You filed a police report, received a case number, and went about the rest of your day. A few days later, you haven’t heard anything. You don’t know whether someone is working on it, whether there’s been any progress, or whether you should call and ask. There’s nothing wrong with following up. You reported something…
When someone reports a crime, explaining what happened may only take a few minutes. You told the officer what happened. They took some notes, maybe took pictures, talked to a couple of people, and left. A day or two later, you call because your insurance company wants the report. And we tell you it isn’t…
Most good employees don’t wake up one morning and decide they’re done trying. It usually happens a little at a time. They come to work wanting to do a good job, take responsibility for things that aren’t necessarily theirs, help coworkers who need it, and try to fix problems before those problems become somebody else’s…
You see something happening in your neighborhood, call the police, and explain the problem. An officer comes out, talks to a few people, and leaves without arresting anyone. From your side, it may look like nothing happened. Sometimes the officer could have explained the response better. But there are also times when we know something…
The stories and ideas I don’t want you to miss.
The first time I went through the police academy was in 1998. On January 19, I’ll start all over again. Because I’ve been out of law enforcement for more than 15 years, my Alabama certification is no longer active, so I have to complete the whole academy. There isn’t a shortened version based on the…
Sometimes I know more than I can tell you. That doesn’t mean I’m hiding something, and it doesn’t mean the department gets to say “no comment” and disappear. It means there are times when putting out everything we know would be a bad idea. Maybe two witnesses are telling us different stories. Maybe we have…
People carry a gun because they want it available if something goes wrong, but then they get where they’re going, leave it in the car, and walk away. Now it can’t serve the purpose they carried it for, but it can still be stolen or found by somebody who shouldn’t have it. At that point,…
Small-town accountability gets personal pretty fast. There’s a good chance I know the person I’m dealing with. I may know his parents, his kids, where he works, or what he ordered the last time I saw him at lunch. Sometimes I know everybody involved. That’s part of living and working in a small town, and…
Every leader says they don’t care about being liked, and most of them are lying, myself included. But when being liked and being trusted pull in different directions, trust is what I’m protecting. I want the people I work with to like me, and I want them to be comfortable walking into my office and…
When you call the police, the officer who shows up usually knows a lot less about what’s happening than you think he does. Dispatch may have given him an address, a name, and a couple of sentences about why somebody called. Meanwhile, you’ve been standing in the middle of the problem for twenty minutes, two…