I understand why people ask for a supervisor. Sometimes they think the officer is wrong. Sometimes they don’t trust what they’re being told. Sometimes they think another officer will see it differently. And sometimes they’ve watched enough videos online to think asking for a supervisor is the police version of speaking to the manager, where…
A police report is a record of what somebody reported to law enforcement. It doesn’t establish that a crime occurred, and it doesn’t mean somebody has to be arrested. Sometimes an officer takes a report and begins an investigation. Other times, there’s nothing more for law enforcement to do with the information provided. I understand…
A lot of police movies make patrol look like one long emergency. A traffic stop becomes a chase, a disturbance turns into a major investigation, and every routine call seems to connect to something bigger. End of Watch does plenty of movie stuff too. I wouldn’t use it as a training film, and I wouldn’t…
There’s an old saying about having twenty years of experience versus having one year of experience twenty times. I’ve always thought that was a pretty good way of looking at it, particularly in law enforcement. I’ve known officers who could tell you exactly how many years, months, and days they’d been on the job. They’d…
The stories and ideas I don’t want you to miss.
If an employee uses a police system for something they aren’t authorized to do, that employee owns the decision. I’m not interested in watering that down by blaming the software, the supervisor, the policy manual, or anybody else for a choice the employee made. But when it happens more than 2,700 times over about a…
I saw a story about an AI manager at a San Francisco store recommending that an employee be fired. The employee had been late 17 times in 23 shifts, so I’m not going to pretend the attendance problem wasn’t real. A human manager probably should’ve dealt with it long before the AI did. What caught…
I went through the police academy for the first time in 1998. Twenty-eight years later, I went through it again. A lot changed in that time, including me, but one thing became even clearer the second time around: The police academy is a terrible place to start getting ready for the police academy. By the…
I’ve seen some impressive resumes in my life. College degrees, command schools, leadership certifications, specialized training, and enough certificates to cover an “I love me wall.” There’s nothing wrong with any of that. I believe in education and training, and I think officers should take advantage of every opportunity they have to improve themselves. But…
Most people don’t deal with traffic stops very often. Police officers do, and that difference alone can create a lot of uncertainty. You may wonder why the officer is still sitting behind you instead of walking up, why you’re being asked a particular question, or why something that seemed simple is taking several minutes. Sometimes…
The main argument in Extreme Ownership is hard to disagree with. If you’re responsible for a team and your first explanation for every failure is that everybody beneath you screwed up, you probably haven’t looked hard enough at your own part in it. That doesn’t mean every failure belongs to the leader. That’s where I…