Who is attracted to policing jobs? | Brian Klaas

• One of the areas that abuse of power has shown up a lot in the news recently is with police abuse. One of the things that's been discussed around police reform is how we can make this stop, how we can end up fixing policing. A lot of the discussion is on a part of the problem that absolutely warrants attention, but is only part of the problem, and that's what the police do.

So this involves solutions like putting body cameras on police officers, oversight, scrutiny, basically; trying to make it so that there's deterrents to stop police officers abusing their position. What we don't think about often is not what the police do, but who the police are.

On one end of the spectrum, people say that "This is anti-police because the data show that certain types of people are more attracted to policing, who frankly, shouldn't be in a uniform, and therefore, I'm trying to paint the police as some group of bad people." Which is not what I'm saying. On the other end of the spectrum, politically, people are saying, "This is naive. Policing is fundamentally going to have these problems because the institution of policing was set up to abuse people."

The way I came to this problem was to look at how recruitment of police officers determines who ends up in the uniform. And I was scouring across the United States and looking at various police departments, and one that stood out to me is this small suburb of Atlanta called Doraville, Georgia.

Now, when you used to click on Doraville's website for the police department, you are greeted with this video, that is quite frankly, insane. The first thing you see is a literal tank with the SWAT Team inside of it, screaming across the frame. They're in military uniforms, they're carrying assault weapons, and they toss smoke grenades out of the vehicle. They shoot their weapons, and the whole thing is set to the soundtrack of death metal music.

The people who look at that video and think, "Wow, that looks cool. I'd love to drive around Walmart in a tank with a smoke grenade and a huge weapon"- they sign up. Now, New Zealand thought about it carefully. So I spoke to people in my research who had designed a system of recruitment that they called, "Do You Care Enough To Be A Cop?"

Basically, what they start with is this very funny video, in which police officers are chasing an unseen suspect, but stopping to help people cross the street, dancing with someone with a boombox for a bit, telling jokes that are quite funny.

• 'You kind of just ruined my flow now, there was supposed to be a big buildup, and now we have to go over this whole section again.'

• 'Who's we?'

And then at the end of the video, they finally catch the perpetrator, which turns out to be a border collie who's stolen a woman's purse, and "Do You Care Enough To Be A Cop?" flashes on the screen.

And what happened in New Zealand was that the number of recruits shot through the roof. Their applicant pool expanded dramatically. People who didn't previously see themselves as police officers started to think, "I could do that job because I care about the community."

The juxtaposition with the Punisher logo and the tank, compared to the border collie and the "Do You Care Enough To Be a Cop?" logo is so extreme that it's almost amusing. It's two parallel worlds of policing that are drastically different.

It's not that we can ignore what the police do; we absolutely have to have oversight and very close scrutiny of police officers who abuse their authority. But at the same time, we have to think more carefully about who ends up in the uniform, to begin with.

This shows up in the data when you see that the rates of domestic abuse among police officers in the United States is higher than the general average in the public. So, you know, when you think about why that's happening, perhaps it's that the job is making them a bit more on edge or causing them to behave in certain ways.

I think what's more likely is that people who are abusive are disproportionately likely to seek out a job in which you can abuse people. So that means you have ever-more important scrutiny and ever-more important screening of who becomes a cop in the first place.

That aspect of recruitment is often not part of the discussion. So I think we absolutely have to think about what the police do, but we also have to devote just as much attention to who the police are.

Now, I'm not naive enough to think that my proposals mean that we will never have police abuse, we'll never have police violence- these are deeply ingrained problems. I do think that we are not picking the low-hanging fruit of how we address some of these problems, and that means that we have to think more carefully about how we can make marginal improvements that add up.

You have to make police behave better so that people want to be officers, and you have to present policing as though it is better, so that people apply when they are publicly minded as public servants, rather than people who like the idea of holding power with a badge and a gun.

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