Thin Blue Mind / Smokey Heroes
Police Psychology | How Do We Find and Divert Violence Before It Happens?
Robert John Zagar PhD MPH and James Garbarino PhD
Homicide, suicide or mass murder, are two sides of a coin. Violence is either directed at others or at oneself. So how do we find violence?
Background checks miss violence 75% of the time. For interviews and judgment the figure is 54%, unstructured physical and psychiatric, 51%, and conventional ways combined miss 61% of violence. How can 
this be if background checks miss 75%, interviews miss only 54%, or exams 51%?
When the current approaches are summed into an average, the combined approach is less than any one single approach. One would be better off tossing a coin than using these conventional ways. Yet 95% of the professionals persist in “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Einstein defined this as insanity.
This fixation with ineffective approaches is costly. In the United States, work productivity losses due to violence range from $1,000,000 – $5,000,000 per victim, whether it’s homicide, suicide or mass murder. Read the rest of this entry »
it out to the public, we had contacted Clint Van Sandt of the FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit. We went down to see him and we were ushered over to Dr. James Reese. He was running a program inviting the top police psychologists to stay at the FBI Academy and he invited me to join. It opened up my world to about fifty police psychologists. Fifty people doing what I did, but also something different. That different was what I needed to know. I remember I made a presentation that day about Keeping It Simple as a law enforcement officer. I quoted some great persons in history like Aristotle, Einstein and Dante who all told you to simplify. Then I said “we have to go with the modern greats” and I went around the room and quoted the psychologists who spoke before me. Got everyone’s attention on that one, and it started my work with the FBI and many other departments since.
leader or psychologist to help the situation. Unfortunately, I have worked on too many mass casualty situations, from TWA Flight 800, to the embassy bombings in Africa, to both World Trade Center bombings and quite a few in-between. Being in the New York area I still have cops processing their work at 9/11 and Flight 800.
