Amy Herman teaching police officers Amy Herman at the Metropolitan Museum (with Sargent's Madame X) asks her class of cops, "How would you describe this woman in one sentence?"

Amy Toensing

Teaching Cops to See

At New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, Amy Herman schools police in the fine art of deductive observation

  • By Neal Hirschfeld
  • Photographs by Amy Toensing
  • Smithsonian magazine, October 2009

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    Early one morning a bunch of New York City police officers, guns concealed, trooped into the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Inside a conference room, Amy Herman, a tall 43-year-old art historian and lawyer, apologized that she hadn't been able to provide the customary stimulant. "I usually try to give you coffee with plenty of sugar to make you talk more," she said.

    The officers, all captains or higher in rank, were attending "The Art of Perception," a course designed to fine-tune their attention to visual details, some of which might prove critical in solving or preventing a crime. Herman laid out the ground rules. "First, there are two words that are not allowed—'obviously' and 'clearly'—since what's obvious to you may not be obvious to someone else. Second, no reading of labels. For purposes of this exercise, we are not focusing on who the artist was, the title of the work or even when it was created. Third, I want hands back, no pointing. If you want to communicate something, you have to say, 'Up in the left-hand corner, you can see...' "

    Herman did not want to talk about brush strokes, palettes, texture, light, shadow or depth. Schools of painting and historical context were moot. Suspecting that some of the cops were first-timers to the Met, she tried to ease the pressure. "Remember," she said, "there are no judgments and no wrong answers."

    She showed slides of paintings by James Tissot and Georges de La Tour. There was an Edward Hopper in which a hatted, forlorn-looking woman sits alone at a table, sipping from a cup.

    "OK, what do we see here?" she said.

    "A woman having a cup of coffee," answered one of the cops.

    "Unlike us," another said.

    Herman said, "Do we know it's coffee?"

    Early one morning a bunch of New York City police officers, guns concealed, trooped into the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Inside a conference room, Amy Herman, a tall 43-year-old art historian and lawyer, apologized that she hadn't been able to provide the customary stimulant. "I usually try to give you coffee with plenty of sugar to make you talk more," she said.

    The officers, all captains or higher in rank, were attending "The Art of Perception," a course designed to fine-tune their attention to visual details, some of which might prove critical in solving or preventing a crime. Herman laid out the ground rules. "First, there are two words that are not allowed—'obviously' and 'clearly'—since what's obvious to you may not be obvious to someone else. Second, no reading of labels. For purposes of this exercise, we are not focusing on who the artist was, the title of the work or even when it was created. Third, I want hands back, no pointing. If you want to communicate something, you have to say, 'Up in the left-hand corner, you can see...' "

    Herman did not want to talk about brush strokes, palettes, texture, light, shadow or depth. Schools of painting and historical context were moot. Suspecting that some of the cops were first-timers to the Met, she tried to ease the pressure. "Remember," she said, "there are no judgments and no wrong answers."

    She showed slides of paintings by James Tissot and Georges de La Tour. There was an Edward Hopper in which a hatted, forlorn-looking woman sits alone at a table, sipping from a cup.

    "OK, what do we see here?" she said.

    "A woman having a cup of coffee," answered one of the cops.

    "Unlike us," another said.

    Herman said, "Do we know it's coffee?"

    "If it was tea, there would be a spoon."

    "Or a pot, like in England."

    A Caravaggio appeared on the screen. In it, five men in 17th-century dress are seated around a table. Two others stand nearby, and one of them, barely discernible in shadow, points a finger—accusingly?—at a young man at the table with some coins.

    Among the officers a discussion arose about who robbed whom, but they soon learned there could be no verdict. No one was being accused or arrested, Herman said. The painting was The Calling of St. Matthew, and the man in the shadow was Jesus Christ. The cops fell silent.

    Later, Deputy Inspector Donna Allen said, "I can see where this would be useful in sizing up the big picture."

    Herman led the students upstairs into a gallery. The cops split into two- and three-person surveillance teams, each assigned to a particular artwork.

    One team huddled in front of an enormous painting in which a heavily muscled man with close-cropped hair was being manhandled by a throng of armored ruffians and a buxom woman who was tearing off his shirt.

    Robert Thursland, a 52-year-old inspector who looked trim and corporate in his gray suit, gave the class the skinny. The painting appeared to depict the end of a trial, and the muscle-bound fellow was "possibly being led off to be tortured," said Thursland. The woman tugging at his clothes was part of the lynch mob, he added.

