A couple of years ago, when I was serving as chief of police of Quantico, Virginia, I found myself picking up trash in Raftelis Park, alongside a guy in his twenties who, his tattoos told me, was involved in gang activity. We weren’t far from FBI headquarters: in Quantico, you never are. But there he was, that day of the annual town cleanup event, no enmity between us. I’m not an FBI guy, I’m regular old police. We picked trash in silence for a while, the Potomac River that borders the park flowing beside us, then fell into companionable conversation. From what I knew – and I did know something of his activities – my park cleanup buddy wasn’t involved in criminal activity in my town, but only when he was in a nearby jurisdiction. And he didn’t want to live in a town whose parks were filled with garbage any more than I did. He didn’t want to live in an unsafe neighborhood, either, or one where people and the police are at odds.

The job of the police is something like repair. Of course we have to solve crime, catch bad guys. But when the social fabric gets frayed it is both a cause of and a result of crime. Our job is to do our best to repair that fabric, weaving together the threads of reparative justice for victims, and restorative justice for perpetrators, bringing them back into the community.

We forget this pretty frequently, and the way that police are trained tends to promote that forgetting. We are too often trained as technocrats: human relationships are not legible to the programs and statistical models and paperwork that are the tools of contemporary policing. But they’re what the job should be all about.

Law enforcement in the United States is still searching for a firm footing in the post-2020 landscape, rocked by protests after the murder of George Floyd. The so-called Ferguson Effect (named for a similar dynamic following the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri) has led to a pullback on police presence in communities and subsequent rise in crime. Floundering, we question what we thought were the principles of our job.

In trying to find a way forward, some have looked to the past, with the refrain, “We just need to get cops back on the beat.” Others point to Robert Peel’s 1829 principles of policing, as if Victorian-era policing ideals describe and prescribe all the tasks of contemporary police. Some hang their hats on shibboleths like “procedural justice” – which, important as it is, can become its own form of technocracy, something we use to protect ourselves: if we do the procedures right, no one can blame us, even if justice itself is elusive.

Still, these ideas – beat-cop, shoe-leather community policing and care with procedures – are at least good in themselves, even if they’re not enough. More concerning is the turn to high-tech approaches to police-community relations – “there’s an app for that” – a reliance on technology and data that fails to capture the human contours of actual experience or rebuild trust.

What does this look like? I recently Zoomed into a town-hall forum, full of residents and desperate elected officials, as part of a police executive search process. Violence in the community had been spiking, and these residents wanted to know what the new executive would do to address it. It was a profoundly human moment. “Can you make us safe?” the residents were saying. “Can we trust that you will neither neglect nor abuse us?”

The job candidate met those questions by mentioning CompStat. Short for computer statistics, this is a technique of data-gathering and assessment used to develop crime response strategies; it was first used in New York City in the 1990s. To my mind, the candidate had answered “Can you make us safe?” with “We’ll have to crunch the numbers.” This did not alleviate the tension of the conversation.

The truth is that police departments are increasingly becoming organizationally schizophrenic. In the corridors of police agencies across the nation, leaders are internally moving away from the calculated management practices of the past, but in our relations with the community, we’re working on a technocratic model. We’ve started to humanize ourselves, while continuing to mechanize our interactions with the people we’re meant to serve.

Essentially, this is the law-enforcement version of Taylorism. The “scientific management” approach of F. W. Taylor, now more than a century old, is grounded in the belief that efficiency is the highest goal of workplace culture. Each person in an organization must work in such a way as to be as interchangeable and frictionless as possible. In the factories in which Taylorism was first applied, this meant that workers were almost literally reduced to cogs in the machine. In the white-collar workplaces to which it was later extended, “leadership” was replaced with “management,” and management was meant to be as impersonal as possible: data-driven and mechanical.

Taylor famously used a method that deconstructed work, identified primary tasks, and timed those tasks, then instructed workers in the precise way in which they must move their bodies to perform the tasks for maximum production speed. Production went up, but humanity went down.

