In a recent issue of “Eighteen Eleven”—the monthly periodical for members of the Federal Law Enforcement Officer’s Association—Special Agent Jean Kanokogi, PhD, authored an article titled “5 Ways Law Enforcement Officers Can Embrace their Moral Compass.” Kanokogi is (was?) the FLEOA director of Mental Health and Peer Services.
“To be effective in their duties, it is crucial for officers to embrace their moral compass and uphold ethical standards. By aligning their actions with their sense of right and wrong, LEOs can foster trust, promote fairness, and ensure justice is served.”
—Special Agent Jean Kanokogi, PhD
Here I’ll expand on the ideas too briefly presented in the article. What exactly is this so called ‘moral compass?’ How does one reflect on ‘personal values,’ or for that matter, what are they? Why should we cultivate ‘empathy and compassion’—isn’t that a sign of weakness? Can we define ‘ethical leadership’ and how does this apply to those not in a leadership position? Lastly, what is this ‘community outreach’ stuff the author writes about?
VALOR Initiative Paradigm Shift
In this article I see hints to what the VALOR Initiative (BJA) calls a “paradigm shift for 21st century law enforcement.” This shift in thinking proffers three elements that define a professional law enforcement officer. That they strive to be:
- Scholars—with a commitment to life-long learning,
- Statesmen—proactively engaging the communities they serve,
- Guardians & Protectors—honoring their oath, performing their duties to the best of their ability, and actively pursuing their potential, to be someone’s hope in their time of need.
“To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.”
—Winston Churchill
Writing for VALOR, Dr. Roy Alston states, “we can be agents of change. Being a professional law enforcement officer requires a commitment to yourself, your fellow officers, and your community.” Where appropriate, I will tie the VALOR ideals back into Kanokogi’s five ways of embracing our moral compass.
“There is an inseparable connection between your professionalism, your continual development, and your safety. Professionalism leads to officer safety.”
—Dr. Roy E. Alston, VALOR Spotlight on Safety: Law Enforcement Professionalism
What is a Moral Compass?
Let’s start with a definition. Your ‘moral compass’ is your personal set of beliefs and values regarding right and wrong. Morals aren’t fixed. They may change as you face new experiences in life, gain knowledge, or cope with hardships.
More broadly ‘morality’ is what defines whether an action is perceived as good or bad, proper or improper. Morals guide your individual behavior within a society. Though sometimes used interchangeably, morals and ethics are not the same.
Ethics refers to community values—they are more culturally based. Ethics can and often do align with morals. But ethics tend to be the cultural, societal, or organizational standards that outline how ‘everyone’ within that group is expected to behave. For example, this law enforcement code of ethics.
So our moral compass is made up of our beliefs and values. Therefore, it may be helpful to articulate these and actively renew them (or revise them) to fit reality, throughout our lives. This brings us to Kanokogi’s first recommendation to “take the time to reflect on [our] personal values and beliefs.”
Values and Core Beliefs
Most don’t think of their values and core beliefs, they think with them.
Values and core beliefs are a set of attitudes, unique to each of us. They govern our behavior and filter the way we look at the world. You have them whether you know it or not. Knowing your personal core values is a way of connecting with your inner self. Not knowing, you run the risk of going against them. That leads to making choices that take you off the path. To creating cognitive dissonance or ‘moral injury.’
Have a look at this list:
Highlight, underline, or circle the words that most resonate with you. This diverse list of over 100 values, to which you can add your own, comes from Brene´ Brown’s book “Dare to Lead.” Her challenge to us is to narrow this list down to your core two values. And, yes, Brown admits this is universally difficult.
Those first ten or twenty or so that you earlier highlighted she calls “second-tier values.” The most difficult part is whittling that down to just two. I’m not as hard on myself and have accepted that I can get this down to four. Like cardinal points on my moral compass.
Those second-tier values can be grouped together as they relate to one another. Therein we can refine our first list into two (or four) core values. The second-tier values then support these values. When we are guided by clear values, we can continue to make choices about how to behave from a position of confidence, strength, and dignity.