    Herman revealed that the officers had been scrutinizing a 17th-century Guercino painting of Samson after his capture by the Philistines—the woman, of course, was Samson's lover and betrayer, Delilah. That corroborated suspicions in the room as to victims and perps, and everyone seemed to agree the case could be closed.

    In another gallery, a squat Congolese power idol, embedded with nails and gouged with holes and gaping gashes, appeared to be howling in pain. "When you came through these doors," Herman said, "what struck you about him?"

    Assistant Chief George Anderson, who commands the Police Academy, said with a sigh, "First thing I thought, 'Boy, this guy caught a lotta flak. I kinda felt it was me.'"

    Back in the conference room, Herman had the group pair up and take seats. One person faced forward while the other sat with his or her back to the screen. The officers who could see the pictures described them to their partners. One slide showed the well-known 1970 photograph of a teenage girl at Kent State kneeling beside a student who has been shot by the National Guard.

    Anderson told his backward-facing partner: "The woman is obviously distraught."

    Ms. Herman scolded, "Uh-oh, I heard an 'obvious' out there!"

    "Oops!" he said. "That's the second time I did that."

    Another photograph showed two couples standing side by side. Herman cautioned that neither should be identified by name, only by body language. The consensus was that the younger couple looked happy, playful and brimming with enthusiasm, while the older couple seemed stiff, worried and ill at ease.

    Eyeballing the older couple, Thursland offered, "They don't know where they're gonna be living come January. "

    They were George and Laura Bush; the younger couple, Barack and Michelle Obama.

    Herman, who grew up in Somerset, New Jersey, and earned a master's degree in art history as well as a law degree, began her career as an attorney in a private firm. But after a while her lifelong love of art held sway, and she went on to manage programs at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, assist the director of the Frick Collection in Manhattan and give lectures on 19th-century American and French paintings at the Met (which she still does). She's currently the director of educational development for the New York City public television station WNET. She began teaching her three-hour "Art of Perception" course at the Frick in 2004, to medical students at first. Then, over pizza one night with a friend who wondered why Herman limited her students to future physicians, Herman recalled a harrowing experience she had had while studying law at George Washington University.

    Assigned by a professor to accompany police on patrol runs, she had raced with two cops to the scene of a raucous domestic dispute. Standing on the landing below, Herman watched one officer bang on an apartment door while the other nervously fingered his handgun. What the first officer saw when the door opened—a whining child, say, or a shotgun-toting madman—and how he communicated that information to his partner could have life-or-death consequences, she realized.

    The following Monday, Herman made a cold call to the New York City Police Academy to pitch her course. And four months later, she was teaching NYPD captains at the Frick. One comment she remembers was an officer's take on Claude Lorrain's 17th-century painting Sermon on the Mount, in which a crowd gazes up at Jesus. "If I drove up on the scene and saw all these people looking up," the cop said, "I'd figure I had a jumper."

    Herman, speaking to the class I attended, underscored the need for precision by recounting the murder of a woman whose body was not found for more than a year, partly, according to news reports, because of a commander's vague instructions about where to look for it.

    Anderson, who is often called to crime scenes, took the lesson seriously. Instead of ordering detectives generally to "search the block" for shell casings, weapons or other evidence, he said he would now tell them specifically to start at the far end, work their way back to the near end, look under all the parked cars, behind the gated areas, in the shrubbery, in the garages and in the trash cans.

    One of Herman's graduates, Lt. Dan Hollywood, whose last name seems well-suited to his Jimmy Stewart-like demeanor, said her pointers have helped snag pickpockets, handbag snatchers and shoplifters who prowl the Times Square area. Hollywood coordinates the Grand Larceny Task Force of 24 plainclothes officers. "Instead of telling my people that the guy who keeps looking into one parked car after another is dressed in black," he explained, "I might say he's wearing a black wool hat, a black leather coat with black fur trim, a black hoodie sweatshirt and Timberlands."

    New York's finest aren't the only law-enforcement types to benefit from Herman's teaching. Other students have included U.S. Secret Service agents and members of the Department of Homeland Security, the Transportation Security Administration, the Strategic Studies Group of the Naval War College, the National Guard and, during a visit to London, the Metropolitan Police of Scotland Yard.

