Rethinking the Police: An Officer’s Confession and the Pathway to Reform

By Daniel Reinhardt. InterVarsity Press, 2023. 224 pages. $18.99/paperback or eBook.

Daniel Reinhardt, a White person of faith like myself, wrestles with the antiracist work of police reform; he often does so in progressive language that I found familiar. Unlike me, however, Reinhardt served 24 years as a police officer in racially diverse communities. Also unlike me (and many other Friends), he, his African American wife, and their six children worship in interracial congregations, including one African American church in which he served as an assistant pastor. There the senior pastor opened Reinhardt’s eyes to the experiences of his congregation and the systemic racism within the compromised institution of U.S. policing. In Rethinking the Police, Reinhardt positions his perspective as “distinctly Christian” but relevant to secular police contexts because Christian precepts deeply shape both policing and American secular culture. I agree and hoped he would identify how “distinct” Christianities undergird police brutality and White supremacy, and the consequent reparations work required of Christians. Instead Reinhardt finds only solutions in that Christianity.

Nevertheless, this book offers much for me: a newly elected municipal official living in the first state to pass a Police Accountability Act after George Floyd’s 2020 murder. The police in my quiet town are requesting a new headquarters and increases in staff, even though the town hasn’t grown significantly and enjoys the national trend of decreased violent and property crimes. Our department chief—from a police family—won’t assign his officers walking beats, a key component of community policing. His deputy chief, on the other hand, hired one of our state’s first police department social workers. The perspectives shared in Rethinking the Police have helped me navigate these two different responses to police reform and accountability.

Reinhardt draws skillfully on recent research in criminology, sociology, and psychology to describe modern policing’s swerve from “peace to brutality.” His insider experience brings to life the depth of police enculturation and how that enculturation shapes even the most well-intentioned officers’ use of force. Cultural learning starts in the academy, as Reinhardt testifies: “you’re not just learning the curriculum, you’re absorbing the [admired] officers’ attitudes, vocabulary, and mannerisms.” That culture, including the toxic trio of unquestioned hierarchy and social distance from and dehumanization of minorities, is powerfully reinforced in officers’ everyday embodied experiences, which “no formal guideline has the power to usurp.”

But Reinhardt shares an encounter that shook him to the core: he “saw” a suspect with a knife “attacking” him and yet he held his fire; he then realized there was no knife: the man was surrendering. “I now see that my faith was a key part of my response . . . that young man was intrinsically valuable.” Friends will recognize this profound moment of seeing the Divine within another, even in extreme circumstances.

Modern policing, he recounts, started in 1829 when Britain’s original “bobby,” Sir Robert Peel, was moved by a religious revival and established the policing maxim “to keep the peace by peaceful means.” But when New York City in 1845 opened a police department under local control, police corruption and brutality promptly emerged, as did the racist history of police enforcing slavery, Jim Crow, and the war on drugs. Reinhardt names today’s intelligence-led policing (ILP) with zero-tolerance as that history’s newest stage. ILP promoters state that objective data inform police response to “hot spots.” But the “data” are generated in vulnerable communities through routine spurious stops, warrantless searches, and abrupt arrests. Reinhardt realized that, as a school resource officer, he turned his own alma mater—where as a high schooler he started fights—into a “hot spot” through zero-tolerance practice, creating felony records and limited futures for youth.

I was startled that Reinhardt followed his discerning socio-cultural-historical analysis with his “revolutionary” proposal to end police brutality: “servant-shepherd leadership.” He expands upon the late Robert K. Greenleaf’s servant leadership concept (established in 1970 and partially informed by Greenleaf’s Quaker beliefs) by adding a new dimension: the biblical “shepherd’s” responsibilities of presence, protection, and provision. Upholding Peel’s maxim and equality, Reinhardt states these servant-shepherd leaders “stand with and not above their followers as a moral example focused on developing their people.”

In this not-so-new form of patriarchy, Reinhardt prescribes more power to individual police leaders, no additional accountability, and no role for community members. His metaphors for equality—family and shepherd—instead illustrate hierarchical inclusion. I wonder if many police officers relish being “sheep” to a servant-shepherd, or if Muslim police leaders find the Christian model inspirational. His former colleagues aren’t convinced: “We aren’t social workers.”

I agree, but I hope Friends will find in Reinhardt’s work what I did: a compassionate and clear-eyed insider’s ethnography that helps us mobilize community agency in abolishing police brutality; a testament to the role of faith communities and faith leaders, such as his senior pastor, in that process; an invitation for non-officers to take up the work of emergency response and community security, such as the social worker my town’s deputy chief hired; and a place for me and other Friends, as we assume our civic responsibilities, to make more way open for that deputy chief’s vision.

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Abigail E. Adams worships with New Haven (Conn.) Meeting. She serves Friends Committee on National Legislation as recording clerk. Recently retired as an anthropology professor, she and her children remain close with Central American Friends and friends. Although she was unexpectedly elected to town office, she dreams of serving as a Connecticut tree warden.