Let’s get serious and let’s get uncomfortable.
Rhetorical question:
how many of you or someone you love have had an encounter with the police?
And if you can answer that yes,
just acknowledge your privilege;
but for a moment, let’s sit in this room and let’s feel the energy around us.
Because there are people here
who’ve have had encounters with the police that have not gone so well.
So, just notice the discomfort.
And a few questions with more discomfort.
Why is it in the world’s greatest democracy
that so many people of color are oppressed by our criminal justice system?
And why is it that so many marginalized people have to fear the police?
And why are the articulate and intelligent voices of police reform
so frequently muted by the rhetoric of police system and culture?
And maybe I could also ask why these questions are so uncomfortable?
There are no simple answers.
What we do know is that we all must come together
with open hearts and open minds
and find our way forward in this thing that we call police reform.
As Professor Phil Goff likes to say,
“The police are the people, and the people are the police.”
We’re existing in an institutional failure in American policing right now.
And this leadership failure can be seen sometimes graphically
within the police that are sending encounters across America.
And perhaps less visibly, it can be seen
within the sordid health matrix of police officers themselves.
It’s this suffering that I like to frame
as the suffering on both sides of the badge.
I stand between two worlds that we need to unite:
police officers and the people that we serve.
And what stands in our way
Is police culture, traditional police leadership models,
and the ever growing hostility toward police officers themselves.
Imagine if we could train police officers with evident space skills
that would allow us
to cultivate our humanity over the course of our career,
to bolster our capacity for sense making and decision making under stress,
ti open our hearts and our mind
to our own bias and judgment against others,
and to ground our culture in compassion.
This capability exists now.
It’s at the confluence of contemplative wisdom and science,
and we call this mindfulness.
As a police officer for two decades,
I am keenly aware that most of the men and women who serve as police officers
have a deeply rooted humanity.
And over the course of our careers,
the occupational stress and acute traumas that we face
have a negative impact.
Compassion fatigue and burnout visit us with predictability,
and this is just the beginning of the story of our suffering.
The good news is that science can show us a path forward.
We can train in emotional intelligence
and cultivate humanity and resiliency among police officers.
We can transform police leadership and police culture,
and perhaps, even most importantly,
we can heal this broken relationship
between police and our communities in so many places in America.
In 2013, my training and research team at Pacific University, in Oregon,
trained 40 police officers
in an eight-week mindful and space resilience intervention.
And we found some very promising results.
We found reductions in stress,
we found improvements in sleep management.
Improvements in pain management,
but most notably, we found a reduction in self reported anger.
Not only were we able to get cops to the dojo to train in meditation
– which is a whole other story that requires profanity –
(Laughter)
but we were able to find evidence that suggests
that mindfulness intervention needs to be
at the table in the conversations around police reform.
And so far, getting to that table is a real challenge.
Police officers are asked to serve in a landscape
that is a chaos of failed social systems, economic and justice policies,
institutionalized racism, and the all too frequent dark side of human behavior.
We encounter suffering and violence up close, and in high definition,
and in places and ways that none of us want to experience.
We work with communities that are often squeezed by social pressures,
that their hope has been stolen by forces of addiction, child abuse,
family violence, poverty,
and other forces that marginalize and oppress.
And so here we have it.
We have suffering police officers who bump up against the suffering community
and we expect positive outcomes.
In order for us to evolve policing in the 21st century,
we need transformation,
and mindfulness can lead a police culture that, as Richard Strozzi-Heckler writes,
“is grounded in compassion, pragmatic wisdom, and skillful action.”
This is the warrior ethos of equanimity and social justice
that we need in our profession.
We can train and sustain
emotional intelligence and cognitive performance.
Awareness and compassion are the gateway
for peak physical performance, peak cognitive performance
and the foundation for equanimity and social justice in police culture.
We can integrate mindfulness into other contemporary efforts
to reform policing, like procedural justice,
fair and impartial policing. And perhaps, even more significantly,
we can bring training to impact bias in policing
that changes us from the inside out.
Instead of creating policies to direct police officers not to be biased,
we can teach them about it, and we can eradicate it.
So our first step is mindfulness based resilience training,
which we’re doing in Oregon.
Our second step is mindful leadership training,
and the Drucker School of Management at Claremont in California
is driving that effort.
Earlier this year, my research team recruited 60 police officers
in the Portland metro area to train in an eight-week mindfulness intervention.
We’re just finishing up that training, and looking at our preliminary data,
and we’re seeing some interesting things.
We’re seeing a reduction in cortisol levels
– That’s pretty important –
and we’re seeing a reduction in alcohol use;
but perhaps, most interesting,
we’re seeing a reduction in self reported aggression.
Remember, in our first study we found a reduction in self reported anger.
So what we know is that mindfulness teaches skills in emotion regulation,
and imagine the impact on policing for just this reason.
A mindful police culture changes
how we, police officers, show up on a radio call.
It allows us to meet our community in their suffering and in their crisis,
without bringing our own unregulated emotion
which is often a source of cognitive failure.
It will change how we lead ourselves and change how we lead others
in our organizations.
I have hope in our collective humanity.
I have hope that we can all come together with an open heart and an open mind,
without vilifying each other,
come together with love, and come together mindfully,
and work to lead police culture forward.
Police reform will not happen from the inside exclusively.
It’ll happen from the inside of this machine,
but it won’t happen inside the institution without your engagement.
So I would encourage you
to engage your police leaders and your community leaders
in conversations around contemplative practice,
around the mindfulness research that we’re doing out in Oregon,
and it’s begun elsewhere,
Madison Wisconsin, and soon in other places.
So, the work that we need to do, the effort we need to make,
we have to do this together.
So, I encourage you to join us in this effort of police reform
and thank you so much for being here.
(Applause)
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