Racing to the Bottom
Why Are US Police Standards Dictated By The Least-Skilled Officers?
I was a part-time bouncer back in my undergraduate and early postgraduate days in the UK.
I was paid the princely sum of £3.50 (CAD$6 / $4.50 USD) per hour to deal with drunks and stop fights in bars and clubs. We also retrieved overdosing clients from toilet-stalls, gave first-aid to victims of assault, removed used syringes from fire-escapes, wrestled weapons from people trying to rob the bar, ejected Nazis, and sheltered sexual-abuse victims.
I did the job for three years, partly because I was a non-traditional student who was flat-broke and desperate for the work. We had no PPE, no insurance, and no professional union.
Skills with responsibility.
Something we did have was basic, mandatory training. This was the early 1990s and the city council had implemented a new system of door-staff registration, meaning that no licensed venue or event could employ door-security who hadn’t attended a training course and gained a badge. No badge? No work.
Our quick-thinking Student Union had paid for some student training so that they could access registered staff for its bars and events, and my cohort included undergraduates and postgraduates who were already working as door security, as well as veteran bouncers from across the city.
The old-hands were mountainous, gentle, hugely welcoming and terrifyingly smart. Despite being reasonably large, tough and seasoned ourselves, we students quickly felt very small and very green.
The training took place in the police station gym and was delivered by gnarly, old-school, fat-fisted officers from both the local police force and the local prison. It covered alcohol licensing laws, de-escalation of conflict, effective listening, watching and speaking, citizens’ rights under the law, and how to make detailed reports of incidents for use in potential criminal proceedings.
Only when those softer, smarter skills had been covered in detail was there any mention of the use of force. It was hammered into us, loudly and clearly, that using force was an absolute last resort, and that there were strict laws on exactly how it may be used.
Resorting to force would forever be a sign that the bouncer in question was lacking those other, smarter skills.
The mountains nodded.
Crucially, we were then taught when it was (and wasn’t) appropriate to restrain an individual, and how to do it in a way that was safe and appropriate for the person being restrained. Some very clear points were made about the term ‘safe and appropriate’:
the bouncer won’t know the health, mobility or mental state of the person they’re dealing with so they must be observant and responsive to signs or statements of difficulty from the person being restrained (such as, ‘I can’t breathe.’);
the easiest method to use in the heat of the moment may not be safe or legal, and door security have a responsibility to work out the safest effective and legal technique in each case;
some restraint methods are banned from use by police and prison services because they can cause permanent injury or death to absolutely anyone.
We were taught basic joint-locks, uncomfortable but loose holds, various blocks and feints — all to the amused approval of fellow bouncers who were already black-belts in the martial arts they were borrowed from.
Again, the ultimate aim was to never use them.
Choke and ‘scarf’ holds were explicitly banned. Restraining a larger person while laying them on their front was also banned. And using a knee to place your weight onto any focused point other than a limb was also banned.
Doing these things would certainly lose you your badge and probably result in a criminal charge of common assault, which we all thought seemed right and fair.
Self-regulation.
Of course, attending a course doesn’t mean that people will use what they’ve learned properly. So, because we often worked in teams (and because one weak link in the team could affect how much work we all got), we policed things between ourselves — we held each other to a high standard and tried to use the training well.
As a supervisor, I had a responsibility to spot and respond to any slip in standards in the team, especially during high-pressure situations. This might involve directing my staff to back-off, to step-in, to stop speaking and listen, to substitute the staff member involved in an exchange for someone with a cooler head, or to end an intervention entirely.
Any ‘bad apples’ (we used a far more colorful term for them) were called out for their behaviour during debriefs. They would often be passed-over for entire shifts and they certainly wouldn’t be offered overtime or promotion.
Importantly, there was a sense of seniority among badge holders. Our licenses were numbered sequentially, with the lower numbers signifying a longer length of service. My number was 47 but I regularly worked with people whose badge number was in three or even four digits.
Everyone deferred to the lowest number on duty, and those people understood the absolute requirement to lead by good example.
Responsible amateurs.
We were no angels. We didn’t always do our jobs as well as we might have, and there was always room for improvement. Some bouncers would still behave poorly until they understood the not-so-subtle messages from their co-workers and either straightened-out or exited the role.
But very few registered door-staff in that place and that time received complaints severe enough to lose their city-issued badge, and there was a sense of collective failure if they did.
We were just part-time door-staff. Practically amateurs, taking no pledge, receiving no public funding, with only a sliver of public accountability, facing various weapons and routine abuse with only our bare hands and some effective phrases to protect us, earning pennies, receiving no benefits, with no pension to look forward to or professional union to hide behind.
We could have become that disillusioned group of misunderstood front-liners demanding more and doing less, but we didn’t. Many people disliked us because we spoiled their shenanigans, but we were never feared, distrusted or hated.
We saw the rules as tools to help drive standards up, not as unwelcome hindrances that stifled some sense of dominance and authority.
We took responsibility for our actions and worked hard to maintain positive, safe spaces for ourselves and the people we served.
And we refused to allow a system to take-hold where standards were set by the worst of us rather than the best, resulting in a futile race to the bottom of a rotten barrel.
Why is it so hard for so many oath-swearing, publicly funded, well-armed, highly trained, union protected, police officers to do the same?
You can find out more about police reform at 8CantWait.org.