The CopDoc Podcast: Aiming for Excellence in Leadership
Visit our website: https://www.copdocpodcast.com
The CopDoc Podcast delves into police leadership and innovation. The focus is on aiming for excellence in the delivery of police services across the globe.
Dr. Steve Morreale is a retired law enforcement practitioner, a pracademic, turned academic, and scholar from Worcester State University. Steve is the Program Director for LIFTE, Command College - The Leadership Institute for Tomorrow's Executives at Liberty University.
Steve shares ideas and talks with thought leaders in policing, academia, community leaders, and other related government agencies. You'll find Interviews with thought leaders drive the discussion to improve police services and community relationships.
Happy to report that The CopDoc Podcast is listed as #4 in the 10 Best Worcester Podcasts!
https://podcast.feedspot.com/worcester_podcasts/
The CopDoc Podcast: Aiming for Excellence in Leadership
Optimizing Police Operations: Expert Insights with Dr. Jim McCabe
Season 7 - The CopDoc Podcast - Episode 144
Dr. Jim McCabe, a seasoned expert in police management and assessment, takes us on an in-depth exploration of optimizing police operations. From his foundational experiences with the NYPD to his academic journey at St. John's University, Jim provides insights from years of applying data-driven strategies to enhance police performance. Learn how the 2008 economic downturn became a pivotal moment in Jim's career, leading to his role with the International City Managers Association and creating CERTUS Public Safety Solutions, a venture dedicated to fostering meaningful client relationships through operational enhancements.
As we navigate the complexities of police organizational performance, Jim illuminates the critical importance of using data effectively, particularly in accreditation standards like CALEA. His latest book, "Understanding Police Operational Performance," serves as a comprehensive guide for police chiefs and city managers alike, covering essential topics such as patrol allocation, investigative performance, and community engagement. Jim shares actionable insights geared towards helping law enforcement leaders elevate their organizational effectiveness and adapt to evolving social responsibilities, including handling non-traditional tasks like mental health calls.
Our conversation also delves into the practical aspects of optimizing police department staffing levels and the value of collaboration with community stakeholders. Discover the strategies behind the "Rule of 60" and the significance of scorecards in assessing departmental performance. Jim offers a candid look at the challenges and rewards of building collegial relationships between police departments and city councils, ensuring the successful implementation of recommendations. This episode is packed with expert guidance and practical advice to help police departments adapt and enhance their service delivery in today's complex environment.
Happy to report that The CopDoc Podcast is listed as #4 in the 10 Best Worcester Podcasts!
https://podcast.feedspot.com/worcester_podcasts/
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
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.
Speaker 2:Hey everybody. Steve Morreale, coming to you from Boston, massachusetts, today, and we are in our 145th, 146th episode, and I'm talking to somebody in the last four years We've talked to two times this will be the third time my colleague, dr Jim McCabe, who's sitting in Queens, new York City. Hello there, jim, good morning.
Speaker 3:Steve.
Speaker 2:So thank you so much for joining us. There's a special reason that we are getting together. I will explain to the audience that Jim and I are colleagues. We are friends. We met, actually, at ACGS many years ago. We've written together, we've presented together, we've taught together, we've traveled together, and we've traveled together even with our beautiful brides. And so he is now at St John's University, after a storied career with the New York City Police Department services, the monitor for the New York City Police Department, and he just wrote a book with colleagues called Understanding Police Operational Performance. And in my mind this is very important for us to consider because not a lot of police departments want to assess and yet it's so important to assess and that's something you've been doing for years and years and years.
Speaker 2:So, let's get started, jim, by giving us a little bit of a thumbnail sketch of your background in policing, how you got into academia and how you got involved in police management studies.
Speaker 3:Sure, I started in the NYPD in the mid-80s and, like a lot of people at the time when I joined, college wasn't required. I didn't have a college degree and I decided that in order to make a career you know my time in the NYPD I needed that college degree. So I went back to school as soon as I got off from probation and I continued going to school until my retirement day. I ended up with a PhD criminal justice from John Jay and I decided I would go out and see who would be interested in hiring me. And, as you know, when we met in ACJS my first academic conference and I hadn't done a lot of academic stuff, so I wasn't expecting anybody to hire me. But I got a job. I went to Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, connecticut. I spent 17 years there and last year I got recruited to join the faculty at St John's University in Queens, which is right in my backyard. So I'm very happy to be home, very happy to be working in and around the New York metro area. And so the other question was how did I get involved in this assessment stuff?
Speaker 3:When the economy tanked in 2008, police departments, city managers around the country began looking for solutions to just hiring and hiring and hiring. Money was tight, fiscal budgets were constrained because of the recession and they were looking for help. So the International City Managers Association started a consulting group to provide that help and I was recruited to join that effort in 2009. And since then I've done 100 or so as the principal investigator and probably 150 as part of a team looking at local police departments around the country, been to 44 different states. Every region sort of been crisscrossing the country looking at local police departments.
Speaker 2:So a while ago and I know we keep in contact, we're talking with each other once a week, I would say but a while ago you started your own concern and it is called CERTUS. So talk about that. You broke away from ICMA and now you're doing things on your own with colleagues. Talk about that company or that LLC and what you're doing there.
Speaker 3:Sure, well, it's called CERTUS Public Safety Solutions and I'm partnered with, as you said, three of my colleagues Demosthenes Long, he likes to be called Monty Paul O'Connell and Carol Razor-Cordero and each of us have been involved in doing this assessment kind of work for a decade or more, and each of us also had long careers in policing and as well as academics, we're all PhDs and working in various universities around the country. So you know, we decided that. You know, the work that we were doing was fun, it was enjoyable, we were adding value, but we wanted to do it slightly differently. We wanted to have more of an engaged and long-term relationship with our clients, not necessarily to provide the report and run on to the next client, to have more of a relationship and do deep dives into the work, into the organization and into the organization, and provide that longitudinal, if you would, longitudinal service as opposed to a cross-section.
