If somebody has been doing the job for twenty years, I expect them to know things a new officer simply hasn’t had time to learn yet. They’ve seen calls go sideways, watched people react under pressure, learned which details matter, and probably made enough mistakes of their own to recognize a few before they happen again.

What I don’t assume is that twenty years on the job automatically means twenty years of good experience. There’s a difference between learning over time and repeating the same year over and over until the routine feels unquestionable.

I got a pretty good reminder of that when I went back to the police academy in 2026. My first time through, we were taught how to enforce the law through tactics that included things like vent-window extractions. This time, there was much more emphasis on de-escalationCommunication, time, distance, positioning, or other tactics used when practical to reduce tension and lower the need for force., mental-health awareness, communication, and slowing things down when there was room to do it. I wasn’t being taught the same job the same way because policing isn’t the same job it was when I started in 1997.

That doesn’t mean everything we learned then was wrong, and it doesn’t mean everything being taught now is automatically better. It does mean today’s police officer can’t stay stuck in the ’90s just because that’s when he learned how to do the job.

Police work changes. Laws change. Court decisions change. Policies, equipment, technology, tactics, training, and professional standards change. Something that made perfect sense fifteen or twenty years ago may still make sense today, but the fact that we’ve been doing it that long isn’t enough by itself.

What I value most in experience is judgment. Over time, I expect an officer to recognize patterns faster, notice when something doesn’t fit, understand how people tend to react under stress, and get a better feel for which problems need immediate attention and which ones need a little patience. You don’t get all of that from a classroom or a policy manual, and good veteran officers can save younger officers years of unnecessary mistakes.

The problem comes when experience becomes the reason nobody is allowed to question how something is being done. We’ve all heard some version of, “I’ve been doing this for twenty years.” Sometimes that carries real weight because the person saying it has actually learned something over those twenty years. Other times it means the practice hasn’t been reconsidered in twenty years.

Every organization develops routines that outlive the reason they started. Maybe an old piece of equipment required a certain process. Maybe a supervisor preferred it. Maybe an old policy required it, or somebody found a workaround years ago and everybody after them inherited it. Then the circumstances changed and the routine didn’t. Nobody made a decision to keep it. Nobody reviewed whether it still made sense. It just became part of how things were done because the person who trained you did it that way, and the person who trained them probably did too.

I don’t believe in changing something just so we can say we changed it. If a process still works, fits current law and policy, and gives us the result we need, there may be no reason to touch it. But I still want to know why we’re doing it.

That’s one reason I pay attention when a new officer starts asking questions. Sometimes the answer really is that the new officer doesn’t know enough yet to understand what the veteran sees. There are things that only start making sense after you’ve worked enough calls yourself. But somebody who hasn’t spent ten years looking at the same process may also notice something everybody else stopped noticing a long time ago. They may ask why we complete a form nobody uses, why three people touch something one person could handle, or why the written policy says one thing while everybody in the building does another.

The new officer isn’t automatically right because he asked the question. But if there’s a good reason for what we’re doing, somebody should be able to explain it. If nobody can, then I need to look at the practice before I look at the person asking about it.

Experience also creates shortcuts, and most of them are useful. You get faster because you recognize what matters, stop turning every routine call into a major production, and learn which steps actually move the problem toward a solution. A veteran officer shouldn’t approach every situation with the same uncertainty as somebody on their third week.

The risk is when a useful shortcut becomes something we stop noticing. You’ve handled the same kind of call a hundred times, so you’re pretty sure you already know where it’s going and skip a step that usually doesn’t change anything. Most of the time, you may even be right. Then you get the one call where that missing step was the part you needed. Pattern recognition is one of the advantages of experience, but it still has to leave room for the facts in front of you to prove you wrong.

As a leader, I also have to pay attention to what experienced officers pass down. A new officer may read the policy once, but they watch the veteran every shift. Before long, how the veteran handles something can carry more weight than the academy, the policy manual, or the supervisor.

Sometimes that’s exactly what I want. Good veteran officers teach judgment, timing, communication, common sense, and practical skills that no written policy can fully capture. I want younger officers learning from that experience. I just also need to know whether what they’re being taught still fits current law, policy, training, and the job we’re doing today, or whether they’re inheriting a workaround that made sense years ago and nobody ever went back to question.

The experienced officers I trust most aren’t the ones who act like they’ve seen everything. They’re the ones who have seen enough to know the job can still surprise them. They have strong instincts, but they’re willing to check them, and they can explain why they do what they do without falling back on rank or years of service.

If I’ve been doing something the same way for years, I still want to be able to explain why.