Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 89: Lt. Richard Goerling, Mindfulness in Police Work

Episode Date: July 19, 2017

At a time when there have been controversial police shootings of unarmed civilians and many officers risking their lives to protect their communities feel under siege, one potentially constructive element being introduced into this highly-charged atmosphere is mindfulness. Richard Goerling, a police lieutenant in Hillsboro, Oregon, who has served in law enforcement for 20 years, works with police departments around the country to teach officers how reduce stress, combat unnecessary use of force and make smarter decisions in the field through mindfulness training. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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and being the person in law enforcement, being the white male in law enforcement that's willing to talk about the oppression of people of color in the criminal justice system. For ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. This is not a surprise to anybody, but we live in an era, and I know this,

because I cover it a lot as a journalist. We live in an era where there are lots of police shootings, particular of unarmed African-American men. We also live in an era where police themselves feel under siege, like they're being painted with a very broad brush as a result of these videos that have gone viral, even though they're out there risking their lives to protect us. And one potentially constructive element to be introduced into this highly charged atmosphere is mindfulness. And we've got police departments around the country introducing mindfulness as a way to get their officers to reduce stress and also to make

officers who are making better decisions in the field who are using mindfulness as a way to combat prejudice and unnecessary use of force. So we're seeing this and you may have heard a couple of episodes back. We talked to Chief Sylvia Moir of 10P Arizona, which is right outside of Phoenix. She's using it with her men and women on her force, but it's also they're using in Dallas where as we can, as we all remember, there was that horrible shooting of officers not long ago. And our guest this week is a guy named Richard Girling, who is from Portland, Oregon, and he has introduced

mindfulness quite successfully to the force there. And he travels all over the country to teach officers all of the country how to do this. So give him a listen. However you feel about this issue, I think he's going to have something to say that will peak your interest. Richard Gurling. So how did you come to meditation? Well, you know, I like to answer this question, you know, I think people ask me how long have you been meditating?

Because that's like the scorecard it seems in the meditation world. In the meditation world, you know, how long have you been meditating? And I like to answer now, you know, all my life, because I think that we all intuitively have this meditative capacity as a human being. So I think it's been a part of my experience as a human being, but I didn't know what to call it, and I didn't do it formally, necessarily, until I had formal training and meditation. So that was about 10 years ago. And I got to that through really through the study of stress and resiliency. At that time as a police sergeant, just recognizing that this job I was in had a lot of negative impacts on the health of the people myself and the people that I worked with and so I looked for

Training tools to help police officers be more resilient and frankly to be less unkind I'm guarding my language because we're on a podcast, but We can you you can use whatever language you want. Great. So to not be at all, right? And so I think this police officers often act unintentionally, mostly, kind of like this sort of tough act, right? And so I jokingly call this the act factor.

And so looking for ways that we can relate to people in a way that were not overly guarded, overly tense, overly directive. And at the end of the day, I looked for how to unpack this police citizen encounter, how to improve the performance of the police officer on a tactical level, so a cognitive decision making. How do we make better decisions, but also how do we make this experience for the citizen that we're engaged with, how do they experience more productive, make them literally feel better.

And so a lot of the work that we do in law enforcement now is brokering social services. So we may go to a radio call and, you know, sometimes we think, well, why am I here? And like, I'm a police officer and I'm not really here to help these people parent their children, but in fact, you are. You know, that's why we are there

because out of desperation, they call us, we show up and we're like, hmm, well, I guess I have to deal with this. So managing our own emotion, managing the frustration or the anger or the fear or whatever it is, that takes skill, right? And we can teach those skills. And so what I found after frankly a few years of research, I started with the emotional intelligence. I looked at Dan Goldman's model and became a student of that and actually trained emotional intelligence in an academic environment to cops and realized, okay, now they know about emotional intelligence, but they're not building skills in emotional intelligence. How do we take this to the next step?

That's where I found mindfulness. And there's a local yoga teacher in Hillsboro Oregon where I'm from, where I work. And he also happened to be a mindfulness based stress reduction teacher. And so I engaged Tim, partnered with him, and took my first eight week in BSR class. And that's where it started. So you were, if I, if I hear you correctly, which often I'm not mostly out of a complete lack of mindfulness, if I'm here, you correctly, what brought you to it was a desire to improve police work, not necessarily some sort of personal anguish. Yeah. So, you know, I like to say that I don't have a conversion story. I don't have, oh my

God, my life was so messed up. And certainly it has been over points in my life, but it wasn't, I didn't seek mindfulness to sort of remedy anything I was going through. I sought mindfulness to improve my performance in a job that is incredibly complex and difficult that I didn't feel like maybe I was performing at my capacity. And also, because I, at that time, I was supervising relatively young police officers and I just observed their behavior and I thought, wow, we're four or five years on a job and we're acting like we're 15, 20 years on a job with our cynicism and our judgment towards others. And I really started paying attention to how judgmental we can be.