Speaker 3:I was just going to say that sounds like a PhD word. Longitudinal, it's true, and it's more satisfying. There's less clients, which is good. You can provide more attention, which is better, and we have that sustained relationship which we enjoy, because none of us are in this really for the money. This is not a get rich quick scheme. It's about an ability like what you're doing with the CopDoc podcast. It's an ability to give back and to use our skill and our experience in order to do that help people around the country.
Speaker 2:What strikes me as Jim and myself, is when we're in the classroom, when we're doing the podcast, when we're doing training, when you're doing evaluations, it clearly keeps your finger on the pulse. We both may be out of policing for 10 years, but we're as much in policing as anybody else because we interact with people who are doing the job, struggling, trying to figure out how to do it, and I know you have the opportunity to sit in focus groups and some are better than others and I know we talk about them. But what I'm curious to know is what lights your fire? What keeps you wanting to do that? I know you're very keen on creating opportunities and options to deal with the data and let the data speak for an agency that there's so much data in police agencies that most we talked about this yesterday most don't know what to do with. So talk about that.
Speaker 3:It's an interesting question. I don't know what fires me. I'm a bit of a nerd. You know my sons-in-law call me like a data nerd and I just get excited when data, the numerical data, tells the same story as what you see, the qualitative data, and what you're talking to people on the ground. It's just, it provides that sort of here's another academic word for you when you can triangulate the information that you're seeing, both quantitative and qualitative, and it tells the story. And it tells the story to the people that are living that story. You see them recognize what you're saying is true and then you can provide this solution or at least recommend some solutions to them, and then they do it.
Speaker 3:It's like it's terribly rewarding. So I guess that's what keeps me motivated. It's certainly a labor of love. I just enjoy doing it. I get up every day with purpose and, like you said, I have my finger across the country Is that I get to talk to people and listen to their stories and see their organizations and how they work. Like Johnny Appleseed, you know I can travel around the country dropping seeds and picking up things and learning. So I guess you know, going back to my entry into the police field, I started learning right away and I became like a lifelong learner, and I'm still doing it to this day, contributing to this effort, to your work.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you. So very interesting. We're talking to Jim McCabe. He's in New York right now. He's a PhD, a doctor and a professor, most importantly, at St John's University. He just wrote a book and it's called Understanding Police Operational Performance and it was just released. I just ordered it. I'm sorry I don't have it. I've seen glimpses of it because you've shared with me, but it's very interesting because I think most police and most police chiefs don't necessarily know what it means.
Speaker 2:Here's the issue that I have in policing, we really don't especially small agencies take a look at ourselves. We're fearful of looking at what goes on, when really, by ignoring what goes on, you're raising risk and you're raising liability. And to understand what others are doing, best practices and what you're doing and how you can better utilize time and limited resources is really important. So what I want to do here, jim, is we talked when you first started to think about writing this book, and I think it's an extremely important book.
Speaker 2:It's for people to understand, in my view, what is a management study, what should it look for, what are the questions you should ask, what are the questions you should uncover and what is the process by which this is a created, in other words a request for proposal to take a look at my agency. I'm trying to explain from my understanding. You'll do a better job in a minute but sometimes it's police chiefs that ask for this, sometimes it is city managers, sometimes it is the council, sometimes it is the public that drives the idea. Someone from the outside has to come in and look. So talk a little bit about that, if you will, and then we'll start to dig into what a management study looks like.
Speaker 3:A lot of layers there, Steve. I know I'm sorry, yeah, so let's start with. The first layer is assessment and the reluctance of police agencies to assess themselves. We write about this in the book. Like policing is you have a monopoly on police service in your community. Whatever the geography is, there's typically one police department. You're not in risk of competition. You don't have to continually evolve and improve because there's nobody else coming down the street to take your position. So it's easy to sit and just wait for the problems to arise and deal with them. Well, you don't have to assess, you don't have to look forward, you don't have to learn and sense about what's going on in the environment. So there's sort of a natural tendency not to do this because you don't have to. So that comes to. The next layer is well, why would you? Well, there's a few different reasons now, particularly in 2024, as we're talking.
Speaker 1:Number one.
Speaker 3:Like you said, you can identify problems and address them before they become bigger problems. So having the data and having the capacity you know the organizational processes to look at your data, look at your operations and identify the problems and fix them is really important in this day and age.
Speaker 1:And I think more importantly, from what?
Speaker 3:I see is that as you do this you'd be able to, like I was saying before, where the data and the story kind of meet, you're able to collect the information that promotes the good work that you're doing, that people don't appreciate the good work, the effort that goes in. Yeah, sure, they see the problems, the one-tenth of 1% that make it to TikTok or YouTube where the police do something that's objectionable. But in the most cases the police in our country do an amazing job and when you start assessing what you're doing, you get to tell that story with data and examples and you get to promote that. So it's sort of a two-edged sword, number one, two-sided sword. You get to identify the problems and fix them and you get to identify the really good work that you're doing already and promote that and let the world know and let the officers know they're appreciated.
Speaker 2:So again, a lot there and I wrote a few things down. And one is that really there's 18,000 or so different police agencies from varying sizes, from three to 30,000, 40,000, whatever. Nypd has one of the largest in the nation. And there's no national standards unto themselves, there's no National Police College, and my sense is that police chiefs who are in the business a lot of them just want to babysit, they just want to mind the store. They want to get through three or four years without any shit.
