The CopDoc Podcast Ep 69 Dr. David Lambert, Associate Dean, School of Justice Studies, Roger Williams University

Dr. Dave Lambert is a retired Lieutenant from the Massachusetts State Police.  He is now the Associate Dean for the Justice System Training and Research Institute (JTSRI) at Roger Williams University, School of Justice Studies.  JSTRI provides training, and technical assistance,  collaborating on research projects.  The Command Series focuses on first-line supervisors, mid-managers, and executives from police, corrections, and probation agencies throughout New England.  

While with the MSP, Dave served with the State Fire Marshal's Office, the Commonwealth Fusion Center, and in planning and research at MSP HQ.   We talked about the wide range of issues and positive developments with projects created by police agencies to improve services and collaborative community action to address social issues.  

Contact us: copdoc.podcast@gmail.com 

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

[00:00:02.890] - Intro

Welcome to the CopDoc Podcast. This podcast explores police leadership issues and innovative ideas. The CopDoc shares thoughts and ideas as he talks with leaders in policing communities, academia, and other government agencies. And now please join Dr. Steve Morreale and industry thought leaders as they share their insights and experience on The CopDoc Podcast.

[00:00:32.210] - Steve Morreale

Hello, everybody. Steve Morreale here from Boston, and you're listening to The CopDoc Podcast. Thanks for joining us. We have a dear friend of mine who is now the Assistant Dean at Roger Williams University, Dave Lambert. Good morning, Dave.

[00:00:46.550] - Dave Lambert

Good morning, Steve. How are you doing?

[00:00:48.260] - Steve Morreale

Well, thank you. So we're going to be talking about professionalism. But before we do that, I want to say that every now and then I'm getting emails and a couple of things that are telling us that we're doing pretty well in Canada, New Zealand and Ireland. We're in the top 150 podcasts, which amazes me, but that's obviously focused on education and the public sector. But Dave and I are going to talk about professionalism. And Dave and I go back many, many years back into the 90s, and Dave is a retired Lieutenant with the Massachusetts State Police. He is now Dr. David Lambert, and he is the director of the Justice System Training and Research Institute in Rhode Island at Roger Williams University. So, Dave, tell us a little bit about yourself when you got to Roger Williams and all about this Justice System Training and Research Institute.

[00:01:31.270] - Dave Lambert

Sure. Thanks, Dave. Thanks for having me. So the Justice System Training and Research Institute has been at Roger Williams University for over 18 years at this point. Previous to that, it was in epic Babson. It was the Law Enforcement Institute up there. So it's got a long history working with the New England Association of Chiefs of Police as sort of a training arm for them and for police departments across New England. So it's well, kind of embedded in the police culture in this region of the country. What we try to do here is really kind of focus on what we believe is professional development in trying to move the field forward. We are a Justice Institute, so we don't deal just with police, but the majority of our clientele, our attendees are from police departments across New England. So again, we offer a variety of classes. Our core classes are what we call our command series. That's our executive development class, our mid management class, and our first line supervisor class. We're right in the middle of a field training and evaluation program this week. So we're just wrapping that up today. So we do a lot of programming that we think moves the field forward.

[00:02:42.200] - Dave Lambert

Again, as we've talked about in the past, our frustration has always been the fact that we think we are doing we think these things are all trying to make the field better and enhancing them in ways that are fairly tangible.

[00:02:56.040] - Steve Morreale

Well, a couple of questions. And to be fair and clear, I have been teaching down there since the very beginning, and it's one of the highlights of my weeks or months when I'm able to go down there and mix it up with sergeants or lieutenants or captains and Chiefs. And one of the things that you and I talked about before, the many things we talk about in policing is about the professionalism of policing, and that will be generally the topic. But I want to ask this. I remember asking a question of Bill Bratton, who wrote the book The Profession, and I asked him, do you really think it's a profession? And the reason I say that I don't mean to play devil's advocate, but there are so many people out there that simply think that policing is a blue collar job. And even in classes and classes you have taught, we start to ask the question, what does a profession mean? Where are professions? And you know that I think lawyers and accountants and doctors and nurses would be considered professional. It seems to me that we're still lagging, at least in public sentiment about whether or not policing as a profession is a profession. And so I'd like your point of view on that.

[00:03:58.540] - Dave Lambert

I mean, it's kind of self-serving because I was in policing for 30 years. So I think it's a profession. I think under the standard that we talk about, does it have a code of ethics, does it have a body of knowledge? Do we apply that body of knowledge in a specialized way, using training and education? I think we meet all the criteria profession. I think policing is much more complicated than what we've heard over the last four or five years. I don't think people really understand the depth of what the police have to do on a daily basis. So I think it's easy to sort of pigeonhole the police into it's just a job. It's an occupation. But I think the professional conduct of what the police have to do on a daily basis and how they have to apply a variety of knowledge bases. I mean, the police have to know without being lawyers, they have to know about the criminal law a real significant degree. They have to understand case on how that applies those things. We spent a fair amount of time bringing people up to speed in policing with basic training, and we can talk about the deficiencies in American policing in terms of the training regimens that we have compared to other countries.