And I think Dan, what we do in police work is we judge others in order to make sense of the world around us because you're just exposed to so many things that are like tragic, you know? And so when you go to that, you get that radio call and it's a dispute between a parent and their child, right? And you're kind of thinking in your head, well, these people just simply can't parent their kid. And so now, to make sense of this conflict, you judge the parent like, well, you're actually a parent.

You know, you shouldn't have had kids, right? And then it just spirals and gets worse and the judgment. And you do whatever it is you do in that radio call. Maybe you broke some services, maybe you just give bad advice, good advice. I don't know. And you leave. And then later, when you're talking with your, you advice, I don't know. And you leave.

And then later, when you're talking with your brothers and sisters in blue, it's those kinds of judgments come up. Because you want to talk about it. So we talk about those experiences almost therapeutically for ourselves, but we foster a culture of negativity and judgment and cynicism. And it's not, I don't even think we know we're doing it. I think it is a classic stress response, but it has really long-term consequences

that are not healthy for us and not healthy for how we relate with the community. So did you find after eight weeks that your attitude and performance were changing? Not so much. You know, I found after eight weeks that, what I felt was that there's something to this that could be helpful. And the MBSR course itself, there was probably about five other police officers that we all

went through an MBSR course on our own time, at our own expense. And then we kind of rallied together and said, okay, what do y'all think? And all of us thought, well, it's helpful. There's something here, but we can't send all these cops to an NBA surcourse because there's some things that are just going to make them get up and walk out the door. Touchy feeling. Yeah, exactly. And so I didn't have this like, like, wow, this is amazing.

My life's different, but I thought, hmm, yeah, this could be helpful. This is interesting. And so we explored over the following few years with our, with our mindfulness teacher, Brent Rogers, and we started creating a modified MBSR course. And so we took out some of the more, you know, touchy-feely stuff. We added a little more gritty stuff, and we also focused a lot more on kind of the movement because cops hurt, right? You're in this job long and I've doesn't take but a few years with all this gear you're wearing and especially if you're in a radio car, you're in and out of the car. I mean, you know, you're pretty much screwing your body over every

day. And then you sleep deprived and all these other things. So we had realized that we bring in some of the movement, just some of the gentle yoga practices that, for that alone cop should I go, can I stay in this course? But then also focusing on the culture piece. So I wrap mindfulness around a warrior ethos concepts. And I know warrior is not a real popular term right now in law enforcement politically, but that's our fault. It's our fault is police leaders because we've sort of let police cultures stray off.

But I think we've created a model where we can bring mindfulness in, where it meets us in our culture, and it's relevant for our culture. And at the end of the day, I think one of the things that mindfulness trains is that you can be a badass warrior, and that could be in news media, or policing, or whatever profession, but you don't have to be a dick, right? What do you mean by warrior? You know, warrior is a very overused term. In the concept of police officer warrior is somebody who

Who sort of stands the watch over our public safety our democracy and when someone's in crisis somebody who responds so it's the classic running to The crisis instead of running away from the crisis and then when you're there Actually doing something meaningful and useful in a way that doesn't further enhance the crisis that's occurring. So not creating more harm because of the potential energy that you bring. Gotcha. And so you modified the course. Yes. And what happened then? We modified the course. And then it took me, it took a few years of socializing

the neuroscience behind mindfulness, socializing mindfulness with my peers and with a key group of leaders inside my police organization in Hillsboro. And I spent a lot of time. I spent hours talking to our SWAT team members. I spent hours talking to our force tactics trainers to our canine officers, to our school resource officers.

And these are key people. These are really what I call the leaders in the organization. The people that are on the ground doing the job that influence change. And establishing good relationship, establishing sort of the groundwork of, hey, this is based in science, and the neuroscience of this makes sense.

And essentially, socialize this in a way that allowed us the opportunity to train. And in Hillsboro, the reason we, in in 2013 the reason we were able to execute three series of mindfulness-based resilience trainings is because we had an incident one of our police officers off duty got into a domestic violence incident at home and Ended up getting into a gunfight with the SWAT team and it was just a crazy tragic incident. No loss of life, but at the end of the day,

either softsters, spending 10 years in prison for attempted murder and other charges. So that sort of shook our organization up. And the morale was probably as low as I've ever seen it and we had a change of leadership at the top. We had an interim chief who a guy named Ron Louis who had previously been the chief of police there and sort of transformed the police agency over a period of about 15 years as the chief and he'd always been a mentor and friend of mine. And he came in and basically, he's first staying in the job as interim chief.

He calls me and says, okay, we're gonna get, we're gonna get the barriers out of your way. I want you to do this training. So within a week, we did. So I had to, I'm curious just to step back a little bit. And I'm gonna get to how the training goes. But for all these years, you're out there saying, hey, our culture is problematic.

