Robert Stewart, Director - Policing with Our Community

Join Bob Plaschke, CEO of PepperBall, in First Response, a podcast dedicated to diving deep into the lives and challenges of emergency responders. In Episode 6, Bob Stewart, a seasoned law enforcement executive with over 50 years of experience, discusses the evolution of policing, community engagement, and police accountability. Stewart's rich career spans leadership roles across various police departments and his insights into operationalizing community efforts, rethinking patrol structures, and addressing modern challenges in policing provide valuable lessons for today’s public safety leaders. Tune in to gain a deeper understanding of the issues shaping public safety in America today. 

Transcript

Episode 6 Robert Stewart

[00:00:00] Hello there. My name is Bob Plaschke, and for most of my adult life, I've had the privilege to spend time with and serve emergency responders. First Response is an effort to get behind the badge and understand the highs and lows that emergency responders face and how they handle them, and to understand the issues that affect public safety in America today.

This podcast is sponsored by Pepperball, where I have the honor to serve as the CEO. Pepperball makes a non lethal alternative to guns that police agencies across the United States use to keep themselves and the public they serve safe. My guest today, and I'm super excited about having him on, is Bob Stewart.

Now, Bob's background is he's served over 50 years in law enforcement in one way or the other. I'm going to go through the His long list of accolades. And then get, I get him up and talking first of [00:01:00] all, just educationally fantastic guy graduated from Howard university has a Degree from American University, went to the FBI Academy a degree from the University of District of Columbia in public policy, George Washington University in contemporary education development in Florida State University and Public Administration.

Bob has been a an executive and that means major. Lieutenant Major Captain Chief across multiple agencies, the captain of the D. C. Metropolitan Police, a major Tallahassee, Florida Police Department, the chief of police at Ormond Beach Police Department of Florida. Director of training in Louisville Metropolitan Police, my hometown headed up Rutgers University on an interim basis to help them, Camden, New Jersey Police Department.

And then was the executive director of NOBLE. And for those that don't know what the acronym NOBLE is, it's a fantastic organization that I've worked with before, the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives. [00:02:00] an organization that's super important to policing and as, as policing evolves.

Bob today spends his time in between watching NASCAR and baseball games with his wife spends his time focusing on community engagement and police accountability. Bob, welcome. Tell us what is community engagement and what is police accountability and are they even related? Thanks, Bob. And thanks for having me.

Am still trying to get my arms around a really short definition of community engagement, but I think it begins by differentiating it from community policing. And I think the common understanding is just that community engagement is a new name for community policing, and we should continue doing that.

The same kinds of activities, which are largely crime prevention kinds of activities, but I think what we have found [00:03:00] more specifically is because we began to have gun violence in some of our major cities, police departments began looking at different ways to not only do crime intervention and reduction, but also get the community involved.

So over the last 25 years, as we have done a very good job of increasing Our crime fighting ability. We recognize that this doesn't work without community engagement. So the early parts of police network investigations or operation ceasefire that have been in, in operation now for probably. About 20 years, we're finally learning that we must have a much more intentional partnership with community resources.

I think I [00:04:00] generally divide them into crime prevention and emergency management, where people get together in, in, areas that really aren't police driven. They're public safety driven. And during that process, we get to know each other. The second big area, of course, is crime intervention and crime reduction.

And that the euphemism is that we need to do a community ComStat. We need to sit down with our community partners and actually talk about, number one, repeat calls for service. Where do the police go over and over again where we need to bring remedies to stop going to that particular house or business and find out what's causing problems there that get the police attention and then eliminate them.

Then the third part is that blends over into the accountability area [00:05:00] is having watched the proliferation of police oversight bodies leads to the question of. Is this the real approach that we ought to have to get accountability, or should we hold police command staff responsible for policing the police?

Either way, we recognize that we need a lot more transparency about the, nature of our efforts to reduce police officers who either never should have been hired in the first place or whose conduct runs contrary to both our departmental and community standards. And finding ways of either correcting that behavior and that performance or severing those employees from the workforce.