[00:05:06.890] - Dave Lambert

Clearly, it's a continuing sort of education field where we have to continue to train the police because things evolve. Over the last few years, there's been a whole number of different issues that have popped up that the police have had to deal with. And I've done a great job with making a transition to how they deal with the opioid crisis nobody would have ever told me 30 years ago that the police would have the level of empathy and out of the box thinking on how they deal with people who suffer from drug addiction the way they're doing it now, they're moving away from the arrest mentality. And that's a real significant change in how the police culture has dealt with issues that have been ongoing. I mean, I just think that people don't really understand that.

[00:05:46.710] - Steve Morreale

So we're going to talk a little bit about that because there are so many social issues that police are called on that are way outside of their responsibility. But they're the 24/7. But I want to go back again to this idea of profession and talk about and play devil's advocate, that it's a profession, but you only need a high school education. It's a profession, but military helps. It's a profession if you have a GED. And I know that both of us are now in higher education. And I'd like your perspective on education. And certainly I wonder what the requirements might be for entry level in the future, but also the requirements for people who are moving up the chain. Should they have a bachelor's degree, should there be a master's degree? If you're going to be a chief, should that be a minimum? And I'm curious about your perspective there.

[00:06:28.870] - Dave Lambert

I'm fully bought into the idea that like other professions, there has to be some level of formal education. And I think maybe not a four year degree, but entry level. I really think that you need to have at least two years of College level work under your belt. First of all, I don't think we need 18 year olds coming into the police profession. I think we need people a little bit more mature. So I think that's really important. But I think the skills and we've talked about this. You have to have a certain level of writing skills. You have to go to court at some point. So you have to be able to write professionally in a manner where you can present a case in a courtroom into a prosecutor. So I think it's important to have critical thinking skills, to have writing skills, to be able to obviously, communication is a huge part of policing. And I don't think you pick those things up with just a GED. I think you have to have a higher level of that. I think it's interesting that we've talked about this for probably 40 years. This goes back to some of the Commission work that was done in the 1960s in trying to reform criminal justice and law enforcement.

[00:07:25.160] - Dave Lambert

We're still talking about but I looked over a National Police Foundation report that found that only about 30% of the offices in the United States have a four year degree, 52% have at least a two year degree. We're still fighting this battle 40 years later that people again, I think there are still some people in the field that don't believe that College is necessary or that that level of education is necessary for this job. I just disagree. I think philosophically, I think we have to bring it up in the federal agencies. As you well know, as a former federal agent, there's a requirement that you have an education in all these federal agencies. So what makes state local policing different? I just can't get my head around the fact that we can't start to push just a little bit more. And I think a lot of this has to do with the hesitancy of local municipalities to understand that this is going to cost them more money. If you give people a requirement, then you're going to have to pay them well.

[00:08:14.470] - Steve Morreale

And certainly both you and I have had the experience in classes that we teach where police offer an incentive. If you go back to the 60s, as you said, that was the Genesis of law enforcement education, not criminal justice education, but law enforcement education. My degree at Boston State was a bachelor's in law enforcement, and criminal justice came afterwards. But back then there were a lot of development of programs in criminal justice and law enforcement at the two year level, starting in California. And we're seeing some movement, but there seems to be, again, some resistance, even with politicians. And the arguments are you are cutting out a diverse population that does not have the opportunity for College. Shame on you. And I wonder how do we overcome that? Because certainly we need to diversify police agencies. But how do you buck that? You and I are originally from Massachusetts, and it just doesn't seem to catch hold. How do we move the needle?

[00:09:05.480] - Dave Lambert

Well, I think on the diversity issue, for instance, in Rhode Island, they're making community College free for anybody in the state. So I think those types of efforts open the door for that. I think that's a good start. We don't do a very good job in the field of policing with doing recruiting, again, because it's a local issue, because police departments don't have the expertise to do high level recruiting. That's what we're seeing the police recruiting and hiring prices as a result of that right now. So I think we obviously have to better drop that whole realm. But I think that a two year degree is somehow going to limit people. I'm not sure that that's going to limit the applicant. There's a lot of other reasons that limit the application for right.

[00:09:43.760] - Steve Morreale

So let's talk again about what you're doing at Roger Williams. How long have you been as the director now?

[00:09:49.450] - Dave Lambert

I've been here for three years. I came in 2018. It's been here about two years. Two of the years has obviously been kind of pandemic related, but we try to offer a variety of different programs. Again, we focus on some leadership and supervision classes, but we also do a lot of courses that again, I think are what I look at as real reform. We teach classes in internal affairs and we got a background investigations class next week. All these classes that are risk management, all these classes that really revolve around quality control for police departments. I think those are some of the things we have to focus on in the field to a greater extent. We've had a really good reception for bringing people in and teaching them field training, for instance. That's not something in the past. It was kind of informal in a lot of police departments. You put people into a police cruiser with another individual who was a veteran officer, and they kind of drive around for ten weeks or twelve weeks and we kind of all figured it out. Now it's much more formalized, it's much more structured. There's feedback and mentoring that goes on.