We're being jerks. How does that go down with your colleagues? Not well. With some, not well. We know this though, Dan. We know our culture is a challenge. We work and live in an incredibly toxic environment. And, you know, any challenge to the institution of policing is generally met with a defensive posture, right?

And even internally. And so, one of the things I did was I became an adjunct instructor at a local community college and I developed a class where I called this class initially effective police encounters. And so I taught this class to college kids and talked about these things. So they were sort of an outlet for me, like to present an alternative perspective on the state of policing. I would occasionally give talks at law enforcement conferences.

And I've been to a few where I've given talks and been critical and I learned that the institution doesn't want to hear criticism from the inside. And so I thought, okay, I'm gonna have to figure out how to be this change agent and have this contrarian voice internally. And I just continued to do it and I found this relationship with Pacific University. They invited me to be an affiliate faculty member. So I have this team with Pacific University that I do most of this work.

I don't do this work as a lieutenant of police because there isn't enough acceptance inside the institution to do this. So, I mean, I do some of it, but it's very, very limited, but most of the work that we do, the research and the training that we do is really done as a professor, adjunct professor at Pacific University. And so that's how I've had to cope is to step outside and kind of have one foot inside the system and one foot outside the system. So working with Pacific University, you start running these cohorts through the training, fellow officers in 2013. How did that go? They were being studied too.

They were being studied. It was interesting. So the very first class I advertised internally and I had more people than I could bring into one class. As an indicator, I didn't have to go and recruit and sort of pull teeth to get people to the dojo. It was a dojo. I like to use the term dojo. It's sort of this martial arts term of a sacred space to train. And so I had police officers who wanted to be in the first cohort who couldn't be

because I had too many people. Is that because they had just gone through this terrifying thing with with your colleagues? In part, and in part that in part, you know, here's the thing. Police organizations, the leadership of police organizations and more broadly the institution will say understands that stress and trauma is a significant issue. We understand because we see, and we'll talk about the sort of the health metrics of law enforcement officers, but we have a huge problem with addiction. We have a huge problem with behavior on duty. We have a problem with suicide.

We have a problem with just health and well-being of our people, on duty, injuries, and then there's the whole performance problem, right? So there's all these issues, and we know it's intuitively even. We know it's connected to stress and trauma of the job. And we don't do a lot about it. I mean, I think the most effective training

is to teach skills and resiliency so that we can walk through trauma and with some period of adjustment, come out the other side as strong as we were when we started or maybe a little stronger. And this is the notion of post-traumatic growth and it's the notion of Icaria's resilience and science teaches about these things, but we're still stuck in the post-traumatic stress disorder, which we need to understand and we need to mitigate. But we send police officers to trainings where they sit for a half day or all day

and we talk about hypervigilance and we talk about things. And so now they leave the training and go, oh, now I know about stress and I know about hypervigilance and I know about post-traumatic stress disorder. And what the hell am I supposed to do about this? And so I think what we know about neuroscience is that we can teach skills

that allow us to navigate through a traumatic situation or chronically stressful situation and have an awareness that allows us to perform better to regulate our emotion, to regulate this stress response and have an awareness that allows us to perform better, to regulate our emotion, to regulate this stress response, to have our humanity with us, because one of the first things we jettison

is sort of our give a sh** factor. Well, this is serious, and I'm intense now, right? And I'm gonna be hyper-vigilant and step into this situation, and emotions are optional. now, right? And I'm going to be hypervigilant and step into this situation and, you know, emotions are optional. And, you know, so our training that we do isn't very helpful. And with mindfulness, we're teaching skills. One of the first things we're teaching is, let's

talk about emotion. Emotions are actually not optional. And emotions don't signify weakness or strength. Emotions happen because you have a brain, and we have this thing in our brain called the amygdala, and there's lots of other complexities to the neuroscience of emotion, but you will experience emotion whether you desire to or not. So the next question is, how do we regulate that?

We don't control them. I don't like to use the term control. I like to use it to regulate. So we teach how to regulate those emotions, but first becoming aware of them. And that's a challenge when you have people who are conditioned to ignore their emotion or stuff their emotion, we're going to compartmentalize my emotion and put it in a box over here. Well, okay, but the box is going to, the lid's going to come off that and it's going to be explosive. I have a friend who jokes that he switches between two gears, self-pity and rage.

It makes sense, right? If that's how your condition, that's good training, right? Probably not real productive, but I think a lot of police officers probably have two or three gears as well. And it's not very helpful for us. So we're teaching skills in these trainings. And so what I found was that you have this continuum

of response, the anecdotal continuum. And so I've had officers, I had a few officers who maybe have to climb two or three left and never came back. And no judgment, no questions. I still don't even know why they didn't return. And that's okay. Sort of the majority of the officers

gave us some pretty positive anecdotal feedback. And then a few officers were like, this changed my life. And I consistently see those anecdotal, that anecdotal feedback and trainings that we do. And it's really remarkable. But the research data on that, and those, we did three cohorts in 2013, the research data is amazing. So it's improvements in sleep, improvements in pain management, improvements in empathy, reductions in anger, and there was a number of other metrics there that were very promising for us to

continue doing research. So you're going to do more of this now? Yeah, so we're right now in the middle of a national Institute of Health-funded studies, and we're looking at, this is an exciting piece, but data right now, we're not sure we have anything useful, but we're looking at all the health metrics that are important. We're testing a Salivary Cortisol, and we're testing some other self-reported psychological metrics, but we're looking at...