Now that we have those top tier values lined out and the second tier values adding texture, we can reflect on them. I suggest a journal practice where you can meditate on the values as Marcus Aurelius did in his personal journals. Maybe a brief daily reminder, or a weekly deeper conversation with yourself.
“To ‘have a practice’ … is to follow a rigorous, prescribed regimen with the intention of elevating the mind and the spirit to a higher level.”
—Stephen Pressfield, Turning Pro
Think of this journaling as a practice. As Stephen Pressfield writes in Turning Pro, “we come to a practice as Warriors.” But remember, “the real enemy is inside himself.” The space of the practice is sacred. The journal then is sacred space in which you do battle with yourself. Therein you exercise and strengthen the better angels of your nature and purge the imps and demons.
“The professional displays courage, not only in the roles she embraces (which invariably scare the hell out of her) or the sacrifices she makes (of time, love, family) or even in the enduring of criticism, blame, envy, and lack of understanding, but above all in the confronting of her own doubts and demons.”
—Stephen Pressfield, Turning Pro
Throughout the book Turning Pro, Pressfield equates the path of the professional with the hero’s journey. As mentioned earlier, the VALOR initiative encourages the 21st century law enforcement professional to be a guardian. The word Hêrôs in ancient Greek meant not ‘warrior’ but ‘guardian.’ So, the professional is a hero, the hero is a guardian, the guardian is a professional.
The Strength of Compassion
The Eighteen Eleven article next suggests we “cultivate empathy and compassion.” These character strengths are “essential qualities.” They allow LEOs to “approach their work with fairness and understanding.”
“[L]aw enforcement officers must bridge between the community and the law enforcement agency. This bridging is accomplished by asking questions and treating citizens better than they expect to be treated while maintaining officer safety … fairly and with dignity.
“All law enforcement officers should understand four universal principles: (1) everyone wants to be important; (2) everyone wants to feel respected; (3) everyone wants to be appreciated; and (4) no one likes to be criticized, demeaned, or condemned. Violating any of these universal principles could result in diminished officer and citizen safety.”
—Dr. Roy E. Alston, VALOR Spotlight on Safety: Law Enforcement Professionalism
Before we go further, let’s take a step back and see what exactly we are cultivating here. The article suggests ’empathy and compassion.’ Is this to mean two different things or the same thing with different names? Hearing the word ‘empathy’ many may stop to wonder if it is in any way synonymous with sympathy. It’s not, but compassion is. Let’s try to straighten this out a bit.
“Empathy: the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another.”
—meriam-webster.com
Empathy and compassion both refer to a caring response to someone else’s distress. The word ‘empathy’ was coined 1858 by German philosopher Rudolf Lotze. It’s a translation of Greek empatheia, “passion, state of emotion.” The word was modeled on German Einfühlung (from ein “in” + Fühlung “feeling”), which is an art appreciation theory, that maintains appreciation depends on the viewer’s ability to project his personality into the viewed object.
“Compassion: sympathetic consciousness of other’s distress together with a desire to alleviate it.”
—meriam-webster.com
While empathy refers to an active sharing in the emotional experience of the other person, compassion removes the emotional vicariousness, maintains instead a ‘consciousness’ and adds to that a “desire to alleviate” the distress. The online etymology dictionary tells us it’s from Latin compati, meaning com– “with, together” + pati “to suffer.” Latin compassio is an ecclesiastical loan-translation of Greek sympatheia.
“Sympathy: an affinity, association, or relationship between persons or things wherein whatever affects one similarly affects the other.
—meriam-webster.com
Sympathy is the (much) older of the three words—first known use in 1579. It comes from the Latin sympatheia, from the Greek sympatheia. I’m left wondering (and Google provides no good answer) why the German philosophers needed to create another word. Sympatheia by the way is the basis from which the Stoics move from self-interest to the interests of others and ultimately the cardinal virtue ‘Justice.’
“For perception is the origin of all appropriation and alienation (allotriosis); and Zeno and his followers [the Stoics] assert that oikeiôsis (appropriation or alliance) is the principle of Justice.”
—Porphyry
Following ‘Hierocles’s Circles,’ Stoics taught we should always seek to draw the further circles—family, friends, neighbors, countrymen, all humans—towards ourselves. We’ll come back to this later.
