NEWARK — Speaking to more than 20 local law enforcement leaders Wednesday in a training at Essex County’s Leroy H. Smith Public Safety Building, Scott Cunningham was clear on the risks the profession faces if it doesn’t police its own.
“Once we’ve harmed a citizen, we can never go back and fully regain their trust,” he told the badge-carrying students, who represented communities ranging from Montclair to Nutley.
Key to protecting that trust, he said, is building a dialogue between the community and rank-and-file law enforcement, and creating mechanisms to identify and counsel officers exhibiting bias before their issues necessitate the involvement of internal affairs.
“What we’re trying to do is get officers to recognize it, and slow it down,” Cunningham, a longtime police chief and law enforcement trainer, said during a break in the class.
The two-day training, held Tuesday and Wednesday for command-level staff, was the first organized by Essex County officials since racial bias training was mandated for law enforcement agencies statewide under an October 2016 directive from Attorney General Christopher Porrino.
Acting Essex County Prosecutor Carolyn A. Murray, shown here in a file photo. (Aristide Economopoulos | The Star-Ledger)
While the trainings comply with the attorney general’s orders, Acting County Prosecutor Carolyn Murray said the Essex County trainings were planned prior to Porrino’s directive.
Throughout the summer, she said, the Prosecutor’s Office attended a number of meetings with community leaders in the wake of highly publicized and controversial police shootings in other states.
“The first meeting we were invited to, there was a great outpouring of pain and anger (over negative interactions with police),” Murray said.
After Murray sat in on a one-day training session by Cunningham’s employer, Florida-based Fair & Impartial Policing, “I thought it was very useful,” she said.
The trainings don’t focus on blatant misconduct from what Cunningham calls “active bias,” but rather on identifying and curtailing behaviors that arise from subconscious assumptions.
“We’re talking about implicit bias, which comes from knowing stereotypes,” Cunningham said.
During a morning training session, he used the example of a traffic stop in which the driver was speeding but where the officer may have been suspicious simply because of subconscious concerns of who was in the car.
While implicit bias often takes the form of negative assumptions about race or social groups, Cunningham noted, it can also manifest in terms of preferential views toward people of certain economic status.
“It’s not all about racial bias,” he told the class.
In coming weeks, the Prosecutor’s Office will host a second, “train the trainer” class to train mid-level personnel who can further spread the lessons learned throughout their agencies, according to Katherine Carter, a spokesperson for the Prosecutor’s Office.
The Prosecutor’s Office hopes to have 3,000 law enforcement officers in the county attend the training in 2017, Carter said.
Thomas Moriarty may be reached at tmoriarty@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @ThomasDMoriarty. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
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