Transform the Police: A More Integral Approach to Law Enforcement

Chris Orrey Ethical, How should we relate to the social justice movement?, Integral Justice Warrior, Intrapersonal, Leadership, Life Conditions, Values, Video, World Affairs, Worldviews 20 Comments

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Mark and Corey are joined by Chris Orrey, a retired police lieutenant with over 30 years of service with the Hayward, California Police Department, to discuss the abuse and resulting death of Tyre Nichols, who was severely beaten and ultimately killed by five Memphis police officers. What allowed this tragedy (and others like it) to take place? What sorts of personal, cultural, and institutional transformation are necessary to prevent something like this from occurring again?

We were very excited to have Chris join us for this discussion — not only because of her experience as a former police lieutenant, but also because she is leading the Integrative Policing Transformation Initiative over at the Institute of Applied Metatheory, designed to map the fuller complexity of policing in the United States and examine how a transformation toward a fuller guardian model of policing might be achieved. If you are at all interested in supporting this tremendously important and timely endeavor, we encourage you to get in touch here.

One of the primary factors we discuss is how our modern Orange standards of law and justice depend on Amber enforcement agencies being healthy, trustable, and reliable — otherwise the entire system breaks down as the public looses confidence in the police’s ability to serve the community.

Without this Orange-stage accountability and oversight, Amber groups often go bad fairly quickly — we don’t only see this in policing, but also in organizations such as the military, the Boy Scouts, the Catholic Church, and others. Closed-off Amber groups often tend to normalize, justify, and cover for all sorts of abuse within the group — even when that abuse is coming from a small number within the group. There is a natural Amber drive to protect the group at all costs (such as the “blue line of silence” within policing culture) which prevents real accountability from taking place, and which in turn drives more resentment and mistrust between the population and the police in general.

We go on to talk about a number of other critical factors and leverage points in each of the four quadrants, including:

UL (Intentional problems/solutions)
  • Creating more support and healing for officers (e.g. helping officers with accumulated job-related traumas),
  • Training greater emotional intelligence to help with empathy and  de-escalation of violence
  • State training to help officers better regulate and manage intense emotional and psychological states of consciousness (e.g. the natural fight or flight response) in both officers and criminal suspects
UR (Behavioral problems/solutions)
  • Managing physiological states associated with interior mental/emotional states (e.g. adrenaline, overall physical health of the officer)
  • Identifying multiple skillsets to deal with different kinds of confrontations and social challenges,
  • Recruitment strategies to attract more healthy and ethical officer candidates

LL (Cultural problems/solutions)
  • Expanding officers’ sense of “we” to include the communities they are protecting,
  • Restoring trust by creating more connective tissue between police and the communities they serve,
  • Dismantling internal “blue wall of silence” culture within police culture,
  • Surrounding tensions and frictions from the culture wars.
LR (Systemic problems/solutions)
  • External social/environmental conditions (overall social violence, proliferation of guns, race and racism, etc.),
  • Outmoded social/systemic patterns, inertias, and karmas from previous policing eras that remain with us today,
  • Rethinking “qualified immunity” that often prevents abusive officers from being held accountable,
  • Various forms of corruption and bias in justice systems,
  • Bringing more Orange-stage accountability to Amber-stage police organizations

This is a tremendously important and in many ways inspiring conversation, as together we try to find a path to a more just, more integral approach to law enforcement. If you are at all interested in supporting this endeavor, we encourage you to check out the Integrative Policing Reform Initiative over at the Institute of Applied Metatheory.

Written and produced by Corey deVos


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Chris Orrey

About Chris Orrey

Chris Orrey is a retired police lieutenant with over 30 years of service with the Hayward, California Police Department. She is a graduate of California’s Command College, an 18-month program designed to prepare law enforcement leaders for the challenges of the future, and the LAPD Leadership Training Program, which is based on the West Point Leadership Program. In true Integral fashion, she will soon have a Master’s Degree in Comparative Religion and Philosophy and will be continuing her education at the California Institute for Human Science, pursuing a doctorate degree in Integral Noetic Sciences with an emphasis on Wisdom Design. Her in-progress Master’s thesis is on the application of Wilberian Integral Theory to U.S. policing: Integral Policing: Transforming U.S. Policing via the AQAL Map.

