orally. Make your point known to the shopkeeper on the corner, to the teenagers who are fooling around to the town council, to the prosecutor. When you write an arrest report, that's also got to be very clear.

[00:27:20.343] - Jay Albanese

If you can't write a good report, you're useless. So some communication skills to me are the most important skills. And the second I would I call them critical thinking skills, that is, you never prejudge any kind of situation. So when you pull over a car for speeding, you should never walk. You have to go. Have already drawn a conclusion. You should be gathering information, gathering, information, gathering information. And that's what a critical thinker does.

[00:27:44.883] - Jay Albanese

Wait to the very end before you draw a conclusion, you're always gathering facts, gathering facts, gathering facts. And that prevents you from stereotyping, that prevents you from jumping to conclusions, that prevents you from getting in over your head too quick. And that that's a skill that takes some time to learn. And I argue in a book that really there's only about one-page of critical thinking skills. You need to know in terms of how do you evaluate information as you see it.

[00:28:06.573] - Jay Albanese

And police are always put in the circumstance where they walk into an evolving set of facts. So responding to a call, the call might not be a good representation of the facts or the facts might have changed by the time you arrive. So it's very important to always be approaching any kind of individual or circumstance with a completely open mind. I'm gathering information here and have the information push you one way or not, your preconceived notions before you got the well.

[00:28:33.243] - Steve Morreale

It's time to sign off. I want to thank you very much for joining us, Jay. Thank you very much. And I'd love to have you back on any number of items. We didn't even talk about the most recent book, My Search for Meaning: A Professor, His students in 12 Great Conversations, which I read and I liked an awful lot, sharing with each other, just probing. So thank you very much. I appreciate your being here.

[00:28:54.483] - Jay Albanese

Well, very good, Steve, and I appreciate the work that you're doing.

[00:28:57.243] - Steve Morreale

So, everybody, that's the end of this episode. I want to thank you for listening to The CopDoc Podcast. I'm Steve Morreale from Boston, speaking with Dr. Jay Albanese from Virginia. And I'd like you to keep tuning in. Thanks very much.