Speaker 3:Without the fires that come in.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and I think leadership takes a resolve to look inside yourself what can I do better, what can we do better, what are we doing well and what can we improve on? And I think that's a mindset that is starting to take hold. But there's an awful lot of oldtime chiefs out there that just are afraid of what they'll uncover should they look under the rock, and I think that it's so misplaced in my mind and I'm seeing you shake your head, so tell me about that. Look, I know there's accreditation. There's state and CALEA national. What do you feel about that as a way to move the industry or the discipline forward?
Speaker 3:I think CALEA does an excellent job. The agencies that at least I've experienced that are accredited are much better than the ones that aren't. But again, it's only the tip of the iceberg. So, for example, you know CALEA will require that you do some kind of community survey, and which is great. You know you should be, and our book suggests that you should be understanding through data what your organized community thinks of the services you're providing.
Speaker 3:But it doesn't tell you what to do. It doesn't tell you how to do it, it doesn't tell you who to speak to. It says you got to do it and a lot of times organizations that are accredited go through the check the box exercise because they have to do it. They don't really know what to do. Like you said, they're kind of afraid of the results that they're going to use that opportunity to really collect the data, and not just for accreditation but to use the data. Collect the data and use the data in order to inform the way that you should be doing business, and Kalia certainly points you in that direction. So it's a matter of taking that leadership position and embracing it and using the information to assess your organization and your operations effectively and not just that check the box. I got to do this to move on.
Speaker 2:Well, in some cases, even a report that would come from you. It really strikes me I've done a few myself and you hand it to them and they become almost paralyzed, like what do I do now? There's a checklist. This is so true. There's a list of recommendations. Why don't you chip away at it? Why don't you prioritize? Why don't you try to? In other words, you just spent five, 10, 20, 30, $50,000 on this report. Will you do something with it? I'm going through it with my own hometown, where they're saying you need more people. Here's the justification for people and no one reacts to that.
Speaker 2:But I think this is this is a move in so many places, and certainly at NYPD to be more data driven, be more evidence-based, and whether or not that takes shape, and there's resistance with that, it seems to me. You go out and you measure outcome. You did this, this was the outcome. Before you did that, there was no outcome, right. So you're measuring outcomes, and we talked about that the other day. And so the book itself. I want to spend a moment.
Speaker 2:So this again is a book just out on the 17th, just this week, by Rutledge. It's called Understanding Police Operational Performance. We're talking again with Jim McCabe, former NYPD and St John's University professor. Here's what the contents say. Why should you assess Patrol allocation and deployment? Assessing patrol operations, investigative operational performance, professional standards, administration and policy assessment I mean these are big, big buckets Assessing recruitment and retention, assessment of police, training, community engagement, assessing understanding and managing organizational culture, which is a big nut strategic management, planning and future considerations and alternative service delivery models. So you wrote an awful lot in this book that I know comes from the four of you sitting down and saying well, when we look at something, what are we seeing? What are we looking for? What are the components of policing? Now I don't want to go over the heads of many listeners.
Speaker 3:I think this is an important discussion to have. So talk about how this took shape and the way that we study departments and put it in writing and give people the opportunity to pick it up. Like if I was a city manager or a police chief, this would be on my bookcase Because if I wanted to figure out what I needed to do to understand how my organization, my police organization, was performing, there's a blueprint in there. If I want to know what I should be looking for out of the detectives, if I want to know what I should look for for of my community relations or community engagement platform, it's in there. What are my critical policies? It's in there. The idea is this was born out of our process that, as we went into an organization, this is how we do it and this is what we would report so clearly over time.
Speaker 2:you've been doing this since 08, you were saying so that's a pretty long time. You've got an awful lot under your belt. You've made mistakes and maybe they're not mistakes, but I know what it's like. You go into an organization and you know, you and I talk to people who are beginning research and say ask as many questions as you can when you're there, Cause when you're gone you're not going to really be able to get a second bite of the apple. So I'm sure you walked away early on to say man, we're missing. That is that a fair statement, and that's for sure.
Speaker 2:so it's an evolution right and of course, even even still, body worn cams are new and technology is new and cyber crime is new and all these things that have been piled on. Social issues are new not new, but have certainly piled on. Mental health are issues that police deal with all of the time, and so the role of the police changes and expands and sometimes, as you and I have talked about before, there's mission creep. Are we supposed? Should we be doing all that stuff? So I'm sure you're sitting there thinking, okay, let me take a look at this agency. You're going out fairly soon. You just came back from Alaska, for goodness sakes, and you take a look at it, and some agencies are more adept than others. But what's your view of where policing is and where policing has to go, understanding the deficits you sometimes recognize?
Speaker 3:Well, let's go back to the first part of that question, the evolution of it and making the mistakes. So when we go to an organization now, in 2024 or 2025, for the first time, we will give them a list of data and documents that we want to see. It sometimes overwhelms the agency because it's so long. I think we're up to 162 items, and when I first started you didn't get any of that. You just sort of parachuted in and started rooting around and you learn. Like you said, you come back, you go damn. I wish I had that information before I went.
Speaker 3:So the idea is you collect as much data as possible and do as much analysis as possible that when you get on ground to actually meet the client and do the interviews and the observations, you know as much, if not more, about their operations than they do. And it's more of a clarification. Can you explain this to me? Can you tell me how this works? Can you show me X, y and Z? And that physical presence gives you the ability to see what you're seeing in the data and the documents. And again, it really is fascinating when it comes together in a way that you go oh yeah, I see what you're talking about and you're able to measure it and you're able to make conclusions about it and then recommendations from it. And it's really important to do that kind of that work beforehand, because you owe it to the client, you owe it to the organization that you're working for. They are better able to help them help themselves.