Mark Fischler

About Mark Fischler

Mark Fischler is a Professor of Criminal justice and current program coordinator for the criminal justice and criminology programs at Plymouth State University. Prior to joining the Plymouth State faculty, he practiced law, representing poor criminal defendants for the New Hampshire Public Defender’s Office. Mark has worked extensively with alternative theoretical models in law, constitutional law, and higher education, and has published on integral applications to teaching, being a lawyer, and legal theory. His focus in the classroom is ethics and criminal procedure, and is well respected for a teaching philosophy that emphasizes recognizing the humanity and dignity of each student. Professor Fischler was awarded the outstanding teaching award at his university in 2014. He currently offers a weekly Spiritual Inquiry class through Satya Yoga Studio.

Corey deVos

About Corey deVos

Corey W. deVos is Editor-in-Chief of Integral Life, as well as Managing Editor of KenWilber.com. He has worked for Integral Institute/Integal Life since Spring of 2003, and has been a student of integral theory and practice since 1996. Corey is also a professional woodworker, and many of his artworks can be found in his VisionLogix art gallery.

Notable Replies

  1. A particularly engrossing, meritorious, and timely episode of IJW; thank you Corey, Mark, and Chris.

    *I definitely agree with the specific frame of “transforming” the police and addressing interiority more–of officers, police departments and administration, and the justice system (and also of course, culture as a whole). Big Job, but necessary, and already, I think, we’re on our way, slowly but surely. Some things in policing are in dire need of transformation, such as:

    I was struck by the contradiction that while most recruits say “helping people” is why they want to become a police officer, at the same time, per Chris (and others who I have read here and there),
    " aren’t interested in psychology." This is a major problem, and a logical inconsistency that needs to be confronted at every step of the way, starting with recruitment. How do you help people in almost any field without some interest and knowledge of human psychology and behavior, including one’s own?

    **On another subject but related: yes, there is the “blue line of silence” and there seems to be groupthink and apparent gang-like behavior where peer pressure and peer permissions play a role in some police misconduct and killings. As Bill Maher questioned, wasn’t the Tyre Nichols beating and killing a little like “Lord of the Flies?” I can see or imagine some similarities–lack of supervision, groupthink vs. individuality, emotionality superseding rationality, issues of morality, desires for dominance/power/control, and of course the ‘unreal beast’–given that Nichols was a thin unarmed man against five guys much larger than him armed with weapons and the badge, he was not a threat to them at all.

    But one still has to wonder about the psychological make-up of individual officers who commit such acts. I’ve read that some police officials are calling for regular mental health assessments of officers, instead of a typical evaluation upon hiring. Maher interviewed the former chief of police of Minneapolis who basically said there’s been more weight given to “camaraderie (among officers) than to individual character,” which he thinks needs to change.

    Journalist Tom Nichols writing in The Atlantic about mass shooters (in the article “The Narcissism of Angry Young Men”) reported on them as having a “stubborn immaturity and towering narcissism.” He used other phrases: a dangerous insecure masculine identity, fantasies of power and dominance, a sense of a special mission, etc. I wouldn’t be surprised if some officers who have brutally assaulted and/or (criminally) killed someone in the course of duty were found upon assessment to have similar traits.

    ***Fortunately, both mass shooters and “killer cops” are outliers. We shouldn’t forget that. But they do have a significant impact on how the population perceives society and governance and law and order, and how safe and sane they feel. A term I’ve recently come across–cultural betrayal trauma–comes to mind. Used originally (I think) by a black feminist to discuss black-on-black rape, it’s also been discussed in relation to the Memphis officers and Nichols’ death. But it’s also a term that can be used unrelated to racial issues, a term that Vietnam veterans relate to, for instance, having returned from war to find so much societal hostility against them. Families of mass shooting victims relate to it, when little to nothing is done to prevent future mass shootings.

    Betrayal is no small thing, sapping as it does one’s trust. So getting a handle on these two situations–mass shootings and unwarranted police abusive or murderous conduct–might go a long ways in helping society.

    ****Again, a great program. It was nice to hear from a former officer who is also integral-identified, quite the rarity in the world! The IAM project on the policing initiative sounds full of “star-studded talent,” as they say, and this discussion seems like it will be very helpful.

