Recommended Best Practices
Recommendation 10.6 Implement transparent policies and practices that are centered on internal procedural justice.
Internal procedural justice gives employees a sense of agency and value within departments because their input and feedback are considered in departmental decisions. This, in turn, creates a positive work environment with good morale, which is central to attracting high-quality candidates and grooming them to be the next generation of leaders. To promote internal procedural justice, departments should:
Make promotions systems transparent. Opaque promotions systems instill a sense of unfairness and inequity in police departments.[i]When officers don’t know how or why promotional decisions are made, they often end up resenting fellow officers and supervisors.[ii]
At the Chicago Police Department, the lack of transparency around promotional systems and decisions created a narrative among officers that the department “does not value good leadership” and that “leaders [were] unqualified to lead.”[iii]To increase confidence in the system, leaders should create transparent promotion processes, establish them in policy, and evaluate candidates based on consistent metrics to ensure fairness and equity.
Department leaders should also ensure that performance reviews and appraisals reflect and reinforce community policing values and skills such as dispute resolution, de-escalation, problem-solving, and community engagement.[iv]Likewise, departments should weigh factors that indicate how officers engage on the job. Reviewing sustained complaints against officers will help leaders gauge whether they warrant promotion.[v]
The Civil Rights Act bars promotional exams that disproportionately impact women and applicants of color. As such, all promotional exams should be evaluated on a regular basis to make sure they are fair and lawful.[vi]Departments should also offer them regularly so that qualified candidates are promoted.[vii]This will increase officers’ sense of internal procedural justice and their faith in their departments’ decision-making processes, which will increase retention, especially among officers from underrepresented backgrounds. As with the hiring process, departments can provide test preparation services to improve candidates’ performance on promotional exams.
Invest in professional and career development. Police departments, like other organizations, should invest in professional development. Department leaders should consider how to promote high-performing employees and provide all officers with professional development so they have opportunities to advance in their careers. Departments should also provide training so officers can develop the skills they need to rise up the ranks. (For more detail, see Chapter 11.)
Mentoring is an important component of professional development, particularly for people of color, women, and those from other underrepresented groups, who may need specialized support.[viii]A sustained mentoring initiative for new andexperienced officers throughout their careers communicates that departments value and are invested in officers’ long-term professional growth, which makes them more likely to stay with the department.
Seek community and officer input to promote internal procedural justice. As discussed earlier, departments should cultivate processes and systems that comport with internal procedural justice — including the sense that community members and officers know and understand what is expected of them, their colleagues, and the department. (For more detail, see Chapter 9.) When departments operate and treat officers in a procedurally just manner, officers will apply those principles to their interactions with community members. Research shows that “if departments wish to implement a procedural justice-based approach to policing in their communities, it is essential for those departments to ensure that their internal policies treat officers with fairness and respect.”[ix]
Department leaders should also allow officers to provide input. Evidence suggests that the biggest predictor of engaged, productive teams is the presence of “psychological safety” — people’s belief that they can speak up and take risks without being punished by others in the organization.[x]Psychological safety is related to a positive view of the workplace and an understanding of what is expected of employees.[xi]
Accordingly, department leaders should encourage dialogue between rank-and-file officers and senior managers. Supervisors should be trained on the importance of listening to officers, positively reinforcing strong performance, and mentoring personnel under their command. (For more detail, see Chapter 11.) Modeling these behaviors gives officers space to voice opinions and ask questions,[xii]which, in turn, makes officers more invested in the job, increasing retention.
[i]See, e.g., U.S. Dep’t. Justice Civ. Rights Div. & U.S. Att’y’s Office N.D. Ill., Investigation of the Chi. Police
Dep’t 13, 129 (Jan. 13, 2017) [hereinafter Chi. Investigation],https://www.justice.gov/opa/file/925846/download(noting that the Chicago Police Department “[does] not effectively communicate the details of its promotions process to the rank-and-file, and does not provide sufficient transparency following promotional decisions to allay officer concerns.”).
[ii]See, e.g., id. at 129-34 (describing how the lack of transparency around promotional systems and decisions created a narrative among officers that the department “does not value good leadership, and that current leaders are unqualified to lead”).
[iii]Id. at 129.
[iv]SeeThe Model Police Officer, supranote 8, at 25.
[v]Id.
[vi]Chi. Investigation,supranote 69, at 13.
[vii]Id.
[viii]See, e.g, U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Assistance, Recruiting & Retaining Women: A Self-Assessment Guide for Law Enforcement 4-5, (June 2001), https://www.theiacp.org/sites/default/files/all/p-r/Recruiting_Retaining%20Women%20officers.pdf.
[ix]Megan Quattlebaum, Tracey Meares & Tom Tyler, The Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School, Principles of Procedurally Just Policing 7 (Jan. 2018), https://law.yale.edu/system/files/documents/pdf/policing_report.3.20.18.pdf.
[x]Charles Duhigg, What Google Learned from Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team, N.Y. Times (Feb. 25, 2016), https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html.
[xi]Wendy Hirsch, Five Questions About Psychological Safety, Answered, Science at Work, Oct. 9, 2017, https://scienceforwork.com/blog/psychological-safety/(last visited Dec. 8, 2018).
[xii]Forbes Coaches Council, 14 Ways You Can Improve Psychological Safety at Work, Forbes (Nov. 15, 2017), https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2017/11/15/14-ways-you-can-improve-psychological-safety-at-work/#59393efd5610(last visited Feb. 18, 2019).