Speaker 2:So I'm throwing a lot at you because there's so much that you know and so much I think the listeners can gain from our conversation. Data don't always lie. Sure, and that's what you say, and my experience with this was with the Drug Enforcement Administration is that on a rotating basis, every three or four years, inspectional services would come out, just like NYPD. And I'm going to come out, captain, and I'm going to take a look at your organization and you're going to do an interrogatory and you're going to answer questions before we come out, and of course, you're digging like oh shit, I got to answer this question. You know, you've been through it and certainly I've been through that Most agencies do not have to, most posts do not require those audits, and so this is a way to hire a company like you, or ICMA or whoever it might be becomes pretty important. And then I suppose, when you leave well, so react to that, jim, about the inspiration.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's true and I think the way that the studies, at least that I've participated in, come from the organization's inability to do that themselves or they want an independent quote, unquote impartial view that the biases that are built into doing research on your own organizations they're minimized because you have an independent, independent, personal body doing it. So that's why organizations like that independent view. It's sort of like an accounting where the auditor has to be independent. If you're looking at a bank or a business in order to give them an impartial, sort of unvarnished version of what's going on, you don't want to have your own accountants doing the auditing of your own books, so to speak. And a lot of times this comes from the city manager. Like you said, the council is that the police chief might be asking for resources that the council or the city manager or the mayor is hesitant. That's a big ask.
Speaker 2:Funds are tight, Maybe we need to get somebody in here to give us an objective opinion on whether or not we need more people or less people, or how things should be organized. One of the things I know you have been famous for. But you're famous for is your. I'm sorry, I'm blanking.
Speaker 3:Rule of 60.
Speaker 2:There you go, exactly. So the rule of 60 in terms of staffing, talk a little bit about that. And has that stayed constant? Has that? Yeah, it has Okay, so talk about that it turns out.
Speaker 3:It has a lot of face validity and likeness and likeness.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So the question is always how many officers do I need? And that's where this started. My work in this space started, you know, 2008,. You think about it.
Speaker 3:The city doesn't have enough money. Police chief says we need more cops. This town council says that's a lot of money. Maybe we get somebody in here to give us an objective opinion. What is that objective opinion? So I developed this rule, call it the rule of 60.
Speaker 3:And the idea is there are two components to it and with those two components you can get a basic framework of what staffing in a police department should look like. So the first part of it is that 60% or about 60% of the department's sworn personnel should be assigned to patrol. If you go below that, you're probably over-specialized, and if you go way above that, you probably have too much invested in patrol and not enough in specialization. So that's sort of the benchmark. It's not a hard to fast one, but just sort of gives you a place to start the second piece. I mean that's easy. You can get your table of organization, you count out the people, you do the math and you can see how your personnel are allocated.
Speaker 3:The harder part of the Rule 60 is looking at the workload of the officers on patrol. This part of the rule suggests that no more than 60% of their time should be committed to work, meaning calls to service, self-initiated activities, community events, whatever it is that you need to have 40% of their time uncommitted? And why is that? Well, number one they're not machines. You can't expect somebody to work 100% of the time. Number two is that they need to be free to react to emergencies as they occur, if the officers think that they are overly patrols and hotspots. So if they're too busy, they're not going to do that.
Speaker 3:And that sort of inhibits your department's ability to deal with crime and quality life.
Speaker 2:Can I just interrupt for a moment, because I think another offshoot of that is if all you're doing is running me from job to job to job to job, right, not much of a breath, maybe a little bit of time to go and eat. I never get to know the community that I'm supposed to serve. That's the other thing right.
Speaker 3:The community becomes just the people you're dealing with on an interactive basis, from call to call to call to call, and they were always in crisis. They're having problems and you get to assume that everybody in the community is like that and we know that's not the case. So that's hard to calculate, that's hard to figure out and most police departments, most police chiefs, don't have the capacity to do that, even the sophisticated ones. I mean, even when you explain that those two fundamental principles it's like, yeah, that makes a lot of sense, that rule has sort of stood the test of time. When I explain that to police chiefs around the country, they're like, yeah, okay, I can live with that, that makes sense. How do I figure that out?
Speaker 3:So we have a data team that extracts the information from the department, does the analysis and can spit back what we call the saturation, how much of the officer's time is saturated with work, and then, based upon that, you have a couple of decision points to make.
Speaker 3:You can either add more people, you can either change shifts to have them work when the work is there, or you can reduce the number of calls that they're actually doing, and that's probably the easiest but the hardest because things like traffic accidents and alarm calls and all the miscellaneous calls that officers go to on a day-to-day basis. They scratch their heads going. Why the hell am I in this woman's house scolding her kid not to go to school? Why am I here telling one neighbor not to blow leaves on the other neighbor's lawn? It's just a waste of my time. The silly story yeah, the silly stories, and they all have them, and that's the great part. Tell me your silliest call that you have. If you can minimize those calls, if you can organize the patrol staff in the right ways, working the right times, doing the right shifts and then sometimes you need to add people and those are the combinations of things you can do to address that workload saturation.
Speaker 2:The other lingering thing out there is concept that the Justice Department had with a ratio of officer to population and that seems to be changing and I know you've seen some recent studies. So talk about how that squares up. Your rule of 60 squares up with that ratio. That's out there. It used to be 2.2. It's changed. Where are you at, I think?
Speaker 3:that ratio does a disservice in a number of ways to our profession. I mean, it's easy to calculate, it's simple. How many people do I have in the community? That's how many cops I need, period. Some places that's too many police officers. A lot of places, that's not enough. You know, when you look at a place like New York, the ratio is off the chart. You go out west and the ratio is a lot smaller when there's probably not enough police officers. So it's sort of a shortcut. It doesn't tell the full story. You know, we recommend not using it to look at workload as the basis of making your decisions. Yeah, because-.