    Perhaps the most vivid illustration of art's crime-fighting power involved a task force of federal, state and local officers investigating mob control of garbage collection in Connecticut. One FBI agent went undercover for 18 months, and during that time, as it happened, attended one of Herman's classes at the Frick. According to Bill Reiner, the FBI special agent who heads the task force, Herman's exercises helped the undercover agent sharpen his observations of office layouts, storage lockers, desks and file cabinets containing incriminating evidence. The information he provided led to detailed search warrants and ultimately resulted in 34 convictions and government seizure and sale of 26 trash-hauling companies worth $60 million to $100 million.

    "Amy taught us that to be successful, you have to think outside the box," said Reiner. "Don't just look at a picture and see a picture. See what's happening."

    Herman has taken her lessons to heart. When her 7-year-old son, Ian, was in preschool, his teacher worried that he wasn't verbal enough and suggested that Herman try some of her exercises on the boy. Herman pressed him to describe in detail what he saw when they were at home or on the street. "It worked!" Herman says. "We started talking about all the things we see and why we think they look that way, and he hasn't stopped talking since."

    She encounters frequent reminders of her pedagogy's impact. While riding the subway not long ago, Herman noticed two burly men giving her the eye. They were unshaven and dressed in shabby attire. They made her nervous, and she got ready to get off the train at the next station.

    Then one of the men tapped her on the elbow. "Hey," he said, "we took your course. We're cops."

    Neal Hirschfeld's latest book, Dancing With the Devil, the true story of a federal undercover agent, will be published next year. Photographer Amy Toensing is based in New York City.


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    Comments

    Amy very good !!!! very proud of your accomplishments !!! im glad to have you on our side :)

    Posted by jack brenner on September 21,2009 | 03:36PM

    Very intersting. Nice to see some creaative thinking and teaching. Way to go, AMY.

    Posted by sue hurwitz on September 21,2009 | 03:57PM

    I suddenly want to be a 'cop' and take Amy Herman's course.

    Posted by Harriet Pakula Teweles on September 22,2009 | 07:08PM

    I found this subject to be quite interesting. Does she have any books to reference? I would love to see more.

    Posted by Joe Spodnick on September 24,2009 | 12:27PM

    I am so proud of you. What an interesting article . I too wish I could take your class. I tend to take in the whole rather than the minutia of a painting. It was nice seeing you the other day. Y

    Posted by Yvette Edelhart on September 25,2009 | 07:46AM

    I am thrilled to read of the deductive logic sessions by Amy Herman at MOMA in N.Y.

    Art always can speak louder than words. What a wonderful teaching tool! And respect by doing so for the talents of the artist's images goes along with it as they study. Great article!

    Not just the police departments should have such an opportunity, but wouldn't it be wonderful if these types of sessions wer offered to especially women? Along with self defense classes it certainly would apply to the awareness of surroundings and actions by people who might be laying in wait to harm others. We should all be more aware of what we can see and be thinking as she stated, "How would you describe this person...to another?" Could be very meaningful in preventing a crime or saving a person's life. Hightened awareness should be ingrained in all of us, especially we females.

    Posted by s. j. madama on September 25,2009 | 03:29PM

    I teach high school art and I am always amazing at the improvement in the drawing skills when students draw what they "see" rather than what they think is there. I'm sure the cops assumed the solution before really looking. The details really do matter!

    Posted by Marsha Mueller on September 25,2009 | 04:29PM

    How cool is this??????? Amy - I am an old friend of your mom and dad's and mom sent this to me. I think this is absolutely fascinating, innovative and something that can be applied to just everything!

    Nice goin'! Congrats! Mazel Tov!

    Posted by Sue Werner on September 27,2009 | 06:21PM

    I think this is just fantastic. Amy's method can be applied to so many areas since people tend to see what they want to see or used to seeing. Certainly allows people to step back and observe. If there are any reference texts, videos, presentations,I would be interested. I am prepared to fly from Osaka to take the course at a heart beat.

    Posted by Jay Bhatt on September 28,2009 | 09:30PM

    I teach reading to adjudicated youth at a residential facility in Canaan, NY. I thought using this method would be an excellent way for them to practice making inferences. I'm going to start with the art work and connect that to making inferences in literacy. Thanks for the inspiration!