If you do this enough, you stop being a man who is using a technique and become a thing used by it.

Delve into any of the disheartening literature related to police technology initiatives and this bleak vision will be apparent: the overwhelming goal is efficiency.

What does this look like? You get officers driving city streets, the screens in their cars running green with waterfalls of numbers. They are looking for glitches in the social matrix. They see themselves as people among numbers, people among tasks, people among objects, and people among clusters of cataloged and bundled behaviors.

This is what policing looks like when we see our communities through the lens of data – it’s all about moving the numbers. This is how humans are legible to the technology we use, including the social technology of scientific management.

Pick up some of the textbooks on crime, read some of the journals, read the promotional material for the latest seminar or system, and you will be hard-pressed to find any discussion of crimes – the stories of people and justice and pain. What you will find instead is all about crime rates. We talk in terms of crimes per capita – number of murders per one hundred thousand in population. That is, by itself, as useless a way to think about the citizens and victims and criminals and suspects who are your community as it would be to consider that the national average birth rate is 1.94 children per couple as you are making decisions for your own family. Instinctively everyone knows this, but once this type of thinking becomes entrenched, a more humane alternative seems unimaginable.

Years ago, when I was a patrolman, my supervisor warned me that my “ticket numbers were low.” He was not claiming that traffic accidents, fatalities, or complaints had risen. There was no tangible problem in my patrol area that he could point to. Rather, I’d failed to meet a specified target, decided in the abstract, for effective patrol techniques. This wasn’t a conversation about the condition of the community; it was a conversation about measurement. My supervisor was a technocrat, and I was being optimized.

Meanwhile in my patrol area, I had far more important issues to deal with than attempting to collect a random spattering of traffic tickets to satisfy some metric on a spreadsheet. I had lots of people problems. I was dealing with victims of domestic violence, violent crime, gang activity, and robbery. I could name them. I didn’t have a problem with traffic victims that the emphasis on tickets might (most charitably) be intended to solve, but I did have real people who needed real help. I tried to explain these things. I could see his eyes glaze over during my sermon – in his mind I was simply lazy. If only I would bring the numbers up, I’d be lauded as an effective contributor to the team effort, irrespective of the actual outcomes.

This is the type of environment that makes cops hate our jobs. And the dehumanization it fosters too easily gets passed on, leading us to despise the integers (the citizens) who compose the equation (the community). It’s a context that cannot help but generate enmity. Police learn to see ourselves as fulfillers of quotas, targets, and goals. The public are the units we use to quantify those targets. There is no dignity, no honor, in either role.

Many police executives are aware of this tendency. We try. Often we will add a footnote to data-driven discussions: “Remember, each one of these numbers is a real person.” Or, as I heard in a recent public information training I attended, “Communication is a value, not a technique.” This was followed by several hours of training in communication techniques. Ultimately, these caveats ring hollow. After all, if we really believed in the humans behind the numbers, their humanity would go without saying.

Ultimately, police are secondary: they repair, but it is others who weave. The social fabric must, if it is to be repaired, first exist.

This must change. Good teaching is not teaching to the test; good policing is not policing to the metrics.

The technocratic ideal becomes most obvious, and can be most destructive, in police-hiring ideology. This type of thinking usually expresses itself via some type of euphemism like “he can do the job,” or “he can handle himself,” both of which are another way of saying, “despite what might be serious character flaws, this applicant can fulfill the transactional task.” Skills first, humanity second. The idea that a good policeman must first be a good man is often alien to our hiring practices. We’ve all seen the tragic outcomes associated with this type of hiring, in the shocking encounters between police officers and suspects (or even random bystanders) that regularly make the news.

To solve the problem of police alienation from the community, we simply have to stop framing our world according to it. We have to realize we are literally speaking the problem of police–community separation into existence, creating our own inhumane reality, one data-driven meeting at a time. We have to become radically person-centered and, in particular, victim-centered. Meetings related to crime control in a community must involve the community openly, transparently, and frequently. We should all be sitting at the same table, seeking solutions together. We need to be talking with those who live with our decisions.

