6. Change Response to Students to Avoid Criminalizing Youth While Maintaining a Learning Environment
FPD has the opportunity to profoundly impact students through its SRO program. This program can be used as a way to build positive relationships with youth from a young age and to support strategies to keep students in school and learning. FPD should:
- Work with school administrators, teachers, parents, and students to develop and implement policy and training consistent with law and best practices to more effectively address disciplinary issues in schools. This approach should be focused on SROs developing positive relationships with youth in support of maintaining a learning environment without unnecessarily treating disciplinary issues as criminal matters or resulting in the routine imposition of lengthy suspensions;
- Provide initial and regularly recurring training to SROs, including training in mental health, counseling, and the development of the teenage brain;
- Evaluate SRO performance on student engagement and prevention of disturbances, rather than on student arrests or removals;
- Regularly review and evaluate incidents in which SROs are involved to ensure they meet the particular goals of the SRO program; to identify any disparate impact or treatment by race or other protected basis; and to identify any policy, training, or equipment concerns.
7. Implement Measures to Reduce Bias and Its Impact on Police Behavior
Many of the recommendations listed elsewhere have the potential to reduce the level and impact of bias on police behavior (e.g., increasing positive interactions between police and the community; increasing the collection and analysis of stop data; and increasing oversight of the exercise of police discretion). Below are additional measures that can assist in this effort. FPD should:
- Provide initial and recurring training to all officers that sends a clear, consistent and emphatic message that bias-based profiling and other forms of discriminatory policing are prohibited. Training should include:
- Relevant legal and ethical standards;
- Information on how stereotypes and implicit bias can infect police work;
- The importance of procedural justice and police legitimacy on community trust, police effectiveness, and officer safety;
- The negative impacts of profiling on public safety and crime prevention;
- Provide training to supervisors and commanders on detecting and responding to bias-based profiling and other forms of discriminatory policing;
- Include community members from groups that have expressed high levels of distrust of police in officer training;
- Take steps to eliminate all forms of workplace bias from FPD and the City.
8. Improve and Increase Training Generally
FPD officers receive far too little training as recruits and after becoming officers. Officers need a better knowledge of what law, policy, and integrity require, and concrete training on how to
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