[00:10:47.000] - Dave Lambert

It's really more coaching oriented. And those formal processes, I think, make police departments better, but we have to get everybody on board to do that. It's a big effort to change that approach. And I think a lot of departments have stepped forward and done that. And I think that's what we are here to try to support innovative programming to make departments better and to increase the quality of the personnel and the services that they provide to the community.

[00:11:08.730] - Steve Morreale

So some of the courses I know that you've offered are drones using drones, crime analysis, crime mapping, those kinds of things. It seems to me that what we are pushing for is to understand the data and to use limited resources in a strategic way. And this whole idea of evidence-based policing, not a lot of people understand that. What's your perspective and why do you think that police who are in the field need to know about these things?

[00:11:32.560] - Dave Lambert

I think it's a great question, Steve. I think one of the things, if we're going to be a profession, then we have to have a body of knowledge that we draw from, and we have to stop doing what we've always done, because we've always done it and start to do things that we have some sense that are working. And my passion has always been analytical and work that actually help the field. So we want to start to start to push our classes on things like climate analysis. I just talked to somebody today about doing a traffic analysis program. We should be looking at where our problems are and then trying to put resources where those problems happen when they have. So we're big on trying to use data. It's an emerging field. It's a little bit different in the private sector when we talk about the Red Sox and the Patriots as we can because we're Champions. The reality is we used to be in the reality is that those types of businesses use data to drive their decision making, and that can happen in criminal justice, particularly in policing. We have better data today than we ever had, and we have greater ability to try to use that data to support new programs and to evaluate programs we don't do, in my opinion, a very good job with evaluating our own program.

[00:12:40.420] - Dave Lambert

There's very few things that we can say in policing that are rock solid gold standard types of evaluations of we know that this works. Hot spot policing is one of those programs. Our friend Brenda Bond up enroll, did a hot spot experiment, and they did a great job of showing how focusing on hot spots can reduce crime and disorder. Those things aren't always done at the local level, but again, having evidence that those things work, I think is part of the professional mantra of making sure we're not only doing these things, but we're also sharing those accesses with other police departments so they can adopt innovative approaches.

[00:13:14.090] - Steve Morreale

So you and I met many years ago at NECP2, which is now defunct New England Community Police Partnership up at St. Anselm with the state police. Community policing has always been in your blood, and yet we diverted from that because I think when 911 happened, we started focusing on terrorist prevention, and I think we lost our way. I think we're back at it again. That's certainly what a lot of people are talking about. What's your point of view of community policing? 2.0 for me?

[00:13:38.980] - Dave Lambert

Again, I think we have to go back to community policing. I think some of the issues that we've run into that we've seen over the last five years as a result of the fact that we've been disengaged from our communities and that we've taken some ideas and really kind of twisted them around into things that they're not. I stop and frisk as the answer to everything. While stop and frisk, I think has some benefits if it's done constitutionally, I think when it becomes a numbers game, I think it becomes problematic, but I think we have to get back into our communities. I think good police departments still do that. I think some of the bigger police departments in the United States still have some form of community policing where they know their citizens, they know in their community who they can rely on when they have problems, and they tend to be able to reduce some of the community angst because they have a relationship with the community. So I'm a huge supporter of all these community policing efforts. As a matter of fact, we've been talking with some of the couple of retired Chiefs down here about trying to put together another community policing center because it seems to be that a lot of the newer officers aren't being exposed to community policing and problem solving, and I think that's a huge mistake.

[00:14:42.200] - Dave Lambert

Again, I think those types of approaches bring in data. We can start to look at community surveys to find out what the community really wants and focus on what they think. The problems are not necessarily what we think as professionals are the problems because sometimes the community's perspective on what's important really revolve around disorder and everyday nuisance types of crimes, which police are really good at dealing with.

[00:15:04.820] - Steve Morreale

As we know, so many police departments are small. Some of the people who show up at Roger Williams come from police departments of 620, 1525. How can a small police Department do so many of these things when they're just trying to put a couple of people out on shift? We in New England and in a lot of places we resist regionalization because we want local control. Are there some ideas out there about what a small-town chief can be focused on writing a strategic plan, those kinds of things that you and I have talked about? What do you think about that?