For better or for worse word meaning evolves over time. This cute cartoon from TED, with over 1.3 million views on YouTube, indicates the current thought is empathy is good and sympathy is bad. I’m not convinced. I don’t think the giraffe is being sympathetic. I think the draft is a dismissive prick.
As psychology professor Paul Bloom argues, there seems to be some confusion about the three terms. He encourages us to think more accurately and more effectively about our relationship to moral terms. The title of Bloom’s book says it all—Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. To me the most compelling arguments in his book are those of scale and bias.
“Intellectually, we can value the lives of all … we can give them weight when we make decisions. But what we can’t do is empathize with more than one or two people at the same time. Try it. Think about someone you know who’s going through a difficult time and try to feel what he or she is feeling. Feel that person’s pain. Now at the same time do this with someone else who’s in a difficult situation, with different feelings and experiences. … Now add a third person to the mix. Now try ten. And then a hundred, a thousand, a million.”
—Paul Bloom, PhD, Against Empathy
In scientific studies of empathy, empathy has shown a way of narrowing our focus in a self-regarding way. That is we empathize more with those that either resemble us or those we find attractive. Bloom goes on to show how this can lead to tribalism or ethnocentrism and atrocities in the name thereof.
Bloom also drops this bit of information which kind of set me back on my heels:
“In his book on Buddhist moral philosophy, Charles Goodman notes that Buddhists texts distinguish between ’sentimental compassion,’ which corresponds to to what we would call empathy, and ‘great compassion,’ which is what we would simply call ‘compassion.’ The first is to be avoided, as it ‘exhausts the bodhisattva.’ It’s the second that is worth pursuing. Great compassion is more distanced and reserved, and can be sustained indefinitely.”
—Paul Bloom, PhD, Against Empathy
Coming back full circle, while working in a peer support capacity, I aim to activate as much empathy (and sympathy) as I can for those I’m supporting. But when it comes to decisions in the field, I try to be rational and compassionate. To make decisions based not on what the involved parties look like, or whether they seem more or less like me, or some other emotional push-pull.
My tools for cultivating rational compassion? Reading.Especially philosophy and psychology. Meditation—‘loving kindness’ meditation—and the work of Tara Brach (Radical Acceptance and Radical Compassion). With all of these new skills, start slow, start small, and start close to home. Once the tool is honed sharp then you can bring it to bare in LE encounters, being more TACTful and TACTical. As VALOR teaches, you “listen and explain with equity and dignity (LEED).” Stephen Covey calls this “seek first to understand and then to be understood.”
“Empathy [Compassion] means moving into the mind and heart of others to see the world as they see it. It does not mean that you feel as they feel. … Rather it means that you understand how they feel, based on how they see the world. Strictly speaking, you will never fully see it as others see it, but you try.
“Your attitude is: ‘I will try to understand. I may never understand, but I am going to try.’”
—Stephen Covey, Principle-Centered Leadership
Start by practicing self-compassion. While there is some evidence indicating this doesn’t grow empathy or compassion, it certainly doesn’t hurt, and your overall wellness will benefit. Heal your own trauma. If you hold on to unhealed trauma, you’ll likely traumatize others unintentionally. When you do the work to heal your psyche and connect to your should, compassion is a natural by-product.
Learn and practice active listening (which is great for building rapport with victims, witnesses and suspects).
Maintain a daily gratitude journal. Move beyond your self-referencing—practicing shifting your perspective away from excessively thinking about how something effects you.
Relax your dualistic judgements. Not everything is ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ Practice being present. Try being fully present with everyone you encounter (more on this soon). This makes it easier to detect and read body language. You’re more likely to ‘feel’ what the other person may be thinking beneath the words. Like I said earlier, TACTful is TACTical.
Intentional engagement is the key to being a Statesman, and to your personal and professional health. Engagement is a personal choice. Professionals are not made by chance, but by choice. They develop over time through trials and by perseverance.
Continuously Seek Education and Training
In the last section we discussed quite a few practices and skills. This leads directly to Kanokogi’s next suggestion to continuously seek education and training. VALOR too admonishes law enforcement professionals to be scholars—life-long learners.