So it's just them, do you jump in? Yes, Salivary Cortisol is a bit... Cortisol is a stress hormone that you find it in your spits. Right, exactly. So, yeah, we had officers sp and tubes for us, you know before before the training right after the training and then eight weeks later. Mm-hmm. Let's see idea and The other thing we're looking at is bias and cognitive bias So yes, this is the issue that people are talking about absolutely

So I believe based on the research that's out there as do my colleagues that mindfulness is the path to really get into implicit bias in policing. And you know, if we don't vilify our actors, whether it's the police officers or community members, and we really look at the science of bias. And I think that we will find that mindfulness is a training pathway for law enforcement, for us to become aware of bias, and once we become aware of it, then we can begin to mitigate it through a variety of mechanisms, maybe the first of which is the awareness and compassion that mindfulness teaches us. So to just put the fine point on this, we have, as you know, had this rash of shootings

of unarmed black men by police officers, many of them white. And one of the theories is that implicit bias that cops see blackmail are just subconsciously tell themselves a bunch of stories about how this is probably maybe a dangerous person and therefore they're more likely to shoot that person. So you think meditation is the way one possible way to mitigating cognitive bias, implicit bias. Yes. And you think their evidence is there to suggest that it could actually work? I do.

You know, there's so far there's no research in law enforcement with police officers in bias. This study we're in now is I think the first research for police officers, mindfulness in bias. And unfortunately, the tests that are available aren't very good. So we don't even really know. Right. So I think this study that we're doing now is going to tell us, it's probably not,

and we're analyzing our data, but it's probably not going to tell us, oh, this is a definitive yes, this impacts implicit bias. But I think it'll tell us whether or not there's feasibility in the next study. And so we've planned our next study and we're gonna make some modifications to how we test bias with police officers and mindfulness. And we're looking at, you know, there's, of course, there's the, you know, implicit bias testing that exists out there and we use that IAT.

We're also looking at how a decision-based bias testing. So we're looking at how to design, whether it's a forced response test or some other kind of decision-based test. Forced response test, will you use force in this? Right, a classic shoot, no shoot, kind of thing. Gotcha. And so there is something out there called

a shooter bias task, which was designed, I think up in Michigan at the University there, that was used with college students. And it's great with college students, but when you move into highly trained police officers who see the nuances in these tests and kind of call like, well, this isn't going to work. And I first looked at the shooter bias task with my research team before we started this and said, this isn't going to work. It was a shoot no shoot. I'll show you a picture of somebody with something in their hand. And if it's a weapon, it's shoot, if it's not a weapon, it's no shoot.

And I said, this doesn't jive. This is not a realistic test, so we can't do it. So we changed it to, the question was not shoot no shoot. The question was armed unarmed. So you're making one simple judgment of, is this person armed or is this person unarmed. And they flash these photos very fast, very rapidly, right? But the police officers what we're finding and what we believe is they're so well trained, they're answering these questions very easily, you know? And one dimensionally, you can't, you can't give a one-dimensional photo or set of circumstances to a police officer and say, would you shoot? Because they start asking questions.

Well, tell me more about the situation. Yeah. And so it just shows how well-trained police officers are. So we have to change our testing to meet them at their level of training and really raise the game in testing cognitive bias. And so we don't, you haven't come up with it yet. We're working on it. You're working on that? I mean, it's not. So we don't, you haven't come up with it yet. We're working on it.

You're working on that. I mean, it's not just shoot, don't shoot. It's also like, do you stop that car because you think the driver looks as quick. It's just do stop a kid on the street and frisk him because of his pigmentation, all of these. Correct.

Well, and I think Dan, it's some, and then let's grow that beyond, because there's so many system forces that create the directives, whether they're cultural or organizational for police officers to take enforcement action. For example, in agencies across the nation, generally, there is pressure to write traffic citations, there's pressure to take people to jail. And so-

So you meet your quotas or whatever? Well, I wouldn't even use the term quota. That's kind of an old school term that isn't helpful in the conversation, at least this conversation. But I think that, you know, a young cop coming on the job wants to perform well, right? And so where are the performance metrics?

Where are the performance metrics? And I think if you look at the system of policing and you look at the criminal justice system or broadly, we really just have to acknowledge the legacy racism that exists in the system. And not that, you know. What about the whole country? Well fair enough, yeah.

