Chronicling the nastiness that police do to others leaves me to wonder whether it’s a genetic predisposition, a job that attracts those who can’t find decent work as a criminal or something else.  PsychProf Todd Kashdan offers an alternative explanation, with solution in tow, at HuffPo.

Idle on the side of the road is a lone police officer with a laser gun pointing to an endless parade of cars. Their task is simple. Look at the gun and determine if someone is speeding excessively and also be on the look-out for reckless drivers.

Any rational person would be bored senseless.

It’s not clear that rational person would be the first choice of descriptions, or bored senseless necessarily reactions.  Other choices that come to mind are overtaxed, at the extreme of intellectual capacity, happy to be working off the donut high.  Okay, a bit snarky, but opening with the assumption that we’re dealing with rational people, or that rational can’t refer to reasonable dolts.

Kashdan then suggests:

Negative emotions can influence our behavior in powerful, pernicious ways. When we experience negative emotions our attention narrows such that we are less open to new information, less willing to compromise, and more likely to rigidly adhere to initial reactions and stereotypes. When in a negative mood, we tend to judge people more harshly. When in a negative mood, we are particularly aggressive towards people that are different from us (what we might call our “out-group”) which may be based on age, education, gender, race, political orientation, or religion. Our biases are bigger, badder, and stronger when we are in a funk.

Nobody wants funky cops, but it strikes me that when Kashdan says “different from us,” what he really means is different from them, meaning that the “out-group” is everybody who isn’t a funky cop.  But I digress.

Are police officers aware of how boredom impacts their decisions? Are police officers aware of which citizens fall into their “in-group” and “out-group?” And don’t respond with a statement that they are trained not to show biases. Everyone has biases.

Kashdan faces a fork in the road, and takes the wrong one.  There’s no question that everyone has biases.  But the job of cops is to not act upon bias.  I know, that’s really, really hard to do.  It’s not like we pay them to do the job.  Oh? We do?  Well, still, if they don’t do the job properly, it’s not like they won’t be immediately fired, maybe even imprisoned. Oh? They won’t?  That’s not good.

Upon this backdrop, Kashdan offers a modest solution:

Here is my brief suggestion: allow police officers small personalized strategies to put themselves in a good mood. Let them listen to soothing, melodic sounds of their own choosing (commercials and channel switching on the radio is often more frustrating than pleasurable). Let them spend some time outside of their car where they can physically stretch. Let them stand in the sunlight so that they can increase their serotonin levels while observing their surroundings. When police officers are in a good mood, they are more perceptive, think more clearly, and show greater kindness and compassion.

Despite the fact that everything Kashdan has offered in support of his thesis is, well, simplistic and basically demonstrates a lack of understanding of what police do (they don’t all do highway duty), or the expectation that they really shouldn’t bash in the heads of black people because their donut was stale, his solution has some appeal nonetheless.

Whether described as happier, calmer or more peaceful, these attributes tend to make anyone more likely to be slower to lash out in mindless anger.  While it emits the stench of coddling a well paid bunch of armed folks on the government dole, with a full pension after 20 years and the authority to tell people whose lives are dedicated to developing the cure for disease to hop on one foot, Kashdan asserts that it’s not for their benefit, but ours.

The aim is not to make police officers happy, the aim is to create the optimal environment for them to serve and protect the community. It is far too easy to overlook how our mental content and environment influences our ability to do this.

How nice would it be to have the officer approach the driver’s side of the vehicle with a serene smile on his face?  A warm handshake after the ticket is delivered and a caring admonition, “sorry that I have to do this, and take it a little slower, please.”  Young or old, black or white, wouldn’t we feel better with a happy cop? 

And it doesn’t stop there, as Kashdan points out.

If you think this research on emotions is only relevant to police officers, you are mistaken. How about courtroom judges who feel fatigued after listening to dozens of cases in a row?

Consider how much easier it would be to get those cases adjourned if only the judge was getting a nice foot rub under the bench?

Stress and boredom are the bookends of modern life.  To the extent we manage to avoid them, we are fortunate indeed, but most of us, regardless of our occupations, are constrained to suffer both at various points in our day.  This certainly includes cops, and to a lesser extent, judges.  To the extent we are able to avoid stress and boredom on the job, our spouse and kids are there to pick up the slack.

We could all use some coddling.  We could all use some happy time.  Perhaps cops more than the rest of us, and perhaps Kashdan is right that we would all be safer if cops were saner.  But to follow his advice is to go down a road of no return, where their conduct is contingent not on propriety but feel-good ethos.  It’s hard to disagree with the theory that an environment where police are less inclined to lash out in violence, particularly against those against whom they are biased, would be wonderful.  The question of how to achieve that environment, however, is the issue.

What Kashdan ignores is the culture of being able to indulge their most visceral whim with impunity.  What if his happy cop theory produces police offers who feel badly about beating someone afterward?  Is that good enough?  What if the cop smiles as he tases a pregnant woman or granny?  These aren’t out-group types, but people who are just like those in the cops personal sphere, and yet it happens.  And what of the kids?  Police have kids, yet they don’t seem to show the same empathy when the youngster before them is fathered by someone else.

I’m all for police officers who make smarter, calmer more rational choices in the performance of their duty.  Or more precisely, I’m very much against those who don’t.  But to suggest that they need yet greater concessions to accommodate their personal happiness, even if for our benefit, is naive.  What they need is the knowledge that abuse, misconduct, needless anger and violence, will not be tolerated on the job, and that their fellow officers, their supervisors and the public will not accept it.

Coddling is nice, but getting a beating from a happy cop doesn’t hurt any less.  

H/T Stephanie West Allen at Idealawg