I disagree with a lot of what comes out of California’s legislature. Some of their laws seem to create solutions for problems that don’t necessarily exist. But every now and then, they get something right, and their recently enacted No Robo Bosses Act is one of those occasions. In fact, I think every state should…
Most advice about when to quit a job is really advice about grit, and in law enforcement there’s even more pressure to stick it out because of everything it took to get where you are. You did the academy, collected the certifications, started the retirement clock, got the seniority, worked the bad shifts, and maybe…
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…
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’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…
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…
Sometimes an officer asks a supervisor what to do because he doesn’t know what to do. Sometimes he asks because the decision isn’t his to make. Those aren’t the same thing. I want officers who can think for themselves. If every traffic stop, report question, complaint, or minor problem has to go through a supervisor,…
When a decision affects people, “Because I said so” usually isn’t enough. That doesn’t mean everybody gets a vote, and it doesn’t mean every decision has to be defended forever. Sometimes I’ve listened, made the call, and we’re moving on. I can still tell people what I was trying to accomplish and why I chose…