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 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…
Starting over sounds like going back to the beginning, but at 52, I don’t think that’s what it means. I have started over in a few different ways over the last several years. I came back to policing after being away from it for a long time. I went through the police academy again, twenty-eight…
Most of what I call experience started out as questions. I ran into situations I hadn’t seen before, slowed down, listened, asked what happened, and tried to figure out what I was missing. After enough years, some of those questions turn into patterns. I recognize certain problems faster now than I did early on. That’s…