Monday, May 21, 2012
A Thought for Police Week 2012
Alone in the darkness with only the glow of the dash lights and the red, green, and amber lights of various electronics surrounding the drivers’ seat, thousands of police officers cruise, crawl, or careen through the streets and back roads of America every night of the world.
And yet they are not alone.
Some surround themselves with icons of the fullness of their life. A picture of their child or a statue of St. Michael, or a card printed with inspiring or motivating words. Memories accompany them, too. Words of an academy instructor. Advice from an old hand.
The longer the years, the more stories they carry. It seems that every block or mile post reminds them of an incident. Even that old patrol car, the odometer marking each mile, can hold a lot of stories.
The other — and universal — companion of every officer is the constant presence of death. We can ignore it, reject it, fight it, accept it, or challenge it. death doesn’t care much what we think of it. However we ride with death it rides with us still. Will it meet us at the next call? Will he visit us before we get home again?
I am no stranger to death. As a lawman, I have had death in my nostrils. As a chaplain, I have officiated over its handiwork. As a coroner, I have declared it. As a messenger, I have announced its arrival. As an investigator I have probed it. As a human, I have touched its twilight with prayers for deliverance from it. As a son, I have watched the science of its arrival, measuring the absence of the breath and pulse of life in the clean, white room of my father’s last moments.
We can taste it in the wasted lives and vacant looks of the addicts. We see its shadows in the hopeless child. We see its wicked finger beckoning to the woman on the bridge whose life has lost its appeal. We see it reflected in the engravings on a thousand noble memorials to fallen warriors.
When we stand at those graves or under the half-lowered flags this police memorial week, has death won?
I say no. I claim with the Apostle, “O Death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”
I shake my fist at death and do not fear it.
If we have lived well and planted good works and wisdom, death does not win. If we serve daily in honor of those who served to the end, death does not win. If those who survive us can say we were good and faithful servants, death does not win.
If we look past our last breath and see a future that bears the mark of some good we have done, death does not win. If we cheat death’s purpose of robbing us of precious moments by burying them in silence and instead say today to those whom we love how much they mean to us, death does not win.
This week we will grieve.
Death has visited our brothers and sisters. It has taken warriors from us.
It has battered and bruised and challenged us.
But it has not won.
Monday, March 5, 2012
Excited Utterance and Officer Involved Trauma
By Joel Shults
The legal belief that people behave rationally on a conscious level, short of mental disease and defect, can be lethal to the career of an officer involved in a controversial traumatic event.. A lot of attention has developed around the brain and its processes in recent years. A search of book titles about how we think, make decisions, and learn most effectively will reveal several best sellers. Legal assumptions have not caught up with biological realities and may never be able to do so.
Are humans rational? I believe so, but not always on a conscious level. Let’s take a walk down the block and examine how the brain guides us. Stay with me while I make a crucial point. If the terrain is familiar then some neural paths have already been formed in the brain – you know to be alert for that uneven place in the sidewalk and the dog that always barks ferociously from the other side of the fence. If this is unfamiliar territory then the brain must rely on previous walks to interpret and navigate the environment. The brain speculates, very accurately, what to expect and how to respond.
Now let’s say you see a dog on a leash coming toward you. I once worked a series of peeping tom calls where the peeper used his dog walking as an excuse to be out in the evening. I’ve also been bitten too many times to remain a dog lover. So in my case my brain puts my body on alert when I see a dog. If you’re a dog lover, your brain puts your body in a different condition of acceptance and calm. In any case, the point is that our past experiences construct how we see the world and how we physically react to it.
As you continue on your imaginary walk, you see two people walking on the other side of the street. They stay close to the shadows, hold their jackets close to them, and look back over their shoulders. The average citizen would find them suspicious, but they wouldn’t necessarily understand why. As a seasoned officer you know that the behavior is suspicious because most people want to walk where it is best lighted, their arms relaxed, and focused on their path. The citizen just knows something doesn’t seem right because whatever those two are doing, it doesn’t match up to their mental template of normal people out walking. This is the concept of cognitive dissonance – things don’t feel right, causing some mental tension. We have to resolve this tension somehow. For the citizen it is typically a mental narrative seeking an explanation. The citizen resolves their fear and can go on about their business without further distress or involvement: “I bet they are skipping school” would be a nice way to explain and resolve the scene. The officer, however, will continue to investigate to determine the real facts.
Our walk gets more exciting. Out of nowhere, a motorcycle and speeding car collide and skid to within a few feet of you, striking a utility pole. Now the brain is remarkably focused. It shuts down every function and thought of the body that is not directly related to surviving the next few seconds of life. This is especially true if we have no existing template of experience in our past to guide our response. Digesting supper? Forget it. You need the blood elsewhere. Getting a cold? No time to make antibodies. Beautiful sunset? The building behind you could be on fire and you wouldn’t know it. The normal pathways that filter experiences through the frontal cortex are short circuited directly to the primitive fight or flight part of the brain. Most officers are aware of the sensory and memory distortions that accompany traumatic events like lethal encounters. But what about the moments after when the brain and body are trying to return to normal?