These days I’m the chief of police in Marion, Virginia, in the heart of Appalachia. A long way from Quantico, a long way from anywhere. Mountains rise up behind the main street.

When I arrived in Marion six years ago, I started scouting the community for applicants for the department. I found a young man working at a local hardware store. It wasn’t a great job, didn’t pay much, but he had one of the most compelling customer service attitudes I’ve ever seen. He had a second gig, part-time at a local Mexican restaurant, where he was its only non-Hispanic employee. I immediately recognized the strengths associated with someone who could not only thrive in a public-facing customer service job, but also seamlessly integrate into a diverse work setting. I hired that young man about a year later.

A couple of years ago, this officer encountered a man with a hunting bow. He was aiming for something like suicide by cop, determined to either kill or be killed. Bulletproof vests are not knife-proof or arrow-proof. The officer was in mortal danger and would have been, by standard measures, justified in killing the man. He did not. He recognized the humanity of his assailant, and took every possible action to avoid bloodshed at the risk of his own life. With this approach, he may well have saved two lives.

This story about defusing a violent encounter is what policing should look like in almost every case. It won’t always end this way. But we can at least strive to make encounters that end in deadly force true anomalies.

Within the safety that effective and humane protection against crime can offer, the social fabric can be repaired. In Marion we have a grassroots initiative launched by local leaders called The Appalachian Center for Hope. The ACH’s stated goal is to provide a whole-community and cross-sector response to the crisis of addiction – primarily opioid addiction – in our region. We’ve recognized that as a community, we can’t arrest or regulate our way out of the problems associated with addiction. We can, however, rally around those affected and support them – providing secure bridges from one step of recovery to the next.

Ultimately, police are secondary: they repair, but it is others who weave. The social fabric must, if it is to be repaired, first exist. That’s the work first of parents, who raise human beings; of teachers and students, employers and employees, lodge brothers and volunteers, hobbyists and dog owners. When the just life they are living with each other, the justice they are giving to each other in each interaction, is interrupted by a crime, a violation of justice, police can and must step in, but only to restore what was already there.

To counter the forces of dehumanization – not just in policing, but modern life in general – I recommend the “integral humanism” described by midcentury Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain and popularized by figures such as C. S. Lewis and T. S. Eliot. This vision of order recognizes a complex, combined human reality, honoring our shared place in the created cosmos, integrating the very best of what we have produced in helping us navigate it – together.

“If,” Maritain wrote in Humanisme Intégral (1936), “instead of resting in the heart, purity rises to the head, it creates sectarians and heretics.” Our job as police is to promote safety and justice in a community, among humans who are spiritual as well as physical and intellectual beings. We have to treat them, and ourselves, as the kinds of creatures we are. The problems we face in law-enforcement interactions are not going to be solved by the adoption of mechanical catechisms of “procedure,” or the recasting of the ideals of order, or by CompStat – these may help tactically, but not strategically. If we are going to police well, we must police human beings, not statistical agglomerations. We must know that we ourselves are flawed human beings, of the same kind as those we are entrusted to guard.

That day in the park in Quantico with the gang member was formative for me. The man I was working beside wanted to live in a good place, just as I did. We were working toward that goal together.

Several weeks later he was arrested in town, on a warrant for crimes committed elsewhere. As soon as he was released, he returned to Quantico and came to the police station. He asked to speak to me. He apologized: he had shamed himself in my eyes. This floored me. Somehow, he viewed our relationship in different terms than he did his relationship with other police officers. I can only think the reason was that to him, I wasn’t just a cop. He saw me as a fellow human, just as I did him.

A cynic might not make much of this story, but I took from it hope. Perhaps for the first time in his life, he had experienced the fellowship of common work with a police officer, and in that context, wanted to become a vital part of an ordered community. We were both invested, shoulder to shoulder. Maybe, as a start, it can be that simple.