More watchdogs won’t reform policing. Ousting bad cops will.

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As required by the highly publicized consent agreements signed with the state and federal governments, the city of Minneapolis is now hot in the middle of hiring an “independent evaluator” to watchdog its Police Department (”Firms vie to monitor Minneapolis police reform,” Jan. 12). Count me skeptical that these lengthy agreements will lead to lasting change. Indeed the excessive micromanagement stipulations, myriad and difficult to alter, may get in the way.

I’m skeptical for two reasons. First, these consent agreements miss the underlying cause of the Minneapolis Police Department’s long-standing police misconduct. Second, the most successful police turnaround in the country, in Camden, N.J., was accomplished without a single consent decree or watchdog agency.

Well-documented in the state and federal investigations leading to these consent agreements is the MPD’s long history of violent, racist behavior and failure to reform. This has caused unnecessary and unjustified death and injury and cost the taxpayers millions in damages. But these are symptoms. Missing is the diagnosis.

The diagnosis is the decadeslong inability of good chiefs to remove bad officers.

The MPD has many honorable officers who risk their lives to protect and serve, and deserve our highest gratitude. But, as documented in the reports, the MPD has used an ineffective violent racist policing approach for decades, dignified by the name “warrior policing.” This approach not only improperly trains our good officers, it attracts bullies enchanted by weapons and force who have long dominated the department and police union. These bullies will not be changed by orders, training or discipline. They must be removed.

In the few places where they’ve been adopted, the new approaches far surpass warrior policing on every goal: reduced crime; reduced death and harm to both suspects and officers; and restored trust and cooperation with communities of color.

The new kind of officer needed is well described by Chief Scott Thompson, the man who in 2013 engineered the successful turnaround of the violent racist police department in Camden. To be sure, unique circumstances allowed him to recruit a new police force from scratch. To get the kind of officer he wanted, they had to pass psychological screening tests, which could and should be adapted for use here in both police departments and training academies.

Addressing his new force for the first time Thompson said: “You will have an identity that will be more Peace Corps than Special Forces. Anyone attracted to this job by the opportunity to crack heads or bully others will be fired immediately.”

While recruiting a new force is not replicable here, the example still proves the two things necessary and sufficient for durable police reform: a new policing approach and a new personality officer. Camden shows us how good a police force can be when it has a good chief, the right kind of personality officers, and the right kind of policing approach. And as long as the chief can remove warrior-minded and unfit officers, the reform appears durable.

The people needed to become the new kind of officer are available. Many are in the MPD now, but these honorable officers have ceded dominance to the warrior types. The holdup is inability to remove warrior-minded officers who flout the new approach. Their opposition to de-escalation and false claims that it is weak on crime has stalled adoption of the new approaches. It is warrior policing that has proven weak on crime.

All the orders in these consent agreements will come to little if insubordinate officers can flout them and keep their jobs. The plan to add non-police first-responders to respond to calls that do not require force is excellent, if shamefully years overdue. First responders are cheaper than officers and far more effective in nonviolent cases for which officers are untrained. That first-responder teams have not been adopted by every police department in the nation is indicative of the perverse warrior policing mentality dominating this country.

Nevertheless, even if we embrace, as we should, adding non-police responders, this still does not solve the problem of removing bad officers. Neither, apparently, may the consent agreements. These should have also been aimed at the union contracts, arbitrators, prosecuting attorneys, judges, police training programs, labor laws, and Democratic and Republican legislators, not just the MPD, that perpetuate the myriad obscure obstacles that have for too long protected warrior-minded officers from being removed by their chiefs.

The first step to correct the diagnosis is a good chief, strong on the new approaches. Besides professional pride, his incentive is that the city can replace him if he proves unsatisfactory. Minneapolis now has an excellent police chief and commissioner of public safety committed to an improved policing approach.

But the second step — replacing bad officers with well-screened good officers — requires that leaders be empowered to remove bad officers.

If the consent agreements do not address the diagnosis, we cannot expect durable police reform, just noise and motion. Therefore let us directly address the diagnosis ourselves.

That may finally give Minneapolis and our honorable officers the kind of police force they and this community deserve.