The recipe for improving policing requires 2 major ingredients Author: Charles D. Hayes Print article As an ex-cop who has reflected on my experience for more than half a century, while studying the positive and negative literature about policing, along with sociology, anthropology, psychology, human biology and neuroscience, I am apoplectic about the current confusion and total misunderstandings about racial bias and calls for defunding the police being discussed daily in social media and in broadcast news. There are two profound ingredients necessary to improving policing. The first ingredient requires police officers to learn how our brains work, how their repeated experience in dealing with stressful situations negatively affects their mental health and can result in physical changes in their brains. In particular, stress will increase the size of their amygdala, which can cause them to become hypersensitive to being insulted or having their authority questioned.