Gillespie agreed that the events of the ’60s were recent enough. “No,” the officer persisted. “I’m talking about even in my career—that has happened, you know? That [if] you ran, you got your punishment when you got caught.”

This connection between literature and everyday life is exactly what Gillespie hopes to facilitate. Police officers, he told me, “deal with the human condition constantly.” Books offer people “a safe way to look at circumstances and ask yourself, ‘What does this tell us about us? … What does this tell me about myself? What does this tell me about the human condition?’”



And, more to the point: “What does this tell you, officer, about policing?”

***

Since Freddie Gray suffered a fatal injury in the back of a Baltimore police van in 2015, setting off days of protest and rioting, the city has been pushing through a wrenching overhaul of its police department even as violent crime has surged to unprecedented levels.

Gillespie works in the division that teaches retraining courses. Once a year, every cop is pulled off the street and thrown into the classroom to take refreshers and learn new policing techniques. This in-service training used to last for one week. This year, the commissioner doubled it, requiring far more hours than many other departments.

Drawing on his master of liberal arts degree from Johns Hopkins University, the 48-year-old Gillespie teaches a curriculum that includes bite-sized chunks of literature, philosophy, and history. “You can get so into the outcomes, into the methods, [that] you don’t look at the ethic with which you’re operating in many cases,” Gillespie said. “And we’re trying to get officers to delve into it.”

In a course on Plato, he introduces officers to the philosopher’s idea of the tripartite soul, which can be governed by the intellect, by the “spirit,” or by the appetites. Gillespie has his students discuss real stories of police misconduct in Platonic terms. “The ultimate point is that you have to … take a moment, and stop and use your intellect, and ask, ‘What’s driving me right now?’” he explained to me.

Gillespie is trained to teach nuts-and-bolts courses on terrorism response, extremism, and gangs. But since the unrest of 2015, humanities have occupied the bulk of his time. The strategy is unusual in police training. “I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve never heard of an instructor using this type of approach,” said William Terrill, a criminal-justice professor at Arizona State University who studies police culture.

But he nevertheless understands the general theory behind it. He’s authored studies showing that officers with higher education are less likely to use force than colleagues who have not been to college. The reasons why are unclear, Terrill said, but it’s possible that exposure to unfamiliar ideas and diverse people have an effect on officer behavior. Gillespie’s classes seem to offer a complement to the typical instruction. Most of it “is mechanical in nature,” Terrill said. “It’s kind of this step-by-step, instructional booklet.”