Episode 42: Restoring Trust & Respect with Guest Dr. Jonathan Wender
We are joined this week by Dr. Jonathan Wender, co-founder of POLIS Solutions - an organization created to improve safety and restore trust in communities through its officer training program. Dr. Wender explains how police go most often into disenfranchised neighborhoods, typically those with people of color - “Police touch society where it already hurts the most” - and how this impacts the officers and community. POLIS’ goal is to improve the interactions between police and citizens by training officers to treat each person with dignity and respect through their T3 training. BJ and Dr. Wender discuss the development of BLET (Basic Law Enforcement Training) over the past few decades, as well as the trouble departments are having hiring new officers and how they can get people to serve again. They debate whether education should be required for policing, what departments should be looking for in officers, and how to improve the effectiveness of police training. They end the conversation by discussing the way both policing and community view each other and how to change that to improve trust and relationships moving forward.
YFO is an advocate for the work POLIS is doing to improve police training and rebuild relationships, trust, and respect with the community. These are essential steps toward reimagining policing, and directly connect with our previous episode about Jacques Gilbert’s Blue Lights College, where they are preparing the next generation for this moment. Blue Lights College instills in its students "community before policing", building trust, service, and humanity. POLIS is instilling the same thing in current officers through its training and we are big supporters of that work!
Listen to Episode 41 - Community Before Policing: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7G5Lo3uu2jInLyKx5kqnjA?si=ERGl8t7gQyy5gF1h8J6VJA
More about Dr. Jonathan Wender
Jonathan Wender is a twenty-year police veteran and interdisciplinary social scientist. His area of expertise is face-to-face social interactions in critical situations where risk is high and trust is low. Jonathan has broad experience developing and implementing training programs that integrate social and tactical skills, and is lead developer of Polis Solutions' T3 - Tact, Tactics, and Trust training system. Prior to co-founding Polis, Jonathan helped develop and launch the Strategic Social Interaction Modules (SSIM) Program at DARPA, and served with the program as senior advisor. Jonathan previously served on the faculty at the University of Washington in the Department of Sociology and Law, Societies, and Justice Program. Jonathan is widely recognized as a subject-matter expert on police-community interactions, police use of force, officer decision-making, police training, and other related topics. He holds a Ph.D. in criminology from Simon Fraser University (2004). Jonathan is the author of Policing and the Poetics of Everyday Life, a multidisciplinary analysis of police-community encounters.
More about POLIS: Polis Solutions | T3 -Tact Tactics & Trust and Patrol Expert (polis-solutions.net)