December 9, 2011

At Bias-free Columbia Coalition’s fourth meeting Wednesday, two Kansas City Police Department officers shared their experience and their approaches to remedy the consequences of racial bias in community policing.

The two officers, Jack Colwell, recently retired, and Sgt. Charles “Chip” Huth, who has been a police officer for 28 years, said their training program reflected the philosophy in their book, “Unleashing the Power of Unconditional Respect: Transforming Law Enforcement and Police Training.”

The Kansas City officers said they started training their staff of supervisors Thursday at the Columbia Police Department, CPD Chief Ken Burton said.

“I think the philosophy is the future of American policing,” Burton said.

Since the 11th Annual Report on Vehicle Stops from Attorney General Chris Koster showed that CPD officers stop black drivers three times more than they stop Caucasians, Burton has been working with Don Love, chairman of the Missouri Association for Social Welfare, to reduce racial bias in the community.

The two officers said their core value is revolutionizing police training and teaching every officer to treat people in the community with respect without exception, which they call unconditional positive respect.

The officers said professional officers should require personnel to see all people as people, bring in integrity, buttress it by courage and express compassion toward all people. Huth said police officers got complaints not because of what they were doing, but how they approached it.

Huth introduced their successful experiment in the west side community of Kansas City, which was named a national model. The west side is a predominantly Hispanic area where undocumented workers and criminals were constantly causing a lot of problems, he said. There were police cars on every block of the streets.

“We have tried everything in the police tricks book, and nothing is working,” Colwell said. “I was a sense of hopeless.”

Colwell said one day, an officer came back and looked at the guy he had arrested three times because of urinating in public and said something needed to change. The officer let people come to their building to drink coffee and use the restroom. It works, Colwell said. The two officers said this area now has essentially no crime in the neighborhood, and people have started to report crimes to the local police.

“When I gain trust from you as a public servant, you are more likely to get on board to help me in our mission of preventing crimes and providing security,” Colwell said. “What it did was just like a click of the mechanism, and all of a sudden, it started turning around significantly.”

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