Police departments have access to things political organizations don’t. We can stop people, investigate them, obtain records, use surveillance systems, gather information, write reports, make arrests, and speak with the credibility that comes from an official badge and government authority. That power exists for a public purpose. Political policing starts when somebody tries to use…
When I’m looking at a police promotion, I don’t start with who deserves it. I start with the job that needs to be done. An officer can be very good at their job and still not be the person I want supervising other officers. They may handle calls well, make good cases, stay productive, know…
Most cops don’t wake up one morning and decide they’re done putting in the work. It usually happens slower than that. They start out wanting to do the job well, solve problems, be useful, and maybe even believe that if they work hard enough somebody will notice. Then the department starts teaching them different lessons….
A sergeant candidate may have to meet minimum qualifications, take a written exam, sit through a structured interview, complete an assessment, compete against other candidates, and live with a scoring system somebody can point to afterward. Then the chief’s job opens, and sometimes the process gets looser. A city may review resumes, conduct a few…
I’ve never believed being chief means I owe an officer blind loyalty. If one of mine is wrong, I have to deal with it. That may mean coaching, discipline, termination, or standing in front of the public and saying we got something wrong. What I won’t do is decide he’s wrong because defending him became…
One of the easiest ways to lower a standard is to do nothing. I don’t have to change a policy or announce a new rule. I can just see the same problem enough times and keep walking past it. Eventually, everybody figures out that whatever the written rule says, this is what we actually accept….
When a police officer screws up, the officer owns it. If he violated policy, used bad judgment, lied, mistreated somebody, failed to do the job, or made a decision he should’ve known better than to make, supervision shouldn’t become a way to explain that away. But once I understand what the officer did, I want…
A chief can get a pretty clean version of a department without anybody lying. A sergeant gives the short version. Somebody trims it down again. A detail gets left out because it doesn’t seem important, or because it makes somebody look bad. By the time the story reaches the chief’s office, the part that might’ve…
I’ve had officers ask me why they need to write a use-of-force report when everybody already knows the force was justified. Nobody complained. Nobody got hurt. Maybe it was nothing more than a two-second grab to get somebody under control. Why write several paragraphs about it? Because six months from now, “everybody knows what happened”…
If I were helping a city hire its next police chief, I wouldn’t be comfortable making a recommendation based on a résumé, a good interview, and three references the candidate picked himself. I’d want to know quite a bit more about the person who was about to take charge of the department. A police chief…