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Welcome to Roll Call, a newsletter about the state of policy and technology in public safety, and the people shaping it. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Or just read on…
TL;DR
IACP is a useful timestamp not only on where technology is going, but the cultural forces at work and what they say about the national narrative pushed by police organizations.
Mental health was the most high profile topic. The top 5 of agency operations, mental health, trust (between agency and community), training, and crisis management made up 32% of IACP’s focus.
Agencies were the subject in 46% of the training sessions. Communities were the subject of 15%, and victims only 1%.
Today’s note is the sequel to Who Won IACP, published last month. IACP is an important and noteworthy event in public safety for two reasons:
It’s the highest concentration of decision-makers and the recipients of decision-making dollars. To that end, most vendors will time their strategic product announcements to coincide with the conference in an attempt to pull public safety in the direction of their vision for public safety in the future. Alan Kay’s “it’s easier to invent the future than to predict it” is at work. My previous IACP note covered this.
This note is about IACP because the conference is also the highest concentration of agenda-setters and cultural power in public safety. IACP is where it's easiest to read the tea leaves; what do law enforcement organizations care about? What’s most pressing? What’s the narrative that officials are exporting from Chicago to the rest of the country? We can try to answer these questions by mining the content of the 250+ training sessions at the conference. Private conversations and chiefs’ dinners would likely reflect more accurately the topics of concern, but this gives us a great benchmark.
A quick word on methods:
All training sessions had up to two subjects and three topics. There could be one subject, like in the session “Leading an Agency through a Line-of-duty Death,” where Agency is the only subject. There could be two subjects, like in the session “Maximizing De-escalation,” where the primary subject is Agency and secondary is Officer. Sometimes boilerplate sessions had no topic, as they were only about IACP.
Subjects and topics are subjective. The main focus of the session was determined to be the primary, and the other involved subject the secondary. Often, this meant that the subjects were arranged so that the primary was the actor and the secondary the acted upon, but not always.
Here is the sheet with all subjects and topics, as well as my analysis. Please feel free to branch off of my work. If shared externally, give credit to Roll Call Media. Alright, let’s jump into it.
Subjects
Each session involved some combination of the five types of subjects below:
National - the context superseding all agencies and communities. Mostly used when describing national statistics, global best practices, law at the federal level, etc.
Agency - the law enforcement agency as a unified body. Sometimes described as a part of the community.
Community - those served directly by an agency.
Officer - the individual interfacing directly with the community.
Victim - the individual on the receiving end of a crime.
Adding up and weighting subject scores such that primary = 2*secondary, we see that Agency is far and away the most important:
This is not surprising. After all, IACP is about how leaders of agencies should direct their attentions over the next year. The fact that a weighted 27% of the focus was on Community, Officers, and Victims is noteworthy. I have not performed a similar analysis on previous IACP conferences, but I would be willing to bet that the share of Community and Victim has doubled over the last four years, and I expect that it will double in conference share over the next four.
Raw counts are only so helpful. To go a level deeper and look at the relationships between subjects, I built a chord diagram showing directional flow between pairs of subjects:
Three sections within Agency help understand how to interpret the graph. The blue, self-referential section of Agency refers to when it’s the sole subject. The ribbon connecting Agency and Community shows that there were 39 instances of Agency-Community, and 15 instances of Community-Agency. It’s purple to show that Community is the bigger recipient of flow, the end point. Vice versa, the ribbon connecting National and Agency shows 34 instances of National-Agency and 12 instances of Agency-National. It’s blue because Agency is the sink.
This helps put the Victim numbers in context. There were zero sessions where Victim was the primary subject, let alone the sole subject.
Topics
By looking at session titles, descriptions, and presentation materials (when possible), I was able to identify 60 topics. Topics were similarly scored, where primary = 2*secondary = 3*tertiary. Graphing the scores gives us:
What’s important to understand from this? First, the concentration is notable. The top 5 made up 32% of the topic focus. The top 10 made up 53%! Half the conference was dedicated to two handfuls of topics.
To get the best idea of what matters, we should also remove a few topics from consideration. Because IACP is geared towards operators and leaders, there were a wealth of topics on generic operations, leadership skills, and tactical best practices. Without those, we get a top 10 of:
Mental Health - The topic of the year. We can finally say that mental health in first responders is mainstream, which is fantastic. It scored strongly because it was well-represented across all subjects. Agencies discussed laws and policies built to improve Officer resilience. At-risk communities were strategized for. Common adjacent topics were Trauma, Support, Suicide, and Wellness.
Trust - The relationship between Agency and Community. The topic spanned technology and policies. Phrases like “proactive media relations,” “balancing fun and public information duties,” “the new role of police… as recovery coaches,” and “collective healing” stood out. Common adjacent topics were (Social) Media and Training.
Training - Mostly National and Officer focused. Culturally tinged, like introducing “after-action reviews” or building policies to enable officers to attend degree programs. Bias, Tactics, and Wellness were common adjacent topics.
Crisis - Preparation, response, and management. Often addressed the fallout of poorly handled media crises, including phrases like “navigating your agency’s narrative in the digital age” and “the era of misinformation.” Also addressed how to interact and de-escalate citizens/neighbors going through mental health crises, the dangers posed, and the partnerships or actions to resolve. Common adjacent topics were Mental Health, Support, Morale (Trust, but w/in an agency), Training, and Mass Violence.
Investigations - A focus on DNA, Video, Data, and Financial Crimes. Tactical in nature, as mostly looking at best practices.
Recruiting - An Agency-centric problem, but was addressed from several angles: Underrepresented groups, cultural adaptations required, and prioritizing Mental Health even before hiring.
Data - Lot of discussion of “next generation” data management; going beyond CompStat, NIBRS, intelligence gathering (and the liabilities that come with it), and Early Intervention systems.
Trauma - Mostly related to how Officers react to Trauma, and the responsibility then on Agencies to address the Mental Health and Wellness consequences. This was also the section with the closest relation to Victims, looking at policies being put in place to aid Victims and provide “trauma services.”
Underrepresented - How Agencies are interacting with minority and Underrepresented groups, as well as steps being taken to Recruit more seriously from these populations. Common adjacent topics were Trust, Hate Crimes, Recruiting, and Sexual Assault.
Wellness - Closely related to Mental Health, but more expansive to address Officers’ longevity and physical health. Most often paired with Morale and Mental Health.
There were a few other surprises that jumped out. DNA was an over-represented topic, considering that most attendees aren’t investigators. There were several sessions about consumer genealogy tech and the laws/policies governing law enforcement’s ability to obtain that data. Drones got a decent amount of attention. I expected early intervention systems to be more prominent, given how closely related that is to mental health, use of force, privacy, and media crises.
Tech, Policy, and Law
Finally, a raw count of sessions that addressed technology, explicit agency policies, and/or federal law:
I included Operations to contextualize how prevalent policy and technology were. 20% of all sessions dealt with technology in some capacity. Drones, DNA, and Social Media were the topics that consistently tapped into each of these buckets.
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-MA