2023-12-07
47 分钟In policing, as in most vocations, the best employees are often promoted into leadership without much training. One economist thinks he can address this problem — and, with it, America’s gun violence.
This is a scene we recorded recently at a professional training session in Chicago.
We gotta train the way we expect people to perform.
And sometimes when they don't perform in those use of force situations, we kind of have to take a step back and go, well, why would they?
Based on the PowerPoint that they just got.
This training was being held at the University of Chicago.
And if you start doing it in your district, you're going to make a difference, and you're going to see either uses of force go down or the amount of force used.
This is a brand new program called the Policing Leadership Academy.
Now, you may ask yourself, police training at the University of Chicago.
This is a school known for its intense undergrad, core curriculum, for its economics department, and business school for its medical and law schools.
Why would they be teaching police officers?
Heres why, you know, spending time looking at policing and realizing these arent high performing organizations of the sort that you would expect.
That is Jens Ludwig.
He is an economist at UChicago.
He teaches in the public policy school, and he also runs a research center called the crime lab.
Its not hard to go sit in a courtroom, visit a prison or a probation office to understand how they work.
But policing, really real policing, is the most opaque part of this.
And so we went out and spent a lot of time just watching what police do, sitting in police cars and police stations.
One of the biggest surprises to me is that I think in most cities in the United States, they just haven't made the shift to high performance, professionalized organizations yet.
And what do police departments that you work with say, when you say, hey, on average, police departments are not very high functioning?
Well, in my experience, having spent a lot of time around Chicago cops, nobody complains more bitterly about the terrible functioning of the Chicago police Department than Chicago cops.