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Public Safety
Active Bystandership Training For Law Enforcement: An EPIC Idea By Jonathan Aronie | Chair, Georgetown Law/Sheppard Mullin ABLE Project Board of Advisors
By Paul Noel | Deputy Chief New Orleans Police Department
In 2016, the New Orleans Police Department did something no major police department in the United States had done before. It implemented a department-wide, holistic active bystandership program for police officers. Other professions had implemented similar programs in the past — the airline industry and the medical profession did so with great success — but law enforcement, incredulously, had not. The New Orleans program, called EPIC (Ethical Policing Is Courageous), provides practical, evidence-based education that teaches and empowers officers to intervene in another officer’s conduct — regardless of rank — to prevent misconduct, reduce mistakes and promote officer health and wellness. The program was readily embraced by members of the NOPD and the New Orleans community, and began paying dividends almost immediately. While it is hard to quantify the success of the program because when an effective intervention occurs often nothing happens (which obviously is the goal of an early intervention), most observers have credited EPIC with materially contributing to the city’s steady decrease in officer uses of force and citizen complaints, and the accompanying increase in citizen trust in the police and officer job satisfaction.1 In 2020, following the killing of George Floyd, the NOPD began receiving calls from law enforcement agencies across the country for help standing up similar programs. To meet the overwhelming demand, the NOPD worked with the Georgetown University Law Center and global law firm Sheppard Mullin to develop a national version of EPIC. That program, called the Active Bystandership for Law Enforcement (ABLE) Project, quickly has become a national best practice in police transformation. Currently, more than 130 law enforcement agencies from coast to coast have been accepted into the program, including Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, D.C., New York, Orlando, Seattle and Dallas. The Attorney General of New Jersey currently is in the process of bringing ABLE to every agency in that state. Sadly, nonintervention by police officers — even in the context of misconduct — is not an anomaly. While police officers are heroic “active bystanders” in many situations, they are no better than anyone else when it comes to intervening on one of their own. And make no mistake about it, most non-police are not so good at it either. (If you question our 1. See http://consentdecreemonitor.com/reports.
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view in this regard, we offer up as Exhibit A the abuses by U.S. clergy over the past decades that went almost totally unchecked by their peers.) But we actually know quite a lot about why good people often fail to intervene to prevent harm to others. Decades of research has shown us that powerful “inhibitors” exist that can turn even the best of us into “passive bystanders” in the right circumstances — things like peer pressure, fear of reprisals, fear of getting it wrong, diffusion of responsibility, pluralistic ignorance and bias. For decades, municipalities and police agencies have tried to attack the problem of “passive bystandership” only through policies, threats of reprisals and sporadic moral outrage. Such efforts have been mostly ineffective and likely always will be because they are not directed at the core problem. The core problem, in our view at least, isn’t that police officers don’t know what they should do; it’s that they have never been trained to do it. And making matters worse is that many — perhaps even most — officers continue to operate in a culture that strongly inhibits “active bystandership.” The Municipal recently featured a wonderful article about ABLE (see sidebar). The article prompted significant interest among city and police leaders. Some of the questions we have received are worth sharing with others. Do police officers support ABLE? Yes. Because ABLE, like EPIC before it, is not a discipline program, not an internal affairs program and not a whistleblowing program; the program is all upside for community members and officers. ABLE teaches a skill we all need. It’s a skill that will help keep a police officer out of harm’s way just as much as it will help keep a community member out of harm’s way. In New Orleans, officers are vocal about their support of active bystandership training and culture. Veteran officers in the city play an active role in creating a workplace culture that promotes active bystandership and that provides positive examples for newer officers. As
