Ex-Stratham chief takes over NH police training amid pandemic and unrest

I spoke with former Stratham Chief John Scippa about how to train 21st Century law enforcement officers against the backdrop of nationwide calls to defund police departments.

By Alexander LaCasse

---

Originally published by Seacoastonline Sept. 17, 2020.

CONCORD — Upon being named the new director of the New Hampshire Police Standards and Training Council Director in March, former Stratham police Chief John Scippa said he didn’t have the real-life experience to prepare him and his team for training new police officers in a pandemic.

Rather than beginning the process of implementing cutting-edge developments in police training and drawing from his experience in law enforcement, Scippa walked into his first day having to shut down in-person operations and shift on the fly to a virtual setup.

It was March 16, and Gov. Chris Sununu’s emergency stay-at-home order was put into effect as the country was bracing for an economic shutdown to stem the spread of COVID-19.

“My first official act was to shut down the New Hampshire Police Academy,” Scippa said. “I worked with staff to continue to deliver training because we just couldn’t stop. That involved a lot of communication throughout the state to get officers trained, so we worked together to everything remotely and it was a pretty heavy lift.”

Scippa said when the director position opened at the Police Standards and Training Council, he said he wanted to combine all of his experiences from his time as a beat cop, executive officer, instructor of new officers, educator and from his brief time in government to elevate New Hampshire’s ability to train and prepare the next generation of officers against the backdrop of increased scrutiny on police nationally in the wake of numerous police brutality incidents around the country.

“I have a unique background of having spent a quarter of my career teaching officers at the Police Academy as a training officer, teaching criminal justice in a classroom setting and a significant amount of time teaching adult education for officers,” Scippa said. “With my long career in New Hampshire law enforcement helps because I still know a lot my peers in law enforcement, so all of that helps.”

The state Police Standards and Training Council is responsible for basic training of police officers and is the primary source of in-service training for all law enforcement officers in New Hampshire. The council certifies nearly 4,000 full- and part-time police officers and the nearly 475 corrections officers.

Scippa led Stratham police from 2009 to 2018. He became a full-time officer in Rye in 1989, after which he worked as a training specialist for the Police Standards and Training Council where he trained new recruits at the Police Academy. After leaving the council the first time, he served as an executive officer for North Hampton police before becoming chief in Stratham.

After retiring from Stratham, Scippa worked in U.S. Sen. Maggie Hassan’s office, specializing in law enforcement matters before becoming director of Northern Essex Community College’s Police Academy in Haverhill, Massachusetts, teaching criminal justice courses.

Scippa said just as the virtual trainings for officers were catching on, four Minneapolis officers’ allegedly killed George Floyd while in custody with one kneeling on his neck for more than eight minutes after Floyd was arrested May 25 for allegedly using a counterfeit $20 bill at a convenience store. On June 16, Sununu established the Commission on Law Enforcement, Accountability, Community and Transparency (LEACT), which Scippa has testified before.

Scippa said several of the recommendations that have come out of LEACT’s work so far includes undergoing complete Job Task Analysis (JTA) across local police agencies. He said JTAs will entail posting state police standards and materials on all agency websites, developing use of force policies, codes of conduct, duty to intervene policies in cases of police misconduct and banning chokeholds, for instance.

“Let’s make sure we’re teaching new recruits exactly what they need to know to be successful during their first three years on the job,” Scippa said. “Most police officers would not hesitate to do what LEACT is asking them to do, and many departments are doing this already, but what we need to be better at is formalizing that. We’ll do a complete review of the current broad curriculum for every single topic we teach.”

Other key elements for developing the police standards of the future to come out of LEACT, Scippa said, are national programs to eliminate official police misconduct, such as Active Bystandership in Law Enforcement, or ABLE, and EPIC (Ethical Police is Courageous). EPIC was created by New Orleans police after incidents of misconduct following Hurricane Katrina and relies on officers applying peer pressure to colleagues when they observe them committing possible crimes in their official capacity.

Scippa also said he plans to launch national implicit bias trainings as part of New Hampshire police standards training.

“Nationally, police departments are looking for intervention training to empower other police officers to speak up and prevent officers from engaging in misconduct,” Scippa said. “Officers need to understand that they’re dealing with people usually at their worst and they need to be treated with respect. So, we need to focus training to reflect that all police decisions are made for procedural reasons and not from an officer’s implicit bias.”

Nationally, while critics of police brutality call for municipalities to “defund” their police departments in wake of several high-profile police killings, like Floyd and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, Scippa said to implement any number of programs to improve law enforcement training will take a significant investment of resources.

Scippa said he supports a broadened conversation over what police responses to certain crises, like mental health issues, would look like by having a social worker respond to such incidents, as an example. However, he said generalized calls to defund the police, “fail to recognize” the contributions law enforcement makes to keeping communities safe.

“At the end of the day, every community in every state in this country ultimately makes the decision to what level of police services they want but then who’s going to fund that person responding to a mental health crisis?” Scippa said. “When that call does occur, it would be nice to bring appropriate resources on the spot as a mobile crisis team; an officer to protect the situation, medical and a social worker to talk things down. There’s a lot of room to have those discussions when we talk about the future of policing.”

Original Link: https://www.seacoastonline.com/news/20200919/ex-stratham-chief-takes-over-nh-police-training-amid-pandemic-and-unrest