Reprinted from Calibre Press
Last week, guest columnist and longtime law enforcement writer Barbara Schwartz shared insights from current and retired officers on what they felt was the biggest challenge to the police profession. The responses she shared in her article State of the Troops were varied and elicited additional comments from our readers. Here are a few:
Lt. Jeremiah Larson with the Inspections, Training, and Personnel Division at the El Cajon (CA) PD writes:
Thank you for the article, as I’m sure many people across the country need to hear this, contemplate it, and improve wherever we can.
However, I find it incredibly disappointing that you heard back from absolutely no officer who is happy with their job or employer. I understand these are changing and often difficult times. I understand the media has vilified police in various ways, prosecutors in certain parts of the country are filing charges against police officers based on public opinion rather than facts, city councils and police chiefs are not backing up their employees because they are looking out for themselves, and community members who hate the uniform and everything that comes along with it for no other reason than they are the police.
What I don’t understand is how a few men and women across this great nation, in this great profession, doing this noble work for the people, allow all of these outside influences to win! More befuddling to me is how you didn’t hear back from ANY of those great men and women who are not letting those outside influences win.
I am very fortunate to work for a community, a city government and a police chief who offer their full support of the police department. I also work around neighboring departments who do not have this luxury. Among the thousands of officers in San Diego County, the majority of them are incredibly grateful to have the job and to serve the communities they serve – regardless of how much support they receive from outside influences.
Morale is a daily, personal decision. The media, city government, department leaders, and the community can all make it more difficult, or easier, to make that decision – but morale is a daily, personal decision. Nobody decides for me if I am unhappy with my job or employer. I make that decision. The oath of office I took over 20 years ago doesn’t allow me to let outside influences decide if I am happy with my employer or not. The oath of office I took states I will “…well and faithfully discharge the duties upon which I am about to enter”. That still stands to this day, whether or not I have the support of the media, the public, or my department.
There are people who need the police. There are opportunities for the police to positively influence those people every day. I choose to be happy with my job and my employer. I choose to be very proud of my profession, to be happy with my career choice, and to be thankful for the opportunity to serve the community – because that is what the vulnerable members of society I swore to protect need.
Dr. Sue Weaver, Professor of Criminal Justice/Program Coordinator at Emmanuel University in GA writes:
I am a retired police officer after 23 years, then taught police academy for five years. I have a PhD in criminal justice and have been teaching and preparing college students for a career after graduation. Most of my graduates go into law enforcement.
I think that there are competing major issues facing law enforcement today. There have certainly been some major shifts in our society. With technology and the internet, the citizenry has a very skewed perception of police. The gap has widened between what rights people think they have versus what rights they actually have and what authority the police have versus what the public thinks the police can do.
Ten years of my twenty teaching at universities has been at larger state schools, and the last ten at a private Christian university. Ten years ago, I saw a noticeable uptick in the socialist indoctrination at the university. So, I left the fat paycheck out of conscience. “They” hated the police. The battle is over the minds of our young people and this has an impact on police.
I do not have an answer as to how we fix the problem, but I feel if we conduct more citizens academies and demonstrations with role play and invite the media to participate, we can slowly change the mindset. A few years back, Charlotte/Mecklenburg Police invited Fox News to a use of force role play and the enlightenment was profound.
And as far as recruitment? Contact Christian colleges and university professors of criminal justice because you will find many candidates that would be a good fit due to a conservative, pro-police mindset.
An officer from Royersford (PA) PD responds:
To assist in the dilemma of officers not feeling like the higher administrations have their backs, maybe look at how those higher administrators are being trained for that position. I was a street supervisor for many years. My basis for leadership I took directly from the Marine Corps, where leadership principles are driven into you down to the lowest common denominator. At a broad level, the principles do not really change, whether you’re a fire team leader or battalion commander, street supervisor or Chief.
It is one thing to study the books and tell the testing board what they want to hear. It’s quite another to balance all the dynamics of street work and the personalities of your officers in real time. Some departments send their new supervisors to leadership schools but it appears some of the programs are teaching supervisors to be risk averse and not teaching how to actually lead.
Chief John Comparetto (ret.) of the Passaic Co. (NJ) SO, also a former Lt. with the NYPD comments:
The article was spot on.
I did 35 years starting in 1973, 26 with NYPD retiring as a Lt and then 10 in NJ as a Chief.
We were allowed to be cops with the primary focus on enforcing laws and arresting bad guys.
First, they took away our tools such as the nightstick and the slapper. These were the greatest de-escalation instruments.
Then they changed the laws so that no one goes to jail or prison.
Then they ignored the Supreme Court ruling of Graham vs. Connor which set the standard for judging police and instead based it on media coverage and community activism.
Then they defunded the police which anyone with an IQ over 70 knows would not work out too well.
You have Mayors, City Councils and D.A.s who hate the police (NYC is a prime example).
Why in heavens name would anyone want to be a police officer? And if you are one, why would you want to do anything above and beyond?
From Retired LAPD Det. Thomas Campbell:
Some excellent points were raised by individuals regarding the feedback of the biggest challenge facing law enforcement today. Not too long ago, my former agency, LAPD, banned the display of Blue Line flags from all LAPD facilities and vehicles because it was divisive. The spineless chief caved in to one community agitator who voiced a complaint.
Needless to say, that decision did not go over well with the officers and detectives of LAPD.
