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We want them to protect us and maintain law and order. We authorize them to use force, lethal, if necessary, and we expect them to get it right every time. And when the police err, we get angry.

We’ve seen a number of police shootings nationwide, and the shootings that cause us concern often involve white officers shooting black men. The optics aren’t good, as they say, and the question that always follows is, were the officer’s actions justified?  But there’s a more important question: how do we minimize mistakes?

Because it’s hard to make sense of what we see, I spent some time with Commander Robert Meader, who leads the Columbus Division of Police Training Bureau, and three of his instructors. Before getting to that, let’s look at the big picture.

In 2017, Columbus police responded to over 600,000 incidents, resulting in 22,228 custodial arrests. Force—everything from throwing a punch to using a firearm—was used 438 times; firearms were used 13 times. That same year, the police recovered 2750 firearms—that’s seven guns a day—the large majority of which were not lawfully possessed.

Meader invited me to participate in live training that involves realistic scenarios. It was eye-opening. I didn’t recognize potential threats until it was too late. My performance was, well, not good.    

I watched recruits perform. Besides dealing with potential and obvious threats, there’s the stress element and dealing with distractions. You hope the training takes over instinctively and the recruits will think clearly and not emotionally, but mistakes are made. And when a recruit errs, instructors move in to discuss what went wrong and alternatives that were overlooked.

Back to the primary question: how do we minimize mistakes? Let’s start with the premise they’re inevitable. As Meader puts it, “We only hire imperfect human beings because that’s all that’s available.” He places emphasis on the culture of a police department and advocates a culture of training, accountability and discipline.

“We train beyond the standards mandated for us,” Meader says. Minimizing errors is a matter of good initial training, realistic scenarios and continuing education, his instructors explained. Meader stated it’s a matter of “trying to develop good habit patterns, similar to muscle memory in sports. And what we do has to comply with the law, and so we regularly train on legal issues that affect our work.”   

When there’s a problem, the situation is investigated, and, if warranted, remedial training is mandated. The mistakes made by officers are used as training opportunities for others. It’s how you develop, Meader says, “a culture of accountability.”

Still, there are complications. The Plain View project revealed that several Philadelphia police officers were posting bigoted and hate-filled posts on social media. Were warning signs overlooked? Can these officers be trusted? Should they be required to undergo evaluation, or should they be dismissed? The point is, there are subsurface issues that affect the integrity of a police force and have to be dealt with. 

And there’s the matter of what the public thinks it knows about police work from the usually unrealistic world of TV and movies. Our predetermined attitudes set our expectations when we watch body cam footage.

Adding to the complexity is the judicial system. Sometimes police officers are not indicted or are acquitted in situations that to the public call for a different result. Juries—there’s that human element again—can get things wrong. Or maybe these are situations where we think we know better, even though we didn’t sit through the grand jury proceedings or trial and listen to all the testimony and see all the evidence.

At the risk of appearing to be an apologist for law enforcement, where there is human endeavor, there will always be error. The best we can do is conduct routine training and remedial training, when required, and foster a culture of accountability and discipline so as to minimize mistakes.

[This post was published as an op-ed in The Columbus Dispatch on August 2, 2019.]

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Jack D’Aurora writes for Considerthisbyjd.com

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