After years of teaching local folks how to become police officers, Highline’s Dr. Steve Lettic is now doing the same in Bangladesh.
During last week’s annual Highline Welcomes the World Week, Highline professor and former Des Moines police officer Dr. Lettic talked about his work via the U.S. Department of Justice in a presentation of Zoom.
Dr. Lettic has degrees in law and justice and industrial psychology, and his doctorate is in human services. After more than 20 years of working in law enforcement, he worked at Highline as a professor in the Administration of Justice program before heading to Bangladesh last year.
“I’ve been to about 67 or so countries now where I’ve worked over the last 20 years,” said Dr. Lettic. “This is my seventh time [in Bangladesh], and I’ve been here the last 14 months.”
Specializing in police reform, Dr. Lettic is a member of the International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program.
“What we work on is peace and stability through security,” Dr. Lettic said. “My job is to work with the national police in several different capacities. We are helping train the police in basic human rights and human dignity courses. We were [also] heavily involved in helping the Bangladeshis work through pandemic policing.”
Bangladesh’s police force has taken a heavy hit from the pandemic, he said.
“These poor [Bangladeshi] officers were serious troopers,” he said. “They dressed in full PPE to go out in 90 to 100 degree weather during the pandemic. … Over 100,000 of them contracted COVID, and we know of at least 100 died of related complications.
“The national police here [in Bangladesh] have over 300,000 officers spread around the whole country,” Dr. Lettic said of Bangladesh, which has a population of about 163 million.
Compared to the way law enforcement works at home in the U.S., where officers all receive very similar, more generalized training, the police system in Bangladesh is very different.
“Here, the police are trained in a singular thing, and then rotate between different units,” Dr. Lettic said. “One of the units that I work with is the industrial police, and they work specifically in the garment factories to do labor relations and mediation, and help with security.”
Bangladesh is a massive trade center, and the Bay of Bengal in particular is a port that exports goods to countries all over the world. “Two thirds of [shipping] container traffic comes from the Indo-Pacific region,” said Dr. Lettic, “and half of that is through the Bay of Bengal. So when this area gets interrupted … [it] can significantly interfere with transfer of goods around the world.”
Bangladesh production companies work with a large number of major international clothing companies (such as Sears, Zara, H&M, and many others) to produce the fast-fashion clothing found at malls and stores in the U.S.
These clothes are made in massive factories that often have as many as 20 to 50,000 workers, “which is bigger than the city of Des Moines,” Dr. Lettic said. “These [factories] are cities unto themselves … They have their own hospitals, their own daycares, their own cafeterias. So, the [industrial] police help with that.”
But because these factories depend on their international buyers for business, the pandemic, which is slowing down economies everywhere, has created a huge problem for them.
“The United States and Europe, particularly Britain, have canceled big, huge orders of [garments], which has significantly impacted the country [Bangladesh] and their economy,” said Dr. Lettic.
Because the factories aren’t paid by the international companies until the garments are actually received at their country of destination, if an order gets canceled at any point in time before it ships, the Bangladeshi factory workers won’t get paid for their work.
“This then triggers some big protests … that interrupt a significant area of the city,” Dr. Lettic said as he explained the difference in size between these factory protests and the ones we have seen recently in the U.S. (which are typically around a couple thousand people per protest).
“A protest on average [in Bangladesh] is 20,000 people. Since we’ve been teaching here, we have seen a significant drop in violent use of force issues between protestors and the police in industrial police areas.”
Factories are not the only concern, however. Dr. Lettic explained the different ways the Department of Justice has been assisting them around the country, such as forensic technologies and training centered on the use of force.
Women in policing and gender representation, counter-narcotics, countering violent extremism and terrorism, court security, prevention of child labor, and airport stabilization (which includes things like K9 explosive detection teams and human trafficking prevention) have also been main focuses of the police assistance and training programs.
On top of all of that, the international training program is also working hard at launching their Host National Instructor (or HNI) program, which has a goal of certifying Bangladeshi instructors to perform training in place of U.S. instructors, in motion.
“We’re trying to work ourselves out of jobs … so they can build capacity and stability on their own to the point where we can leave and they can train themselves,” Dr. Lettic said. “And they’re getting there.”