So there is that tie, I think that comes back to accountability [00:06:00] and the work that I've been doing in consent decrees, but I think I bring a view of. The consent decree, which is not necessarily an academic endeavor, but how does it affect the operational design of the department and what does it tell us about operationalizing the activities in the consent decree?

Just like we try to operationalize the activities in community engagement, one of the big failings of about in community policing. Now that we've been doing it for 50 years was that we really never operationalized it. We didn't carve out activities for patrol officers that were a part of that effort.

We tended to do what was operational. Became the major operational design, which was to create more specialized units. So while we were beefing up [00:07:00] our investigative units and our traffic units to be specialized in that function, we did the same thing with community engagement, which was to take a group of officers who, who did very well in communicating.

with community members. And they did this from headquarters completely bypassing the officers who work out in the field and the results. I think you can see when you go to community. I've been to town hall meetings And they're fascinating to watch because the community police officers are in there, they know everybody, they're hugging and kissing people, but the patrol officers are standing in back having a conference within the cells, not engaging in those rooms.

And so I think At the end of the day, we're looking for more intentional relationships and more productive relationships that actually have citizens participating in the activities of the [00:08:00] organization and assisting in helping design the course of the future of the organization. It's it's interesting you you talk about the change in policing.

And before we started the podcast, you were mentioning the bus that we built to manage 911 calls back in the sixties and seventies. That's no longer, that bus is being used for doing a bunch of stuff that, that bus was never designed for. And to your point, as.

the agencies tried to react and create special specialties, specialty groups to deal with those additional problems. They then to some degree, the day to day policing group left, got left behind. And so it's almost, and is that a fair way of describing the kind of the challenge of specialization and where we are today in terms of what policing police are asked to do today?

I think so. And when you look at the numbers real legitimate [00:09:00] 911 emergencies take up a relatively small proportion of officer time. It's probably less than 5 or 6%. Of all officer time, most officer, patrol officer time is spent in non emergency service, and it's been confounded because people use 911 not for what it was intended, which was emergencies, and we mistakenly started to capture non emergency response time.

But, I think there were warnings along the way and in some materials that were written all the way back in. Like 1972 or 73 that talked about differential response and how we had to manage these calls for service in different ways. And I think it, it really came full circle and we didn't take advantage of the discussion about defund the police.

We [00:10:00] reacted to it. negatively and what do you mean defund the police? Give us more money when in fact the whole idea and what we see now is a trend mostly along those particular calls that really need to help someone in crisis. Somebody who's having a mental breakdown, somebody who's having a mental crisis, That maybe we need a co responder who is a, someone, a professional who understands the dynamics of people in crisis rather than an armed police officer, or at least a co response.

We never really enlarged that argument to talk about calls that can be handled in some alternative way. My best example is the stolen car. The stolen car we can take in a report over a telephone in about three or four minutes. If you roll a car on a stolen auto, there's nothing there when the officer gets there and [00:11:00] nobody has their VIN number.

You still have to run this to the computer. And I always look at these as examples of the inefficiency of the model that was really created in about 1972 and the real need to. Re-look at the basic patrol function and how we manage it. And in that context of re-looking to the basic patrol function, your thought is that's where community engagement happens.

It doesn't happen with the com with a specialized group. It happens from from a day-to-Day patrol perspective, and getting them to engage the c. So as we've looked at this I have a, an academic partner Randy Nelson, who does a lot of community engagement work. And I've always found it fascinating.

So when Randy just made the assumption that Randy just made the assumption that Officers needed to just be prompted or that on their own, they would spend time getting to know people in a [00:12:00] neighborhood that they patrolled regularly. And it was interesting because the officer's re responses were one of two types.

One was my sergeant doesn't tell me to do that. If my sergeant told me to do that, and then would check with me about whether I had done that or not. I would do that, but my sergeants don't tell me to park my car, get out of service, and go and walk through a neighborhood and meet shop owners, meet school principals, meet recreation employees, any of that.