And so all of these forces influence how I behave as a police officer. And so I think what happens is we want to focus on the individual actor. Well, yeah, we need to be held accountable for sure. We also need to be supported. Yet, we really need to open up our lens to a macro or a strategic view.

And pay attention to, well, what are the social and cultural forces that are creating the tactical behavior of our police officers? And I think that's a broader question. And when we start training mindfulness to police officers, maybe what one of the things we're doing is allowing them to sort of take back the ownership of who they are as a professional law enforcement officer and give them a little more autonomy and control over how they Do their job as opposed to being one tiny cog in a giant wheel that has a lot of Racism shot through in it. Absolutely. I mean, you're right

I think just based on the numbers that I've seen, but I can't recall offhand, but you know, prosecution rates and jail, you know, sentence lengths and all of that stuff. Like we would to get qualified counsel, et cetera, et cetera, all of it for minority communities, that just in the wrong side of those numbers, almost every single time, from what I've seen. And again, I want to issue the caveat that I haven't looked at the numbers in the last five minutes, but I've covered the criminal justice system for a while. It's not a system that were down to the benefit overall of minority communities, by which I mean that they're often disproportionately punished.

Therefore, I guess my question for you is how much can meditation with cops really do given the scope of the overall problem? No, it's an excellent question Dan and the power of the individual should not be underestimated. Even in a system that has a lot of challenges and systemic racism and other issues that create those social and cultural forces towards behavior maybe that we would like to change. So mindfulness changes how the police officer

is aware of themselves. It changes how they manage and lead themselves. And so it opens up, I think, an awareness and a compassion that radically shifts how they show up. So it changes the energy of the encounter. So in other words, I can show up as a stressed out, suffering, and I'm going to have an encounter that is authoritative. Or I can show up as a well-regulated compassionate, yet still capable of turning on a bad asset anytime I need to, police officer, that is chill,

and that has an energy that isn't threatening to people in crisis, and that isn't judgmental, and is, you know, is this fierce compassion that, you know, our Buddhist friends like to talk about that is so remarkable. And so we can begin to change how we show up. And if we do that, you know, one police officer here, five police officers here, and soon that begins to infect the attitudes and the energy of a team and then of a culture and then of the organization and then, you know, and it grows. So it really does make a difference.

And so I think there's a lot of efforts nationally, politically, to, to, and they're good efforts to, to change law enforcement. But I think we also, to be effective, we need to change grassroots, bottom up, and then as we're changing top down, and maybe we'll meet somewhere in the middle and see which is more effective. But if you want to change police officers, attitude, culture, and behavior, you have to get to them and we have to provide skills training that mitigates the deeply negative impact of the trauma of this profession. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life.

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And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. It's funny listening to you because you talk with compassion about the situation that police officers in which they find themselves, but at times also, and I think there's probably a way for you to connect with your audience. You're pretty tough on officers.

You use the A word a few times. I can't, you can swear I can't because I word for Disney. But isn't it the case though? I mean, again, this is not an area where I have numbers. It's just my intuition having spent a time with the police officers professionally. Most of these people don't go into the job to pick on minority communities. They go into the job because it alope a dangerous job because, go into the job, it's a low pay dangerous job because they think they're gonna do something good in the world.

Absolutely. Absolutely. So let's explore that. So a person joins a police organization, I think exactly, to be a part of something greater than themselves, to do good, right? And I like to say they have a heart for social justice. And they get on board and their first exposure to culture is the academy. And you know, so you go to the academy and that's when you start generally speaking, that's

when you start learning the culture. And in some police academies across the nation, there's remarkable cultures that are healthy. And many, that's when you first begin learning the us versus them culture. And then you spend time in field training, you get coached by other officers and you learn the skills to do the job and you do the job. And maybe three or four years later, you're still stoked, you're still excited about the job,

you're enthusiastic, because the chronic and acute stressors in trauma of the job haven't really caught up with your body yet. But it may take a few years, but what we see is between years, seven and 10, we start to see issues in behavior and burnout. And that's when we see these young, fit people, these men and women. And that's when they start gaining weight and they start having health issues.

You see injuries. You see all these things that are symptoms of something going on. And you also start to see cynicism. And you know, this dualistic thinking of, you know, if you're a police officer, there's people out there that are out there to get you. And there's no question that this is a dangerous job and there are people that that are foes. We can't paint everybody as as a as a foe out there in the field and I think sometimes our default is to do that because it's just simply easier and maybe safer for you. Well you know it may be but here's what's interesting though. There was a study done in

Savannah, Georgia. So Jeff Alperds, a professor at University of South Carolina in Columbia, and in 2008, he published this study. And it was a study on police officer demeanor. And so he's said, how much grad students out in Savannah and they, with their clipboards, and they wrote with police officers, and they took these metrics down. And to oversimplify a study, and I hope he's okay with this.

