Handcuffed Quotes

“If a department appreciates that complexity, does well on vigilance, nimbleness, and skill, and therefore excels at spotting emerging problems early and suppressing them before they do much harm, what will success look like? How will such a department demonstrate its crime control expertise? The answer is that evaluation of performance will consist largely of problem-specific project accounts describing emerging crime patterns and what happened to each one. Each project account will describe how the department spotted the problem in the first place, how it analyzed and subsequently understood the problem, what the department and its partners did about the problem, and what happened as a result. Some in policing call that the scanning, analysis, response, and assessment (SARA) model. It is a straightforward problem-oriented account that has little to do with aggregate numbers of any particular kind.”
― Malcolm K. Sparrow, Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform

“Any numbers game is, of course, a simplification. Carl Klockars expresses this beautifully (and with a nod to Arthur “Dooley” Wilson) in Measuring What Matters: In every instance of measurement, the conversion of a thing, event, or occasion to a number requires ignoring or discarding all other meaning that thing, event, or occasion might have.”
― Malcolm K. Sparrow, Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform

“For executives, simulator-style training is occasionally available in crisis leadership courses, where trainees are invited to take their turn at the helm in a crisis response exercise. But absent a crisis, most executive teams operate without any special training to help them interpret the myriad signals available or recognize important conditions quickly and pick the best response to different scenarios. In the absence of such training, many executive teams muddle through, having learned most of what they know through their own experience on the way up through the managerial ranks rather than through formal training. As one chief noted, the closest equivalent to executive-level simulator training is when one department has the opportunity to learn from the misery of another. A collegial network of police executives, ready to share both their successes and failures, is a valuable asset to the profession (see box 2-1).”
― Malcolm K. Sparrow, Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform

“We cannot continue to evaluate personnel on the simple measure of whether crime is up or down relative to a prior period. Most importantly, CompStat has ignored measurement of other core functions. Chiefly, we fail to measure what may be our highest priority: public satisfaction. We also fail to measure quality of life, integrity, community relations, administrative efficiency, and employee satisfaction, to name just a few other important areas.9”
― Malcolm K. Sparrow, Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform

“What do citizens expect of government agencies entrusted with crime control, risk control, or other harm reduction duties? The public does not expect that governments will be able to prevent all crimes or contain all harms. But they do expect government agencies to provide the best protection possible, and at a reasonable price, by being:           Vigilant, so they can spot emerging threats early, pick up on precursors and warning signs, use their imaginations to work out what could happen, use their intelligence systems to discover what others are planning, and do all this before much harm is done.           Nimble, flexible enough to organize themselves quickly and appropriately around each emerging crime pattern rather than being locked into routines and processes designed for traditional issues.           Skillful, masters of the entire intervention tool kit, experienced (as craftsmen) in picking the best tools for each task, and adept at inventing new approaches when existing methods turn out to be irrelevant or insufficient to suppress an emerging threat.8 Real success in crime control—spotting emerging crime problems early and suppressing them before they do much harm—would not produce substantial year-to-year reductions in crime figures, because genuine and substantial reductions are available only when crime problems have first grown out of control. Neither would best practices produce enormous numbers of arrests, coercive interventions, or any other specific activity, because skill demands economy in the use of force and financial resources and rests on artful and well-tailored responses rather than extensive and costly campaigns. Ironically, therefore, the two classes of metrics that still seem to wield the most influence in many departments—crime reduction and enforcement productivity—would utterly fail to reflect the very best performance in crime control. Further, we must take seriously the fact that other important duties of the police will never be captured through crime statistics or in measures of enforcement output. As NYPD Assistant Commissioner Ronald J. Wilhelmy wrote in a November 2013 internal NYPD strategy document:”
― Malcolm K. Sparrow, Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform

