Practical Alternatives for No-Win Policing Scenarios

I began working with the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department in 1978. A large part of my initial work was to convert paper databases to electronic databases. Law enforcement is a data-rich environment, and I was particularly fascinated with the calls for service data--data captured as a result of a person requesting law enforcement assistance.

After months of research and reviewing old call logs, I became curious as to why it had historically taken deputies so long to arrive at a popular bar at the east end of Thousand Oaks, following weekend disturbance and fight-in-progress calls.

Weekend after weekend, deputies seemed to take 30 to 45 minutes to travel, on virtually empty streets, the one- to three-mile distance at midnight. Every call log suggested that sirens were used and, even more curious, that there were rarely any arrests made at the bar after the deputies finally arrived.

The Ventura County Sheriffs Department policy clearly dictated that, given this type of call, a deputy should proceed directly to the site. I later discovered that these deputies had created an alternative to a well-intentioned but narrow policy.

The deputies’ street experience suggested that the few dozen local patrons at this bar would be pretty intoxicated by the time dispatch got the calls. By midnight, only one or two deputies were available locally. The arrival of one or two at a bar with two or three dozen drunk patrons might aggravate any fight in progress--easily a no-win scenario.

So the deputies reprogrammed the outcome. After the call from dispatch was received, a deputy would go to a freeway underpass near the bar. This underpass provided a natural amphitheater, or amplifier, for the siren. The lone deputy would activate the siren and the bar patrons would hear what probably sounded like a flotilla of police cars coming. After the second deputy arrived, and allowing for enough time for the bar patrons to exit, the deputies would drive up and speak briefly with the owner. After their call logs were completed, they would return to their other patrol responsibilities.

“Star Trek’s” Captain Kirk did the same thing when he went through the Star Fleet Academy. He reprogrammed the outcome of the Kobayashi Maru, a training exercise designed in a way that every student would fail it. The object was to see how cadets handled failure--but Kirk didn’t want to lose.

We might ask ourselves what happened between the time of these reprogrammed or tailored policies by a few deputies that worked so beautifully years ago and the apparent Kobayashi Maru / no-win street policies of today. Journeying back 30 years simply dismisses the fact that the legal and residential communities, and the expectations of law enforcement have changed. The deputies in my story chose not to immerse themselves in a bar fight. Instead, withdrawing or withholding resources worked.

The Los Angeles Police Department probably faces dozens of similar scenarios every weekend and solves 99% of them by tailoring a correct solution to the problem. Officers arrive at solutions in spite of no-win scenarios. We just don’t read about it. We read about the officers who enter the bar and shoot a patron. Was it necessary? Was there another way?

Let’s reprogram a recent no-win scenario: LAPD officers arrive at the scene of a large, loud Halloween party and are unable to locate the homeowners, despite repeated attempts at the door. The officers return to their patrol car and ultimately decide to leave. They locate the person who made the loud-party call and explain that they have to move on to other calls for assistance. But they also have dispatchers call the party house; if dispatch can’t reach the owner, officers will return the next day, assuming the party doesn’t escalate beyond disturbing the peace. The complainants, meanwhile, still have the option of filing disturbing-the-peace charges in the next several days.

We have always placed law enforcement in no-win scenarios. And they take their toll, both on the officers and on the community. The difficulty of recruiting new officers should make this more apparent than ever.

The next time the community suffers an officer-involved shooting or when the number of residents shot are totaled for the year, ask the LAPD how many of their officers committed suicide or died in the line of duty. The idea is that you are supposed to fail the Kobayashi Maru test. We in the residential and legal communities designed it that way.