Speaker 3:It's like saying. It's like saying Steve, it's like saying how many people live in this town, Therefore, that's how many people I need working in my pizza, my pizzeria.
Speaker 2:It's like well it's a very small number.
Speaker 3:Depending upon the demographics of the community, it would change.
Speaker 2:Yes, exactly right. And what's your call volume? And what are the calls? What are type one calls, what are type three calls, what are emergency calls? And that's all of the data that you need, because I think that's extremely important to understand. I think it's important to understand. So we're talking to Jim McCabe, author of a new book, understanding Police Operational Performance, former NYPD inspector and now a professor at St John's University, and we're talking about a number of things. It strikes me that you go out seeking sometimes because requests for proposals are put out there, asking for bids for somebody to come in and to evaluate a police department, not only that, corrections at some point in time, and certainly district attorney's office or district attorney office investigators. So you look at these RFPs and you respond to them. You find sometimes that they are written either too broadly or too narrowly.
Speaker 3:Yes, so it's easy. When you read the RFP you can tell that there's always a story behind the story. You can tell they don't know what they want. Sometimes there's so much in RFP it's impossible to provide the study One in your area. It was like a 35-page bulleted ask. It would have taken somebody a decade and an army of people to do it and it was just like these people are just they don't know what they want.
Speaker 3:And then others know specifically like this is what I want. This is. It's driven sometimes by a scandal. Sometimes they had a problem in a certain area that we want a deeper dive into this, and then we'll say, well, okay, that's fine, but in order to understand that, you need to look at the broader organization. You just can't say, yeah, I want to look at training, because it's an element of the entire assessment process. You have to assess the organization. Training is part of it. So we try and it's not an upsell. Sometimes it sounds like an upsell, but we need to do it right. If you're going to ask for an RFP, if you're going to have strangers come into your organization and study it, it needs to be studied right. So we see it runs the gamut and you apply to a lot of them and you miss most of the times and they're like, ah, that would be nice to have gone there, I'm interested in. You could tell by the RFP that somebody's put some thought into it. Those are the misses that you regret not getting.
Speaker 2:So you're looking at elements. Is it outside the realm of possibility? First of all, in your view, if somebody got your book and followed it as a recipe if you will and you know how I am with recipes as a recipe for what an RFP should ask, it's like a menu of some sort. You need to know patrol investigations, clearance rates, all of those kinds of things what are important? Training Is it enough? Training, staffing that's important, all of the things that you talk about. Have there been times where you've actually either reached out to the person who has submitted the RFP and said can you give me a little more detail as to what you're looking for, because I think it's too broad, or you're missing a couple of things that I would suggest could be valuable to you. Have you had those?
Speaker 3:Certainly the first part, but not the second part, because most RFPs have to abide by local procurement rules and most of them give you an opportunity to ask questions before you bid, so there's always going to be an opportunity to get clarifying information.
Speaker 3:Not the second part where you say, hey, I would do this again and write this Because it's already done. It's already done and I've had occasions where people have asked me to help them structure an RFP and I will and they go, oh great, when you do it, then we'll publish it and then you can bid on it. I'm like, no, I can't, you can't do that. That's sort of a conflict, but it's an important part, and I think, to your question. I think the book is more of a recipe that if anybody picked it up they could start asking the right questions. And if there was a well-intended police chief or city manager that wanted sort of a guidebook on what they should be looking for and some solutions perhaps on how to fix things that they might encounter, that assessing police operational performance could do that, would it help you write an RFP, perhaps because you would know what the assessor is going to be looking for and what kind of information that they have.
Speaker 3:And it's also certainly give you an opportunity to say, hey, we don't collect any of this stuff. We should start going back to the drawing board and seeing what are we doing here, what?
Speaker 2:are we counting?
Speaker 3:So, for example, sometimes I told you we have like 162 item data requests. Sometimes the best response is not getting anything, because it shows that the organization doesn't have the data, even just doesn't even collect the information that they really need.
Speaker 2:Don't realize it's of value to them so they don't add it in the CAD or in the reporting systems, exactly we don't track case closings, so we don't track clearance rate.
Speaker 3:What do you need? How do you not do that? How do you know if your people are successful? How do you know if they need more training or you need more of them, if they're not clearing cases effectively?
Speaker 2:Let's take us into an evaluation. You've been hired, you begin to interact once it has been granted to you, whoever the point of contact is, and you're asking for the data, and I know we've talked. Sometimes you get it and sometimes they balk at it. And the real problem here, jim, and what our listeners may not know, is sometimes it is the city council or the city manager that is asking for it on a police department and the chief is reticent to give that information. I think it begins to potentially expose them. Sometimes you walk in blindly because you don't get what you needed. But once you're talking about that, what are the conversations that you have as you get ready to frame the job?
Speaker 3:That's a great point you raised, Steve, because it does depend on who's asking for it. Typically, if it's the police chief asking for it, you have a lot easier time getting the study done. If it's the council or the city manager asking for it, over the objection of the chief, that oftentimes runs into some difficulties. In all cases, what we like to do is set up an introductory meeting and send them our resumes so they can get to see us and know who we are, that we're not these beltway bandits that are coming in here to pull the pin on a hand grenade and close the door on that. We've actually walked the walk. We've sat in the desk. We understand the challenges that the chief is facing.
Speaker 3:And it humanizes the process. It's not us telling you what to do, it's us trying to help you, help yourself. And those conversations start difficult but at the end they're very, very.