Here’s where the concept of excited utterance comes in. Also known as spontaneous exclamation or res gestae statement, these statements are legally considered reliable because they are made spontaneously in reaction to a sudden event without deliberation. While these statements may be honest and unfiltered, they reflect a mental search for truth but may not reflect factual reality. A police officer who has just shot a suspect (or engaged in any life threatening activity from a hard fight to a dramatic rescue) has gone from conscious, controlled awareness to a series of autonomic responses (hopefully using neural pathways built during training). As things rapidly begin to return to normal the brain now begins to reconstruct the event to make sense of it. Because killing someone doesn’t make “sense”, even to a trained police officer, the brain begins exploring “logical” explanations. Thinking outloud, an officer may say “I must have tripped”, or “My gun just went off”, or “I didn’t mean to kill him”, or “did you see that knife” when no knife is found. The officer is in no mental state to be constructing an alibi or defense, he or she is merely doing a very normal thing – trying to construct a narrative that makes sense to a freshly traumatized brain.
When the facts are in, or cooler statements are made after a period of rest and reflection the initial sense-making statements of the officer still in shock may seem incongruent. This may be interpreted as a deliberate lie, guilty statement, or cover up from the perspective of defense attorneys or officers investigating the shooting. I can’t suggest that no such statements ever be made because involved officers will not be thinking clearly enough to engage in self-protective silence that, in itself, could be misinterpreted as conspiratorial. I just ask that you keep this article for the day that you or a colleague need to help explain something that made perfect sense to your brain after the most traumatic event of a lifetime, but won’t make sense in the mind of a jury without the perspective of how the brain works in the context of that event.
The legal belief that people behave rationally on a conscious level, short of mental disease and defect, can be lethal to the career of an officer involved in a controversial traumatic event.. A lot of attention has developed around the brain and its processes in recent years. A search of book titles about how we think, make decisions, and learn most effectively will reveal several best sellers. Legal assumptions have not caught up with biological realities and may never be able to do so.
Are humans rational? I believe so, but not always on a conscious level. Let’s take a walk down the block and examine how the brain guides us. Stay with me while I make a crucial point. If the terrain is familiar then some neural paths have already been formed in the brain – you know to be alert for that uneven place in the sidewalk and the dog that always barks ferociously from the other side of the fence. If this is unfamiliar territory then the brain must rely on previous walks to interpret and navigate the environment. The brain speculates, very accurately, what to expect and how to respond.
Now let’s say you see a dog on a leash coming toward you. I once worked a series of peeping tom calls where the peeper used his dog walking as an excuse to be out in the evening. I’ve also been bitten too many times to remain a dog lover. So in my case my brain puts my body on alert when I see a dog. If you’re a dog lover, your brain puts your body in a different condition of acceptance and calm. In any case, the point is that our past experiences construct how we see the world and how we physically react to it.
As you continue on your imaginary walk, you see two people walking on the other side of the street. They stay close to the shadows, hold their jackets close to them, and look back over their shoulders. The average citizen would find them suspicious, but they wouldn’t necessarily understand why. As a seasoned officer you know that the behavior is suspicious because most people want to walk where it is best lighted, their arms relaxed, and focused on their path. The citizen just knows something doesn’t seem right because whatever those two are doing, it doesn’t match up to their mental template of normal people out walking. This is the concept of cognitive dissonance – things don’t feel right, causing some mental tension. We have to resolve this tension somehow. For the citizen it is typically a mental narrative seeking an explanation. The citizen resolves their fear and can go on about their business without further distress or involvement: “I bet they are skipping school” would be a nice way to explain and resolve the scene. The officer, however, will continue to investigate to determine the real facts.
Our walk gets more exciting. Out of nowhere, a motorcycle and speeding car collide and skid to within a few feet of you, striking a utility pole. Now the brain is remarkably focused. It shuts down every function and thought of the body that is not directly related to surviving the next few seconds of life. This is especially true if we have no existing template of experience in our past to guide our response. Digesting supper? Forget it. You need the blood elsewhere. Getting a cold? No time to make antibodies. Beautiful sunset? The building behind you could be on fire and you wouldn’t know it. The normal pathways that filter experiences through the frontal cortex are short circuited directly to the primitive fight or flight part of the brain. Most officers are aware of the sensory and memory distortions that accompany traumatic events like lethal encounters. But what about the moments after when the brain and body are trying to return to normal?
Here’s where the concept of excited utterance comes in. Also known as spontaneous exclamation or res gestae statement, these statements are legally considered reliable because they are made spontaneously in reaction to a sudden event without deliberation. While these statements may be honest and unfiltered, they reflect a mental search for truth but may not reflect factual reality. A police officer who has just shot a suspect (or engaged in any life threatening activity from a hard fight to a dramatic rescue) has gone from conscious, controlled awareness to a series of autonomic responses (hopefully using neural pathways built during training). As things rapidly begin to return to normal the brain now begins to reconstruct the event to make sense of it. Because killing someone doesn’t make “sense”, even to a trained police officer, the brain begins exploring “logical” explanations. Thinking outloud, an officer may say “I must have tripped”, or “My gun just went off”, or “I didn’t mean to kill him”, or “did you see that knife” when no knife is found. The officer is in no mental state to be constructing an alibi or defense, he or she is merely doing a very normal thing – trying to construct a narrative that makes sense to a freshly traumatized brain.
