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A society wants order and the police were developed as the government vehicle to achieve that goal. There is often tension between the goal of order and how it is achieved. The tension often results from errors on the part of the responding officer. This explains why alternative methods for dealing with lower-level social disorders have been explored. Nevertheless, alternative systems to deal with order maintenance and peace keeping may carry their own risks and unknown costs. How do we know precisely the risk level of different call types? Should regular police officers continue to respond to low-level problems? Joining the podcast is Dr. Loren Atherley, the Sr Director of Performance Analytics & Research and the Senior Research Scientist for the Seattle Police Department. We discuss his recent study titled, Risk Managed Demand: Operational Risk Management in Police Response to Calls for Service.

Main Topics

• An “all-hazards response” is the traditional approach to social problems that require police intervention.
• Risk Management literature tells us that risk can be minimized but not eliminated. So, how much risk are we prepared to accept with a non-officer response?
• The research identified 4 tiers of social response.
• There is no clearly identified “call type” that is low hazard; rather a model of call triage is being developed.

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Mental health calls to the police can be challenging for many reasons. One of the primary problems with sending the police is that they are not usually properly trained to handle a person experiencing a mental health crisis. The past few years have seen shifts from a law enforcement to a service response. The Co-Responder model melds police officers and social service clinicians with the goal of improving services while maintaining safety for the responders, the public, and the patient. Dr. Vaughn Crichlow, the dean of the School of Justice Studies at Roger Williams University joins the podcast to discuss his recent study exploring the perspectives of police and clinicians and their perceived impact of the co-responder program.

Main Topics

• Both officers and clinicians bring different perspectives that needed to be understood by each other to develop a successful co-responder program.
• The research uncovered different themes, such as sense-making, collaboration, and safety, that will be important for agencies interested in developing a co-responder model.
• The public believes these programs are important, but there can still be hurdles in their acceptance if they have questions about police legitimacy.
• The co-responder model does not replace the police; it is a collaborative approach to handle these calls for service.

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Increasing the number of female police officers is a challenge for police agencies. While there has been ample research on this topic, the issue remains, and so the research continues. Dr. Kathleen Padilla, from the School of Criminal Justice & Criminology at Texas State University, joins the podcast to discuss her 2024 study exploring the advice current and former female officers would give those who are thinking about entering the police profession.

Main Topics

• Females in policing can no longer be considered “token” hires.
• The “30x30” program is intended to increase the number of female officers.
• Cultural and operational changes may have already improved female representation.

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The goal of this podcast is provide the police community with research information to improve their work or help solve a problem. I could not do this without the research that is produced by scholars who have a solid working relationship with police agencies. It’s helpful that this topic itself, police-researcher collaborations, has been studied to understand the motivations and barriers to this relationship. Dr. Jeff Rojek from Michigan State University discusses his work in this area. One of the more important findings from the research may be the result of what the study does not examine: both sides, the police and the researcher, have a responsibility to cultivate these relationships.

Main Topics

• Larger agencies are more likely to have a relationship with a researcher (no surprise there, really).
• A researcher may carry a larger burden when cultivating these relationships.
• Researchers should produce a research that is both tactically and strategically useful to the police. Translate the research into a usable framework.

Citation: Rojek, J., Shjarback, J. A., Hansen, J. A., & Alpert, G. P. (2019). Present but not prevalent: identifying the organizational correlates of researcher-practitioner partnerships in US Law Enforcement. Police Practice & Research, 20(6).

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There are many new training programs being offered to police officers, and policy reforms are almost as prevalent. This is no surprise, as both training and reforms are intended to improve modern policing. What is less understood is the multi-dimensional aspects of training and reforms, and the diversity of police culture, which can impact the acceptance of both training topics and policy reforms. Trey Bussey joins the podcast to discuss the complex relationship between all three concepts, and that police leaders need to consider this relationship if improvements are going to be successful.

Main Topics

• All training is not created equal.
• Police culture is a diverse as any other culture.
• Most officers, regardless of their guardian or warrior orientation, look favorably on most training topics, but they see police reforms differently.

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The answer to problems in policing is better policing, not its abolition. If the move to eliminate policing were successful, “people will hate you.” That was the response of Dr. Paige Vaughn, assistant professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of South Carolina. In this episode, Dr. Vaughn explains that studying the public’s perception of the police is nuanced, but the bottom-line finding is that the public expects the police to be part of most emergency responses, crime or otherwise. Our conversation also moved into aspects of organizational justice and job enrichment. In the long run, efforts to improve policing can benefit the community as well as the officers themselves.

Main Topics

• Understanding the public’s opinion of the police is much more complex than simply slogans about defunding the police.
• Improving policing is preferred over defunding or abolition.
• The mere perception that policing is being diluted or eliminated can threaten their legitimacy, which can lead to an increased perception of crime, increased fear, and even lower police legitimacy.

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Policing tactics are directly related to those used to improve public health (e.g., the impact of abandoned housed on crime and interventions to reduce gun violence). Policing can also benefit by including success stories along the lines of those used by many industries: counting the number of accident-free days. Dr. Branas, the Chair of the department of epidemiology at Columbia University, discusses a recent study that supports using “shooting-free days” to measure crime prevention success. Dr. Branas suggests that this approach does not replace counting shootings; rather, it provides a counter approach to understanding harm.

Main Topics

• Measuring the number of shooting-free days, and a few other similar metrics, offer a different perspective on violent crime.
• This study examined gun violence data from 10 large cities as a proof-of-concept.
• The same simple calculations can be used in any city that experiences violent crime, particularly shootings.

Here is the citation for the research:

Branas, C. C., Plumber, I., Bennett, R., Landes, O., & Rajan, S. (2026, March). Shooting-Free Days as a New Metric of Success in Reducing Firearm Violence. In JAMA Health Forum (Vol. 7, No. 3, p. e260078). American Medical Association.

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Policing includes more than just law enforcement. Crime reduction is a thinking game: how can the police succeed while also saving their own time and resources? Hunter M. Boehme, an assistant professor in the Department of Criminology & Criminal Justice at the University of South Carolina, joins the podcast to discuss what I call “less formal” methods for reducing crime.

Main Topics

• Soft power is still power. Enforcing civil code violations can be used to reduce some violent crimes.
• Non-sworn policing personnel, or even city employees, can provide a light footprint to improve an area.
• While property crime was reduced at a statistically significant level, other violent crimes still declined.
• “Better” does not have to be statistically significant, it just has to be better.

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Feel free to email me your comments using the "send us a text" option (above), or at the following email address: policeinservicetrainingpodcast@gmail.com

You can also contact me at: Bluesky: @policeinservice.bsky.social