Speaker 3:it's a very collegial process even when the chief wasn't necessarily on board with the process in the first place. I like to think that you know, among the four of us, when we do this we have enough credibility that we can go in, and then we don't have egos either. We're not here to tell you what to do and my way or the highway. It's very much a collegial process and we like to think of it as a collaboration, and that's why we started the firm that we started so we could do that to a greater extent and have those relationships and continue that long-term relationship that we like.
Speaker 3:So when you have the report and you know like the last one we just wrote for anchorage was almost 200 pages long how can anybody expect to digest that? And so there might be a time in six months we say say hey, what the hell are they talking about here? We're trying this. Pick up the phone anymore. You can email us and say hey. And when you have that relationship, when you build it from day one, the department and the personnel in the department have a better opportunity to develop the solutions that are appropriate to them, because we don't have all the answers. We point you in the right direction. We think and say, every agency has a different solution, but this is sort of what it might look like. Your version of it will be different and we can help you right-size that for your own organization.
Speaker 2:Frustrating is it to you, as it has been for me when I understand. At the other end of the rainbow, you get paid, they get a report and you don't necessarily know what's going on. But how frustrating is it to you where you gave them a roadmap to begin to improve service delivery and that doesn't necessarily happen.
Speaker 3:I don't know if it's frustrating is the right word, steve, disheartening? No, it's not disheartening, it's. I don't know if it's regret maybe, but I wish we could have convinced them or given them more information to convince them that this is the right way to go. But you know what People are adults, we're professionals. I'm not here to say I have I missed the mark, that's okay. But I like to think that, having seen what I've seen and knowing what I know, I think our recommendations are pretty spot on most of the times Not always, but most of the times. There are kernels that they can work with and really do good things with the solutions and the recommendations that we provide. People don't want to do it.
Speaker 3:You know, it's not frustrating for me, it's just I says, wow, this is good stuff. Can you help me design, for example? I said before about the rule of 60. We'll offer maybe six or seven different combinations of shifts that the department might consider Like wow, I never thought of that. Can you help me work with the union? Can you help me work with the employee organization in order to make this happen? Like, yeah, that keeps me going, that gets me up in the morning. I see an email like that in the inbox. Oh yeah, I'll take that meeting any day of the week.
Speaker 2:That's the real gratifying part of it Well, it's like a booster shot. I guess the big question that I have from that is looking back over your experience since being active in the NYPD, what changes have you seen? What changes do you see coming, and how do police departments have to be more nimble in a lot of ways than they had to be 20 years ago?
Speaker 3:You know, the events of 2020 really opened up a lot of eyes on a couple of fronts. Number one you know I spoke before about police doing all the ridiculous nuisance calls. You know, and every cop has a story. You had mentioned it at the beginning of the discussion here about alternatives to handling mental health calls. So that sort of opened the opportunity, because police departments typically don't want to be involved in these things. You can ask any cop. I don't want to go to the mental health call. It's just not a fun experience. You do get an opportunity to help people sometimes, but you know we see this revolving door, revolving door, revolving door, and it's just one experience after the other.
Speaker 3:So now maybe communities will take that seriously, where there's a co-response model. There are other people that need to be involved in this conversation, that it's not a police problem, that the mental health system needs to step up and help fix this. Certainly, there are communities around the country that are having those conversations and the police should be an important part of that conversation, but they are not the answer, and I think what I've seen is the evolution of our profession. Is that there's finally some recognition in that? Okay, maybe there are other things or other social segments that need to be more responsible here, and we need to give the police a little bit of a I don't want to say a break, but we need to sort of take some of this stuff off their plate, and rightfully so, I think policing is collaboration and relationships, as you well know, and you certainly know, recent commander, and sometimes police become leaders.
Speaker 2:recognizing this ain't work. We need to figure out who needs to be at the table so we can give tools to the police officer who's on the street to be able to hand this off, so it's not always handcuffs. That's the end result. Is that a fair?
Speaker 3:statement, and then a fair statement for sure.
Speaker 2:And then pushing people towards how do you collaborate and who do you collaborate with. Is that a part of an assessment?
Speaker 3:Yes, but going back to the first part of that statement is that I think the police chiefs probably have been saying that for a long time. It's just people have not been collaborating with them. They see the need and now I think people go okay, we get it, it's time for us to collaborate. And then the second part of it is yes, one of the elements of the book and the study is about the level of community engagement, and who are you engaging with and are they stakeholders, and what kind of relationship do you have? And how do you measure whether or not you're providing the services that that group or that organization or those individuals need?
Speaker 3:And if you don't do that, well then you're really kind of flying blind. You're driving or flying without knowing where you're going and whether or not you're making any progress getting to where you want to go. So it's sort of a. Again, it's a two-pronged effort. It's leading the charge, it's collaborating with people and then developing the processes and collecting the data in order to tell you whether or not you're being effective in accomplishing the goals that you want to accomplish.
Speaker 2:Great. So we're talking to Jim McCabe. He's a New York professor at St John's University and he wrote a book on understanding police operational performance and we're discussing that performance and we're discussing that. And I want to drill down a little bit more in terms of the RFP, the awarding of an RFP to you and your particular concern and the planning that goes into it asking, collecting, taking time to evaluate the data before you go out. You know sort of crafting. I know that there is. You know, I know that you have sort of a plan, but that each plan is customized right when you show up there. So to take us through the time it takes for that, how much time you're on the ground, how much time it takes for you to turn around a report. You know, sitting together with all of the players, because I know four or five of you go out there, you do this, you do that, you do this. Two of us will do that and now we come back and we talk and we pull together a report. So talk about that process.