When the facts are in, or cooler statements are made after a period of rest and reflection the initial sense-making statements of the officer still in shock may seem incongruent. This may be interpreted as a deliberate lie, guilty statement, or cover up from the perspective of defense attorneys or officers investigating the shooting. I can’t suggest that no such statements ever be made because involved officers will not be thinking clearly enough to engage in self-protective silence that, in itself, could be misinterpreted as conspiratorial. I just ask that you keep this article for the day that you or a colleague need to help explain something that made perfect sense to your brain after the most traumatic event of a lifetime, but won’t make sense in the mind of a jury without the perspective of how the brain works in the context of that event.
Monday, January 9, 2012
Too Bad It’s Not A Game
I have come to grips with a condition I have struggled with since I was boy. I have LSI (Low Sports Interest). There apparently is no cure. I think I was born this way even though I tried to fight it. I was embarrassed as a young boy when my Dad caught me reading a book about how to throw a football. “You can’t learn to throw a football by reading a book”, he said compassionately. I was confused. After all, the name of the book was “How to Throw a Football”. In junior high and high school I found my leadership and teamwork niche in student council and cut my competitive teeth in debate tournaments. But I still struggled with LSI. Let’s just say that Dad was pretty happy when I joined the Army.
Now the tables have turned. Whereas once I was the wonder of a father who couldn’t understand my lack of manly interest in sports, I am now a father whose son cannot understand my lack of manly interest in sports. My son is a sports fan with notable athletic achievements dating from T-ball and peewee basketball. To try to relate and cement those father-son bonds I will occasionally try to have some quality sports moments. Those don’t last very long because my competitive spirit, honed in the sweat-drenched classrooms of weekend debate tournaments, makes me hate to lose. So, I quit playing when I quit winning. That means that driveway hoops, rec center handball, golf, chess, and thumb wrestling were all bitter memories by the time he went off to seventh grade.
I still attend an occasional pro sports event with him and we have a good time, although I suspect when he finishes college and gets a job my companionship (i.e. buying the tickets) will be less sought after. I still don’t really understand football, or basketball, or the nuances of baseball, soccer, hockey, or the reason I spend a hundred bucks to sit in the middle of screaming intoxicated adults in extended adolescence while trying to read the local paper between plays, or downs, or quarters or whatever they are.
The one advantage that my LSI has provided is that I don’t do any Monday morning quarterbacking; no second guessing of the millionaires who obviously have reasons for making the decisions that their entire lives have been devoted to being able to make. When a batter stands with a thin wedge of matter held above his shoulder, he faces a small sphere that will be hurled in his direction and arrive from the pitcher’s hand to the batter’s torso in about a third of a second. Since the batter’s brain takes a quarter of a second to command the arms to begin his swing, there is less than one tenth of a second to make a decision to swing or not swing. This doesn’t count the milliseconds for the retina to translate a few million inputs, or the micro-adjustments the muscles must intuitively make in order to make the kind of swing most likely to rocket the ball in a certain direction.
Similarly, who am I to question a pass from a quarterback being assaulted by a horde of adversaries anxious to knock him silly, looking into a swarm of movement where the field of opportunity changes with every fleeting moment. Spectators may moan about moves they wouldn’t have made had they been in the batter’s box, but they soon forgive and forget and go about their business.
I wish the public would give the same consideration to officers making their split second decisions. A police officer is thrust into the fight of his or her life. The outcome will not decide who gets a Super Bowl bonus or World Series ring, but who lives and dies. The spectators – always late to the game and depending on replays – will have no experience with which to judge the winner and yet they will be vocal in their opinions while the survivor must remain silent. The field of encounter is not cleared for the contest, it happens right in the middle of the real world. There is little notice, no fanfare, and the adversary plays by no rules while the officer has many. The contest cannot be flagged for penalty, because it is the final play and it will be a sudden death decision.
Fine motor skills will be dulled by primitive body chemistry while those same instincts will focus the senses in ways the officer cannot possibly consciously control. With neurons firing at lightning speed, the officer’s brain will simultaneously reflect on training, emotions, calculations of time and space, moral considerations, and will balance all the training to shoot against all the powerful indoctrinations not to shoot. While the body accounts for movement, light, and all the micro-data accumulated over a lifetime, all comes to focus in one small finger pressing against a very small trigger to create a very small hole in the opponent that may or may not end the encounter. If the officer wins, he or she gets to spend the rest of their career explaining why they chose not to lose.
As it turns out, I signed up for the toughest game of all.
Now the tables have turned. Whereas once I was the wonder of a father who couldn’t understand my lack of manly interest in sports, I am now a father whose son cannot understand my lack of manly interest in sports. My son is a sports fan with notable athletic achievements dating from T-ball and peewee basketball. To try to relate and cement those father-son bonds I will occasionally try to have some quality sports moments. Those don’t last very long because my competitive spirit, honed in the sweat-drenched classrooms of weekend debate tournaments, makes me hate to lose. So, I quit playing when I quit winning. That means that driveway hoops, rec center handball, golf, chess, and thumb wrestling were all bitter memories by the time he went off to seventh grade.
I still attend an occasional pro sports event with him and we have a good time, although I suspect when he finishes college and gets a job my companionship (i.e. buying the tickets) will be less sought after. I still don’t really understand football, or basketball, or the nuances of baseball, soccer, hockey, or the reason I spend a hundred bucks to sit in the middle of screaming intoxicated adults in extended adolescence while trying to read the local paper between plays, or downs, or quarters or whatever they are.
