-- The President's Commission on Law Enforcement
THE CHALLENGE OF SELECTING TOMORROW'S PEACE OFFICERS
The B-PAD Group
Over the last three decades, demands on police and other public safety personnel have grown in tandem with the events threatening social order and personal security. These demands challenge the efficacy of traditional law enforcement methods and our notion of who is fit to wear a badge.
Perhaps the toughest challenge in hiring a police officer is determining whether or not the applicant has the necessary interpersonal skills and judgment to be successful. Selecting police officers with such competence is absolutely critical. The majority of police activity involves human interaction, whether it be pushing a stalled car to the side of the road, giving directions, giving a citizen a ticket, resolving a dispute, or arresting a violent offender. Effective officers must, at times, be aggressive and dominant and, on other occasions, they must be patient, courteous and understanding. At all times they must remain in control.
The cost of losing control is high. The cost extends beyond the obvious consequences of violence and civil unrest. Police liability research shows that poor interpersonal competence in officers is the primary factor underlying most lawsuits brought against the police including those claiming excessive use of force. Additionally claims and lawsuits most often result not from mistakes made by officers, but from the perception of rude treatment following complaints or mistakes. Violating this fundamental principle of customer service in the private sector loses business; in the public sector, with its monopoly on service, it causes lawsuits.
Low interpersonal competence in officers creates additional insidious problems. Researchers consistently demonstrate that such officers are more vulnerable to stressful conditions. The inability to effectively interact with others aggravates an already excessive level of stress in police work. Stress and burnout within police ranks have now made it routine for officers and commanders alike to retire prematurely with stress-related disabilities.
"WANTED: Individuals with the ability to confidently and quickly take charge, establish rapport with strangers, resolve conflict, demonstrate compassion to people in distress, be persuasive, and at all times remain respectful and in control in crises."
The President's Commission on Law Enforcement, assembled in the wake of the late 1960's riots, was clear on this issue when it declared that increased attention must be paid to police recruitment, selection, and professionalism. Despite this call to action, however, the technology used to select police has change little since.
Recent landmark civil rights legislation, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), now imposes an "absolute duty to administer exams to job applicants so they reflect their actual ability to do the job for which they have applied." Unfortunately, only limited methods currently exist to directly and validly assess the interpersonal competence of public safety applicants.
The best method is to directly observe job-relevant behavior of police applicants. In the past, public safety agencies had only two basic options for making these observations: oral interviews and assessment centers. Oral interviews are the most frequently used method for both entry-level and promotional assessments. Although the oral interview can elicit relevant behavioral information, its utility is limited when applied to the assessment of interpersonal competence. A person's response to a social problem or conflict necessarily reflects at least two broad constellations of skills or abilites: what one does (i.e., the strategies, plans, or solutions used to resolve the problem or reduce the conflict) and how one does it (i.e., the behaviors employed in relating to the person, such as emphathetic, assertive, and aggressive behaviors). An oral interview may provide an adequate forum for demonstrating the former skills, but it cannot permit a demonstration of the latter unless it calls for the appplicant to show, in addition to what action would be taken, how he or she would implement that action.
Other procedures to screen applicants based on behavioral observations include assessment centers, background investigations, polygraph interviews, and psychological evaluations. Assessment center, utilizing live role plays of job-relevant sceanrios, emphasize behavioral demonstration of abilities but are not widely used because of their significant cost to set up and implement. Background investigatons and polygraph interviews are effective for screening out undesirable candidates but not for determining which candidates have the greatest competence. Psychological tests and interviews, the merits of which are still being debated, can only, since the passage of the ADA, be administered after a conditional offer of employment is given to an applicant.
Some employers have attempted to blend components of the assessment center with the oral board by having applicants role-play a response to a job-relevant scenarios portrayed by live actors while being observed by raters. Althought this method does permit the assessment of interpersonal skills, it is virtually impossible to standardize the actor's portrayal of a scene to eliminate the differential cues imposed by raters watching the applicant. Both factors impact the responses of the applicant and the perceived fairness of the evaluation. More importantly, rarely are more than one or two role plays ever utilized in the assessment, generally due to financial constraints. This limited role playing is a major failing because an applicant's behavior must be sampled over a wide range of situations, typically more than six, to be considered a valid portrayal of the applicant's skills and abilities.
What is needed in police selection batteries is a method or test to rank qualified candidates on dimensions related to interpersonal attributes critical to successful performance on the job. Ideally, the test should be more standardized and objectively scored than an oral or clinical interview. Creating such a test has required a break with tradition and the utilization of new technologies.
B-PAD capitalizes on video technology to provide a solution to the costly and methodolgically flawed approaches currently used in the public safety arena. In a B-PAD assessment, applications observe videotaped "high-fidelity" simulations, in which a task situation is realistically portrayed, and are videotaped responding to those situations as if they were actually on the job. Their responses are then evaluated by raters using validated scoring criteria, providing employers with direct behavioral evidence of how job candidates can be expected to react to real-life public safety problems.
This video-based method for assesing social competence previously has been applied to applicants in the field of counseling, health care, and financial service with impressive validity and reliability outcomes.