They don't tell me to do that. And so this is a kind of a drawback to, at least in DC, what we called the scandal sheet. So at the end of every work week, you would hand the sheet that had about 50 items on it, but you knew that the sergeant was only looking at about seven of them. And so The idea of getting out of your car didn't make the top 10 [00:13:00] So you don't do it.

It's that one and then the other response was Randy, when I go to work every day I go from call to call to call to call nonstop and we never catch up. Those two functions have begun to make the patrol officer re he's a report writer. He's a report taker. He's not doing investigations.

He's not really working with detectives on issues that relate to crime. That are even occurring in his or her own beat. So the bus needs to be retooled because I think we're still, we built it for a different time and now we are in the process of redesigning that operational structure and function under the rubric of community engagement because we know we need a new model.

How would you [00:14:00] redesign it then? For example, I assume you'd say, there's a 911 for emergencies, but there's a different number for mental health, which is it can be viewed as an emergency, but it has a different response team that needs to come out to it. Would you have separate numbers to call?

You'd have separate dispatch. How would you? In the kind of the, what's the new bus look like? Yeah, the first step is that in the re redesign that we, in conjunction with community based organizations, prompt people on how to notify the police. In an emergency and most cities already have a non emergency number to call, but people can't tell you what it is.

And so we've already set up the dynamic. We just don't utilize it. And we've also in our dispatch centers, don't, start the call with, do you have an emergency? No. [00:15:00] Okay, call this number, click, and get them off the line. The worst things that happen in some places is that, We have so many people calling 9 1 1 that we overload 9 1 1 lines.

And so either you get a busy signal on a 9 1 1 line or a recorded message asking you to call back. So even in a real legitimate emergency, sometimes the people can't get through. So me, for me, this is the foundation. We have to begin managing our calls for service in some kind of different way, then begin utilizing the time that we now get from uniformed officers on the street to get focused on the activities that we really want.

One, getting to know the community better on a personal level, but two, being part of the department's mission to reduce violent crime. [00:16:00] Most police officers in patrol feel very detached. from the department's effort to reduce violent crime because that's now the work of some specialized career criminal group or some intelligence group or some detectives or tactical units, not the patrol officer.

Yeah, no, I see that a lot when I go out. And we were talking about this before that and you start in day to day patrol, it, as opposed to a, long term aspiration or a, a noble outcome. It's viewed as a place you do your time before you can get promoted or move to these specialty groups.

And that the specialty groups, whether they better funded, better reputations, not, and don't have to deal with the, they can be they do the fun part, not the fun part, but the more interesting part of policing. I assume you don't suggest that you disband.

Those groups you still leave them intact or do you maybe you use them as [00:17:00] specialists to work with the day-to-day patrol officers to solve crimes they partner, so to speak, as opposed to Yeah, and I think there, there's, they're two methodologies. One and this is just a shortcut about this, but you have some decentralization that even from headquarters units, their focus is neighborhood based.

And I think San Francisco did that sometime back, all of their investigators worked at headquarters and basically they were operating based on where the next assignment was. As opposed to having a relationship with a specific community. So if there was a violent crime that occurred in district number one, that work would be done in conjunction with the patrol officers and the personnel.

in District 1, not based on a citywide basis. What they did was they recognized that they didn't have [00:18:00] space to physically disassemble the burglary or robbery units. They still had to work at headquarters, but their work began to become community based or precinct based and they began to specialize, but they all came together.

So even crime analysis. Charlotte Mecklenburg decided, their crime analyst had always worked in their districts, so they centralized their crime analysis people. But then the analyst said, Hey, we miss being out in the district because People stop in, they talk to us, they give us information, they ask for information.

So they devised a mechanism so that Monday, Wednesday, and Friday they were out in the fields in their district offices. Tuesdays and Thursdays they were at headquarters coordinating all the activity. That they had collected so that there was a much better focus when they got the comp stat on who was working on what better communication [00:19:00] and it included the efforts of those people who were working on in the district in conjunction with what they were doing.

