You get pulled over and realize you don’t have your driver’s license with you. But you’ve got a picture of it saved on your phone, so you figure that should be good enough. After all, it shows your name, photograph, license number, and everything else that’s printed on the actual card. The officer can use…
A police officer already has plenty of information they can’t release. Criminal investigations, confidential personnel records, protected personal information, and security details aren’t things officers should be discussing with just anybody. Those restrictions come with the job, and there’s a good reason for them. So when a city decides its officers need to sign an…
Back in July 2026, I posted a video explaining that an Alabama police chief has the authority to make any vehicle an emergency vehicle. I didn’t expect that statement to be particularly controversial, but I quickly discovered just how many people on Facebook apparently know more about Alabama law than the people responsible for enforcing…
People sometimes hear that police had enough evidence to arrest somebody, then wonder how that same person could walk out of court with a not-guilty verdict. Or they see an officer detain someone for questioning and assume the officer must already have enough evidence to make an arrest. The confusion usually comes from treating reasonable…
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…
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’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…