Policing practices have increasingly come under public scrutiny, spurring widespread calls for police reform. To date, prevailing views have attributed adverse policing outcomes (such as excessive force and unnecessary arrests) to factors such as prejudiced officers and deficient departmental policies. In this paper, the authors introduce a new focus that explores the role of cognitive demands in contributing to poor policing outcomes. Police work often involves making complex decisions in situations that produce stress, trigger many emotions, and require officers to act quickly. These cognitive demands make it more likely that officers will act without sufficient deliberation and that their actions will be driven by cognitive biases. In this paper, the authors explore this overlooked perspective, which suggests an additional avenue for improving policing outcomes.
To test their idea, the authors develop and evaluate a new training, called Situational Decision- making (Sit-D), which combines a deep understanding of day-to-day policing with insights from behavioral science on how to train people to process information and make decisions more deliberately. The Sit-D training aims to help officers go beyond their initial impression of cognitively demanding situations and develop alternative interpretations.
The authors evaluate the training using a large-scale randomized controlled trial with officers from the Chicago Police Department (CPD)—the second largest police department in the US. Their sample comprises 2,070 officers—nearly one-fifth of all active duty sworn personnel in the department. They use data from an endline assessment officers complete four months after the training, as well as administrative records to assess the impacts of the training. They find the following:
These results highlight the value of considering the cognitive aspects of policing, and demonstrate the power of using behaviorally informed approaches to improve officer decision-making and policing outcomes. Teaching officers to navigate these cognitive demands not only reduce adverse policing outcomes, but also have the potential to reduce racial disparities in policing.