The one advantage that my LSI has provided is that I don’t do any Monday morning quarterbacking; no second guessing of the millionaires who obviously have reasons for making the decisions that their entire lives have been devoted to being able to make. When a batter stands with a thin wedge of matter held above his shoulder, he faces a small sphere that will be hurled in his direction and arrive from the pitcher’s hand to the batter’s torso in about a third of a second. Since the batter’s brain takes a quarter of a second to command the arms to begin his swing, there is less than one tenth of a second to make a decision to swing or not swing. This doesn’t count the milliseconds for the retina to translate a few million inputs, or the micro-adjustments the muscles must intuitively make in order to make the kind of swing most likely to rocket the ball in a certain direction.
Similarly, who am I to question a pass from a quarterback being assaulted by a horde of adversaries anxious to knock him silly, looking into a swarm of movement where the field of opportunity changes with every fleeting moment. Spectators may moan about moves they wouldn’t have made had they been in the batter’s box, but they soon forgive and forget and go about their business.
I wish the public would give the same consideration to officers making their split second decisions. A police officer is thrust into the fight of his or her life. The outcome will not decide who gets a Super Bowl bonus or World Series ring, but who lives and dies. The spectators – always late to the game and depending on replays – will have no experience with which to judge the winner and yet they will be vocal in their opinions while the survivor must remain silent. The field of encounter is not cleared for the contest, it happens right in the middle of the real world. There is little notice, no fanfare, and the adversary plays by no rules while the officer has many. The contest cannot be flagged for penalty, because it is the final play and it will be a sudden death decision.
Fine motor skills will be dulled by primitive body chemistry while those same instincts will focus the senses in ways the officer cannot possibly consciously control. With neurons firing at lightning speed, the officer’s brain will simultaneously reflect on training, emotions, calculations of time and space, moral considerations, and will balance all the training to shoot against all the powerful indoctrinations not to shoot. While the body accounts for movement, light, and all the micro-data accumulated over a lifetime, all comes to focus in one small finger pressing against a very small trigger to create a very small hole in the opponent that may or may not end the encounter. If the officer wins, he or she gets to spend the rest of their career explaining why they chose not to lose.
As it turns out, I signed up for the toughest game of all.
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Are Our Hands Tied?
The Occupy Whatever movement was met with great restraint by political leaders all over the country until push literally came to shove. And guess who got to do the shoving? That’s right – your friendly neighborhood armed government agents. Mayors and college presidents and governors have their private armies to do what begging, negotiating, and persuasion cannot – the police officer. Why don’t mayors send in a phalanx of social workers or public relations staff? How about the street department guys or the city engineer’s office? Are the interns in the mail room so busy they can’t go down to the park and get some trespassers to move along? Or hey, get the firefighters – they have uniforms and everybody loves firefighters!
Why the police? One word: force. We have the license to hurt. Gosh that sounds mean. And on video it looks even meaner. Officers in heavy gear, wielding sticks, carrying industrial strength pepper spray, descending in formation to make people do what they do not want to do makes for riveting video and front page photos. The pictures ignite a visceral response in a society that has become so peaceful and civil that the thought of cops using force is more than the average eye can bear.
The thought process goes like this: person violates law, politician looks the other way, violator decides to continue to violate law, politician decides law should be enforced and warns violator, violator decides to continue to break law, politician orders police to enforce law, police confront violator, violator still breaks law, police exercise force to gain compliance, violator screams bloody murder, politician investigates cops for using force.
The politician wins. He or she got tough, but not too tough and not too hastily so as to allow the pot to simmer a while, and when things happened that don’t play well on the news, he or she gets to blame the police. This scenario played out so much near the end of 2011 that I fear it will do lasting damage to policing in America. As harsh as it sounds, the license of force is a necessary tool for peace. Images of officers doing what is required of them without a coherent narrative make it hard on everybody. Every confrontation is a “raid”, every arrest where force is required is a “beating”, and every tool carried into the fray is “overreaction”. Politicians use police officers like tissue paper – they have an ugly substance to remove and the thing used to remove it gets tainted and thrown away.
I’ve seen disposable officers tossed aside for convenience far too often. I’ve seen officers delay in using appropriate force for fear of repercussions, and officers use inadequate force for the same reasons. Maybe it is time for a reality contract with police administrators and politicians. “If you want me to enforce the law, I might have to hurt somebody. If I hurt somebody in a lawful way, you will accept joint responsibility and support me so that I can keep doing my job and not be afraid that you will punish me. If you don’t want me to ever use force, tell me now and I will walk away. If you want me to avoid using force, give me the training and tools to best accomplish that, and let your public know that it is their responsibility to comply with my lawful commands.”
Do we trust our elected leaders, prosecutors, and desk-bound police administrators to accept that responsibility? I don’t. Maybe it’s time we put it in writing.
Why the police? One word: force. We have the license to hurt. Gosh that sounds mean. And on video it looks even meaner. Officers in heavy gear, wielding sticks, carrying industrial strength pepper spray, descending in formation to make people do what they do not want to do makes for riveting video and front page photos. The pictures ignite a visceral response in a society that has become so peaceful and civil that the thought of cops using force is more than the average eye can bear.