[00:15:35.920] - Dave Lambert

Well, I think that's the challenge for a small police Department. How do you have someone who is trained in internal affairs, somebody else who does staff inspection, somebody else who is their training officer, somebody else who's planning I mean, it's a tall order to do all those things when you have a limited staff, but maybe we can regionalize. Maybe you can work in collaboration with local colleges and universities to bring some of those services and do those things. We've talked here over a number of years. We'd be happy to support a regional crime analysis training program if that's something that police departments want, and we can give some level of training and professional development in those types of areas so that even smaller departments can kind of do those things. So I think you can do regionalization without doing regionalization. I think you can still have people and I do it informally on their own. All these departments get together and they work together informally. I think some of those things can still be done. It's hard to understand how we would never develop the American policing system with 18,000 police departments if we were going to sit down from scratch and design this.

[00:16:33.200] - Dave Lambert

It really doesn't make a lot of sense. It's where we're at. I don't see it changing, but I think there are some ways to try to develop relationships and do collaboration. Again, it gets back to sort of this is community policing on the organizational level, bringing in other resources from not only your own, your own town, but some other police departments together to sort of share those types of resources. There's no reason why three departments couldn't get together and share a crime analysts, for instance. Those things are all possible, and we see it in other situations where they do it with dispatch services and mental health. Now, again, mental health. It's not a full-time job for most police departments, but they certainly correspond to programs that are in Metro West. Those are all things that we can possibly do.

[00:17:09.560] - Steve Morreale

So if we don't know what we don't know how do we convey that to police? What is your strategy in terms of exposing police Chiefs and other command staff to potentially new ideas?

[00:17:22.610] - Dave Lambert

That's the role that we have here at Roger Williams, the Justice System Training and Research Institute, is to share that information. When they're in classes where they can network, they understand there's a lot of material that gets thrown out. And I know that the academic world doesn't always write for a practitioner audience. So one of our goals here is to try to boil some of that research down into how it can apply to police organization. They don't need to know the in depth 30-page research document. What they need to know is what the results are and how we got. One of our roles here is to try to present that material. We try to try to do a four-hour module on community policing and problem solving in our first line supervisor class, because I think that's really important for supervisors to understand that when we look at how we police their communities, it's not just about the metrics that we use for 30 years arrests and tickets. It's really about getting involved with the community, getting some level of community engagement, satisfaction that we can measure and really building relationships so you can solve problems.

[00:18:19.360] - Steve Morreale

So in terms of innovation and progressive ideas, what are some out there that catch your attention and then impress you?

[00:18:26.780] - Dave Lambert

I'm big on doing analytical work and having more expansion, of having departments, being able to look at their own data. Police departments now have a lot more data. They should be looking, and this is not my idea. This is something that's sort of embedded in national and state accreditation programs. But police departments on a regular basis should be looking at their use of force data. They should be looking at pursuit data. If they have a number of vehicle pursuits, they should be looking at their citizen complaints and doing internal administrative analysis of those types of things. They should have some capacity to do strategic and tactical analysis of their information. They should be looking at it to see if they have any patterns of new emerging crimes. Some of the crimes that occur there's innovative crimes that are sort of popping up, catalytic converted theft. That may not be a sexy thing, but it's a big problem for a lot of police departments because it goes on everywhere, stealing copper, copper metal theft, stealing tires off of vehicles for the expensive rims and time. There's a lot of sort of what we would consider low level crimes that are very lucrative for a lot of people.

[00:19:26.300] - Dave Lambert

Organized retail crime, a lot of different things that are coming up. So we have to come up with innovative solutions. And again, I think things like looking at problem solving and how other police departments address these issues, going out and getting police departments set up so that they can actually share information and they can find how other people solve blasting from vehicles or residential burglaries. I think that's really important. And there's a lot of innovative programs around how we deal with mental health, how we deal with opioid addiction. They got some really good programs in New England. And the Rhode Island Hope Initiative is an opioid reduction program in Rhode Island is a really big program in Massachusetts. Side in Plumber County, another one area, the Parry program. So there's a lot of things that police departments are picking up and moving forward. It just takes a little support. Our job here is to try to make sure that people understand what works and how we can support them. Again, my frustration has always been a lot of these programs. Someone will write an 80-page document for the federal government. They'll publish it. It'll be on a website somewhere.

[00:20:23.890] - Dave Lambert

Then we leave it to individual police Chiefs and executives to have the thumb through that. We're trying to sort of bridge that gap here by getting that information out in a way where people can apply it and sort of boil it down so that they understand the meat and potatoes of how you actually do those things.

[00:20:37.720] - Steve Morreale

Well, it's interesting because you and I have talked about this. I think one of the skills that could be very valuable to police departments and to police executives is how to write an executive summary, how to synthesize important information and make it readable and digestible. What do you think about taking ideas from business and other sectors in the medical profession? It seems to me that there's a lot of incestuoustness, and I don't know if I like that word, but that we learn from each other. Not a bad thing, but are there some things outside that could be used inside the police field?

