Teaching Police Departments
What if we could displace the concept of a teaching hospital to policing? Police agencies as learning organizations is largely a function of leadership vision. Using the “displacement of concept” advances policing in ways we can only imagine now. This message is delivered by FPI Fellow Chief Dean Esserman (ret.). In 2005, he was hospitalized. While being treated for cancer, he gained a new perspective on how physicians are trained, in part, through the time-tested learning environment of a teaching hospital. This experience helped him understand that by using teaching hospitals as a model, he could turn the police department he led into a “teaching hospital.”
He may well have been ahead of his time, but Chief Esserman did all of policing a invaluable service. By learning how policing can capture, use, share and increase what we know about policing and the control of crime and disorder, we can realize safer communities. We can make policing safer for cops and the people they are sworn to protect. And America can make substantive progress toward a policing model that if effective, empathetic, and just.