Speaker 3:So the post-COVID era has made that process a lot easier with Zoom and WebEx and whatever that, whatever we're using. But what we do is, you know, we have that extensive document and data request list and it takes us. If the agency is responsive, it'll take them about a month to give us all that information and for us to analyze it and produce it into sort of actionable data that we can use for the assessment. And then so within 30 days of them giving it to us and 30 days from us analyzing it, so it's about a two-month delay between the time we say we shake hands and say, okay, we'll do this, we have that kickoff sort of meeting and then within two months we should be on the ground. And sometimes clients are like, wow, you only want to be here for three days. Well, you know what Probably know more than the chief knows about the department Before we walk in.
Speaker 3:So the time on site is really sort of confirmatory. This is what we're going to see, and now we're seeing. So before we go there, the way we do it is we divide the organization by functional area. So somebody will handle patrol, somebody will handle investigations, somebody will handle administration, basically driven by the way the department is organized. Now, if you could just picture an organization chart, there's four bureaus. There's going to be four people assigned to handle each one of those bureaus.
Speaker 1:If there's three, there'll be three of us If there's two.
Speaker 3:Typically there's always two. Two would be the minimum number of people that you would send. So then we go, and then we go about our business. A lot of times departments like to script your day like eight o'clock with the chief, 8.15, with the deputy chief 8.45.
Speaker 2:You know what that reminds me of, and you and I know about it. It's like when you get ready to be interviewed for a position in academia, the same thing You're going to talk to the provost, you're going to talk to the president. You go to here. You've got no downtime yourself. Do you like that or do you prefer to adjust? I don't. I don't.
Speaker 3:I ask them to reconsider and just throw that out, because that's the way of them trying to control you. So a lot of times they want to control who you see, how long you see them, and not see the things that they're afraid that you'll see. So what I prefer is I call it snowballing. So you'll go in and we ask that everybody be available. You're paying a lot of money for this. Just have your principal people available on the days that we're there. Don't schedule any trainings and obviously, if you have last minute emergencies or whatever, that's different. But just please have your principal people available and we snowball. We'll talk to one and then we'll go to another, and then another, and then oh, that'll give me an idea I got to go back to that person. We find that to be very effective at developing the information that we need.
Speaker 2:Jim, I know that we've talked about situations where you show up, you fly across the country and deputy chief just happens not to be there and he's avoiding you. So tell us about that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that happens. Sometimes it's the chief that avoids you. I was actually told to go away, take your New York gas pack home. So I was actually told to go away, take your New York ass back home. So I go okay, that's fine. Walk across the street to the city manager, the mayor, and I'll tell him my work is done here and I'll send him an invoice because I can't study the department without your people cooperating. Oh, hold on, Hold on.
Speaker 2:I can correct that.
Speaker 3:I can correct that. Let's get you the information you need, and that's my fault. That means I didn't raise the comfort level of the person, of the people that I was dealing with, and that's really important. And that's that data collection phase and that processing information phase, because you get a chance to ask questions and probe before you get on the ground. They get the idea that you know what you're talking about and you're not just some kind of pencil-headed geek that's going to come out here and do a number on me.
Speaker 3:And then you do your visit and it usually takes another month or so to write that up into the document and they'll wall its narrative form. We've tried experimenting with a scorecard, which has been, I think, effective is that the functional areas just say investigations. We have developed a scorecard where we'll rate you on a scale of one to three high performing, somewhat performing, not performing, those sort of categories.
Speaker 2:That has been of the discussion we've had about balanced scorecard and applying it to the public sector.
Speaker 3:It is so. It's sort of a rudimentary way of visualizing and orienting people to the problems or to the good performing things. And then comes the narrative and we try to break it down in narrative form so people can read and understand what we're talking about.
Speaker 3:And it gets long those things are. The doc is lengthy 150, 200 pages of the clip, so it does take some time to put together and then we'll provide it to the client and ask them to spend about as much time as they need, but probably about a month Make any edits they think are appropriate. We won't change substantive material. But if they're as stylistic that they want or you can say this differently, because this is going to not sound good when my people read it that's fine. We'll edit things to make it acceptable and then that's it. Most times we're asked to come back and do some kind of presentation to some governing body the council, board of select men whatever the case might be.
Speaker 2:But I would think, jim, one thing you didn't say, and I'm sure you do. What I didn't hear is how you phrase, how you add the element of recommendation. We call them improvement opportunities. Okay, there you go, that's fine, that's fine. I didn't hear that. So that's a part of this. At the end of your narrative, there is because I mean you know anytime we're looking at even academic pieces. What did you find out? What were the findings? And that's, that's because what good are you if you didn't give me some findings?
Speaker 2:and some suggestions for improvement.
Speaker 3:Each of those functional areas will have recommendations or not. If it's fine, it's fine. We're not there to find things wrong. When I was in the NYPD. I was part of a task force that worked with the McKinsey company and they did an assessment of the department. They didn't use critical language, they used improvement opportunities. I was like, wow, if I'm ever a consultant, I'm going to use that kind of language, so you told me where the source of that is.
Speaker 2:I got you yes. Well, listen, we're running out of time, but there's a couple of other things that I want to talk about. This is Jim McCabe, who we're talking to on the Cop Talk podcast and he, among other things, is a consultant and does management studies and just wrote a book, rutledge, which you can find online just on sale a little bit ago. It's not an expensive book $35.99. And I will put that information at the end of the notes for this podcast, but it's called Understanding Police Operational Performance. There are things that you do as the monitor which we have skirted around, and I know you're very busy and very active in serving as one of the members of a team monitoring for NYPD, the federal court. You do a lot with body-worn cameras and I can't imagine the number of files that are out there. You've created some sort of a sampling approach and an evaluation approach. Can you talk about that a little bit, as you're looking at these things that come up on a random sample?