“I believe the answer is the same across the full range of government’s risk-control responsibilities, whether the harms to be controlled are criminal victimization, pollution, corruption, fraud, tax evasion, terrorism, or other potential and actual harms. The definition of success in risk control or harm reduction is to spot emerging problems early and then suppress them before they do much harm.7 This is a very different idea from “allow problems to grow so hopelessly out of control that we can then get serious, all of a sudden, and produce substantial reductions year after year after year.”
― Malcolm K. Sparrow, Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform

“Despite the richness of the frameworks presented in these and other materials, a significant proportion of today’s police organizations remain narrowly focused on the same categories of indicators that have dominated the field for decades:        1.   Reductions in the number of serious crimes reported, most commonly presented as local comparisons against an immediately preceding time period        2.   Clearance rates        3.   Response times        4.   Measures of enforcement productivity (for example, numbers of arrests, citations, or stop-and-frisk searches)”
― Malcolm K. Sparrow, Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform

“Citizens of any mature democracy can expect and should demand police services that are responsive to their needs, tolerant of diversity, and skillful in unraveling and tackling crime and other community problems. They should expect and demand that police officers are decent, courteous, humane, sparing and skillful in the use of force, respectful of citizens’ rights, disciplined, and professional. These are ordinary, reasonable expectations.”
― Malcolm K. Sparrow, Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform

“Even David Couper admits that as a patrol officer he would not have turned in his police partner: I . . . realized I was closer to the man I was paired with at work—my partner—than I was to the woman to whom I was married. I shared more of my thoughts, feelings, hopes, and dreams with him than I did with her. Each day at work, I trusted my partner with my life. And then I realized that if he did something wrong, I would no more give him up than I would my own mother. This is the power of a subculture. . . . I had become a fully-fledged member of what sociologists call [a] subculture; a distinct group of people who have patterns of behavior and beliefs that set them apart from society as a whole.44”
― Malcolm K. Sparrow, Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform

“What about the other officers, the bystanders, when a suspect takes a beating? What is running through those officers’ heads? I would guess that there are some with a perverted sense of justice who think everything is fine and that this person deserves this treatment, and I suspect a considerable number know it is not fine and they are deeply uncomfortable. But what will they do? Will they have the courage to intervene, to step forward, to challenge their colleagues, to do the right thing? Feeling uncomfortable will never be enough. This is a call to action.43”
― Malcolm K. Sparrow, Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform

“Problem-oriented policing, which was championed by Professor Herman Goldstein from the 1960s onward, exploits the power of thought and analysis. Its central tenet is simple: police become more effective if they can identify and deal with the underlying issues that generate crime and other public safety concerns, rather than continuing to respond to individual incidents and violations after the fact and one by one.”
― Malcolm K. Sparrow, Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform

“Community policing exploits the power of partnerships, with police and the community working collaboratively to establish priorities within the public safety mission, and working together to deal with the crime problems and other issues nominated as priorities by the community.”
― Malcolm K. Sparrow, Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform

“How could this be, in 2015? The concepts of community-oriented and problem-oriented policing were developed more than thirty years ago, and had become generally accepted by the end of the 1980s as the model for improving policing.”
― Malcolm K. Sparrow, Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform

“Officers’ violations of law and policy, according to the report, included the following:           Stopping people without reasonable suspicion           Using unreasonable force           Interfering with a member of the public’s right to record police activities           Making enforcement decisions based on an individual’s demeanor, language, or expression           Overreacting to challenges and verbal slights (“contempt of cop” cases)           Engaging in patterns of excessive force, often during stops or arrests that had no basis in law, and sometimes in ways that were punitive or retaliatory           Arresting people without probable cause, including instances when they were engaging in protected conduct such as talking back to officers, recording public policing activities, or lawfully protesting perceived injustices           Arresting people simply for failing to obey officers’ orders, when those orders had no legal basis or justification           Releasing canines on unarmed suspects, without first attempting to use other methods less likely to cause injury           Using unnecessary force against vulnerable groups such as those with mental illnesses or cognitive disabilities, and juveniles”
― Malcolm K. Sparrow, Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform

“This emphasis dominated the department’s approach to law enforcement: Patrol assignments and schedules are geared toward aggressive enforcement of Ferguson’s municipal code, with insufficient thought given to whether enforcement strategies promote public safety or unnecessarily undermine community trust and cooperation.”
― Malcolm K. Sparrow, Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform

“City officials exerted constant pressure on police executives to generate more revenue through enforcement, and the pressure was transmitted all the way down through the ranks: The importance of focusing on revenue generation is communicated to FPD officers. Ferguson police officers from all ranks told us [federal investigators] that revenue generation is stressed heavily within the police department, and that the message comes from City leadership. . . . Officer evaluations and promotions depend to an inordinate degree on “productivity,” meaning the number of citations issued.”
― Malcolm K. Sparrow, Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform

“Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs. This emphasis on revenue has compromised the institutional character of Ferguson’s police department, contributing to a pattern of unconstitutional policing, and has also shaped its municipal court, leading to procedures that raise due process concerns and inflict unnecessary harm on members of the Ferguson community.”
― Malcolm K. Sparrow, Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform

“What drove the Ferguson police department was revenue raising, a mission that was accomplished through aggressive use of traffic citations and other municipal code violations. Enforcement was often concentrated on minorities and vulnerable segments of the population. According to the report, city officials made maximizing revenue the priority for Ferguson’s law enforcement activity, completely distorting the character of the police department:”
― Malcolm K. Sparrow, Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform

“For observers of American policing (and, in particular, of troubled police departments), the Department of Justice report contains two major surprises. Not so much the racism, corruption, and patterns of excessive force that the federal investigators uncovered. That such phenomena persist in some departments is sad indeed, but no great surprise. The first real surprise is what motivated the Ferguson police staff. For many American police departments, the primary imperative is to show a reduction in reported crime rates. That mission—controlling crime—would strike most members of the public as an appropriate one for any police department to embrace.”
― Malcolm K. Sparrow, Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform

“The Department of Justice report makes compelling and disturbing reading. It lays bare a policing operation totally focused on the wrong mission and exercising little or no control over the means used to achieve the goals set for that mission.”
― Malcolm K. Sparrow, Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform

“Ronald L. Davis, head of the Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, told the Post reporters, “We have to get beyond what is legal and start focusing on what is preventable. Most [police shootings] are preventable.”15 According to the Department of Justice, “The shooting of unarmed people who pose no threat is disturbingly common.”
― Malcolm K. Sparrow, Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform

“On April 19 Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed during a gun battle with police in the streets of Watertown, Massachusetts. He had been shot several times by police and then run over by his brother, who was fleeing in a stolen SUV. One MBTA police officer was shot and nearly died from blood loss. The surviving brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was found later hiding in a boat in the backyard of a Watertown home and apprehended. Scores of law enforcement officers from federal, state, and local agencies had flooded into the area and cooperated in the search. When it was all over, local residents—who had voluntarily heeded the police request to “shelter in place”—emerged from their homes, gathered on street corners, and spontaneously applauded as buses full of law enforcement officers passed by.”
― Malcolm K. Sparrow, Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform

“Three days later, on April 18, MIT patrol officer Sean Collier was shot dead in his patrol car by bombing suspects Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who were apparently seeking to acquire weapons and perhaps provoke a major confrontation with police. In an extraordinary display of public appreciation for police officers and the dangers they face on a daily basis, more than 10,000 people attended Officer Collier’s funeral.”
― Malcolm K. Sparrow, Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform

“At the scene of the Boston Marathon bombings on April 15, 2013, Boston police officers and other emergency workers instinctively ran toward the site of the explosions to help the injured and take control of the scene, even while nobody knew how many more bombs there might be. Video footage made plain to all the classic courage of first responders reacting to a traumatic situation with professional discipline and putting their own lives at risk for the sake of the public they serve.”
― Malcolm K. Sparrow, Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform

“These are tumultuous times for policing in America. Thanks in part to the almost ubiquitous presence of video cameras, the American public has recently had the chance to see the very best and the very worst of police conduct.”
― Malcolm K. Sparrow, Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform