Corrections_Today_Winter_2024-2025_Vol.86_No.4

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intervention. We need senior staff to demand their employees are trained in active bystandership. Leaders need to extend training and policy beyond a duty to intervene to embrace the curiosity, cour age and skills of being an active bystander.

Active bystandership has recently become the most significant new concept in American policing.

Training crucial to success You may wonder why anyone would choose to be passive when harm is about to occur. Our officers willingly put themselves in harm’s way whenever an officer or detainee is in danger. But when it comes to in tervening in a fellow officer’s actions, especially if the person is of higher rank, we are hesitant. Therefore, Anne Arundel County invested in an active bystandership training program. To that end, we reached out to Heroes Active Bystandership Training. The Heroes curriculum is excellent but equally important; Heroes provides us with the tools and the support to change our entire culture. We wanted to teach every one of our staff they already have a duty to intervene, even if it’s complicated. We wanted to make sure the culture of our De partment supports a culture where interventions are respected, accepted,

Photo collage courtesy of the Anne Arundel County Department of Detention Facilities (AACDDF)

welcomed and even embraced, no matter the rank of either person. We know training alone seldom yields these results, so we wanted to embark on a project that aims directly at our culture so the skills we teach will be used daily. Heroes has been our part ner in this effort, and our staff has responded with enthusiasm we have not seen before. The Heroes curric

Massachusetts, Amherst. It explains the definition of bystandership and why it matters. It redefines loyalty from “blind loyalty” to construc tive loyalty so people tell each other what they need to hear instead of what they want to hear. Active bystandership has been practiced in other professions for some time. For example, commercial and military aviation has long been concerned about the dangers of co-pilots being unwilling or unable to correct dan gerous pilot errors. To overcome this problem, they have devised meth ods of progressively increasing the intensity of an intervention. Heroes applies these tactics to corrections,

ulum rests on more than 50 years of so cial science research and is largely based on Professor Ervin Staub’s research at the University of

Ervin Staub

Corrections Today | Winter 2024-2025

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