Interview with Lt. Catherine Haggerty

Lt. Catherine Haggerty

"From the Field Experiences" Feature
Interview conducted in July, 2009

Biography

Catherine Haggerty is a 27-year veteran of law enforcement. Lt. Haggerty started her law enforcement career with the New York Police Department in 1982 and joined the Austin Police Department (APD) in 1987. She has worked in many different units over her career. As an officer she was assigned to uniformed patrol, was a D.A.R.E. Instructor and then a control officer for headquarters. As a detective she worked investigations in the SAFE unit in the areas of asset forfeiture and nuisance abatement narcotics investigations. While a sergeant, she supervised patrol officers, which included training junior officers as well as serving as an adjunct instructor at the academy. As a Lieutenant, she served on patrol and is currently the lieutenant over the recruiting division.

Lieutenant Haggerty is an elected active trustee of the Austin Police Retirement System. The Austin Police Retirement System is approx a $500 million defined benefit plan with 1,621 active employees and 454 retirees and beneficiaries. A board member since 1994, she serves on the investment committee, the disability committee and the goals and objectives committee. As the treasurer of the union, she handles a budget of approximately $500,000 and has served on the meet and confer team since 1998 (for the past four contracts) to enhance wages and benefits for all officers.

Lieutenant Haggerty is a graduate of the first West Point Leadership Academy conducted at APD in 2000. She holds a Masters Peace Officers Certification with the State of Texas.

Interview

Have Austin's recruitment and training efforts been affected at all by the economy?

Our recruiting has slowed quite a bit due to the economy. We had a cadet class that was supposed to begin in January with 100 new cadets, but that has been put off. We're crossing our fingers when the budget comes out next month that we can begin that class in September. We have applied for stimulus dollars, and we're hoping that we have enough to cover 50 cadets. If we get that money, we're going to put on a cadet class that will consist solely of candidates with prior police experience. This means we don't have to train them that long, and it will allow us to focus on training the things that are inherently "Austin". Every community has a right to demand how they want to be policed in ways that are not black-and-white. The part that is just basic police work — what is probable cause, what are the basic laws to enforce — those things are basic things you should be teaching in the academy. But the things such as the immersion program, which is uniquely "Austin", those are the types of things that we can focus on in the modified class. [The Austin Police Department's Community Immersion Program, recently profiled in the February 2009 FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, partners academy cadets with diverse community members in a learning context resulting in presentations by trainees about different community groups.] This will save us resources and time, because the training can go from an 8-month period down to a 4-month period. One of the reasons why we put the current class off for so many months is that we don't want to compromise the ways we train them, especially in ways that are uniquely "Austin". So the attitude is to put it off, rather than completely cancel it or to modify it, or reduce it in its quality.

Have you been able to use the immersion program as a recruitment tool to attract a certain age or type of recruit?

It becomes a recruitment tool when the cadets are finished with their immersion project and they present it to people in the community. It becomes a full-day "seminar" that is put on by the department for all kinds of community leaders, such as church groups, ethnic group leaders, Chamber of Commerce leaders, and political groups. We invite them to see the cadets' presentations so they can observe what the cadets have learned on their own. Other cadets are sitting in the audience too, which means that their peers find out about other community groups and their experiences as well. When community leaders are invited to watch the presentations and see what has been learned, there are a lot of attitudes that get changed as a result. For instance, let's say there is a cadet who the trainers determine, for whatever reason, may be homophobic. They're going to place that cadet in the group where they will learn about the gay and lesbian community. And I have watched many of the presentations and listened to what was said, and many of them have really had their attitudes changed. You know, in the history of policing, there's a lot of mistrust and cynicism between the police and community - that there's a "good old boy" club that is closed to being innovative and open. But when you watch these presentations and see what is truly happening, community leaders are going to see these cadets who may be policing in their backyard one day. So for instance, if you're a minister in your church, you're going to see what the department has done with these cadets, and then go back to your church community and say to a young person, "maybe being an Austin police officer might be a good job for you to have. You like dealing with people." We've come a long way from what we were — we see community leaders watch the immersion presentations who then go back to their constituents and spread good will. So that's a plus for the recruiting side.

So you're including all members of the community in "recruitment" for the department.

I have been recruiting for this department from the beginning. I see a young person, and I'll say, "Have you ever thought about becoming an Austin police officer? You should think about it. It's a great job, you have great people skills." I'll give them one of my business cards, maybe schedule a ride-out, or answer questions if they're interested. We also offer a free day off to any officer who encourages someone to apply, if that person eventually starts the academy. So we have an incentive within our department for all of our officers to go out and recruit. Besides, the best recruiters in the world are going to be us, recruiting who we meet.

The Austin training division has a big-picture motto about creating the "finest officers". How hard is it to sell the larger goals of career satisfaction and longevity to a generation of recruits that may not see that far ahead?

There is some disconnect. The majority of my career has been on the street, so I have supervised young people that come out of the academy, and some make it, and some don't. I have talked with many of them and told them about the importance of their integrity, which becomes even more important if they are on the street. There have been young officers that I have seen where it doesn't look like it's clicking, and I tell them this is a great job, but if they can't apply what they've learned to the real world, there's no shame in discovering that this isn't the career path for them.