Speaker 3:That's the start of it. As you just pointed out, we try to be as random as possible. As random we'll give you a better degree of representation. The NYPD records somewhat on the order of 50,000 videos a day. 50,000 videos a day are logged into the system. So the federal monitor in the NYPD case is looking primarily at stops, at Terry stops. Nypd is conducting about 15,000 to 20,000 stops a year.
Speaker 3:So you can't look at all of those. So how do you select? Well, the best way to select them is to do a random sample. So we try to get the random sample and then, as you pointed out, we do the assessment of those encounters. Was it lawful? Was the stop lawful? Was the frisk lawful? If there was one? Was the search lawful? Does it matter whether it's radio run driven or self-initiated, or somebody's pointing out somebody at the scene? And we look at the supervisory review of those. How is the command itself treated when it's reviewed by the command staff? How do the auditors NYPD auditors look at it? How closely are we looking at the same encounter? The same way, the inter-rater reliability of all these stops that we assess?
Speaker 2:Is another factor. The identification of the officer, the demeanor of the officer, not swearing, are those factors.
Speaker 3:No, not for the course purposes. It's more of a legal assessment, not necessarily a behavioral assessment.
Speaker 2:Thank you. So we also talked a little bit ago about 14th Amendment issues self-initiated stops and let's talk about that not from the NYPD's point of view but from a police agency's point of view and your assessment, your concern, your consideration of that and what kind of guidance you would give a chief where this may be one of the more risky or libelous potential issues for an agency.
Speaker 3:So it's a very complicated field, but it's an important one. Nobody wants to believe that their officers are treating people differently because of the race their race. I'm sure most police officers would tell you I don't treat people differently because of their race. But we know, the data suggests to us that there is a racial disparity in the way that the police and the criminal justice system in general deals with people of color. So we just know that. How do you get to the bottom of that? Why is that happening? How do you know it's happening, are terribly important issues that police departments should be dealing with.
Speaker 3:It's a prominent element in the case that I'm working on 14th Amendment treatment, making sure that racial profiling does not exist when it comes to stopping people in the street. Police departments have data that can help them understand the issues in this area. I'm almost confident in saying that hardly anyone uses that data to answer those questions. When we go into an organization, we don't do that assessment. It's a complicated assessment. It's most times not asked for by the client, by the organization, but we point it out to them.
Speaker 3:We orient to them that this is an issue that you need to start dealing with. So the simplest way of understanding that is looking at two data points. Number one is your traffic stop data. Traffic stop data is typically self-initiated by the officer. How are the officers? Number one who are they pulling over? How are they treating the people that they're pulling over? Does race matter in those encounters? And the second is the self-initiated street stop. Most police departments conducts Terry stops all the time. It comes in the CAD data a number of different ways. Police departments will call it things depending upon the way that they're laid out. But that street stop or the suspicious person the self-initiated suspicious person call it's in there no-transcript suspicious person exactly what you just said, right, but it may not be suspicious person.
Speaker 2:So where else do I look for that information so that I can see the totality of the potential encounters? And it may drive change to say, hey, in the future, this is what we expect you to code when you're stopping someone on your own, I mean. So talk about that, because I think that's an important element.
Speaker 3:I don't have an answer to that, steve, but you're 100% right. It does depend upon how it's coded Like. I don't know what the 18,000 police departments how they code that, but each one knows. They know if I'm stopping a person that I think is prowling a car or about to burglarize a house, I know what's being coded at dispatch. The idea is that you've got to figure that out and start analyzing that information. That's great.
Speaker 2:All right. So we've been talking for a good long time with my friend and colleague, jim McCabe, in New York. He is with St John's University and also again wrote a book that I strongly suggest those of you who are interested in evaluating your organization, called Understanding Police Operational Performance. How do people get in touch with Jim McCabe?
Speaker 3:Well, you could email me. You can call me. What's the best way to reach you? Well, email would be the best. It's mccabej1 at stjohnsedu. M-c-c-a-b-e-j-1 at stjohnsedu.
Speaker 2:Well, we're gearing up for the holidays. I wish you good holidays, my friend, and thank you for your time and for sharing, and I wish you Godspeed everything you do. As you get ready to leave, you have the last word. Do you have belief and hope in a not necessarily a reformation, but a new, earned respect lease in communities?
Speaker 3:Well, I hope so. I think we hit a low point over the last couple of years where the police have been unfairly criticized for the work. I know, because I look at a lot of body camera video, as you pointed out, that the police do an amazing job in our communities and part of the things that I tell departments when I work with them is that you need to leverage that body camera information and promote the good work that your people do. I see it changing. As you mentioned a couple of times, I'm a professor and I teach about police in the community and I ask students to go and ride along with cops and go to community meetings and they come back with this sort of like wow, I didn't realize the really good guys, she really treated the community well and I didn't expect that. So I'm hopeful. I see the change, see things starting to improve, and rightfully so, because I think a lot of police departments and police officers took it on the chin and it wasn't deserved.
Speaker 1:Some was.
Speaker 3:We witnessed some horrific events that needed to be dealt with, but it doesn't mean the entire profession is like that, right, well, thank you.
Speaker 2:Thanks. That's another episode of the Cop Talk podcast on the books and I want to thank you all for listening. We're now being listened to in more than 80 countries and 3,000 cities and towns. If you have an idea about somebody who is innovative, a thought leader, please reach out to me and I will try to connect with them and see if they're the right fit.
Speaker 2:I've just been talking to a good friend and colleague who I feel is a thought leader unto himself. So, jim, thank you very much. Thank you, steve, it was great to be here. Thanks very much. All right, bye-bye.
Speaker 1: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 Western State University. Please tune into the CopDoc Podcast for regular episodes of interviews with thought leaders in policing.
