What If

What if we adapted the concept of "After Action Reviews" and applied it to evaluating the effectiveness of our policing tactics and strategies?

THE U.S. ARMY’S AFTER ACTION REVIEWS: SEIZING THE CHANCE TO LEARN

"The U.S. Army is one of the few organizations to have institutionalized these reflection and review processes, especially at the group level. After Action Reviews (AARs) are now standard Army procedure. 49 They were introduced in the mid-1970s and were originally designed to capture lessons from the simulated battles of the National Training Centers. The technique diffused slowly—according to the Army’s chief of staff, it was a decade before the process was fully accepted by line officers and embedded in the culture—and only in recent years have AARs become common practice. The turning point was the Gulf War. AARs sprang up spontaneously as small groups of soldiers gathered together, in foxholes or around vehicles in the middle of the desert, to review their most recent missions and identify possible improvements. Haiti marked a further step forward. There, for the first time, AARs were incorporated into all phases of the operation and were used extensively to capture and disseminate critical organizational knowledge.

The technique is relatively straightforward. It bears a striking resemblance to “chalk Talks” in sports, where players and coaches gather around a blackboard shortly after a game to discuss the team’s performance. Both chalk talks and AARs are designed to make learning routine, to create, as one commander put it, “a state of mind where everybody is continuously assessing themselves, their units, and their organizations and asking how they can improve.” In practice, this means that all participants meet immediately after an important activity or event to review their assignments, identify successes and failures, and look for ways to perform better the next time around. The process maybe formal or informal, may involve large or small groups, and may last for minutes, hours, or days. But discussion always revolves around the same four questions:

• What did we set out to do?
• What actually happened?
• Why did it happen?
• What are we going to do next time?"

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Do we ever do this in policing except in major cross-jurisdictional or mass murder cases, like the Beltway Sniper situation or the Columbine shootings? Couldn't we do this in every police agency? COMPSTAT bears some resemblance but it was designed to be used by administrative staff rather than line officers. What if we enabled officers to use their street knowledge to learn? What if analysts were part of the after action reviews?