The final piece is that in Seattle when Carmen best was an assistant chief, they closed all the silos. In most departments, you will have patrol, investigations, then you may have some specialties, tactical units. And, the interesting thing is, of course, that those commanders now are bugging the chief every day for more manpower.

Yeah, so you have, rather than having a fight between the silos getting up to the chief, Carmen's job was, she was in charge of all of the combined operations. So all of the subordinate operations commanders reported to her. And so she basically took on that manpower issue as opposed to the police chief.

And so I've been watching that, [00:20:00] looking at it and the typical response. You have disproportionate responsibilities between the assistant chiefs. And I said yeah, but when you look at this long range, number one, Carmen did this job for two to three years. And she's a very attractive lady.

And you'll recognize that It didn't kill her. She was able to function and function well. And it ultimately she becomes a police chief. So I think there is, there's not one size fits all, but it's working through some common aims about the nature of our crime fighting design. What is that design?

And is it community based or is it headquarters based? No, that makes sense. Decentralization the two in decentralization and at the community, at the local level, it's called win locally, so to speak. The third thing you mentioned, you [00:21:00] talk about one, aggregate, how do you train the community to know whom to call and what to expect?

You talk about, How to organize the different entities inside the police agency to be more community and locally responsive. I think the third thing you talked about was the training of the officer itself. You used a kind of a. nurses go through four years of and make sure that they know how they've seen a lot of blood and they're not going to faint.

And they've done a lot of the procedures and they understand that. And yet we don't do that. In a policing context, they have to have a four year degree, but they don't have all of the training that they should have coming in. You, and you're giving a 21 year old a badge and a gun. How how does that, how does, how do what advice or what is the new way forward in terms of getting people trained, given the chronic understaffing that we have in the United States.

First and foremost that staffing is really a false [00:22:00] narrative. Because again, when you look at the call for service workload and how many calls That we could either handle differently or completely get rid of by use of the technology that there are now self reporting capabilities for people to report crime.

And the numbers, the staffing numbers. are still based on numbers that were created back in 1972 or 1974 when we were building police departments based on having officers capable of the mobile response to calls for service. So these numbers we're still trying to meet. These same numbers of staffing, when in fact, the biggest gain that we can make is offloading calls that no longer need a police officer and better [00:23:00] managing the police response so that either we are co responding and I use the multiple car traffic accidents.

as a really great example. So if you have three or four calls involved in a crash, maybe somebody's hurt and needs to go to the hospital. So at the end of the day, there is only one officer who's going to write that report. But I now have three other officers who are on the scene directing traffic or assisting with the removal of injured persons.

And those jobs don't require a police officer. One of the things that, you know, and this is just one of the suggestions, and you see this in some places where we have non sworn service officers, people who don't carry guns but perform some of the duties that police officers currently take on. I know that here in [00:24:00] Tallahassee, ours are non sworn officers are now taking traffic.

Crash reports, even when you have people who have injuries. So now I can have a police officer devoted to some real crime fighting activity while I offload. And of course I think it gets summed up. My friend Patrick Oliver talks about the future becomes training your own or raising your own. is that you take people right out of high school, help them get a four year degree while they're learning how to become the police.

And then you're dealing with somebody who's not a shot in the dark. You've already counseled people who say, Hey, this isn't the job for you. Maybe if you want to be in public service, You might be better off being an EMT or a firefighter, but you really don't have quite the reasoning capability that we need here, the judgment and decision making capability that we need [00:25:00] here, and that then leads into the training.

The training that we perform also needs to recognize and accept testing proficiency. It's one thing to be able to load and unload a weapon and put them put 10 in the X ring, but we need you to have the capability of reasoning and being able to read the room and making good judgments and decisions based on the activity that you have.