[00:21:07.440] - Dave Lambert

I'll go back to some things. Obviously, we're more familiar with the literature and criminal justice than we are with some other things. But some of my favorite books are Reading Change by John Kotter. That's a change model. It really came out of the private sector. I think it has a lot of application to police organizations because it's a very logical, sequential process of how you generate change. Competing on analytics is another book that is one of my favorites. And again, it talks about how corporations have used analytics to get a leg up on their competition and how they really spurred innovation by focusing on analytics. If you can use those fields, those types of outside documents, to do it. Again, there's a lot of good leadership. All the leadership books really are written outside of the criminal justice. All these things that we've talked about over the years and adopted these different types of leadership models really come from the private sector. So I think we have to expand our Horizons a little bit and expose these to people. And again, that's some of the role that we do at the Institute is we bring instructors like yourself who present this material to people who may not have on their busy day going back at work, I'm not going to have the opportunity to read some of these other treatises on leadership and organizational change.

[00:22:12.510] - Steve Morreale

Talk about leadership for a minute. From your perspective, we talk about leadership versus management and a first line supervisor. I think so many of the responsibilities are management oriented, but they also can have some opportunity to lead their troops. What do you see as the difference in how important is preaching and recommending and suggesting that people take on a leadership role?

[00:22:34.460] - Dave Lambert

I think obviously people in an organization, patrol officers, are leaders in their community. They're out making decisions every day. They're guiding people on a regular basis. So as they move up and as they become or want to become supervisors, I think they have we have a duty, I think, to educate them to do that, we have to put them in a position to be successful. And that's why I think our first line supervisor class is so important. That's the first step to getting them to change from being sort of a line officer to where they're actually leaders and supervisors. I think that's really important for us to support that effort for organizations. We're not the only game in town. There are other programs, but anything we can do to push people towards building their leadership skills, I think is really critical, and that really goes up the chain. Getting back to your earlier question, I really think we have to start looking at progressive increases in educational levels as people go up the ladder. I don't really believe that anybody in a command level should not have a four year degree, not that degrees are everything, but I think having that depth of knowledge is really important when you get to the level of being a command person or chief executive.

[00:23:37.340] - Dave Lambert

If we don't expose people to things like budgeting and planning and some of the civil liability issues that a police chief faces, I think we're not doing them a service by building those leadership skills.

[00:23:48.500] - Steve Morreale

Why do you think there's resistance from many police departments to surveys and performance evaluation?

[00:23:53.750] - Dave Lambert

I think on the survey thing, I think a lot of people really initially pick a lot of police executives are a little bit afraid of what they're going to find. I think that they don't know. And we've done a few community surveys police departments, and it's always struck me that what we find is that when you're reaching out to a broad audience, you're not hearing the Echo Chamber of just the people that are complaining. You're reaching out to a wider population, for the most part that are pretty supportive of the police. And I think if you're a brand new chief and you walk in, you do a community survey, it's going to be on your honeymoon. You can ask those questions and it doesn't stick to you right away. I think that's a great opportunity for police Department. It's tricky. It may be something where they have to bring people from the outside, and that's always somewhat of an issue, I think, but they reach out to a College University, they can probably partner to do surveys. They're getting a lot easy to do these days. The departments want to do them internally. So I think this is sort of a logistical issue with getting them done.

[00:24:47.240] - Dave Lambert

But I think there's also sort of a hesitancy of what are we going to find? We're afraid to look behind the curtain. Not sure what people are going to respond. That's on the community survey. I think once evaluations again, I don't think we do them very well. I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that we don't invest enough in providing professional development for how they're supposed to be done and taking them seriously. My old organization, they were a homework assignment. People did them at the last minute. It was never taken seriously, and it's hard to do them effect, but it's not impossible.

[00:25:14.290] - Steve Morreale

Imagine going through and some agencies do it going through an entire career without ever having been evaluated, which leads me to, I think, a very important thing. And that is how do you evaluate police? How do you police the police? You talk about staff inspections, those kinds of things. We never really look at ourselves. I'm not saying we overall, but so many departments do not. Bigger departments may, but what's the benefit of doing that?

[00:25:37.340] - Dave Lambert

I think we're big supporters and we have classes on things like risk management. It's important to be looking internally at your own stuff before somebody else does. Now I used to try to make this argument with some of my old bosses. You want to be the ones who look at the pursuit data, or should we? So either we look at it or at some point somebody externally looks at it, and then you're going to be surprised that you don't know what you don't know.

[00:25:58.220] - Steve Morreale

So as we begin to wind down, Dave and we're talking to Dave Lambert. Doctor Dave Lambert. He is the director of the Justice System Research and Training Institute at Roger Williams University, where he's also an assistant Dean. We've been talking about professionalism. Let's talk about some other things that you think need to be addressed or considered. One of the things you said offline was to talk about the politicians and their involvement and engagement in the process of reform.