Basically, intuitively, in law enforcement, we've always known that in a police officer, citizen encounter, if this citizen has an attitude, if they are offensive, if they're non-cooperative, if they just have an attitude, let's say they're an asshole, right? Then we know, well, we're more inclined to take enforcement action because we have discretion because of this person's attitude, right? Well, Jeff looked at the officer's attitude. So the police officer's demeanor

and how did that impact this study? And again, to oversimplify the outcome, it was beautiful because he basically found data from his research that reinforces what we know. And then as if I show up as the, if I show up with the attitude, with the authoritative approach to this, then what we see is a greater incidence of force response,

a greater incidence of enforcement period. So because what happens is, and maybe this is getting into the neuroscience of people's emotional energy, but if I show up as kind of an ass, the person I'm dealing with is probably going to amp out. Right. And pretty soon we're in this sort of like attitude war. So it's not safer for you. It may not be.

It may not be. And I think that it's also not safer in the long run because if we think there's a bad guy behind every, you know, vehicle stop, and there may be, and that's a whole nother incredibly unsafe arena's vehicle stops. I should probably not talk about that one right now. But if everybody is a bad guy, so to speak, then first of all, I mean, we can't sustain

that sort of hypervigilance in our system, right? Being dumped with cortisol like that over time, and this is what we see. We see increased risk of cardiovascular disease, we see obesity, we see type 2 diabetes. The risk of sudden cardiac death for police officers is it's ridiculously high. All of these things that we see as a result of this attitude. So maybe in that moment, in a few tactical situations, it may be safer. But what we try to train with mindfulness is that we're not giving up our tactical safety with compassion. We're actually improving it.

Because I submit to the police officers that I train that awareness and compassion are the gateway to performance. And I believe that because I think what happens, Dan, is that if I have this awareness of myself, I'm improving my situational awareness around me. And if I'm not, if I don't have all this unregulated emotion and stress and things going on in my body and my person and in my being, then I'm more aware of you and I'm reading you better and all this data that my brain's taking in, I can assess more effectively. Therefore, I can make cognitive decisions more effectively because I'm not clouded.

I'm not in this fog of war because of stress. So I would submit that compassion and awareness helped me to perform better. Therefore, I'm safer. So I'm inclined to think there's just based on what you've said that there's really maybe something to the idea of taking mindfulness to police officers, say that without having seen all of the evidence, so I can't say anything definitive, but it seems promising to me with the caveat that I'm biased toward meditation. Sure. However, you are right outside Portland, Oregon, one of the most liberal cities in the universe.

And I'm wondering, like, how would this go down in the Bronx? How would it go down in Huntsville, Alabama? How would this go down in Dallas? Well, I'll tell you this. I had the privilege of visiting Cambridge, Massachusetts Police Department earlier this year. Also, fair enough to end. Fair enough to end. Fair enough to end.

People's Republic of Cambridge. So I look for the liberal spots. You know, it's, well, let me just talk about some of the work that I do. So, you know, I talked about Pacific University. I talked about the work I did early on at Hillsborough Police Department. So I started something called the Mindful Badge Initiative. And through that, I went through UCLA's training program last year. So I got myself credibly trained so I can go out and actually train with some integrity.

And so since then, I've done some work. So I've designed a, I'll back up a bit. The eight week training is a wonderful training model for research. It's not so much a good training model for logistics for police agencies. So let me just say the MBSR, MBSR mindfulness-based stress reduction, which is this eight week program,

which has been, it's very handy because it's an eight week standardized program and you can replicate it and therefore scientists can study it all over the place But you're now saying that eight weeks isn't super useful for what you're trying to do It's it's great for research with police officer. Yeah, where it's not so great It is so difficult to go into a police agency and say hey, I want to do eight weeks of training I want to take 25 police officers and put them in this cohort. And we're going to train once a week for two and a half hours.

And maybe week seven, we'll do this six, eight hour training. And, you know, the wheels start spinning and they're like, well, that's great. But how does this work again? And interestingly enough, it's really difficult to get those 25 police officers consistently showing up for one Because of the nature of the shifts nature of the shifts so operationally it's really really difficult And there's so many things to get in the way so you're essentially instead of saying hey I want you to come to one training opportunity

I want you to come to eight training opportunities, and so there's there's eight times the the obstacles And the buy-in doesn't really happen until week four or five. And so, a lot of times we see police officers really struggle to even show up week two, three, and four. So, what I found is doing some kind of an intensive immersion training on the front end is incredibly helpful. So, I developed with some training partners, a two and a half day immersion training. And in Bendoor again, we do this in a residential environment. So in January of this year, we did a two and a half day residential. We had like about 27 police officers show up on a Friday evening.

We spent four hours on a Friday evening training. And you know, they hit the rack and we're up at 7.30 and you were meditating first thing in the morning and we have breakfast and it's a long, long day on that Saturday. And then Sunday, it's another eight, nine hour day. And that exposure is really, really helpful. And what I find anecdotally from that is that, you know, police officers tell us that, oh, I understand how this is helpful.

