MPD, culture and critical mass

Here’s a quiz.

The most important reason to rebuild the Minneapolis Police Department back to its 2018 numbers is:

1. To improve public safety
2. To meet or exceed the city charter requirement
3. To reduce overtime – saves money, fewer burned out cops

All of the above are correct, but here is an even more important reason:

Hiring at least 146 cops (to meet the charter requirement) and as many as 307 (to get back to 2018 level) is the city’s best hope to bring about, in a reasonable amount of time, the cultural change in MPD that almost everyone agrees is necessary.

Why? We can find the answer in an unlikely place: physics. Nuclear physics gave us the concept of critical mass, which is the amount of fissile material needed to maintain a nuclear chain reaction. The social sciences have borrowed the concept, to define critical mass as an amount large enough to produce a particular result.

The “particular result” within MPD we are aiming for is a culture of policing that emphasizes public safety, to be sure, but achieved in a professional manner that enjoys good relations with the community, and treats everyone with respect. A culture that attracts people drawn to public service, not to the opportunity to be issued a badge and a gun to intimidate the poor and the powerless.

The path to this culture is not continuing to shrink the MPD – the quite apparent goal of the current city council majority – and then training those remaining to evolve from the cops they are to the cops we want them to be¹. Rather, the path is to hire more cops, the kind of cops we want, and enough of them to become critical mass.

Here’s how the executive search firm, Korn Ferry, has defined critical mass:

“When enough employees share a particular characteristic, attitude or behavior, it can significantly influence the overall workplace culture, often leading to a noticeable shift or change in how things are done within the organization. Essentially, a tipping point where a smaller group’s influence becomes widespread due to their growing presence.”

How many is “enough?” Korn Ferry, Wikipedia, and some Minnesota law enforcement leaders writing in Ms. Magazine have all suggested the magic number is around 30%: the “number of personnel needed to affect policy and make change not as a token but as an influential body.”

If nuclear physics is a surprising source of insight about improving the MPD culture, Ms. Magazine may also seem an odd place to look. But in June, 2020, six former Minnesota police executives² published an article called “Women in Law Enforcement Must Have a Seat at the Table.”

The authors described the “us-vs.-them” mentality that easily infects police departments “even when top leadership is benevolent.” They cited research indicating that women “usually do not use excessive force and tend to be more oriented toward community policing.” But rather than resting their case on the rather weak assertion that it’s a good thing to hire women, they argued for critical mass. They said, “we are not talking about a few token women – but when gender parity is realized, policing fundamentally changes.”

This is not to say, they added, “that women in law enforcement never act inappropriately, or that they are better police officers than men. But (they) respond differently.”

They also cited Sir Robert Peel, considered the father of modern British policing, who in 1829 described the critical characteristic of effective and humane police work: be even-tempered, reserved and principled in enforcing the laws. These characteristics, if held universally within any police organization, might strike you as the elements of a healthy culture.

The Ms. Magazine article, unsurprisingly, emphasized the importance of achieving a critical mass of women in law enforcement. With full deference to the authors, the claim here is broader. When we speak of hiring “the kind of cops we want,” we include women, and also people of color, people who grew up in Minneapolis (or who live in Minneapolis even if they grew up elsewhere), people who are more interested in a badge as a passport  to serve their community than as a license to exercise high-handed authority.

Putting some numbers to this, if we merely hire from the current cop count of 585 to the charter requirement of 731, and do a good job of hiring “the kind of cops we want,” the new hires will be 20% of the total department. If we hire to the 2018 level of 892, then new hires will make up 34% of the total. If we split the difference and end up with 811 officers, 28% of them will be new hires.

Whatever the exact number, these figures get us very close to, if not over, critical mass.

So let’s end the foot-dragging, get on with an aggressive hiring program, one that’s even more aggressive than the charter or the consent decrees will require. Faster than other strategies, this approach will give us a new and better MPD culture.

¹ The author’s view is that the large majority of current MPD officers conduct themselves professionally and want to serve the community well. But even they are products of their own history, serving in a department that has tolerated, if not encouraged, gratuitious violence and racism.

² Laura Goodman, former deputy chief, Brooklyn Center, former state ombudsman for crime victims

Juliann Brunzell, former special agent at BCA

Kris Arneson, former assistant chief, Minneapolis

Linda Finney, former superintendent, BCA

Deborah Montgomery, former assistant commissioner, Minnesota Department of Public Safety, and former senior commander, St. Paul police department

Linda S. Miller, former sergeant, Bloomington, and founding director, Upper Midwest Community Policing Institute