I agree with the writers who posted about weak leadership and the media being the biggest challenges today. Many of the younger officers joining now have the same pride and enthusiasm that we had decades ago. Unfortunately, they are continually beaten down by supervisors for doing proactive, observation policing. They are told to handle the radio calls and don’t venture from that script.
An overbearing and draconian discipline system toward sworn officers is another major hurdle for officers to overcome, at least with LAPD. Would I recommend a career in law enforcement to young men and women today? Absolutely not! I would tell them to seek a career with the fire department or EMS.
Another officer writes:
I recently read the Calibre Press article, State of the Troops. I appreciated perspectives from various ranks and walks of careers all the way to post-career retirement. Gleaning from the wisdom of others who have gone before us has become a lost art. Too many times our type A personalities get in the way. Similar to the old adage of never wanting to stop and ask a gas station attendant for directions, we are left in a world where many have walked the same or similar paths before us.
I was yet again reminded of the need for myself and leaders in our organizations to stop and seek wisdom from others as I read about the demise of our profession starting during the Rodney King Riots. I was a young child living in Southern California during the riots and I remember my dad wanting to drive into Los Angeles just to watch the chaos unfold. I have been a sworn officer in law enforcement for 13 years and the Rodney King Riots of my generation were undoubtedly the riots that occurred during the George Floyd dilemma, just as one of the commenters of the article mentioned.
But what happened after the Rodney King Riots to swing law enforcement back into a better light? Because it undoubtedly did swing back. In 2010, when I was applying to various agencies around my state, I was often competing against, literally, thousands of officers for one or maybe two open positions with that department. Most of the cops that were around during the Rodney King Riots have since retired and many don’t want to be bothered in their well-earned retirement, but our generation today must find ways to glean from past generations as much as we can.
During my career, I have been described as a hard charger. After transferring to a busier area, I was even described by one captain as a “kid in a candy shop.” I have always loved finding bad guys and putting them in jail. I’ve worked major interstates on specialized units 100% proactively looking for contraband being smuggled across our country. Our team was very successful. But it all came crashing down when an overzealous district attorney made weak allegations that were stretching facts, ignoring other attorney’s actions and were ultimately found to be untrue. Unfortunately, this tale is too familiar in today’s society. The old law enforcement proverb of, “Better to be tried by 12 than carried by 6” is nothing but a lose-lose situation that has left many cops opting for the latter.
We have more citizen complaints in our profession than ever before. We have departments that are wanting to be more transparent than ever before, and there’s nothing wrong with that. However, what this has resulted in is a higher number of Internal Affairs investigations. A complaint comes in and the commander assigns it to IA to show the public it was thoroughly looked into. IA sees that there is nothing to the complaint and puts it on the back burner to deal with other investigations where officers have no business being in the profession. Meanwhile, the cop involved in the case placed on the backburner sits for months on end hoping people don’t cave to political pressure as they Monday Morning quarterback every move they made and every word they said during the incident. We are eating our own people from the inside out!
We have officers leaving in droves and while the bleeding seems to have slowed down here in the latter part of 2023, we are still facing a shortened workforce. The riots and the social political climate of being a cop coupled with the post-COVID apathy makes for a difficult recruitment pool. As a current background investigator, the applications that come across my desk are night and day between hirable and not. There is no middle ground. A candidate is either well qualified or cannot communicate with a complete sentence in an email, has a troubled, poor choice-making past, criminal history or illicit drug use.
Another repercussion we have seen from officers leaving in droves is promotability. We lost many officers that had between 5-15 years on because they were young enough to get out of the profession and still have another career. Many officers with 15+ years on the job have likely already decided they have no interest in promotion, have only a couple years left to ride out the wave or have retired early. This leaves a young, inexperienced workforce ready to put on some stripes and get more pay. They often lack the job maturity to lead their members towards accomplishing a goal they are still trying to truly understand having only a handful of years on the job. Now this is not always the case. There are tons of officers promoted early in their careers that make great leaders and mentors, but they must be sought and this role cannot be taken lightly as the future of our country’s law enforcement depends on this up-and-coming generation.
So how do we fix this problem and close the gap between our relationship with our community’s citizens and the media that feeds them? We cannot turn from our proactive ways to over saturate the “community policing” of fairs, parades, school assemblies, etc. These are all great things, but we cannot neglect the fact that our boots on the ground are not only deterring crime but stopping criminals in their tracks. For too many years we’ve withheld information from the public saying it was Law Enforcement Sensitive. We’ve gone the Secret Squirrel route and released information on a need-to-know basis. This has resulted in our communities having no idea what we actually do and making an uneducated opinion on what we SHOULD be doing. We need to tell our community that we have teams working the streets, actively looking for murder suspects. That we have teams on standby, ready to respond to the armed robbery. That we have teams making traffic stops looking for hundreds of pounds of narcotics that flood our country. We do not need to tell them the tactics of these teams, but our community deserves to know what we are doing to keep them safe and that we are making educated decisions to deploy resources to make the biggest impacts.
I challenge the upper echelon of our profession to call a respected, retired ambassador responsible for shifting our profession back from the Rodney King stigma and ask what they did to turn the tide.
I challenge our leaders to find new, innovative ways to be transparent with our communities that do not compromise the proactive work our boots on the ground are doing to combat the rash of violence crime that has become socially acceptable.
We do have good leaders in their proper roles. Integrity no longer is defined by doing the right thing when no one is looking. It is now defined as doing the right thing when EVERYONE is watching!
Thoughts? E-mail us at: editor@calibrepress.com