And so that's a good starting point. And so that model has been pretty productive. Also I've done day-long trainings. I've done that same model in a non-residential format because it's difficult to do a residential because the costs go up and it gets really challenging for police agencies to afford training because they're not, their funding models don't support mindfulness training as you can imagine. residential as a Costco up and it gets really challenging for police agencies to afford training because they're not, their funding models don't support mindfulness training as you can imagine. But I think that, you know, what we're looking at now for this next study at Pacific

University is we're looking at a way to combine an initial maybe a day-long immersion or a weekend immersion and then a six, eight week ongoing training. But to get that by in first and sort of sink those skills in and then to train over a period of time, I do think the duration, you know, eight weeks and I'm sure there's all kinds of reasons that John Kebazin chose eight weeks, but it really gels with sort of the science about creating new habits and it really makes a lot of sense and I like having the duration of that formalized training. And we don't want to lose that. But we just want to have some more buy-in on the front end. But so do you think this will work outside of Cambridge and Bend and Portland?

Yeah, so I do. So I've also trained down in California. And the California Chiefs of Police organization is very interested in mindfulness and his potential. Sylvia Moir was a chief of Elcerito Police Department until earlier this year she retired and she went to Tempe Arizona as the chief, but Sylvia pioneered mindfulness getting started in California and she brought myself and another trainer in and we spent,

we did a weekend training there and it was really helpful. And then, and now we have some other chiefs in the Bay Area that are interested in doing this. So I think, and it's the Bay Area, yeah. I get it, Dan, I get it. But it has to start there. And then, and then I think the conversations can shift, you know, you talk about NYPD. One thing that I recognize is that I'm, I'm a West Coast police officer and I am not going to

walk into the house of a place like NYPD and pretend to tell them that I know anything. Now there's a way to build relationships and there's a way to introduce things and there's a way to build trust so that maybe there's a handful of NYPD officers that would want to train and we could try it. I think that is feasible for sure, but it's not like, you know, I would say to the leadership of NYPD that, oh, you know, this is, you need to, you should. I do not like to use should and need statements. I listen to myself. This is my awareness, you know, and I think that there's a lot of conversation to be had. And I think any mindfulness training

has to be carefully crafted to meet the culture of the organization and the expectations of the community. And that's different in New York and it's different in different parts of New York, right? Absolutely. And so, and it's different in Atlanta, in Portland and San, and everywhere. But I do think that there are places where mindfulness is beginning to be part of the conversation

and even part of the training. I have a friend, Brian Shires, who's training Los Angeles Police Department, and really tiny doses, but he's beginning to introduce them to mindfulness. And Brian's one of my training partners partners and we do these immersion trainings together. So I think we're starting to get, you know, police officers are open, I believe in my experience, to training that will help them perform better

and feel better. That's the bottom line. Yeah, okay, well, I'm to share your optimism because why not? Let me ask about you personally. So you've been doing this for 10 years. What's your daily practice look like? And how is it changing how you show up when you get a radio call, when you go or when you got to do a traffic stop?

Yeah, you know, so right now professionally, I am in our investigations division. So I left our patrol division about a year and a half ago, so I'm not out in the field anymore. But I will tell you this, is that my practice is fluid and varied. You know, there are times when I go through periods where I sit daily, for short periods of time, I'm not a you know 30-minute meditation, daily meditation guy. I think sometimes it's 10 minutes, sometimes it's 15 minutes. And then other times, just depending on what's going on in my world, my practice is fluid. So it's part of the rhythm

of what I do. It might be, I'm going to close the door to my office and I'm going to sit here for a few minutes. It might be an intentional walking meditation. It might be, I swim regularly, so it's sometimes my practice is just in the water. And so I find it where I can. And that's the reality of, I think the lies we live, and I imagine, you know, you might have a similar explanation of how you practice. Well, that's a great model for people because I of the things that we've, you know, I have this company that teaches people how to meditate through an app, 10% happier available on

iTunes, that, you know, we find that one of the big fears we've identified for secret fears that either stop you from meditating or screw up your practice and one of them is time. Yes. And so to hear somebody like you who's got a training in this who trains other people to do it and you're like, you know Sometimes I said and do it formally for 15 minutes other times. It's just like Catches one catch as catch can and I I think that's empowering to people and I hope it is because it's realistic You know and and I think you know you get into these in these communities and the mindfulness community and other communities I think they're becomes these sort of into these, in these communities and the mindfulness community and other communities, I think there becomes these sort of, this social pressure to perform, right?

It's like, well, you must be doing this way. And I have a very good friend who is like, you know, well, you've got to sit for 30 minutes every day. And so we had this long conversation. And at the end of the conversation, he understands he's never gonna say that to me again. Cause it ends up in these long conversations that are kind of unpleasant.

