Policing is a reactive profession. We react to situations, to people, and to whatever society wants from us that year.
In 2020, society wanted something different. To ease the civil discourse, a lot of agencies changed how they policed. Crime went up. Murders alone rose almost 30 percent that year, according to the FBI, and it has taken years to get back to where we were before the pandemic.
In hindsight, we should have done what we always knew works.
In the moment, we were trying to earn trust with our communities.
I believe both of those sentences. The first one is easy to say now. The second one is what we were trying to do at the time.
I’ve been reading Nassim Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness this month, and he has a line that fits our business better than it fits his:
“A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.”
He was writing about traders. We already hold officers to the same standard. When someone has a few seconds to make a decision, we’re supposed to judge it by what they knew then, not by what we found out later. It’s in the training and it’s in the case law.
Then we walk into a conference room and forget all of it.
The review starts with how it ended. A decision that went badly gets one kind of meeting. The same decision that happened to work out gets a nod in the hallway, or nothing at all. Same decision.
People notice. The officer who made a reasonable call and got burned for the result notices, and so does everyone who watched it happen. They figure out the real rule pretty fast: don’t decide if you don’t have to, and let someone above you make the call so the ending lands on them. Then we stand at the front of the room and wonder why nobody below us takes initiative.
That isn’t accountability. It’s grading people on luck.
So what about 2020?
The rule has to apply to us too, or it isn’t worth much.
Judging 2020 by the outcome is easy. Crime went up, so the decision was wrong. Done.
Judging it the way Taleb would is harder. What did we know at the time? We knew what works. We’d watched it work for years. We also knew trust was broken in a lot of places, and a police department people don’t trust can’t get much done. Leaders were trying to fix the second problem without giving up the first. Some of them got the balance wrong. I don’t think many of them were acting in bad faith.
The useful question is what we set aside, why we set it aside, and whether we’d make the same call again knowing only what we knew then. That’s the review that teaches the next group of leaders something they can use, because society is going to ask us for something different again. It always does.
Here’s what I’d ask any supervisor to try.
Before anyone in the room says how it turned out, ask the person who made the call what they knew and when they knew it. Let them talk first. Then judge the decision against that. Talk about the result separately, and if a good decision got a bad result, say so in front of the team so they hear it.
Review the lucky ones too. The bad decision that happened to work out is the one most likely to get made again.
And when you make a big call yourself, write your reasoning down. A couple of lines is plenty, as long as it’s written before you know how things end. Hindsight is very good at rewriting memory.
Grade the call with what they knew, not with what you know now.