  2. I can see your point(s), Robert/Bob; thanks for sharing your autobiographical take.

    This is such a tangled ball of yarn, very complex. Ethnocentrism being a trait of the Amber level, and that ethnocentrism generally centering around tribe in its various forms (e.g. race, gender, nation, religion, etc.), I think different groups within the (unhealthy/regressive) Green level have different relationships to the Amber stage.

    For instance, people within the BLM movement are often also associated with the Black Church, a strong Amber ‘institution,’ with the Black Church having been around at least since slavery. Where the BLM folks basically lack a strong (healthy) Amber identity is around nation, it seems, given they don’t seem to feel (and in some cases, aren’t) treated equally under the nation’s laws and systems (and to throw in a little Orange-rationality, the telling of the nation’s history these days). Some indigenous people/groups feel likewise. Unhealthy (white) Amber, excluding the regressive (black, poc) Greens, is fairly obvious in our culture too, which of course sets up a feedback loop of provocations between the two.

    It’s clear to me that when individuals do not feel they are treated as fully belonging, if they do not feel safe, they will join with others similar to themselves to lessen threat, even if this means regressing (as in your hypothetical example of us joining forces to protect ourselves from physical attack at the Red level).

    The LGBTQ folks within the Green community is another example of this happening, although I do think, along with nation/the nation’s systems, religion is an issue for those who have regressed. I’ve heard and read many people in that community talk about not having left their church/religion, but feel excluded and stigmatized by the church/religion; feel the church deserted them. And again, there’s no lack of unhealthy religions at the Amber stage (and no lack of people within the Amber stage feeling threatened too).

    Overall, I think it’s pretty hard to talk about unhealthy/regressive green without talking about the Amber stage itself, how it, along with being a pre-rational stage in and of itself, also has a good deal of ‘disease’ within it, without any of the green regressives.

    My personal experience outgrowing a Green identity (to the extent that I have) was around the realization that the Green level almost by definition is about fragmentation, which has its purposes, but my own direction was onward, towards greater wholeness. Still have my eye on that.

    .

  3. @LaWanna, your excellent response underlines many substantive issues. It would take the thread in a million directions to go after the details, so I thought instead about methods. What is the right method to investigate your many questions and examples? Also, what is Integral-specific about such methods, beyond normal academic social science?

    Here is an idea, for which I would welcome feedback. It occurred to me that a Four Quadrant approach must incorporate on some level an element of autobiography. If not, Quadrant I has been sidelined. This need not be the autobiography of the author of every study (although disclosure of that in a preface would be very welcome). Rather, it means before we bring the theories, the frameworks, the ideal types, etc., we need to listen to actual stories of real people. From there, we can work our way around the Quadrants.

    In social science, this type of approach is sometimes called “grounded theory”. I’ve been leaning that way lately for my own reasons. It just now dawned on me that my own reasons were favoring holism anyway, and that the Quadrant model reinforces why those instincts are indeed holistic.

  4. For some reason I just decided to start watching this and finally noticed that Chris Orrey served with the Hayward Police Dept. Wow! I’m from Hayward. I spent the later half of my formative development in one of the roughest neighborhoods in the Eastbay(Hayward) called Palma Ceia living in a Section-8 apartment dealing with economic poverty, food insecurity, and violence and drugs. 20/20, the national news program, called my neighborhood in 1979 the PCP capital of America. I was 14 trying to navigate that environment which is where most of the experiences I had that left me with PTSD took place. Just reading the first paragraph and being reminded of Hayward has my nervous system feeling anxiety and that’s okay! My healing journey ultimately led me to Integral Life in ways I can’t explain. I know that Chris knows my former neighborhood well! I’m excited to listen to this all the way through and will definitely have something to say when I’m done. Just wanted to share my connection to Hayward for now.

  5. Robert, that is a great idea. The “I” in all of us needs to be seen and heard. People can find themselves feeling invisible and irrelevant in the hustle and bustle of existence. When that is combined with a poorly developed sense of “We” disaster can result. I’ve spent some time over the years going out on the street and having conversations with people struggling with drugs or homelessness and I noticed that they can really light up if you just let them talk and don’t judge them. I think it’s truly therapeutic to some degree to let them feel seen and heard.

Continue the discussion at community.integrallife.com

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