The thought process goes like this: person violates law, politician looks the other way, violator decides to continue to violate law, politician decides law should be enforced and warns violator, violator decides to continue to break law, politician orders police to enforce law, police confront violator, violator still breaks law, police exercise force to gain compliance, violator screams bloody murder, politician investigates cops for using force.
The politician wins. He or she got tough, but not too tough and not too hastily so as to allow the pot to simmer a while, and when things happened that don’t play well on the news, he or she gets to blame the police. This scenario played out so much near the end of 2011 that I fear it will do lasting damage to policing in America. As harsh as it sounds, the license of force is a necessary tool for peace. Images of officers doing what is required of them without a coherent narrative make it hard on everybody. Every confrontation is a “raid”, every arrest where force is required is a “beating”, and every tool carried into the fray is “overreaction”. Politicians use police officers like tissue paper – they have an ugly substance to remove and the thing used to remove it gets tainted and thrown away.
I’ve seen disposable officers tossed aside for convenience far too often. I’ve seen officers delay in using appropriate force for fear of repercussions, and officers use inadequate force for the same reasons. Maybe it is time for a reality contract with police administrators and politicians. “If you want me to enforce the law, I might have to hurt somebody. If I hurt somebody in a lawful way, you will accept joint responsibility and support me so that I can keep doing my job and not be afraid that you will punish me. If you don’t want me to ever use force, tell me now and I will walk away. If you want me to avoid using force, give me the training and tools to best accomplish that, and let your public know that it is their responsibility to comply with my lawful commands.”
Do we trust our elected leaders, prosecutors, and desk-bound police administrators to accept that responsibility? I don’t. Maybe it’s time we put it in writing.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Shave and an Ego Trim
My hairdresser likes me. Attach the number one clipper and run it around on my bowling ball head so that I look like a Marine at least from the ears up. Easy money. I trim my own fingernails, skip the pedicure, scrape my face of sad whiskers that have never been able to shape themselves into a decent mustache, and basically pay enough attention to my appearance that the rough edges are gone and I look presentable for the sake of the uniform.
It’s interesting to me that we do all kinds of stuff to our cars, our guns, our physique, and even our lawns to keep things running and remain socially acceptable. For most of us there does seem to be one thing that never needs maintenance and stays at a state of perfection forever – our personality. I confess I’m pretty happy with mine. I find that when people don’t like me it’s their problem. They either don’t understand me, can’t handle the truth, or lack the wit and wisdom that I have honed to a fine point over the years. The obvious problem with that attitude is that when I am not doing maintenance and improvement on my personality I am opening myself up for others to do it for me.
This week I was teaching a class, sort of a citizen’s police academy for credit, and we talked about qualifications for officers. The subject of tattoos came up and, being old-school, I made a few spontaneous jokes about the subject, since I have a delightful sense of humor. I took another crack at tats later in the class and a fine young student who recently served in the Marines and sported a few lines of ink on his well-developed biceps took exception. He was very polite but asked me simply why I was down on people with tattoos. Ouch.
The truth is back in my day the only people with tattoos were formerly drunken sailors, people who had been in prison, or ignorant white trash – in other words my mother’s side of the family. I know that tattoos are now popular, normal, conformist, and done with enthusiasm. My predictions of a generation of regretful senior citizens with droopy cartoons where their cool tats used to be notwithstanding, I had kept my old ideas and let them turn into disrespect for persons with a benign difference of opinion from mine.
I thanked the student for pointing that out, apologized for any offense, promised to watch that attitude, and asked him to partner with me in holding me accountable to that promise as the semester progressed. As if Fate had not finished with my humility lesson, I left the class to find a parking ticket on my motorcycle, one written by one of my officers. Along the way I had somehow justified the special privilege of driving and parking on the sidewalk, a privilege that did not belong to me despite my exalted administrative position and that I lay my life on the line every day for you people.
When the student is ready, the lesson comes. I resolve, even though it’s not New Year’s Day, that when I look in the mirror to trim my fuzz that I’ll think about what rough edges my attitude might have developed as well. I’ll have some skin bracer ready though, because those adjustments often come with a little sting to them.
It’s interesting to me that we do all kinds of stuff to our cars, our guns, our physique, and even our lawns to keep things running and remain socially acceptable. For most of us there does seem to be one thing that never needs maintenance and stays at a state of perfection forever – our personality. I confess I’m pretty happy with mine. I find that when people don’t like me it’s their problem. They either don’t understand me, can’t handle the truth, or lack the wit and wisdom that I have honed to a fine point over the years. The obvious problem with that attitude is that when I am not doing maintenance and improvement on my personality I am opening myself up for others to do it for me.
This week I was teaching a class, sort of a citizen’s police academy for credit, and we talked about qualifications for officers. The subject of tattoos came up and, being old-school, I made a few spontaneous jokes about the subject, since I have a delightful sense of humor. I took another crack at tats later in the class and a fine young student who recently served in the Marines and sported a few lines of ink on his well-developed biceps took exception. He was very polite but asked me simply why I was down on people with tattoos. Ouch.
The truth is back in my day the only people with tattoos were formerly drunken sailors, people who had been in prison, or ignorant white trash – in other words my mother’s side of the family. I know that tattoos are now popular, normal, conformist, and done with enthusiasm. My predictions of a generation of regretful senior citizens with droopy cartoons where their cool tats used to be notwithstanding, I had kept my old ideas and let them turn into disrespect for persons with a benign difference of opinion from mine.