[00:26:23.330] - Dave Lambert

I always look at this sort of it's always curious to me that we're talking about defunding the police. My initial reaction was I work in an organization that I thought was defunded for 25 years. I never thought we had the amount of resources we needed to do the function that we would get. We kind of scraped through. When I was with the state police trying to set up a crime lab with really no additional funding, ended up, after consolidation, taking over the state crime lab, cobbling together funding from community policing grants to try to hire forensic chemists. I've seen this chronic government, the margins approach to the world where we want to do things. We just don't want to put any money towards funding them. Over the years, things like the crime lab, Massachusetts, the municipal police training committee never really had the funding to do the job that they were asked to do. It's getting a little bit better. But again, they don't have a permanent Academy. And that's a really typical thing across if you look at the Academy structures across New England, all these structures, these aren't like we build schools and then people come, we find old buildings, and we stuff police academies into these places.

[00:27:22.510] - Dave Lambert

I think it reflects on sort of the seriousness of the policymakers in terms of what they want to invest in policing, in terms of a lot of rhetoric about professionalizing them. Let's give them good facilities, let's give them effective, quality training, and let's hold them accountable after we do that. I don't think that's done. I think really they kind of put these little mandates together and they mandate certain training without really looking at the big picture of making sure police departments meet all these different frameworks, like having an early intervention system in place, like having some level of accountability, like being more transparent. A lot of this has to do with, unfortunately, good resource constraints and what police departments can't mean. We're really lucky at Roger Williams that police departments choose to come here. They're not mandated to come here. They choose to send people and pay tuition to come here. That's very unusual that we get that level of support in other parts of the sector where again, there really isn't a lot of funding to do to do these types of things. And training is always underfunded most police officers. You can ask any cheap.

[00:28:23.600] - Steve Morreale

And what you're saying in the term that is bandied about in the public sector is unfunded mandates. So you thrust these things upon a police agency or Department of public works, whatever it is, but you don't have any funding. It happens in higher education, too. So that's a real problem. You tell us to do something, but you won't help pay for it.

[00:28:40.620] - Dave Lambert

Yes, that's my big frustration with the police reform efforts is they're doing little things here and there. I think that I don't know. Again, if you ask progressive police practitioners what they really need, they're going to tell you that they need resources in certain areas. They haven't been addressed by this. That's a real problem. I think we need to look at we want to have a situation where we want to professionalize the police and hold them accountable. They need better technology systems, and that's always a constant struggle with the local level. Everybody I've ever talked to are disappointed with the level of technology systems that they have just to do basic work every day. So those have to be funded. And again, everybody struggles with that issue. And to me, that goes towards Where's the legislative branch and the executive branch in making sure that those systems are in place so that officers can do their work every day in a way where they can be more transparent.

[00:29:26.850] - Steve Morreale

Well, think about body worn cameras here's, this push for body worn cameras, and you see police departments having to go and write grants, basically begging for money to do what it is that they're being asked to do.

[00:29:36.790] - Dave Lambert

Right. That's a great point. And that's exactly the situation. I've done a lot of   grant writing in the past. I always used to tell people, if you're going to write a grant, it's because really, nobody really is that support these things should be part of your budget every year. And if it's important to the community or to the state, then they'll fund it. They certainly will fund other things that are important. They just don't look at in the policing world as it's all that important. Again, 41 cameras. The systems are expensive over the long term. It's not something that it's one and done. They're always going to be ongoing costs.

[00:30:07.070] - Steve Morreale

Maintenance, the maintenance and obviously the storage, very expensive things.

[00:30:12.080] - Dave Lambert

Like we were just talking to one of our Chiefs today. They've got to put a whole mechanism in place to redact videos to be able to make those videos available to the public. Well, that's great. That's a resource issue. That's not something organizations can do, just can't give it to an intern. You really have to have somebody who knows how to do those things. And those are just resources. And if municipalities are willing to fund that, then that's great as long as they understand what the cost is. I think a lot of these things, we can just do this and it will work out. And I think that the resource needs a different situation. Again, real reform means real resources.

[00:30:42.250] - Steve Morreale

Well, interesting, because I spent so much time in the classroom now, and one of the things I do, including when I'm with sergeants and lieutenants and Chiefs, is I put a dollar sign up. And I'll say, well, why aren't we doing that? And I'll put the dollar sign up even with students. That's the reason we'll put a lot of money into schools. But we're not going to put that much into public safety. But we're going to expect a lot from public safety. We're just not going to fund it. And I think that homes in on your point. Let's talk about a couple of other things before we wind down. Should policing begin to civilian eyes a little bit? Are there opportunities for civilians, non sworn employees to do some of the work rather than taking a police officer or a sworn officer to do crime analysis or social media or whatever it might be.

[00:31:22.230] - Dave Lambert

Yeah, I think we're seeing that in certain situations. It varies by community, but most crime analysts are probably nonstarter in New England at this point. Somebody who has a degree in analytical work in geographic information systems probably has a higher subject matter expertise than we can try to teach police to do certain things, but that may not be the best use of resources. So I think in some areas, absolutely. Crime analysis is one. I think we don't need to have human resource people in a police Department that are cops. We probably want someone who has a degree in human resources. We've kind of always accepted that in certain ways, and I think that in some other areas it makes more sense to be able to bring people from the outside to do some of that work. And again, there's a lot of benefit to that changes the get out of the in solar world of just the police cave, and you get other people who have different perspectives. Having somebody run a police Department who has a business degree is probably a good thing. Having someone who is a budget director doesn't have to necessarily be a police officer.

