The State of American Police Reform: The Movement Continues (Part 1 of 2)
Dr. Noble Wray has been involved in policing as patrolman, chief and consultant since he was a neighborhood officer in the Broadway-Simpson area in 1982.
by Jonathan Gramling
Dr. Noble Wray came into policing on a wave of reform. Wray joined the Madison Police Department in 1982. It was a time when the department was working to diversify its ranks to more reflect the community it served. Community policing, to allow officers and community members to have relationships beyond the emergency situation, was beginning to take hold in Madison. Wray a neighborhood officer in the Broadway-Simpson neighborhood. Wray would eventually move up in the ranks and served as Madison police chief from 2004 to 2013.
But even as he retired from the Madison Police Department — and throughout his MPD career — Wray was engaged in the police reform movement.
“I have been involved in police reform since the early 1990s,” Wray said. “I’ve worked with a number of national organizations, nationally-recognized organizations that were responsible for police reform. In the United States, federally, we really started focusing on police reform during the Clinton Administration. That’s when they consolidated a number of law enforcement entities to review, to discuss and to work on improving policing. There were the Police Executive Research Forum, the Police Foundation, the International Association of Chiefs of Police and NOBLE, the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Officers. These entities were brought together to reform policing. I worked for all of them as a consultant beginning in the 1990s. More recently, I have spent a lot of my career as a subject matter expert in the area of implicit bias. I’ve pretty much gone all over the United States and North America in training and consulting in this particular area.”
And right after retiring as chief, Wray became a part of the Barack Obama Administration’s 21st Century Policing Reforms that gained traction after the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
“There were key things that the Obama Administration was looking at,” Wray said. “They wanted change in the area of building trust and legitimacy, police oversight and accountability, issues related to technology. I think technology has had a profound effect on policing. A lot of what you see now is you have video technology. You have things that people see. Throughout our history, many communities knew what was going on. As a child growing up in Milwaukee, during the heart of the Civil Rights Movement, there were a number of incidents that occurred in Milwaukee that no one
could ever prove or disprove. Now with video technology, there is an objective standard and people can see what actually police are doing. It still requires the rigor of investigating it and looking at it on both sides and not jumping to conclusions. There was technology. There was community policing. There was training and education. And the last pillar — as we referred to it in the Obama Administration — was officer health and wellness.
And this was critically important because what we started to recognize is that the men and women who go out and do this job need support. They need to be in a position where we can help them, that we are focusing on their health and wellness. Sometimes officers may do things as a result of the stress and day-to-day work that they normally would not do. So that’s the reason why we also included in the Six Sets of Reforms in the Obama Administration officer health and wellness.”
Police reform has been a periodic movement in the United States since the 1920s when Al Capone ruled Chicago through the sales of alcohol in spite of Prohibition and with the tacit approval of the police as money was slid under the table.
“They put in place a number of reforms in the 1920s and 1930s,” Wray said. “The next set of reforms took place in the 1960s and 1970s, post Kerner Commission regarding what was happening related to Civil Rights in society. Communities wanted to be heard. More than one community, a diverse set of communities wanted to be heard. And so that revolution moved from being as we refer to in policing as a 1 Adam-12, Just the Facts Ma’am to this community policing model. The last one, we’ve seen really formed and shaped by two primary incidents. One was Rodney King, the Rodney King riots in the early 1990s, which not only talked about policing, but also looked at the justice system and how fair certain processes and procedures were for Rodney King to actually have justice related to what took place.”
The current wave of reform efforts happened in 2020.
“There was the George Floyd incident, which was a national incident,” Wray emphasized. “I couple George Floyd with Ferguson, Missouri. They were close in proximity. There were a number of reforms. As a quick example, one of the things that was recognized in the Ferguson incident was that the question was raised, ‘Are police officers becoming too militarized,’ in terms of the uniforms, how they approach people, and how they engage. George Floyd brings a whole host of issues. And I think the issue of humanity was at the heart of George Floyd. We all remember that police officer in trying to arrest George Floyd, George could not breathe and this very large man was asking for his mother. And that impacted the whole world. It was not just something that impacted what had happened over time in a particular community. And so the George Floyd incident really was a movement. It captured the attention of the entire nation and the world. And I think it crystallized in everyone’s mind that doing this job, it is very important, those issues related to treating someone with dignity and respect and in a humane manner.”
Earlier this year, the Trump Administration threw a wrench into the cogs of the police reform movement. It terminated the consent decrees with the Minneapolis and Louisville police departments and halted its investigations into a number of other police forces including Phoenix, Arizona and Memphis, Tennessee. In spite of these blows, Wray feels the police reform movement will continue.
Next Issue: The Federal Role in Police Reform