I thanked the student for pointing that out, apologized for any offense, promised to watch that attitude, and asked him to partner with me in holding me accountable to that promise as the semester progressed. As if Fate had not finished with my humility lesson, I left the class to find a parking ticket on my motorcycle, one written by one of my officers. Along the way I had somehow justified the special privilege of driving and parking on the sidewalk, a privilege that did not belong to me despite my exalted administrative position and that I lay my life on the line every day for you people.
When the student is ready, the lesson comes. I resolve, even though it’s not New Year’s Day, that when I look in the mirror to trim my fuzz that I’ll think about what rough edges my attitude might have developed as well. I’ll have some skin bracer ready though, because those adjustments often come with a little sting to them.
Saturday, June 11, 2011
A Rant About Cops Who Think I Don't Have "Street Cred"
I've spent a lifetime masking my emotions. Cops are good at that. Fear, loathing, rage, disgust all percolate behind our professional mask. But, I confess, I have an ego. When I get an article published online I check back to see the feedback and comments. . So when I get a comment from some critic that says I don't have "street cred" to talk about anything I write about, I grit my teeth, bite my tongue, take a deep breath, write them off as misinformed, and move on.
But I kept ruminating (oh crap, a four syllable word - there goes more street cred) and now I wonder just what is the perfect cop these curbside critics want to hear from on PoliceOne? I’m guessing first they have to be big city cops. Yeah, big city. Big city and bad neighborhoods. I’ll give you that, bro. If you’re on the front lines in a gang infested, shots fired, nobody got a daddy world you have my ear. But we all can’t work in East St. Louis, the east end of Baltimore, or the east side of LA.
I guess since I haven’t had bodies dropping in fetid urban projects that the blood and guts I waded in just don’t give me the proper street cred. Some super cops might be shocked to know that even us small town Barney Fifes have seen the wrong end of a gun, oozing brain matter, and slice-n-diced appendages too. But I lose street cred points having never worked for a department of over thirty cops. I guess growing up in the country, remembering when we got running water inside and finally a gas furnace so I could stop chopping wood all the time I just wanted to stay small town (yeah, I was white trash not middle class). Shameful.
My small town brethren know that we don’t have the luxury of manning an outer perimeter while the CSI team does our work for us. No air support. Enough officers on a zero budget SWAT team to go one operational cycle if we’re lucky. And if you’re it and the fight call goes out you don’t wait for non-existent backup. You just go. Lost street cred for not waiting for a cover car I suppose. Most real veterans are reluctant to spill their guts about every battered face that haunts them, every death smell, every withheld tear, every cheek-clenching pursuit, every high-noon moment, every tough decision that got second-guessed. But since the critics think I wouldn’t have had any of those experiences I’ll spare the reader the details.
Another liability some of us have is that we haven’t worked midnights all of our career. Of my thirty plus years I took reserve positions for half that time to teach criminal justice in college. Damn. I said college. Not sure how to measure that huge loss of street cred - one point for every year would be twelve points unless you count how long it actually took to get my college education while working full time. And - with all due respect to the distance learners - mine was butt in the classroom education getting off shift at 7am for an 8am class. I don’t suppose I get to cash in any cred for the former college and police academy students who have said thanks for saving their neck or their soul or their sanity either.
At the risk of my credibility as a street cop I made a startling discovery about education: booksmarts didn’t whittle my common sense down one little bit. Turns out writing all those papers and doing research actually makes a person better than he was before! Not better than you or the next guy, just a better me. It also didn’t make me lose respect for some of the amazing cops I learned from who may not have even finished high school. Turns out you don’t have to be just one kind of smart. College degrees don’t cancel out what the streets and veteran cops will teach you.
But now this research thing - goodness! I confess when I was doing research on officer victimization and giving presentations about officer assaults across the country, I could have been doing some good police work back in the ‘hood somewhere. But I can’t be everywhere. There are some battles that really do take place on spreadsheets and in surveys and in wrestling with statistics. Those battles save lives too. Do we take the chemist who developed Kevlar and put him on patrol? Do put the professors back on the block? If we want to continue to do police work like they did in the 1900s then sure - don’t listen to anybody without that precious in-your-face street cred.
The worst blow to my credibility is that I hold the title of Chief. You can smell the cred leaving the body with every promotion. I wish I could say I slept my way to the top but the reality is I worked my rear off to earn it. The irony is that I still have a small department. When I was reading the critique of my last article by one of the detractors I was trying to chill out after a 20 hour day investigating a sexual assault and I already had a domestic violence report overdue. Of course, to my cred detriment, those crimes happened on a college campus. When a nine year old boy is forced to fellate his father, one of my officers shoots an intruder, a kid goes berserk on acid, it’s just not the same when these crimes happen within the sweet, ivy covered walls of my college campus. Housing cops, transit cops, campus cops - all step-children of the guys with real street cred.
Bottom line is for those Jurassic Cops who think that somebody that’s over fifty, wears some brass, keeps a diploma on their wall, and works in Mayberry can’t give you something to learn that might save your sorry ass the least you could do is find a less pathetic phrase than “street cred” to use to cover your own poverty.