But again, it's this classic judgment. You know, well, are we judging ourselves for, I mean, I've heard you talk about this, and it's so right on. It's like, well, sometimes we're so worried about how do we do this right that we're not even doing it? Yeah. And so, but it comes back to maybe what I said earlier, and I think that so much of what we have called mindfulness is just the intuitive human

experience and it's just being awake to it. And so I think we can walk through our live, awake to that and augment that with a daily practice, you know, a few times a week practice or whatever. And I do think that, you know, I find that formal intensive practices are very important for me. And it might just be once a year, you know. It might be a five day retreat once a year. It might be a weekend retreat once a year. But I seek those out because those are life saving. And then the race in between those is the race in between those. And it looks like what it needs to look like.

So how has it changed you on the job? How has it changed you? I just met your lovely wife before I walked in here. So after 10 years, are you a different guy or are you always awesome? No, not always awesome, that's for sure. I think I am an evolved person and I don't think I'm a different person,

but I think, you know, living life is about the evolution of who we are as people. I think I'm a lot more aware of myself. I think I'm a lot more aware of people around me. I think that I am more compassionate towards others. It doesn't mean I don't have this sense of accountability. I mean, you know, I'm not, well, everybody can do whatever they want. No, it's not true. But I'm compassionate when I bump up against people's suffering. And, you know, if people, you know, this is so petty, but this is the word we live in, you know, if I go to the coffee shop and the barista behind the counter is unpleasant, instead of being like, well, damn, you know, what a jerk, right?

I think, yeah, that person is probably having a really difficult time in their life. And I'm not going to meet that with my own unpleasantness. I'm going to be kind. And maybe I'm going to actually tip a little more because maybe this is a single parent trying to survive and this is their third job. And why do I have this expectation that this should be nice to me? Because who the hell am I? So I think that changes how I encounter other people. So it changes how I parent. I mean it's got you know parenting is

this journey of realizing just how much work you have to do on your own self right? It's like you know just, just, and it's accountability to raise these people into productive human beings. And, but, you know, it's changed how I parent, my own awareness of decisions I make. And then, you know, I have two daughters and I find myself saying, I'm sorry, a lot, you know? Because maybe I'm too quick to have an answer or whatever, right?

But so it definitely has changed who I am. It changes how I see the world. And you know what's interesting, Dan, is that this journey I'm on is a change agent in policing. It is not one that I chose. It's in that my sound sort of strange, but I mean, I came to this realization that it chose me. And it's been, I think, the most difficult path in my life.

And I've had a lot of challenging paths in my life. And I've finally come to a place where I'm comfortable with being the weirdo that is going to talk about mindfulness and being the person in law enforcement, being the weirdo that is going to talk about mindfulness and being the person in law enforcement, being the white male in law enforcement that's willing to talk about the oppression of people of color in the criminal justice system. That's not my opinion. That's my realization. And, you know, so having those kinds of conversations and speaking publicly about those kinds of things,

I guess you'd say that I'm a radically different person than I was when I was a naive young police officer 20 years ago. It's interesting because I bet you get it from both sides. You and I yesterday were at a conference social justice conference and there were a lot of people in the room who've had deeply negative encounters with police. So I'm going to view you maybe with some suspicion. On the other hand, you exist within the police infrastructure. And as you said before, you're the weirdo

who's talking about mindfulness. So it's hard for you to find a home, I would imagine. Yeah, that's pretty accurate. And I think some of that is, yeah, it's really a difficult place. I mean, I am clearly not well-established in the, what we might call the traditional good old boy network of law enforcement. And I'm not fully accept that I think, by the police reform community. And I don't need to be either. I think I see a lot of my path as a bridge and not as the only bridge, but as a bridge

to bring communities together. And whether it's academia who's going to look at this as objectively as we know how, whether it's law enforcement leadership or the frontline personnel, which really I think are the best leaders in law enforcement, or whether it's a law enforcement leadership or the front line personnel, which really I think are the best leaders in law enforcement, or whether it's the community activists. And I think that if I can stand in the overlap of all of these communities and I can create conversation and build relationships, then that's very helpful. And that is a very lonely place to be. There's no question, but that is my path.

And I have to honor this role that I play. I'll make a prediction before we close. It's not going to be lonely forever. I suspect that you will have more and more allies as this thing becomes more and more socially acceptable. Where can people learn more about you? Well, I have a website, mindfulbadge.com. And yeah, I think that's the starting point. Okay, that does it for another edition of the 10% Appear Podcast. If you liked it, please take a minute to subscribe, rate us. Also if you want to suggest topics, you think we should cover or guests that we should

bring in, hit me up on Twitter at Dan B. Harris. Importantly, I want to thank the people who produced this podcast, Lauren Efron, Josh Cohan, and the rest of the folks here at ABC who helped make this thing possible. We have tons of other podcasts. You can check them out at abcnewspodcasts.com. I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music.

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