Blog

Gregory Saville and Gerard Cleveland 

The resolution of the George Floyd trial with the conviction of Derek Chauvin signifies little to those 

of us familiar with the world of police reform. For over thirty years we have attempted to change  

from within the culture of the blue tribe. We are failing, but our hope for better policing in the  

future remains strong.  In our January 25 Denver Post Op Ed “Key to better policing lies in trained  

community oversight”, we outlined the need for certified Local Police Management Boards to  

oversee policing programs.  

In this article we focus on the cultural issues that are internal to police organizations that require our  

immediate attention – the so-called Blue Wall.  After decades of training police and watching the  

good, the bad and the ugly of academy training, police leadership and political pronouncements, we  

offer the following recommendations to bring about the systemic change that we so desperately  

simply  enforcing laws. Despite some recent superficial improvements in hiring practices, we still  

cannot find, and retain, enough divergent thinkers with a community guardian mindset who seek to  

solve problems as a primary means of community safety.  Police agencies must actively recruit 

community members who have a history of providing service to their community. 

Professions such as EMTs, social workers, teachers, nurses, community development workers, 

business owners, child-care workers, and those with a track record of employment in community- 

support professions should top our lists. If we continue to hire warriors who believe they are fighting 

a war against an intractable enemy and who suppose the job mandates protecting citizens  

from each other, the killings of vulnerable and visibly identifiable individuals will go on unabated. 

recommend the creation of a nationally-mandated (perhaps starting with Colorado State-mandated) 

cadre of non-agency aligned firearms and defensive tactics trainers – all with police crisis  

experience- to refashion training methods. New methods would focus on a combination of de- 

escalation techniques, mental health crisis intervention plans, preservation of human life ethics, and  

less-than lethal training options all incorporated into academy weapons and restraint training.  

The current academy firearms training – often fostered by instructors with a singular  

focus on officer survival rather than a respect for all human life – must stop immediately. 

Police conflict training needs an immediate overhaul and, from what we have seen, it cannot happen 

soon enough. Some current trainers will claim, with righteous indignation, that what we advocate 

will lead to police deaths and a consequent loss of officer safety. Both those claims are nonsense.  

The evidence does not support them. Here we are, seven years after the Michael Brown shooting in  

Missouri, still pondering our options rather than taking positive steps to reduce the excessive use of  

lethal force in American policing.   

The term “police service delivery” has a sad and nondescript history and law enforcement and  

political leaders must do a better job in describing and delivering exactly what their particular  

“service to the community” entails.  

City managers and police governance agencies have numerous options to put to potential leaders  

who seek to lead the public safety team in your community. If your chiefs and sheriffs tell you that  

they will include random vehicle patrol, saturation patrol on crime hotspots, predictive policing  

algorithms with directed police patrol you should save your tax dollars and tell them; 

“We don’t want more computers or targeted patrol without our input! We want a plan for  

community safety with us as equal partners!”  

Rather than the above stand–alone enforcement strategies, we encourage the only strategy that 

really works – partnership service delivery. We must insist that patrol officers get out of 

their vehicles and work directly with residents to solve the specific neighborhood crime problems 

that typically produce the calls they keep attending and leaving without solving. Agencies such as  

New Orleans district patrol officers and NYPD’s Neighborhood Coordination Officers in public  

housing have all taken this approach with considerable impact. Permanent adoption of this  

partnership service delivery model across the entire agency may be difficult, but it will work. The  

alternative involves maintaining a status quo that remains unacceptable – even unsafe –  to a  

significant portion of our citizenry. We recommend that funding the partnership service delivery  

model makes much more sense than simply defunding police agencies with no clear path forward. 

Partnership service delivery goes a long way to breach the “blue wall” of cops speaking only to cops. 

We have the potential to receive significant safety impacts on our communities from local cops and  

residents working together while learning problem-solving methods to address shared problems.  

We saw successes each time we did this collaboration.  Residents and police enjoy working  

together to solve real life problems. 

If residents in the above areas saw or heard of excessive police force used on minorities in the  local  

media, they would criticize police headquarters and the institution of law enforcement, but not the  

cops sitting across from them at the table. Those were “their” cops, and they were protective of  

them. The officers in these collaborative situations experienced, often for the first time in their  

careers, the power of true community support. 

Partnership service delivery provides them a chance to build community understanding, engage  

resident support and escape from the constant resource drain of 9-1-1 dispatched calls for service. If  

we can incorporate the above three strategies into our policing agencies, along with Local Police  

Management Boards for more responsible governance, then the terrible shootings of recent history  

will have led us to a better approach to keeping our citizens safe and truly engaged in their own  

wellbeing.  

BIOS 

Gregory Saville is a criminologist and former police officer, who runs a consulting firm in Arvada. Gerard Cleveland is an attorney, university law lecturer and former police officer. Both have consulted with the U.S Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Colorado Department of Public Safety.