[00:32:17.100] - Steve Morreale

Got you. So what do you think about accreditation at the state and the national level?

[00:32:20.560] - Dave Lambert

I'm a huge supporter of accreditation because I think it provides a framework for all the best practices that organization should do. And we talked about, well, there are no national standards for what a police Department does. Well, from national and state accreditation, frameworks for - you need to have all these things in place. You need to have somebody who's doing training in your organization, who's in charge of training. So I think it gives you the minimum standards. It gives you the structure of what you should do, and you should have to meet all those particular standards. And I think it brings forward the ability to make sure that somebody is doing some type of analytical work. They're looking on a day-to-day basis at citizen complaints that use the force complaints so that you don't get into a situation where these things start to pile up. So accreditation is again, I think one of the issues that we ran into in a large agency is we're going to get accredited. Well, we started to put money towards it, and looking at we're going to have to get a radio system that actually is accreditation worthy.

[00:33:13.350] - Dave Lambert

We're going to have to get cells, juvenile cells, and adult cells that meet certain standards. All of a sudden, it becomes real money at that. But again, places like Rhode Island has done a great job with state accredited. Most of the agencies in the state are accredited. They follow these minimum standards. And I think that makes a lot of sense as a way to professionalize the field. It just gets people in the right direction for a lot of these different issues.

[00:33:36.030] - Steve Morreale

So as we were talking and one of the things that you talked about, the difference in terms of training standards and the approach to training in other countries and what we might be able to learn from that, you know that I spent time in Ireland, and when you go to Ireland and you go to the Garda College, there is actually a Garda College. There is no police College here in the United States, but they come out with a bachelor's degree. If they went in with a bachelor's degree, they get the opportunity to get a higher degree beyond that. And so what can we learn from other countries that have been doing this for far longer than we?

[00:34:05.000] - Dave Lambert

Well, again, I think that's another example of the investment that our policymakers want to make in the policing system. Most police academies in the United States are around 20 weeks long, maybe about 840 or so hours of training. If you look at some of the European countries, three years in Norway, two years in Finland, Germany, two and a half years. There are some shorter periods as well, 36 weeks, I think in Spain, according to Bureau of Justice Studies. So again, I think it goes to why do we try to jam all this, the complications of policing into 20 weeks? Mostly, I think it's a resource issue. We try to get these people out. We put a lot forward in those 20 weeks or so, and then in some cases, that's the last thing I'll ever have. And I don't think that's the way we would draw it up if we had to start from scratch. And I think we need to do better. We have to look outside into other countries and how they do it and wonder. But again, these are the types of questions. It's shocking to me that nobody in the police reform movement brings up that, Geez, European countries spend a whole lot more time trying to train their officers to do a job.

[00:35:06.240] - Dave Lambert

It's really complex. I think people don't want to walk to see what it's going to cost.

[00:35:11.010] - Steve Morreale

So what are you reading now besides police stuff?

[00:35:14.040] - Dave Lambert

That's a good question. Recently, I guess nothing actually outside of police.

[00:35:19.470] - Steve Morreale

Nothing police related, but other things. You're finding some inspiration in reading or understanding other periodicals or other news feeds.

[00:35:26.640] - Dave Lambert

I try to listen to the national news to see how this thing is evolving in terms of what's coming next. I'm hopeful that the administration at the national level is going to understand that it's an odd situation where most policing is done at the state and local level, but all the funding is done at the national level. The federal government has funding. I don't know the federal government should necessarily have to sponsor all police professional reform, but they need to contribute. So I'm trying to get a handle on where these trends are going in terms of how we can find a way to increase resources so that the police can do a better job of managing their efforts.

[00:36:00.330] - Steve Morreale

Dave, work life balance. How do you find a way to kind of check out?

[00:36:04.110] - Dave Lambert

I don't do a very good job of that. It's on my list of things to do this year. I tend to spend more time doing work, and I need to do a better job of that. So it is tough. But when I have time, I try to go out and take the dogs out, try to do a little bit of exercise when I can. That's clearly something I have to do better job.

[00:36:19.870] - Steve Morreale

If you had the chance to sit down with anybody, dead or alive that you feel could inspire you or that you look towards, who would that be?

[00:36:27.790] - Dave Lambert

I keep coming back to Abraham Lincoln. I just think based on where we're at now as a country and sort of the civil discord we have and the divisiveness, I think I'd really like to know more about how he was able to navigate the divisive nature of the country back in the 1800s and how we can learn from that in terms of how we resolve where we're at now as a society.

