Is policing with empathy the key?

Today we’re speaking with Queensland Police (Australia) Inspector Corey Allen on how he went from facing domestic violence in his childhood home and homelessness after the Army to joining the police and introducing empathy into the largest station in Australia with some surprising results!

How long were you in the Army and how long have you been in the police?

I was only in the Army a short while full time before dropping out of officer training 8 months in. I went back into the reserves later on but I suppose the unfulfilled army life stayed with me and influenced my decisions.

I’ve been in the police 33 years now. I got the Australian Police Medal this year (The QPM equivalent), I’m a Churchill fellow, a Paul Harris Fellow and was the alumnus of the year for my University faculty of arts education and law. My projects have won five national crime and violence prevention awards! (I wouldn’t expect anything less from you, Corey!)

In your TEDx talk (which you can watch below), you mention you faced homelessness after leaving the Army; could you tell us a little bit about that and how you came to join the police?

There was a family expectation to go into the Army as my father was in. I dropped out of training and I felt a failure for ‘throwing away a career opportunity’. I made some poor choices and decisions and there were a clash of values.

I applied to get back in [the Army] but they wouldn’t let me back in the regular, only the reserves. I felt embarrassed to go home. Dad was an alcoholic; there was abuse and domestic violence in the family; it wasn’t a nice environment to go back to.

Friends helped me out by letting me stay at their place and I floated around sleeping in parks (I’ve shown my kids the tree I used to sleep under) (Corey was visibly upset at this point; a poignant reminder that his feelings about that time in his life are still present) and I pumped gas at service station for a bit.

There was a lot of police corruption in the 80s and I had bad experiences with them growing up as they’d turn up to my house but wouldn’t help us. I felt bad about myself and wasn’t confident I could be police but some friends from school had joined and said I’d get a uniform and it was exciting so I should join too!

When I went through the selection process there was a height requirement of 172cm and I was 171cm. A couple of mates told me that your spine decompresses throughout the day so you’re taller in the morning. I tried everything – I wore 3 pairs of socks, saw a chiropractor and eventually my mates drove me to the station with me lying in the back so my spine wouldn’t shrink on the way to get measured and I passed. I guess you could say I was determined to get in! (laughs)

It took a couple of years to settle in. It was a rough culture back then with lots of drinking and people didn’t trust me because I didn’t drink; they thought I took the job too seriously but I grew up with alcoholism and didn’t want it. So I got used to cracking one beer open and held on to it all night and I was instantly accepted as ‘one of them’. It’s a different culture now thankfully!

What changed for you mentally to go from a tactical-minded officer (with some of the highest arrest records) to a proactively empathetic one?

We had a prostitute / heroin operation in a particularly bad neighbourhood where it was just a cycle of arresting and fining women for solicitation and men for paying them and supplying heroin but it wasn’t solving anything.

I thought “why are we arresting her if she can’t pay the fine?” and she spends the night in a cell just to do it all again the next night. Why arrest vulnerable people that are clearly victims? I couldn’t reconcile how fines were helping people. You can’t arrest your way out of every problem!

Then I remembered some training I’d done where one of the key questions was “What is the centre of gravity of the thing you’re trying to stop?” and in that neighbourhood it was drugs and money. So we changed tactics and proactively and aggressively started going after the men dealing drugs and their suppliers.

The prostitutes were viewed negatively by uniformed officers but when we started to get to know them individually, we heard their stories and they became informants. We recorded mini interviews with some of them and showed them to uniformed officers which changed perceptions and interactions between the women and girls and police.

Our operation was so successful we strangled the supply of heroin into the neighbourhood! When the money and drugs dried up, the women finally accepted the help we had been offering with partner services as they couldn’t make money or get heroin.

You say that good leaders gave you the support to change operational focus with proactive empathy; what do you think makes a good leader in policing?

It’s different for different situations. We all appreciate that there are times we need space to work things out and others where we need to be told how and when to do something.

We have a blame culture in the organisation (we do here in the UK too); we make decisions quickly over years of practice but if you can’t move out of the phase of retrospectively blaming decisions, we can’t improve. Sometimes we have to ask “how do I manage these wicked problems?” and realise that we can’t just tell them what to do; that we need to listen and consult, be actively curious and we will eventually influence people.

Senior leaders didn’t understand me, my approach or why I wanted to help the homeless so they were quite negative about it at the start and I got a lot of ‘not our job’ when trying to discuss helping our homeless community.

Police are programmed to see things negatively – when we look at each other in that we pick at each other instead of learning from each other and from our mistakes.

I was really lucky as I had a protective leader who told me to just call it a ‘project’ and do it in my own time. He could read the issues and officers on the ground, he cared and looked after me; he understood what he was trying to do.

We found that by getting police to divert people to help it and arresting less of them, it impacted all the crime in the area positively. If police focus on prevention and partnerships, it won’t produce the numbers and money the Government look for but it helps our communities.

The most grief I’ve had in policing has been conflicts with management who couldn’t appreciate the power of empathy and change.

When you began to police with empathy, you found that assaults on officers dropped but also that sickness rates of your officers reduced when you made this operational change; why do you think that was?

One of my theories is that if you make sense out of things that frustrate you, morale improves. Most join to help and if they feel they’re not making a difference, it can affect morale.

Officers reconnected with the purpose of their job – to help – because other people were helping them with issues which they couldn’t solve alone such as homelessness and domestic violence etc.

Our officers were being assaulted less, reducing their need to go to court and with their training of learning to communicate empathetically, actively listen and build rapport with the homeless, they were beginning to practice these with each other.

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For Our Men: We have a lot of time for Corey. He is someone we have come to admire greatly both as a man and as police for his humility, empathy and honesty. It was our absolute privilege to spend time talking to him but more importantly, listening; something we could have done for many, many more hours than we did.