“Knowledge is the cornerstone of being a professional… The factors that matter are knowledge of the law (statutory and judicial), policies and procedures, interpersonal communication, and tactics.
—Dr. Roy E. Alston, VALOR Spotlight on Safety: Law Enforcement Professionalism
What else should we study? The article mentions enhancing our understanding of:
- ethical standards,
- community relations,
- professional conduct,
- and the “latest practices and developments in law enforcement.”
VALOR recommends, “participating in training that goes beyond the basics, such as:
- casualty care and rescue tactics,
- techniques used to defuse difficult encounters,
- and recognizing “pre-incident indicators.”
The VALOR Initiative has free training in all these topics.
A few things I’d suggest:
- Law–codified, statutory, and case law
- Rules of evidence
- Psychology
- Philosophy
Don’t wait for ‘the agency’ to offer you training. Go find it. Go do it on your own. It should be obvious, but if you want to be an investigator, learn and study and train to be an investigator. If you want to be a leader, study leaders. Learn how to be a leader.
Strong, Ethical Leadership
And with that we arrive at the next suggestion—to “foster strong, ethical leadership.” Agencies should develop leadership programs. No one should be hired as a ‘leader’ without having passed through those programs.
“Leaders within law enforcement have a significant impact on the ethical behavior of their teams. It is essential for supervisors and higher-ranking officers to lead by example, demonstrating integrity, fairness, and ethical decision-making. By fostering a culture of accountability and ethical conduct, leaders can inspire their subordinates to embrace their moral compass and perform their duties with honor and integrity.”
—Special Agent Jean Kanokogi, PhD
“Leadership” is more nuanced than title or rank. The US Forest Service’s Middle Leader Program teaches anyone (everyone?) is a leader. You can lead down, out, or up, and I add lead ‘in.’ You may lead ‘down’ to direct reports. ‘Leading up’ describes how you influence your supervisors and managers. VALOR says, through Law Enforcement Professionalism we “set the standard and others will follow.” This is ‘leading out.’ Stephen Covey reminds us that all leadership starts with personal leadership—inside out. This is what I call ‘leading in.’
See yourself in all the various contexts in which you lead:
- work,
- family,
- relationships,
- community.
Your effectiveness as a leader will always be driven by your ability to inspire hope. Shane Lopez, PhD, in his book Making Hope Happen, reports:
“[W]hen Gallup asked followers whether their leader at work (typically a manager) made them enthusiastic about the future, of those who said yes, 69 percent were engaged in their jobs, scoring high on a measure of involvement in and excitement about their work. These engaged employees are the products of hopeful leadership. They are more innovative and productive than others, and they are more likely to be with the company for the long haul.
“Of those who said their leader did not make them enthusiastic about the future, a mere one percent were committed and energized at work. These disengaged workers are a threat to business, coworkers, and themselves. They not only fail to make meaningful contributions; they undermine the hard work of others, and they are likely to be more physically and mentally unhealthy than their coworkers.”
—Shane J. Lopez, PhD, Making Hope Happen
Hope boils down to:
- Goals—having future ones that excite you,
- Agency—you need to believe you have the ability, the wherewithal, to achieve those goals,
- Pathways—be willing to pursue multiple pathways over, around, or through obstacles.
Three things come to mind here. Angela Duckworth’s ‘Grit,’ Stephen Covey’s second habit of success, and Hercules at the crossroads.
Duckworth explains that ‘grit’ is composed of a passion, a practice, a purpose, and hope. See the circular connection here? Leaders with hope inspire hope. Hope is a cornerstone of employee engagement, involvement, excitement, innovation, and productivity. Gritty leaders have and thereby inspire hope. This hope encourages gritty employees.
In Memorabilia by Xenophon, Socrates tells the parable of Hercules at the crossroads. Approached by the female personifications of Vice (Kakia) and Virtue (Areté), Hercules is offered a choice: follow Kakia on a path of pleasure and leisure, or Areté on the severe and heroic path to eudæmonia. Hercules chooses Areté and the rest is history. Well, mythology anyway, but you get my meaning. The heroic journey is supposed to be hard.
