Sean McCarthy stood recently in front of a room full of first-week cadets at the St. Louis Police Academy. Behind him, enlarged on the projection screen, was the face of Dennis Rader, a nondescript white male also known as the BTK killer.
McCarthy read the FBI's psychological profile on Rader, used by law enforcement to track the man in 2005. Rader killed several people in the Wichita, Kansas, area from the 1970s to the 1990s.
"He's probably a white male, middle aged, drives a truck, holds a steady job, is organized and collected, and is a chronic and habitual masturbator."
The room of about 50 police cadets erupted into laughter after McCarthy's statement. McCarthy, a Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) Commission expert on cultural diversity and ethics, provides anti-bias training to new cadets and seasoned officers. His training sessions are peppered with wit and humor, but they get to the heart of complex issues.
The most recent session addressed the fallibility of using racial profiling to police minority communities.
"Any profiling technique that has even a small margin of error will inherently accuse innocent people."
McCarthy said most profiling techniques rely on vague details that often play little to no role in solving cases.
On Aug. 6, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon directed the POST Commission and the Department of Public Safety to recommend by Dec. 1 a new set of rules to improve police training in the areas of tactical training, fair and impartial policing, and the health and well-being of officers.
In response to this directive, POST held six public meetings throughout the state to gather input from policy experts and the general public to help decide which areas of officer training could be improved. Between Sept. 1 and Oct. 14, the meetings occurred in Springfield, Jefferson City, Ferguson, Sikeston, Kansas City and Kirksville.
The commission adopted myriad changes, including a requirement that all basic law enforcement training academies conduct mandatory training sessions in topics such as fair and impartial policing practices, including implicit bias recognition.
"I'm addressing this temptation officers may have to believe that there is this thing called the "profile,'" McCarthy said. "In reality, no science supports this. This training is designed to stop an officer from exercising ad hoc moral judgments, from pulling into a poor neighborhood and expecting to interact with criminals."
For McCarthy, who has been training officers since 2008, a conversation about urban crime patterns is incomplete without the proper historical context of urban demographics, population movements and the long-term effects of poverty on a group of people.
In his pursuit to provide context for the problems officers face in interacting with citizens in tense situations such as the Ferguson protests, McCarthy uses charts that help officers and trainees visualize systemic issues such as the racial wage gap and unequal housing practices.
Karen Aroesty, regional director for the Anti Defamation League of Missouri and Southern Illinois, said she hopes McCarthy's conversational, humorous approach to anti-bias training replaces dated methods she calls "checking the box."
"For a lot of this training, officers are motivated by legal necessity. Most training programs require them to simply review the letter of the law on issues such as racial profiling," Aroesty said. "Good training should help officers be personally motivated to do the right thing because that's what will be better for the community and make your life as a police officer safer."
Aroesty, who performs similar training through her work with the Anti-Defamation League, said she thinks McCarthy's method is more effective because he engages on a personal level with the officers, using real-world cases and humor to pull a genuine reaction out of his trainees.
McCarthy said while the mandatory raises in training hours required by POST beginning in 2017 is a good start, it still isn't enough.
"Any trainer should be the first one to tell you there are limits to training," McCarthy said. "Training by itself can't modify behavior on a radical level; we can give them the tools and perspective, but in the end, incentives and penalties help more."