Teaching Cops Right from Wrong

By EDWARD BARNES

How do you get a bad cop to be good? In countries that have recently shed authoritarian rule, the issue is especially pressing. "It is a huge transition for the police to go from protecting the interests of the state to protecting its citizens," says Jim Curran, dean of special programs at New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He and his colleagues at the school have developed a course meant to reverse the effects of years of bad police practices. Since 1994, more than 3,000 cops in 50 troubled countries have taken "Human Dignity and Policing," funded by the Department of Justice.

A burly former New York City street cop, Curran knew he wouldn't reach his students just by preaching to them. "You can't lecture someone into change," he says. So he sought to make the lessons deeply personal. Part group therapy, part confessional, the course asks cops first to talk about how they have been humiliated in their lives. In Bosnia police noted that their superiors strip-searched them at the end of each shift to take whatever bribes they had collected. In Latin America cops complained of being regularly forced to do menial work, like building houses for their bosses.

Next, officers are invited to talk about the things they have done that violated the dignity of others. Role-playing exercises require them to step into a suspect's shoes. Over the course of three days, the cops, most of whom are shift commanders, are forced to confront themselves and their past. In one session, a police officer from El Salvador admitted that his superiors told him a prisoner he was escorting should be killed. "I got a hero's medal for murder," he told the stunned class.

"The course can be tough going," says Curran, "but it changes them." In Jamaica cops who returned from the classes immediately began reforming the prisons, allowing inmates basic rights, like making phone calls. In El Salvador graduates began segregating youthful offenders from adults in jail. In other countries cops have incorporated the course's techniques into their training programs. A recent survey of the first crop of graduates concluded that the course had been "a watershed in their own lives."

"We've learned a lot of lessons from the course," says Curran, "but the basic one is that all cops want to have their jobs mean something." Usually something good, it turns out.

--By Edward Barnes