I’ll confess one more thing - whatever smarts I have I got from listening and learning from others. I didn’t invent any of it. I’ve learned from Feds, state cops, county cops, wildlife cops, traffic cops, Army cops, big city cops and small town cops. I’ve even learned some things from cops who I thought were fundamentally stupid. I’ve never learned by writing somebody off or labeling them as inferior to me. I don’t know who the perfectly credible cop is. I certainly wouldn’t claim it to be me. I have way too much still to learn.
But I kept ruminating (oh crap, a four syllable word - there goes more street cred) and now I wonder just what is the perfect cop these curbside critics want to hear from on PoliceOne? I’m guessing first they have to be big city cops. Yeah, big city. Big city and bad neighborhoods. I’ll give you that, bro. If you’re on the front lines in a gang infested, shots fired, nobody got a daddy world you have my ear. But we all can’t work in East St. Louis, the east end of Baltimore, or the east side of LA.
I guess since I haven’t had bodies dropping in fetid urban projects that the blood and guts I waded in just don’t give me the proper street cred. Some super cops might be shocked to know that even us small town Barney Fifes have seen the wrong end of a gun, oozing brain matter, and slice-n-diced appendages too. But I lose street cred points having never worked for a department of over thirty cops. I guess growing up in the country, remembering when we got running water inside and finally a gas furnace so I could stop chopping wood all the time I just wanted to stay small town (yeah, I was white trash not middle class). Shameful.
My small town brethren know that we don’t have the luxury of manning an outer perimeter while the CSI team does our work for us. No air support. Enough officers on a zero budget SWAT team to go one operational cycle if we’re lucky. And if you’re it and the fight call goes out you don’t wait for non-existent backup. You just go. Lost street cred for not waiting for a cover car I suppose. Most real veterans are reluctant to spill their guts about every battered face that haunts them, every death smell, every withheld tear, every cheek-clenching pursuit, every high-noon moment, every tough decision that got second-guessed. But since the critics think I wouldn’t have had any of those experiences I’ll spare the reader the details.
Another liability some of us have is that we haven’t worked midnights all of our career. Of my thirty plus years I took reserve positions for half that time to teach criminal justice in college. Damn. I said college. Not sure how to measure that huge loss of street cred - one point for every year would be twelve points unless you count how long it actually took to get my college education while working full time. And - with all due respect to the distance learners - mine was butt in the classroom education getting off shift at 7am for an 8am class. I don’t suppose I get to cash in any cred for the former college and police academy students who have said thanks for saving their neck or their soul or their sanity either.
At the risk of my credibility as a street cop I made a startling discovery about education: booksmarts didn’t whittle my common sense down one little bit. Turns out writing all those papers and doing research actually makes a person better than he was before! Not better than you or the next guy, just a better me. It also didn’t make me lose respect for some of the amazing cops I learned from who may not have even finished high school. Turns out you don’t have to be just one kind of smart. College degrees don’t cancel out what the streets and veteran cops will teach you.
But now this research thing - goodness! I confess when I was doing research on officer victimization and giving presentations about officer assaults across the country, I could have been doing some good police work back in the ‘hood somewhere. But I can’t be everywhere. There are some battles that really do take place on spreadsheets and in surveys and in wrestling with statistics. Those battles save lives too. Do we take the chemist who developed Kevlar and put him on patrol? Do put the professors back on the block? If we want to continue to do police work like they did in the 1900s then sure - don’t listen to anybody without that precious in-your-face street cred.
The worst blow to my credibility is that I hold the title of Chief. You can smell the cred leaving the body with every promotion. I wish I could say I slept my way to the top but the reality is I worked my rear off to earn it. The irony is that I still have a small department. When I was reading the critique of my last article by one of the detractors I was trying to chill out after a 20 hour day investigating a sexual assault and I already had a domestic violence report overdue. Of course, to my cred detriment, those crimes happened on a college campus. When a nine year old boy is forced to fellate his father, one of my officers shoots an intruder, a kid goes berserk on acid, it’s just not the same when these crimes happen within the sweet, ivy covered walls of my college campus. Housing cops, transit cops, campus cops - all step-children of the guys with real street cred.
Bottom line is for those Jurassic Cops who think that somebody that’s over fifty, wears some brass, keeps a diploma on their wall, and works in Mayberry can’t give you something to learn that might save your sorry ass the least you could do is find a less pathetic phrase than “street cred” to use to cover your own poverty.
I’ll confess one more thing - whatever smarts I have I got from listening and learning from others. I didn’t invent any of it. I’ve learned from Feds, state cops, county cops, wildlife cops, traffic cops, Army cops, big city cops and small town cops. I’ve even learned some things from cops who I thought were fundamentally stupid. I’ve never learned by writing somebody off or labeling them as inferior to me. I don’t know who the perfectly credible cop is. I certainly wouldn’t claim it to be me. I have way too much still to learn.
Police officer deaths: What does the increase in attacks on cops mean?
June 02, 2011
Officers may be having more violent encounters because they are having more of all kinds of encounters
We expect more casualties when we engage the enemy more aggressively. Could it be that the increase in officer murders this year means that we are doing our job better than ever? Much of the speculation about officer deaths assumes that all other factors remain equal. But surely the number of fallen heroes is not the only factor changing in the equation. We tend to measure officer deaths against the statistics of previous years, or as a ratio of officers to population, or in comparison to other crime categories. These measures may fail to give us what we are looking for.
