Many American cities are faced with both rising crime rates and demands to cut funding for law enforcement agencies. David Scott is a former law enforcement officer who now serves as an assistant professor of criminal justice at UT Tyler. He offers a candid assessment of the impact these competing interests have on communities and the opportunities they present for newcomers in the law enforcement field. He also provides an in-depth look at the issue of mental health in the criminal justice system, advocating for a more comprehensive approach that engages all stakeholders.
Scott also discusses his personal journey, from working a variety of specialty assignments for the Longview Police Department and other agencies, to the classroom and the research field. He discusses some of the findings from his extensive studies into domestic and family violence, sex crimes and crimes against children.
MIKE LANDESS: For UT Tyler Radio, I’m Mike Landess. After spending more than a dozen years in municipal policing, David Scott joined the staff of UT Tyler to teach in the department of Sociology. He handles undergraduate and graduate courses that focus on criminology, criminal justice policy, criminal investigations and criminal procedures. And Dr. Scott is our guest today. Welcome.
DAVID SCOTT: Good morning. Thank you for having me.
LANDESS: Now, 8 years ago, you left police work to teach at UT Tyler. What prompted that transition?
SCOTT: Well, first I loved my job working for the Longview Police Department. It’s a great department. I had just reached a point in my life where I was still a full-time student. I had finished getting my Ph.D. I was kind of enrolling in just different master’s programs, and my passion had gone from investigations to more to the academics and teaching, and I was already an adjunct professor here. So, when the opportunity presented itself, I applied. It’s been 8 years, and it’s been a great ride with UT Tyler so far. And I’m still teaching at the academy and still consulting for local agencies and for the state when needed.
LANDESS: Now, in addition to criminal justice education, you also study domestic and family violence, sex crimes and crimes against children. Is what you learn just for use in the classroom, or is there a broader application for that information and those insights?
SCOTT: There’s definitely a broader application. I think one of the benefits that I have teaching in the criminal justice department is we offer various topics for courses. And in those topics, I’ve taught family violence, domestic violence, child abuse, and we do get a lot of students who are not necessarily majoring in criminal justice. Their focus is on psychology, social work. I’ve had some that are actually computer science majors who were just curious. So, in, aside from the theoretical stuff that we go through in the textbook and with the discussions, I try to incorporate real life applications, such as what is Texas law say? What does the federal law say? How do you go about working with someone who might have been a victim of domestic violence, sexual assault? And right now, human trafficking is the big flavor of the month that we’re working on being able to identify people who might be in crisis or someone who has experienced it. And then it might spark an interest for them to go into this field and to become not necessarily a detective, but maybe an advocate or someone who works with patients or clients in that sphere that wants to provide some kind of trauma-informed care for a victim.
LANDESS: As someone who worked on the police side of these issues and now as a professor teaching various elements of criminology, what concerns you the most about the current state of violent crime?
SCOTT: It’s rising. I think some of the cities in the last several years who have decided to alter their contemporary police practices — and that’s a nice way of putting it — are no…
LANDESS: Defunding?
SCOTT: Yeah, defunding, basically, yeah. I didn’t want to say — it’s basically defunding. We’re starting to see the short-term and the long-term consequences of those decisions. So, we’re having numerous officers walk off the job. Just recently, the police chief of Austin resigned about a week ago. They’re still 500-plus officers short. Houston’s got a similar problem. Dallas has got a similar problem. If you look across the country, there’s various openings. It’s not just at the local level — the federal government, the FBI, the Secret Service, the U.S. Marshals, ATF, Diplomatic Security, CIA. They have vacancies they still can’t fill. A lot of it has been to attrition people retiring, hitting the mandatory retirement age. A lot of it is people just becoming disenfranchised with politics and so forth and not being conducive to long-term is crucial. Couples with families and it’s just-It’s a good time to get into this field because there’s a ton of openings. But at the same time, I caution people to, you know, really know what you’re getting into. You know this is a very demanding job. It’s very taxing. Some of the folks that you know come talk to me. You know, in class and outside of class, they’re like, “What am I walking into?” And I’m like, “Well, it’s long hours, it’s hard work. No job is ever the same.” So, I said that’s a pro. If you’re not, if you don’t want a mundane 9-to-5 job, you’re not gonna get it in law enforcement. But at the same time, it does change you after a while.
LANDESS: And not necessarily in a good way.
SCOTT: It could be a good or bad way. The good is you, I tell people, you have a good sense of what’s going on in the real world. You, you have a heightened sense of awareness. You’re more attuned to what’s going on in your community, around your home, when you’re driving. The same problem is, you can never turn that off. You know, I tell people, you know, once you put the genie out of the bottle, you can’t put the genie back in. And you walk around like you’re watching everything, you’re scanning things, scanning people, and it’s a blessing and a curse, I think.
LANDESS: Mental health issues are often talked about, even blamed for a variety of criminal behaviors, but is there enough being done to address that, in your opinion?
SCOTT: The answer is not solely law enforcement. We’re actually doing a study right now on the effects of mandatory training, looking at what happened after The Sandra Bland Act was enacted in 2018 in Texas.
LANDESS: Explain that.
SCOTT: Well, The Sandra Bland Act was an unfortunate incident where we had a motorist from Chicago. She was stopped in Waller County by a DPS trooper, and she was arrested. And then 3 days later she had committed suicide in the Waller County Jail. She had a history of depression, was suicidal from the reports, and this just kind of sparked an outrage of, you know, how we were handling mental health. You know, there was already racial tension in the altercation. So, the State of Texas in the last legislative session, basically said, “We need to have more training for officers and for jailers across the board.” The officers can go and interact, we can deescalate, we can try to calm an individual down who’s in mental health or in crisis. But if the facilities behind that aren’t in place, such as the mental health authority, psych hospitals, even local hospitals, they’re like, “We can take them and we can triage them. But if it’s mental illness, you know, we don’t have the bed space to do it.” Jail is not the appropriate setting for them. We need to bring the right people to the table, not just police, and you have all these other components such as the courts and the prosecutors and everyone else, and the left hand knows what the right hand’s doing, then the outcomes improve, services improve, we get more citizen buy-in and confidence in the system as a whole. And right now, everything’s kind of fragmented, in my opinion.
LANDESS: Any parting thoughts to share?
SCOTT: Check out criminal justice. It’s a great major; it’s a great world, whether you want to get into this field or not. I think some of the information we provide in the real workings of the law and order system, the criminal justice system, goes well beyond what people are seeing on TV and on Netflix. I think there’s a lot of practical applications where you can come into our department and really learn about why law enforcement does what they do, why the courts do what they do, instead of just haphazardly watching a show and pretty much saying, well, we need to defund them, they’re not doing their jobs or doing this. We realize that not all crimes can be solved in an hour or 47 minutes with commercials. Right now, that I think our community is at a tipping point where we need good people to step forward and pick up the badge and start protecting and defending our communities.
LANDESS: Our guest has been UT Tyler’s David M. Scott, assistant professor of criminal justice. To hear this conversation again or to share it, go to KVUT.org. I’m Mike Landess for UT Tyler Radio.
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