…many police leaders in 2017 have me wondering if they have a survival instinct to protect the thin blue line, or merely themselves.
If you follow my writing, you’ve probably noticed that there’s been an uptick in the amount of words I spend on speaking out against ever-softening police leadership around the country these days. It’s funny how many leaders within our profession respond to unfair criticisms pulled out of la-la land by apologizing as a gag-reflex, but then expect the public to respect police authority when it comes time for us to take away their personal freedoms under the color of law.
They say you should never back an animal into a corner lest you suffer the wrath of their survival instincts – but many police leaders in 2017 have me wondering if they have a survival instinct to protect the thin blue line, or merely themselves. Through leadership’s failure to exhibit any fight or pushback in the face of damming criticism and handcuffing expectations, the American police officer isn’t really being backed into a corner so much as he/she is being backed to the edge of a cliff. Here are some examples of how our chiefs are leading us to the bottom in 2017.
Social justice is where common sense goes to die and it’s just not possible to police without common sense.
Cities across California are paying violent gang members in their communities up to a thousand bucks per month to stay out of jail while partnering with a group who promises to not cooperate with police homicide investigations.
We’re seeing Seattle cops no longer allowed to designate those accused of crimes in their cities as “suspects”. They’re forced to report them as “community members” instead because armed robbery suspects get to have safe spaces too.
Portland PD’s top cops have proudly tossed the baby out with the bath water in nixing their gang member database because there aren’t enough white gang members.
Social justice is where common sense goes to die and it’s just not possible to police without common sense.
The plague is spreading to small-town America too. Have you heard about this dunce of a police chief in Pennsylvania who has actually made internet headlines for threatening to reduce the hours of any officer in his employ who writes traffic tickets to the town’s citizens? The fool doesn’t realize that this type of response to citizen complaints not only torches any respect the men and women of his force might have had for him, but it shows him to be quite the pushover in the eyes of the public as well.
Although the practice is nothing novel to 2017 alone, we’ve watched one police chief after another throw their own under the bus in the name of political expedience this year. A Cobb County, GA Lieutenant was recently forced out for calling out a white female attempting to ride the coat tails of Black Lives Matter talking points as a strategy to hinder a DUI traffic stop.
Chief Register would make a better ESPN anchor than police chief, I surmise. Pushing social justice warrior tropes in front of the backdrop of a man-child like Michael Bennett better suits police chiefs with who won’t resist unreasonable PC nonsense. I couldn’t work for the man.
Then there was Atlanta Police Chief Erika Shields, who wilted under media pressure and went against her own police academy’s training techniques to suspend an officer using those very techniques to affect an arrest. Punishing cops for doing their jobs results in this kind of policing.
Considering recent events, I no longer think it is necessarily fair to judge this officer’s actions as a violation of the Cowardice S.O.P. – not in Atlanta at least.
A few weeks after the suspension, one of Shields’ officers was caught on camera surrendering while trying to get a woman who he stops for speeding to show her driver’s license. Exasperated and demoralized, the officer tells her to “have a nice day”, before walking off without ever getting that license. As much as I hate to put the guy’s truly sorry attempt at pulling the woman over on blast, it’s an important video that needs to be seen. It’s indicative of everything wrong with policing in 2017.
Many police departments have some type of policy that bars officers from carrying themselves the way this officer did on his stop, and a violation of the policy is usually a fire-able offense. Over at APD, the policy on “Cowardice” is the one that some “old-school” police are pointing towards. Let’s take a look at it in the pages of the Atlanta Police Department Standard Operating Procedure Manual:
4.2.48 Cowardice
Employees shall not shrink from danger or fail to discharge their official duties.
Ten years ago, I’d be ok with the officer getting slammed with Cowardice and moved to a permanent desk job – but policing today doesn’t even exist in the same galaxy as it did back then. “Old-school heads” don’t last long in 2017 and are more likely to get canned for SOP’s on the other end of the spectrum that Cowardice sits upon.
For example, we had a retired school resource officer of the “old-school” mentality in Atlanta who was known for zip-tying high school kids’ pants up so they couldn’t sag them back in his day. That stuff flew back then, but your flirting with a civil rights investigation if you try it now. Good luck old-schoolers.
When it comes to defending the failed traffic stop cop in today’s climate, reasonable minds point to the departmental email Chief Shields released to the rank and file in which she explained her decision for a 20-day suspension that ran contrary to the training academy’s stance on the incident. My sources tell me Chief Shields advised her force that she did not administer the suspension for the tactics used, but rather because they were used to affect an arrest for a low-level drug possession charge.
In other words, the chief put into writing that the crime wasn’t severe enough to warrant strikes to affect an arrest – quite simply because of her own cowardice in the face of social justice warrior histrionics. Had the arrestee complied with the officer’s commands instead of resisting, things would not have turned physical. The original crime is an afterthought at that point. It’s that simple.
With that information coming to light, try and put yourself in the shoes of the officer on the traffic stop. Your chief just put a good cop on twenty days unpaid leave for doing his job to put a non-compliant person into custody. Why? She’d rather lose the confidence of her own people than the confidence of the Black Lives Matter Crowd protesting outside of Governor Deal’s mansion or the idiots blocking traffic with “hands up, don’t shoot” signs on I-85.
You pull a woman over for speeding and she won’t show you her driver’s license even though she is obligated to by law. What are you supposed to do to gain compliance after all your verbal judo techniques have gotten you nowhere with a person who is hellbent on forcing your hand? Many would eventually go hands on, but does the penalty fit the crime in a department run the way Chief Shields runs hers?
Considering recent events, I no longer think it is necessarily fair to judge this officer’s actions as a violation of the Cowardice S.O.P. – not in Atlanta at least. While his actions, or lack thereof, certainly represented a “shrinking” effect – I see the officer “shrinking” not in the face of a conflict with the motorist, but rather in the face of his own department’s backwards culture of policing from the top down.
If I had to guess what was going on in his mind, I’d lean towards believing he was thinking something along the lines of, “I’m not about to lose a paycheck over this idiot”, before telling her to have a nice day and walking off to go handle his 911 calls and whatever else the day might throw at him.
The moral of the story is this. Citizens are not going to respect their police force on domestic violence calls when their complaints over traffic tickets in the past have been met with the chief punishing officers for writing citations as a formal policy.
Criminals are not going to quit a life of crime when given a thousand dollars per month by the state. They’re simply going to be more cautious when committing crimes so as not to get caught. Police are not going to shine when performing a volatile job in a toxic environment if there is evidence that their safe haven, the department they work for, has more pitfalls than the mean streets.
As a cop – if your sycophantic police chief and/or mayor has more in common with ESPN’s Jemele Hill than ex- Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, you should probably be looking for a PD with better job security.