Potentially lethal assaults are mitigated by ballistics vests and better trauma care, so the raw data of dead police officers may yield less life-saving information than we might wish. Are police-suspect encounters fundamentally different than in the past, or are officers simply more engaged than ever before? Officers may be having more violent encounters because they are having more of all kinds of encounters. Here are some hypotheses:
The Technology of Response Time
Cell phones are ubiquitous — they have become cheap and accessible — which means there is a marked increase in the chances that a witness or victim will have the means to immediately call the police. More cell phones, more reporting of crimes in progress, more police contact with active suspects.
Police Efficiency
There may have been a time when a criminal would take a chance on lying his or her way out of a police contact. Due partly to fact and partly to fiction-fuelled perception, there may be a sense of inevitability of capture that makes bad guys more inclined to fight it out. The fact that we do our job as well as we do may put more people in the system, in a sense “creating” more criminals to deal with.
It’s the Economy, Stupid
Theories that good boys go bad to feed their family when no job is available are weak. What is true is that during times of low tax revenues, governments tend to try to house fewer criminals. That likely means more leniency, more parolees and probationers, and fewer bad actors behind bars. The result more people on the street who are at risk of prison with police contact — another reason to resist and assault the police.
Crime Analysis
Crime mapping, although not practiced everywhere, has brought renewed attention to wise deployment of police officers. If we are successful in that deployment the expected result is more officers near criminal activity. If we take the fight to the criminal, we have to expect the fight.
Victim Empowerment
More services and advocacy for victims, if successful, will result in empowering more people to report criminal behavior. Increases in protection orders and other brushes with the criminal justice system may not show up in traditional crime statistics while still impacting police contacts.
Cop Hate or Cop Love?
Higher trust of police officers will likely translate into more information shared by citizens. If we have become a more trusted profession we will get more tips, leads, and reports than before. More information will translate into more intervention and more contacts with suspects.
Lack of Training or Better Training?
Some trainers fear that a rise in officer deaths is due to poor training. A contrary theory is that the profession has more confident, better trained officers who are more assertive. This would result in more contacts and necessarily increases the probability of resistive encounters.
None of these possibilities excuse, rationalize, or make any officer death acceptable. The best hope for reducing mortality is mining data to construct our training and response to deal with the causes. The immediate reality is that when we engage the enemy there will be casualties, not all of which are preventable except by failing to engage at all. If there is any consolation in examining these sacrifices it may be that we are a more confident, trusted, and efficient profession than ever before.
Officers may be having more violent encounters because they are having more of all kinds of encounters
We expect more casualties when we engage the enemy more aggressively. Could it be that the increase in officer murders this year means that we are doing our job better than ever? Much of the speculation about officer deaths assumes that all other factors remain equal. But surely the number of fallen heroes is not the only factor changing in the equation. We tend to measure officer deaths against the statistics of previous years, or as a ratio of officers to population, or in comparison to other crime categories. These measures may fail to give us what we are looking for.
Potentially lethal assaults are mitigated by ballistics vests and better trauma care, so the raw data of dead police officers may yield less life-saving information than we might wish. Are police-suspect encounters fundamentally different than in the past, or are officers simply more engaged than ever before? Officers may be having more violent encounters because they are having more of all kinds of encounters. Here are some hypotheses:
The Technology of Response Time
Cell phones are ubiquitous — they have become cheap and accessible — which means there is a marked increase in the chances that a witness or victim will have the means to immediately call the police. More cell phones, more reporting of crimes in progress, more police contact with active suspects.
Police Efficiency
There may have been a time when a criminal would take a chance on lying his or her way out of a police contact. Due partly to fact and partly to fiction-fuelled perception, there may be a sense of inevitability of capture that makes bad guys more inclined to fight it out. The fact that we do our job as well as we do may put more people in the system, in a sense “creating” more criminals to deal with.
It’s the Economy, Stupid
Theories that good boys go bad to feed their family when no job is available are weak. What is true is that during times of low tax revenues, governments tend to try to house fewer criminals. That likely means more leniency, more parolees and probationers, and fewer bad actors behind bars. The result more people on the street who are at risk of prison with police contact — another reason to resist and assault the police.
Crime Analysis
Crime mapping, although not practiced everywhere, has brought renewed attention to wise deployment of police officers. If we are successful in that deployment the expected result is more officers near criminal activity. If we take the fight to the criminal, we have to expect the fight.
Victim Empowerment
More services and advocacy for victims, if successful, will result in empowering more people to report criminal behavior. Increases in protection orders and other brushes with the criminal justice system may not show up in traditional crime statistics while still impacting police contacts.
Cop Hate or Cop Love?
Higher trust of police officers will likely translate into more information shared by citizens. If we have become a more trusted profession we will get more tips, leads, and reports than before. More information will translate into more intervention and more contacts with suspects.
Lack of Training or Better Training?
Some trainers fear that a rise in officer deaths is due to poor training. A contrary theory is that the profession has more confident, better trained officers who are more assertive. This would result in more contacts and necessarily increases the probability of resistive encounters.
None of these possibilities excuse, rationalize, or make any officer death acceptable. The best hope for reducing mortality is mining data to construct our training and response to deal with the causes. The immediate reality is that when we engage the enemy there will be casualties, not all of which are preventable except by failing to engage at all. If there is any consolation in examining these sacrifices it may be that we are a more confident, trusted, and efficient profession than ever before.
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