Theron Bowman began his law enforcement career with the Arlington Police Department in Arlington, Texas—a city of over 300,000—nearly 25 years ago, just before its community policing program began. He has been chief of police since 1999. In January 2007, he participated in a roundtable, assembled by the Center for Court Innovation and the Bureau of Justice Assistance, to discuss failure and innovation in criminal justice, a transcript of which is scheduled to be published in the first issue of the Journal of Court Innovation in the fall of 2007. He spoke with Carolyn Turgeon about how he encourages innovation in Arlington.
What are you doing to engage the community in your efforts?
We’re very community oriented here in our department. We have what we call a geographic policing concept, which means we have police officers and police supervisors responsible for specific neighborhoods and communities. And so our officers approach their job of answering calls and serving the citizens from what we call the perspective of the “driveway of the citizen.” We try to understand the needs from the citizen’s perspective and provide the level of service that citizens expect. Our whole approach is based on the needs of our citizenry.
We also recognize that policing effectively requires partnerships—between the police and the citizenry, the business community, other city departments, other law enforcement agencies, social service agencies, and so on. And so we assertively go after establishing partnerships with our community stakeholders. We regularly present to our Chamber of Commerce and their business members, for example, and we regularly solicit the Chamber’s participation in joint community efforts. We recognize that economic development within the city requires the perception of safety and so our Chamber is on board with the Police Department, conducting public safety and responsible business campaigns. And, for example, members of our Chamber will go with us to talk to an apartment complex management company that’s not managing its property well, or they may go with us to talk to a hotelier who is not keeping his or her property up to standard and as a result is attracting nuisances and undesirables.
We also have community watch groups. We have citizen-on-patrol groups. We’re working very closely with our code enforcement people. We have joined to form what we call “code rangers,” citizens who are actively looking for community code violations. Many of those citizens are also members of the police community watch groups. They attend citizen police academies and find out what it means to be the eyes and ears of the police officers. We have connected with our other city departments to target certain pieces of geography within the city over a six- to nine-month period, during which we’ll bring in every city department—from community services to code enforcement, animal services, public works for streets and sidewalks, parks department, and libraries—and in that targeted area we’ll do a full court press to try to encourage citizens to more actively participate in their neighborhood and their government and then, from the government’s perspective, expend resources to try to make a physical difference in that particular area.
Outside of the city, we’re members of various task forces throughout the region. We work with social service agencies, for example. We have a partnership with the Boys and Girls Club along with the Texas Rangers baseball team and the mayor’s office to manage and maintain a police athletic league. I think this particular partnership is unique because it connects so many different segments of society. We’re also working with the mayor’s office and the other stakeholders on the youth commission. Through the youth commission we’re able to work with the Parks Department to establish special youth programs and work with other social service agencies that already have youth programs to make sure that we’re able to funnel youth who need those services into those particular programs, and through that same effort we’re able to hold a summertime camp for young people.
We have a number of different community policing efforts and once again it’s an attempt to see the world through the eyes of our citizenry, to understand their needs and expectations and make sure that while we always retain the capability to respond to 911 calls, we also reserve the capacity to engage in proactive work and partnerships. It’s that part of the job we do that’s really going to help our city be safe—any place, any time.
How do you work with prosecutors and the courts?
The prosecutors and the courts are very important. For punishment to be effective it has to be swift, certain, and sure. We understand that the criminal justice system is pretty much overwhelmed and so we know that the types of crimes and the levels of punishment are constantly changing, so we have to make sure that the Police Department, as the gatekeepers for the criminal justice system, are constantly in contact with the prosecutors. We all need to understand what the public priorities are, the needs of the Prosecutor’s Office, and what cases tend to be most prosecutable. They take the cases we make and move them forward in the system, and we need to be on the same page in order to have a nice clean handoff of those cases into the court system.
It sounds like you do a lot of experimenting with new ideas. How do you create an environment that welcomes experimentation?
