The War for Kindness by Jamil Zaki

Author:Jamil Zaki
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2019-06-03T16:00:00+00:00

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RAHR WORKED IN the King County Sheriff’s Office for thirty-three years. She served in every unit, from sex crimes to gang violence, but spent her formative time in internal investigations. She encountered dozens of police misconduct cases, and after a while she found it hard to believe that every culprit was a rotten human being. Many of them had inherited their instincts from a broken culture. “I thought, rather than focus on bad apples, let’s think about the barrel.” In 2012, she took over as executive director of the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission (CJTC). Every law enforcement officer in the state comes through CJTC; by now, more than three thousand have trained under Rahr.

CJTC’s woodsy headquarters in Burien, Washington, recalls a college campus, at least if you can ignore the students marching in formation. The walls are covered with pictures of every CJTC recruit class. Members of class 1a, from 1938, look like Humphrey Bogart understudies from Casablanca. Rahr looks a little uncomfortable in her class 114 picture, from 1979. The week after I visit, CJTC will graduate class 735. Police officers spend nineteen weeks at CJTC; corrections officers, four. The training is relentless. As we stroll the grounds, a supervisor tells me about a recruit whose wife is being induced on Sunday. “I assume he’ll take Monday off.”

Much of CJTC’s curriculum is standard issue. Recruits spend 120 hours on defensive tactics, practicing baton techniques on muscular mannequins and sparring partners. In the shooting range, officers slowly pace sideways while firing at posters of stereotypical-looking criminals. Altogether, CJTC recruits fire about a million rounds a year. After each drill a white-mustached training officer retrieves spent shells using a specialized, caged cart like you might see scooping up golf balls at a driving range.

That’s where the similarities between CJTC and typical police training end. Above the academy’s entrance, a sign reads IN THESE HALLS, TRAINING THE GUARDIANS OF DEMOCRACY. This is meant to remind recruits of Rahr’s most important mandate: that they reject the warrior mentality and instead see themselves as caretakers of their community, working with citizens to keep everyone safe.

On every desk in every CJTC classroom, another motto is written on a folded, laminated card: LEED: LISTEN AND EXPLAIN WITH EQUITY AND DIGNITY. For decades, the psychologist Tom Tyler has demonstrated that powerful people—doctors with patients, police encountering citizens—garner respect when they are transparent, impartial, and attentive, even while delivering punishment. “I’ve had lots of people thank me for arresting them,” Rahr says, “or at least for being decent with them while I did it.” LEED is her encapsulation of Tyler’s ideas; she calls it “a Happy Meal version of a research smorgasbord.”

Guardianship is a poetic but fuzzy idea. On the ground in Burien, Rahr and her staff make it concrete, in three ways. The first is by example. Prior to Rahr’s arrival, CJTC operated like a boot camp. Drill sergeants broke down recruits and built them back up. The first time Rahr walked the halls, recruits snapped to attention as she passed.

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