    Posted by Beth Wing on September 30,2009 | 06:02AM

    Sounds a lot like VTS or Visual Thinking Strategies. :-)

    Posted by Teresa on September 30,2009 | 11:00PM

    I am sooooooooooo proud of you. I always knew you were special and this just prooves I was right. Way to go, Amy

    Posted by Carole Sue Gallof on October 1,2009 | 05:08AM

    This reminds me quite a bit of the legendary detective, Sherlock Holmes. It is amazing how after all of these years, his observational skills coupled with his analytic abilities allowed him to produce a testable hypothesis - who did it, how, and why. The beauty here is that it forces a more careful description and the history of pieces removes it from modern context which risks some sort of bias (the Sermon on the Mount example).

    Posted by Manjit Leo Singh on October 3,2009 | 12:00PM

    Very insightful article. I have saved the article to refer to in the future for discussions with investment analysts. You can look at an investment and not see what it is worth because you are not using your powers of observation. To be a good observer, you have to be precise in your language. Some additional reading or references would be good.

    How do we become better observers?

    Continue the good work.

    Mark

    Posted by Mark Rzepczynski on October 5,2009 | 12:39PM

    Very interesting article. I'm not a cop, but I'd love to take this class.

    Posted by Another Amy on October 7,2009 | 01:23AM

    This is good and good reminder. To me this is nothing new. We have sometimes just got lazy in how we do things and we are sometimes all rushed to "get it done." For those of us who went through basic training way back when, maybe you went through "Powers of Observation Training," as I did, and I did the same thing with photos, paintings, descriptions of people and, of course, at the scene. It's important to "observe" before making any decisions about what we see in front of us. Have an open mind... and eyes, of course.
    From Toronto, Canada

    Posted by Colin Mackenzie on October 7,2009 | 08:10AM

    Excellent! A great course, and it is an aspect of art that gives it great pratical significance. I often tell my sister and brother-in-law to "use your words" when attempting to describe soemthing. Meaning slow down and carefully explain yourself. What do your mean? what do you see? This application of art is sure and "eye opener." Congratulations Amy Herman and thank you.

    Posted by Lionel Monty on October 9,2009 | 08:58AM

    What a wonderful way to integrate art into the Corrections System. I know that many people can benefit from your observations. Is there a course available in the Metropolitan Area for the general public. I am a teacher and could use some of your ideas in my classroom.

    Posted by Carolyn Isherwood on October 10,2009 | 06:22AM

    My brother, the graphic designer, accused me of being visually illiterate. I fear he may have been right. What about a course for us "visually illiterate" folks?

    Posted by Connie Hoar on October 13,2009 | 10:55AM

    I teach middle school and we use a similar method for our appropriately named, Picture Study class. You can get lots of details on this method of teaching children about fine art, as well as nature, by visiting web sites dedicated to Charlotte Mason (a 19th century educator from England).

    Posted by Leslie Sams on October 20,2009 | 10:14AM

    Amy: Hurray for you, and lucky cops! If I can ever help let me know!

    Posted by Felicia Blum on October 20,2009 | 10:51AM

    I found the article on Amy Herman's course fascinating not for her course's concepts but for the remarks of the officers in the article. One officer, while discussing how he would be more descriptive in his assessment of potential perps, reveals a larger problem plaguing our police forces as a whole: stereotyping. The officer explains that instead of informing his subordinates to look for someone who is merely dressed in black, he would tell them to search for someone "wearing a black wool hat, a black leather coat with black fur trim, a black hoodie sweatshirt, and Timberlands." He is obviously (sorry Ms. Herman) characterizing someone in typical "Hip-Hop" attire as his suspect. If police officers are not trained to lose their preconceived notions of who may or may not be a criminal, then our justice system will always be plagued with problems. Yes, we should train cops to be more perceptive, but, more importantly, we should train them to look beyond clothing, skin color, and/or gender, when making judgements in what are oftentimes volatile situations.

    Posted by N G. on October 23,2009 | 11:50AM

    Amy, recommending this as reading in my college Art Appreciation class. It's a breakthrough in thinking when the awareness is created, right? Nice work!

    Thanks for a well written article, Neal.

    Paula King
    Art Professor

    Posted by Paula King on October 25,2009 | 12:04PM

    Amy, congratulations on catching the attention of The Smithsonian on your great program which uses MOMA collection for training. We're going to share with all of our clients who are looking for ways to engage their teams honing observation skills using the collection from the new Modern Wing at The Art Institute of Chicago!

    Your great work will help us explain!

    Bobbie Soeder
    VP Mktg., Catalyst Ranch Chicago

    Posted by Bobbie Soeder on November 13,2009 | 10:04AM

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