Stephen Covey’s second habit of highly successful people is “begin with the end in mind.” He also insists we lead ourselves first from dependence, to independence, to interdependence. To begin with the end in mind means to know what the goal is.
“[T]he most fundamental application of ‘begin with the end in mind’ is to begin today with the image, picture, or paradigm of the end of your life as your frame of reference or the criterion by which everything else is examined.”
—Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People
So by design—not by accident—leaders develop their self-awareness. In the words of Jocko Willink they ‘take Extreme Ownership.’ Then inspire hope in the goal, and encourage and empower others to achieve those goals.
Engage in Community Outreach
Last up in the Eighteen Eleven article is the admonition to “engage in community outreach.”
“Building and maintaining positive relationships with the community is vital for law enforcement officers. Engaging in community outreach initiatives allows officers to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges and concerns faced by the people they serve.”
—Special Agent Jean Kanokogi, PhD
VALOR initiative’s second element in their definition of a law enforcement professional is to be a statesman. To actively engage the community you serve. How? ‘Coffee with a cop,’ Explorers, ride-alongs, community outreach programs, after school programs, visitor centers, entrance booth, interpretive information postings, tourist attractions, recreational spaces, stores and businesses on the beat,…
I could go on. The list could be nearly infinite if you think of community engagement in the way Barbara Fredrickson might. In her book Love 2.0, she explains what she calls ‘positivity resonance.’
“Within those moments of interpersonal connection that are characterized by this amplifying symphony—of shared positive emotions, biobehavioral synchrony, and mutual care—life-giving positivity resonates between and among people.”
—Barbara Fredrickson, PhD
Now I know I may have just made a few of you queasy with the ‘L’ word, but hear me out. Law enforcement officers are guardians in service to something higher than themselves—the community. This makes them heroes in the purest sense of the ancient Greek word ‘hêrôs.’
Like a hero’s journey we are returning back to where we started. That is, your personal values and compassion. The hero returns to the normal world with “the boon” or the healing elixir. Joseph Campbell describes this stage of the journey as the hardest part.
“The whole idea is that you’ve got to bring out again that which you went to recover, the unrealized, un-utilized potential in yourself. The whole point of this journey is the reintroduction of this potential into the world; that is to say, to you living in the world. You are to bring this treasure of understanding back and integrate it in a rational life. It goes without saying, this is very difficult. Bringing the boon back can be even more difficult than going down into your own depths in the first place.”
—Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss
Consider the Stoic virtue ‘Justice’ and the positive psychology virtue ‘Humanity.’ They both require the character strength ‘Love.’ Love is a transcendence of the virtues ‘Justice’ and ‘Humanity.’
Through the doctrine of oikeiôsis—appropriation, affinity, a sense of belonging—Stoics saw humanity as a single community, in which we are all relatives and citizens of the world and universe. We find more meaning in our lives when we overcome our small self, and let our actions be guided towards something higher, like the common good.
The hero’s journey then is from the ignorance and alienation of infancy and adolescence, to ethical self-transformation, wisdom, and human flourishing. As Covey put it, from dependence to independence to interdependence. Love is the key to unlocking the doors between these stages.
Bringing this down out of the ethereal for a minute, what does this look like day-to-day, moment-to-moment? How do we apply this, practice this? Fredrickson says, practice searching for ‘micro moments of positivity resonance.’
Try smiling at the barista. Say “thank you” to to the person at the drive-through window, or “I appreciate you” to the cashier. Appreciate someone else’s good fortune—even it is only silently to yourself.
Remember that journal I mentioned where you were going to meditate on your values? Start taking things as granted in stead of for granted. That is, write down three things you are grateful for everyday.
Wrap Up
And there we have it. Five way long riffs on Special Agent Kanokogi’s article “5 Ways Law Enforcement Officers Can Embrace Their Moral Compass:”
- Reflect on your personal values
- Cultivate empathy and compassion
- Continually seek education and training
- Foster strong, ethical leadership
- Engage in community outreach.
And folding in the VALOR initiative’s three elements defining 21st century law enforcement professionals to be:
- A scholar—with a commitment to life-long learning
- A Statesman—proactively engaging the community you serve
- A Guardian and Protector—with knowledge that you will be someone’s hope in their time of need.