You have to start every day with a philosophy that change is good, and that unless you not only allow but promote change, innovation won’t occur. And you also have to understand that sometimes when people experiment the results are not exactly as you would like them. So you have to be willing to take risks and you have to understand that sometimes the outcome may look like a failure but failure sometimes is a part of succeeding. You learn by your failures. You learn to appreciate them and to improve, and ultimately you come out with some successes.
So I think it starts with the attitude that innovation is good, but that in order to experience innovation you have to promote risk taking and you have to be an agent of change. And that’s how we do it here. We’re constantly challenging our people to think outside the box. Don’t be satisfied with the status quo. Look at what other people are doing and have done but then look at the unique circumstances that are around us and envision ways to address problems that have never been addressed before. When we’re able to look at an issue through several different lenses and see ways we can approach it that are new or different, we’re usually willing to give it a shot.
Do you have any examples of instances in which you had to fail in order to succeed?
One example would be geographic policing. The version of geographic policing you see today is not exactly the same as it was when we started it. We’ve gone through several iterations as we learned how a supervisor could supervise officers working on a different shift. Initially there was some dissatisfaction from the rank and file who had been accustomed to working shoulder to shoulder with their immediate supervisors over the years. We learned to develop a new style of supervision that both officers and supervisors were comfortable with, but it didn’t occur overnight. A lot of these kinds of changes occurred through trial and error.
We’re constantly looking at issues like the day labor workers and homeless people and how to most appropriately address those kinds of populations. And we haven’t found a solution that’s 100 percent certain but we try different methods to address and assist those populations. A lot of the time our efforts aren’t totally successful because we’re not always able to remediate these kinds of social problems from a particular piece of geography. So it’s hard to say individually what those failures are, but I can tell you that we have them and we accept them as a regular part of doing business. We learn from them, we move on, and we continually try to improve ourselves.
You have to engrain this philosophy into the culture of the organization, until it becomes who you are. We have a fairly elaborate awards and recognition system where we recognize desirable behavior. We make a big deal when employees engage in innovations, and make sure that everybody knows about them. We have throughout the city what we call the BEST program that challenges employees to create new ways of becoming more efficient and more effective, and though the BEST program selected projects receive some sort of monetary or gift award at the city level. So we reward good behavior, we talk about it every time we get the opportunity to put it in front of employees, and we encourage innovations. Employees know that innovation is good and that mistakes are sometimes inevitable.
How does someone like you, in such a high-profile position, get permission from your constituents to take on risks that can fail?
When you look at public administration models, the public are the owners of the police corporation, and then the mayor, the council members, and the political people are its board of directors. They all make decisions that affect our ability to fund programs and projects, and so ultimately because the public pays for what we do. The public has to understand what’s in it for them, and they have to see a clear connection between the money they spend and the results they achieve. We’ve been able to build our esteem within the public by talking about these innovations as being good things, looking at how we compare on a national basis to our peers, and showing how the innovations we create make us better, more efficient and effective, and at the end of the day how they save our citizens money and resources. But we have to have the public’s approval of what we do in order to do it.
Getting back to courts and prosecutors, the public doesn’t often see the nexus between the courts and street crime. But we do. We see directly how the amount of time it takes to process citations or summons can have an impact on the overall crime that’s occurring within a city. The longer it takes, the more likely you are to see reoffending. So it’s important that the police articulate these things to the public so that the public will continue to provide the kind of support we need to make an impact on the big picture. We have to understand and help the public understand, for example, that if there are no parks or recreation facilities available for young people after school, when most juvenile crime occurs, then we’re going to have a much larger problem with juvenile crime than has to be the case. So we do have to convince the public that risk taking is okay, that the programs we propose actually have a nexus between what the public wants, which is achieving a safe community, and the dollars that we’re spending. And to the extent that we’re successful in doing that, I think we’re able to continue to innovate.
June 2007