ASSOCIATE Magazine FBINAA Q2-2024

Continued from "Hoping for a Better Future", on page 13

Emotional intelligence has a connection with the basic psycho logical needs all humans have by equipping individuals with the ability to seek and promote psychological safety, feelings of value and purpose, and a sense of belonging. The ability to cope with the strains of the job, to be more realistic about change, and to be more flexible in seeing things from others’ perspec tives can, also, help leaders navigate political landscapes. Police leaders with better emotional intelligence even get along better with their immediate coworkers, which likely produces a better support network within the department, making officers more resilient 10 . The evidence suggests that emotional intelligence is a skill that can be built and improved. As police leaders build their emotional intelligence, they may become more resilient to the uncertainty of the current policing environment. Leaders who help develop the emotional intelligence of their subordinates will help foster a culture that is more hopeful, more engaged, and less cynical about the future direction of policing. SHARED VALUES WITH COWORKERS When agencies are looking to hire recruits, they often assess whether candidates are a “good fit.” Organizational psychology research has clearly demonstrated the importance of fit to the individual's success within employing organizations 11 . A sense of shared values is one important dimension of workplace fit. When employees feel their values are consistent with the values of their coworkers, it can strengthen workgroup bonds (i.e., the team) and contribute to the long-term satisfaction and retention of employees. Shared values generally relate to more open lines of communication, increased trust, and improved work outputs. When police leaders share a sense of value within their depart ments, they will be more effective, more resilient, and better able to handle emergent challenges. Our study found that leaders who reported stronger shared values with their workgroups re ported more hope for the future of policing. We suggest that this observation illustrates the power of shared values in maintaining higher morale and a more positive organizational culture. Final ly, what is true here for leaders is likely also true among officers on the front lines. The power of a police workgroup (e.g., a shift or squad) to shape the culture on that shift is something most officers would acknowledge, and policing research backs this up 12 . When officers feel a better sense of shared value within the department and their workgroups, they will be more confident in their job performance . The findings in our study point us to believe that officers who share more values within their working In addition to sharing values within the department and workgroups, finding a sense of shared values with the com munity is key! Research in policing over the past decade has demonstrated that officers frequently express perceived dif ferences between how they see citizens nationally versus their local community 14 . Research we have done in the past supports this and helps demonstrate that police officers’ moral alignment with the local community is related to more democratic attitudes about how the job should be done 15 . In our current study, police leaders who felt their community shares the same values were significantly more hopeful about the future of policing when compared to those who reported lower levels of alignment with their communities. For line personnel, the perception they share values with their community is important in shaping officers’ expectations. Leaders play an important role in helping cultivate group are more hopeful about the future of policing. SHARED VALUES WITH THE COMMUNITY

strong alignment between community members and agency per sonnel, which can improve officer morale and optimism about their profession. COMMUNITY POLICING FOCUS Many police leaders today started their careers in an era heavily shaped by community policing efforts, and now there are renewed calls to reinvest in community policing to build posi tive relationships with their communities. The President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing (2015) specifically recognized that community policing involves police leaders building relation ships with community leaders and infusing community policing into the culture and organizational structure of law enforcement agencies 16 . Officers today may be reluctant to get more involved with community-based efforts when resources are already strapped and many people seem to object to police presence at community-based events. However, in our study, those leaders who prioritized community policing aspects of the job expressed more hope for the future. This was not true for those who prioritized more traditional law enforcement functions, such as making a lot of arrests, harder enforcement of street-level drug dealing, and so forth. WAR ON COPS Feeling the pressure of public scrutiny, many police officers feel as though there is a war on cops, presented as increased public scrutiny of police and a belief that citizens have been embold ened to resist police actions and are more likely to assault officers 17 . Researchers have considered how officers worrying about the current political climate might de-motivate them, making them more cynical and less likely to stay engaged 18 . Our research shows that those police leaders who expressed greater concern over a perceived war on cops were, indeed, less hope ful about the future of policing. This is important because the rhetoric pushes fears of an out-of-control war on cops, but the data are not as supportive of those fears 19 . When police leaders feel overwhelmed by such fears, they become less hopeful and more cynical, creating a cyclic pattern of negative emotion that drags them down at a moment in history where they should be the champions of hope who focus on a better future for policing. CONCLUSIONS Our study shows five aspects were independently correlated to hopefulness about the future of policing, but we recommend that police leaders view these relationships focus on reciprocity. Emphasizing and focusing on increasing emotional intelligence, personally and among subordinates, improves internal coopera tion (workgroup fit) and better relationships with citizens and external stakeholders. In turn increasing an emphasis on com munity policing (the social dimension of emotional intelligence facing outward) could further reinforce better value alignment with the local community and reduce broader fears of the war on cops. All of these things reinforce a sense of hopefulness about the future, which reciprocally then improves morale and builds a more positive, more resilient culture better-equipped to handle the challenges of policing. Hope requires optimism, and emotional intelligence provides for building the skills necessary to combat the negative cyclical neural bias that leads to hope lessness. Additionally, hopelessness can become an emotional contagion spreading rapidly throughout a department and into the community. Combating the emotional contagion is essential to improving and sustaining hope for the future of policing.

FBINAA.ORG | Q2 2024

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