[00:36:47.830] - Steve Morreale

Let me just finish with this. We're talking to Dave Lambert, Dr. Dave Lambert from Roger Williams University an Assistant Dean. And as we wind down, I'm curious to know, when you walked into this new job, what were the steps that you took and what can we learn from how you assessed where the organization was, where the training was, and where the opportunities were?

[00:37:07.990] - Dave Lambert

I think I walked into a situation that it was a well run machine, so that really helped in a lot of ways. I tried not to change things just for the sake of change. I wanted to make sure that if there's any ways I could fix things, I would. But I think for the most part, this program really runs because we have great instructors who are really passion, basically a program that's run by part time practitioners. Most of the people that teach for us are either in the field or retired from the field. They don't work full time for us, so we have to rely on their expertise and their time commitments they can give to us. So that's always a concern for me because, again, some of these folks are one promotion away from not being able to come down and teach for us anymore. That's always a concern. So that's something we'd like to be able to shore up. We've got to build a bigger bulletin down here for some of our instructors. So that's always something that we have to work on and just constantly trying to look at our feedback from our program and to make sure that we're up to speed, we've added some courses here and there.

[00:38:04.960] - Dave Lambert

Again, my big focus is looking at climate analytics and getting more of a bite on making sure that departments can look at their own data and make decisions based on evidence, not necessarily what they intuitively think are important in their communities. So we're moving in those directions. That's brought up some issues. We had to get a small grant to support some of those efforts. So we were able to get a grant from the Champlin Foundation in Rhode Island to build a small computer lab that we can actually build crime analysis classes around. And we're in the middle of trying to develop those classes now. So those are the types of things we're trying to work on. And I think analytics is a big focus going forward in criminal justice in general. So we're trying to work on that, just making sure that we're serving the needs of our residents. Over the copy period, we had to switch to online, and we're not all that satisfied with the level of our online classes, so we continue to work on those. But we also have to serve a population of small departments in places like Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont.

[00:38:58.160] - Dave Lambert

We have to be able to, once we get back to traveling, to get up there and provide classes where they're at, not necessarily aware of that.

[00:39:04.450] - Steve Morreale

That's good. So how do people get in touch with you, Dave?

[00:39:06.480] - Dave Lambert

We have a website you can go on to Rw.edu, you can put in just a system training and Research Institute, at JSTRIi. And our website will come up and list all of our courses there if we can help with technical assistance. We also have some opportunities to do a little bit of technical systems where I'm currently working with the Jersey State Police now in our DOJ funded grant with Northeastern University looking at their gun intelligence project that they've tried to leverage using information from ballistics imaging and gun tracing to help solve some of the violent crime problems in New Jersey. And they're doing a great job of trying to share information and using analytics to support investigations. So those are the types of things we typically work on.

[00:39:46.410] - Steve Morreale

Well, that word share is exactly what the Justice System Research and Training Institute does. You try to bring people who are trying things new things, have had some success, have had some failures so that we can spread the word. And it's my pleasure to be affiliated, and it's certainly my pleasure to have you on the Cop Talk podcast, but I hold you as a dear friend, and I do appreciate it. Thank you for sharing. I think the idea of professionalism is something that we need to continue to push, and we have to push it out to the people who are trying to raise the professional standards, but also push it out to the public so they understand what policing are doing. You have the last word, Dave, is policing something young people should get into.

[00:40:23.530] - Dave Lambert

Now it's been very frustrating and I asked our students all the time, have you thought about a career in police? Most of the students that I've talked to recently, I think right now they're turned off, but I think we have to do a better job of marketing to them. As we all say, it's a great job. You can do really good work on a daily basis. You can make you impact people every day and a lot of it is the small things solving people's problems that are big problems for them that may not necessarily reflect you're not going to get an award for helping people with their domestic issues, but you're doing the right thing on a daily basis and you're making people feel safe. It's a great career and it's unfortunate. Hopefully this will turn around and people will recognize that some of the bad situations and there certainly have been bad situations. There are police officers who shouldn't be police officers, but there are 8000 or so police officers and on a daily basis, a significant portion of them are doing the right thing are acting professionally, are acting constitutionally and I think we have to put that into better perspective in terms of what goes on on a daily basis.

[00:41:21.200] - Dave Lambert

And again, support from policymakers and people who actually make decisions at the government level are really important if we really want to move fresh and forward.

[00:41:30.370] - Steve Morreale

Well, thank you. So thanks, everybody, for listening. We've been listening and talking to Dave Lambert, Dr. Dave Lambert at Roger Williams University. Another episode of The CopDoc Podcast is in the books and I thank you and look forward to having you come back for the next episode.

[00:41:44.470] - Outro

Thanks for listening to The CopDoc Podcast with Dr. Steve Morreale. Steve is a retired law enforcement practitioner and manager turned academic and scholar from Worcester State University. Please tune in to The CopDoc Podcast for regular episode episodes of interviews with thought leaders in policing.