And I love it that there, there are these cops in every department who never wanted to be promoted. But basically it's almost one riot, one ranger. There are people who are so good at policing, that when they go to chaos, they're going to bring order. And it's really the need to have those.

people skills and [00:26:00] social skills, good judgment and decision making skills that make for good officers. I'm glad that I will give a shout out to the Texas Rangers because I heard that quote, one ranger, one riot the Texas Rangers, they all use our equipment now. And

they use exactly that same that same quote. Exactly right. I didn't want to make sure that we cover one topic that's a little bit controversial. And this is consent degrees. And you have participated. You've basically been part of the team that enforces consent degrees. These are come down from a federal judge based off an external review of an agency's performance and the judge manages and the Judge provides oversight and then the agency has to spend the money to execute that oversight.

The, the, when I talk to the police chiefs, they believe this oversight and consent process has gotten way out of control and is now [00:27:00] it's a it's a a bazooka to to hammer a nail, so to speak. It's expensive, long, and while it does bring change, it brings change at almost too high of a cost.

How? How do you respond to that? How do you think about, talk about consent degrees and the good and the bad and the ugly? Yeah. And I don't disagree with the major observations. I spent a lot of time talking to police chiefs and it's interesting how the police chiefs who actually speak to these issues are generally police chiefs whose agencies We'll never come under a consent decree.

That one. Because they're doing the things that we all know, if not using best practices, we are at least using generally accepted [00:28:00] practices. What's happened in my, mostly in my expert witness work, is that there are two levels of performance. One is, If I evaluate your agency and you are doing what I would generally find in another department this size, this particular kind of community, you're either in Mayberry or you're in Beirut, but that in your organization, this is what I would typically find.

Then there are best practices very good policy, good supervision, good accountability. Good training. And those four elements are really at the core of all of the consent decrees. So one of the difficulties is that the consent decrees are usually in underperforming agencies. And we are, our effort is not to move them to [00:29:00] generally accepted practices.

It's to force them to employ best practices in some places, It's a bridge too far and the organizational capabilities of being able to make such drastic changes in their performance needs to be spoon fed and worked on, And then so that's where the money rinds up because the longer you're in the consent decree, you're not paying the, not just the monitors, but all of the attorneys involved.

And that begins to drive up the prices. In addition to creating. new technology or introducing technic technology that you don't have. The big piece in my estimation is that you are doing your own monitoring. I think I see in most consent decrees, [00:30:00] the one missing piece is that there is no internal professional standards entity that's actually looking out through the organization and looking at.

Deficient officer performance or discriminatory policing. And one of the things we got pigeonholed and really never saw the forest for the trees, but racial profiling became discriminatory policing. And when we started really looking at discriminatory policing, what we found was, is that we were spending so much time looking for disproportionate stops.

And activity with black and Hispanic males from 16 to 25. We didn't bother to look at the police officer who only stopped senior citizens. We never stopped to look at who's only stopping teenagers and why are they doing that? And [00:31:00] what it really opened up for me was that, we now actually capture enough information.

in a professional standards unit that's scanning the the organization. The difficulty is that especially in the consent decrees, it goes back to the lack of street supervision. We've now saddled Organ operational sergeants primarily with doing administrative investigations on citizen complaints and minor uses of force so that they are now not in their operational mode and actually out supervising groups of officers working in concert with each other.

This is the final piece. When Ron Davis was in charge of the cop's office, He had proposed what I thought was a very good remedy, which was the technical assistance and what you hear mostly from police chiefs is rather than sending the civil [00:32:00] rights division and special investigations unit of D O J send something from the cop's office.

That actually helps us and gives us technical assistance. So in the development of the technical assistance model called collaborative reform, it was the same process but was not court based. It was not based on having a process. A federal judge overseeing the operational activities of a police agency, it was having monitors like me who were police professionals, not only evaluating your progress in the agreement, but helping you get there, helping manage the things that are not written into the consent decree that are.

Do to create a better platform. My sense is that the idea was good. It was the way in which we actually carried out. The one thing I will [00:33:00] say is that in most of the agencies that I've been involved with. They were not going to make the change unless it was brought and placed in front of them and made a mandate.

