From warriors to guardians

It was a hot summer night in Seattle University’s Chardin Hall and Sue Rahr, the former first female King County Sheriff and current director of the state Criminal Justice Training Commission, was going over the new reading list for officers in training. 

The list includes several books on philosophy and ethics. One new standard is “Brain Rules,” John Medina’s 2008 book on the human brain, its capabilities and its limits when it comes to attention, memory and learning. Also new on the list, and issued to every new officer-in-training, is a pocket copy of the Declaration of Independence and United States Constitution.

Yes, new; an irony that wasn’t lost on Rahr. 

“[When I was in training] I can’t remember getting any kind of training on the Constitution other than to work around it,” Rahr said. “I never viewed the Constitution as something sacred. I viewed it as an impediment.”

On June 23, Rahr visited with the East Precinct Advisory Council to discuss how the state’s approach to officer training and police work had changed since 2012. She most readily described this change as a shift from a culture of “warriors” to “guardians.”

When Rahr took up the directorship in March of that year, the state police academy in Burien operated under a paramilitary model of rigid discipline. Trainees were required to develop situational awareness by constantly scanning for supervisors and snapping to silent attention in their presence, under threat of punishment. An impressive show, but Rahr said she questioned how stopping and shutting down could be helpful in the field. She said she questioned how officers who learned their trade from a fear-based curriculum might bring those attitudes into interactions with the people who need their help.

Today, under the guardian model, officers are instead required to stop and engage in a conversation — exactly how Rahr would expect them to engage with a citizen on the street.

“Our mock scenes — this might not sound like a big deal — we always used to have mock scenes end with an arrest or instance of physical force,” she said. “Now that’s been changed up so that, for some scenes, the right thing is to not resort to [those solutions].

“The physical and mental stress in the academy is still very high. But the stress comes from the difficulty of learning officer procedure and tactics; the humiliation and fear is gone.”

Rahr said there had been some pushback from older officers who believed the new training model would make new officers “soft.”

But East Precinct Lt. Bryan Grenon said he was seeing more academy graduates making it through the field training program to become full-fledged officers.

“The quality of officer is better now than when I was in training,” Grenon said.

According to Rahr, the timing of the commission’s implementation of the guardian training model led some critics to believe it was a direct response to the national controversy over the shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, in Ferguson, Missouri. But the program was a year in the making before it was rolled out.

The training model still has significant challenges to overcome in teaching officers how to relate to members of minority communities, such as the black and LGBT communities. Engagement could be taught but, as Grenon put it, it was another matter to make a 25-year-old white recruit from Bellevue understand the emotions of someone raised in the black community.

A full understanding of black oppression could be particularly hard to communicate beyond sterile facts and dates, Rahr said.

“You can’t just take this information to trainers and go, ‘Hey: Talk about lynchings in the South,’” she said.

Some attendees of the meeting from the Central District said any officer training programs on relating to minority populations, particularly those involving the Seattle Police Department, needed to include the voices of their communities.

This was particularly pertinent to the issue of ongoing gentrification in the Central District and how residents said an influx of white residents had translated into harsher policing on longstanding black community members.

Central resident Angela Davis said she had been repeatedly “stared down” by new, white residents in the neighborhood she had lived for years.

“That is trauma,” she said. “This is being traumatized, just for being a citizen.”

East Precinct Advisory Council member Felicia Cross said every week, for years, she and her brother would play music outside their mother’s home in Leschi while they washed their cars. 

“We’ve done this for years. And these guys moved in, they called the police on us,” Cross said. “The police came and told us about turning our music down.”

The Reverend Harriet Walden, who co-chairs the precinct council but said she was attending Thursday strictly on behalf of her organization Mothers for Police Accountability, said police were frequently used as a tool by those seeking to gentrify a community.

“The police are the vanguard of gentrification,” Walden said. “They under-police the community when it’s drugs or violence. But after an area starts becoming gentrified, after a certain amount of houses are sold, that’s when they start over-policing. It’s a harassment of our youth.

“... [New residents who call the police on long-time residents are] people who have been programmed to believe criminality and blackness are the same thing.”