Surviving a Police Career in Modern Times [24-2001]

SUMMARY

Law enforcement is under a microscope. Law enforcement immunity has been removed. In the U.S., the profession is the most litigated against and pays out the most settlements. These circumstances make understanding the core elements of a good law enforcement officer very important.

Officers sometimes make mistakes, citizens bait them into making mistakes, and citizens make mistakes. In every case, it is a good bet that a lawsuit will follow. Lawsuits against police are ruining careers and are costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars annually. In New York City alone, taxpayers paid out $175.9 million in civil judgments and claims for police-related lawsuits.

In today’s very politically charged environment, a professional law enforcement officer must keep “at the ready” key emotional and cognitive management concepts and techniques such as:

• Emotional Intelligence- Officers are taught to think rationally not emotionally. They are given tips to help keep their emotions from controlling their professional actions. Policing can cause mental and emotional challenges in the most even keeled of officers. Do not shy away from counseling and regular mental health. It can save your career, or your life.
• Bias and Implicit Bias- Word choices and responses to people of color or of other nationalities can trigger an issue. The way we think about people and events affects the way we feel toward people and events. The way we feel about people and events affects the way we behave toward them. Bias, then, is likely to affect behavior even when we didn’t wish for it to do so. We all have a variety of biases, positive and negative, caused by a lifetime of socialization. Can we ever truly control our emotions and their visible outcroppings? The answers will be rooted in our self-awareness and our willingness to take steps to control – “manage” – our emotions, long before the critical moment in which they will otherwise “leak” into our behaviors, without asking our brain’s permission. Otherwise, we will be less patient, worse listeners, less empathetic, quicker to anger and more volatile. None of this is good. But with self-awareness and effort beyond just our good pre-incident intentions, we can bring about better outcomes in contacts with each other, and with our service clientele – our community.
• Community Policing Working with the public will always be more effective than working against the public. Community Policing is not as much about community relations as it is about problem solving – solving the problems of public safety and security. It is in and of itself an effective model of both leadership and risk management. Community Policing requires relationship and engagement with the community, of course, which is an application of the long-valued notion of government of the people, by the people and for the people. Naturally, government works best when it is with the consent and involvement of the governed. Community policing is democracy – applied to policing. It is the people, a community, policing itself in partnership with its police service, co-producing public safety.
• Physical Fitness- No one can deny that law enforcement work requires some level of physical fitness. The physical demands of the job may be infrequent, but when an officer is in a situation that requires some physical readiness, the inability to perform can have disastrous consequences – for the public and its members, the individual officer, his/her work-partner, and the agency itself. Doing something is so much better than doing nothing in this vital area. With the benefit of expert advice and scientific guidance, it is easily possible to create and implement a successful physical fitness routine. Doing so will increase officer and agency effectiveness, improve odds of officer safety and survival, and reduce a wide array of costs and liability exposures. Most importantly, we can better assure that all officers can actually do their jobs, especially in those infrequent but highly critical moments.
• Constitutional Policing- What are your Constitutional duties? What are citizens’ Constitutional rights? Remember, some individuals may know the law better than you do, so be sensitive to such individuals. Constitutional Policing is a “most important” core competency for law enforcement officers. The federal Constitution underpins the proper function of government, and therefore policing, in our society. It establishes some of our almost sacred personal rights and freedoms. Violations of the federal constitution can cause evidence suppression in major cases, massive civil liability, criminal prosecution of law enforcement officers, career devastation and, of course, loss of public trust, legitimacy. But avoidance of these awful negatives is not the best reason for an officer to follow the Constitution. The best reason is a shining positive – keeping faith with the oath of office.

This course is comprehensive. It will give every officer an overview of their duties, responsibilities to the public, and tools to safeguard their emotional, spiritual, and physical health.