What would you do to target these officers so you can retain them?

Sometimes, if they have graduated from the academy, the last thing they want to admit to themselves is that they can't make it, or it isn't working for them. But we do our best to help them rethink the situation. For example, I had a female officer who was having difficulty, so I sat her down and talked with her. After finding out a little about her background, I asked what she did before she came to APD. She had been a researcher, she had a Ph.D., and was very well educated. She wanted to give back to the community, she liked law enforcement. So I told her that her passion was definitely in this field somewhere, but I wasn't sure if her passion was in being a first responder. She had such a strong background in research and academics that I told her she might be better suited to go into forensics. In this department, many of our forensics people are civilians, unlike other agencies where you have to be a cop first. So I was realizing that this woman is intelligent, but sometimes on patrol, she froze up — that suggests to me that there is a bigger issue going on besides not being cut out for policing at all.

Does this effort indicate a department-wide effort?

It is. One of the things we explain to junior officers is that field training officers are not here to fail them, but are to train them and make them successful. However, not everybody is going to be successful, but when rookies come out of the academy sometimes they're scared to death. They've learned all this stuff that's been shoved in their heads for eight months and now they have to apply it for real. They're scared, they're excited, they're apprehensive, they're worried. They think, "Oh my God, am I going to pass everything? I'm being graded every day, I've got somebody sitting next to me all day long judging me, am I fitting in?" There are so many stresses as a rookie to be able to get a handle on the job. The first thing we want our field training officers to do is help them be successful. Now the old school way was, "so you're out of the academy? Well I'm going to see how many times I can trip you, and if you bloody your nose too bad, you're out of here!" We still have to remember however that there are some people for whom this is not really the career for them, and we have to be able to let them go. We don't want to hang on to some of the wrong types of people. But if they just need a little extra help, and they're not struggling because they're not good at it, we need to know that everybody learns at a different pace. Adult learning is not juvenile learning, and when the light bulb goes on, it might go on at different time spans for different people.

What about other employee engagement strategies?

Well, job sharing is a very difficult thing to do in policing. It may work in the civilian job world, but it doesn't work well in police work. What we do have is a lot of accommodation, such as fixed shifts to account for peoples' schedules. For instance, if an officer's spouse works days and they want to be home with their family, they can take an alternative shift so that they won't have to place their kids in day care. We move officers around a lot to accommodate their lifestyles, and we're here to help each other if there is a problem that might conflict with their schedule. We work things out with employees who need to work a shift that is more accommodating to their lives. Also, we have something that a lot of officers think is a little controversial, but from a management perspective is very good. It's a tool that is used by supervisors called the Guidance Advisory Program (GAP). There are different qualifiers that we look at to trigger a "GAP report" — complaints, use of sick time, and other indicators. For some supervisors like me, if you really know your people, when a GAP report is triggered, you usually know exactly what it's about. But if you have the kind of officer who calls in sick here and there, and you've not paid that much attention to it, and all of a sudden it triggers a GAP report and you see it in black and white, then you can sit down with that officer and ask them "is anything going on?" Sometimes there are reasons behind these things that happen, and the GAP program is intended to help us figure out how to solve their problem beforehand. If they're getting a lot of rudeness complaints, like one officer who was being "uber-professional" and it was coming across as being rude, it signals us they need help. He didn't say anything bad or wrong to the public, instead he was telling the truth but not tempering what he said to people and didn't understand his audience. So we got him into some communication classes which were triggered by a GAP report, and after a while, he improved his communications skills and the complaints stopped happening.

How have you adjusted your recruitment protocol to account for the new economic climate?

We used to have them fill out a 50-page background history statement, give them all the exams and tests, give them their scores, and then the last step was an oral board. The oral board would ask them to respond to scenarios, and then would rank them based on their responses. Once complete, each of the activities would be weighted, and they would receive a final score. But what we found was that one of the tests was ranking people such that it was skewed by education and minorities consistently scored lower. It was not as much a separation by male and female, but by race. So what happened is that the top 50, which we would choose to go into the academy, would be less diverse than the lower parts of the list. We asked what we could do to level the playing field without giving up quality, because we still wanted quality people. We decided to rank people by the date that they get their application packet completed instead, and the other materials are time and date stamped. These other factors will be looked at in a pass/fail manner. What we succeeded in doing is removing the weights and making the oral board more of a job interview. By doing that right up front, we weed out people who would not make it through the entire process, and we are saving resources. Plus we are able to cull from the entire process those who are truly well-qualified. Meanwhile, how many hours of work have been saved?

Has this paid off?

It is definitely making the process more efficient, and they're still required to show us that they have what it takes to get the job. From what I have seen, it's definitely going to bring more diversity to our list. The class that we are hoping to admit in September will be the first group from this new process, and we are already seeing more diversity in the 25 people on the list currently. So I think time will tell, but one of the things I am very proud of with this department is that we are willing to look at new and better ways of doing things. And if they don't work, then tweak them — don't go back to the old way, but figure out why they didn't work and how we can continue to get the results we are looking for.