Every year, universities are flooded with applications for admission and they must winnow the pool of applicants while preventing racial, gender and class bias from creeping into decisions.
Police departments, it turns out from interviews with several local chiefs, have a related but somewhat different problem. Instead of too many applicants, there often aren’t enough people applying for openings. Dozens of positions in local police departments have gone unfilled due to trouble in recruitment. (Budget cuts due to Covid-19 and to the growing pressure of the police abolition movement could now mean that some of these vacant positions never get filled.)
The question, then, is not just how to fairly screen those who do apply, but also how to attract as large and diverse an array of candidates to begin with. The Salinas Police Department website, for example, includes an explicit invitation to prospective applicants: “Women and Spanish speakers are strongly encouraged to apply.”
At the Seaside Police Department, Chief Abdul Pridgen is turning lessons from his time at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where he learned about using behavioral science, to craft better policy.
Before Pridgen publishes job openings, for example, he checks the language of an ad against a gender decoder. It’s a text analysis tool, with entry-level versions available on the web for free.
“The tool helps de-bias the language in our advertisements so that it appeals to more people,” he says. “We make sure the language we use is gender-neutral.”
The word “courage,” for example, is coded masculine. It means that research shows that the word appeals to men more than women, acting on biases that are under the surface. “Some potential applicants might be dissuaded because of that word,” Pridgen says.
He also likes to experiment with the decoder, replacing words like “enforcement” with phrases like “uphold the law.”
The whole process of hiring - from advertising an opening through reviewing applications, interviewing and selecting applicants - could be improved with the help of insights from behavioral psychology, Pridgen says, and he hopes to partner with a company that specializes in eliminating unintended bias in hiring.
The company is London-based Applied, and Seaside PD could soon become its first customer in law enforcement.
He has been in talks with Applied and its competitors since last year. The “decimation” of the police budget due to the pandemic means he has little money to offer. But he’s hopeful that the chance to work in law enforcement will make Applied more likely to strike a deal.
“All the companies I spoke with on this were chomping at the bit at the opportunity to put their robust research into practical application in a police department,” Pridgen says. “I am really hoping that we will be coming to some agreement.”