Then, of course, again at the end of this, and this is part of the evaluation process, is are the institutional changes that get made actually institutional, and do they survive beyond the life of the consent decree, Or do, does the organization go back to what it was previously doing? I did have an expert witness case and that's exactly what happened.

I had been a monitor in this organization. They satisfied the issues of the settlement agreement. But then once they were out of the settle agreement, They went right back to making disproportionate numbers of stops inciting minority residents for things like jaywalking for, very low level and [00:34:00] basically harassing the residents of a particular geographic area.

Bob, we could go on for for for a lot longer. Unfortunately, we have to wrap up. I'm going to be I'm gonna gonna wind down to my last question which will be the Pepperball the company I'm honored to serve makes a donation in your name to any charitable organization you would like.

As a way of saying thank you for spending time with us and trying to educate me and trying to educate the folks that that listen to this podcast, so who as my Last question for you for the day. Who who would you like to donate to? I think I would actually like to make a donation in my name to the HBCU, Leah, the, this is the organization of police chiefs at HBCUs.

And it's it's a fledgling organization. And, but needs to have more stature and what we realize is that at most [00:35:00] HBCUs, criminal justice is usually the largest major on campus. Now, not everybody in there is going to become a police officer, but some of them will be working in allied fields.

Some of them will become civil rights attorneys. They may work as prosecutors, they may wind up in corrections, but they will have an attachment to the police. And so as I've looked across the landscape, there's a lot of potential. in the police agencies on the campuses of HBCUs and the role that they might help in not just recruiting minorities and women into policing, but also the education of people who will be working in the criminal justice field.

Oh, that's fantastic. To your point your point about educating and training not only police officers, but the community at large, where better to do that in college campuses and [00:36:00] where better to do that in college campuses where policing is is a topic and it's a, it's an, it's a, it's an understandable topic and a point of concern.

Bob, thanks much. Again, we've had Bob Stewart on Bob, as I described at 50 plus years in policing, he now runs two different consulting firms. He's the chief executive officer of Bobcat Consulting. So that's www. bobcatconsulting. org. And then he's also the director of policing with our community.

Which is www. policingwithourcommunity. com and I'll attach this his bio and his way of getting a hold of him as part of this podcast. So wrapping up as I think about the my own reflections for this, um, what I took away was that that policing is fundamentally different than when it was designed and developed back in the 60s and 70s.

And the nature of policing has fundamentally changed. And as a [00:37:00] result the way that police chiefs have to reorganize or organize their departments and agencies has to change. Bob talked a lot about the notion about winning locally, which is getting the right people and the right teams in the community to know the community, to get to know the local community and to be a community community engagement is not a community police officer going out and Speaking of churches, it's the day to day function of policing happening in a local community where people can get to know those.

officers. He talked about do more of the work that to do, which is handle re to reallocate resourc stops or reported burglaries that, where, if the someone has to report a stolen vehicle, frankly, the vehicle is not there. It doesn't really require a police officer who's trained to imagine an emergency to [00:38:00] manage something that is a non emergency event.

So how do you restaff police agencies with different type of resources? And you think about mental illness is another really good example. Of making sure that the right resources address those and how do you manage that? And part of it is training the community not to call nine one one on everything, but to find different ways of contacting the police or the agencies to respond.

And then finally talking about the notion of the training of the officer themselves, how we have to we, it may not be that we need 30 percent more officers may be that we need. What we have today. But those in a much better trained context where we're training them before they ever get the gun and the badge, and that they're putting them through an apprenticeship of sorts whether that be at college or even on the job where you can determine who is the right person for the right job as opposed to trying to find out.

While it happens. [00:39:00] So it's I think Bob did a great job of laying out the challenges. There are a lot of them. But all we can do is is tackle them because that's the, policing is such a, an important part of our society and we have to get it right and we have to continue to improve I tell you what, I'm super grateful to be in this role, to be the CEO of Pepperball and to be able to work and support emergency responders and really understand the challenges that they and their agencies and face.

Thanks folks for listening. And we'll see you next time.