anger, greed, or stupidity. If the only way to ensure that is with the death of the bad guy…sorry, pal. You should have made a different choice.
Putting the officer first seems cold and it is—but do the math.
The “Immutable Order” is not a statement of value. It is not saying that the life of the officer is more valuable than the lives of the hostages. It is the way the resources, goals, and obstacles must be prioritized in order to get the job done. If an officer in a hot patrol area really valued his own life over even random strangers, he wouldn’t be in this business.
At the Columbine School shooting, the first responding officers started to go in and were called back by cooler-headed administrators. They were told to do what policy said: Set up a perimeter and wait for the SWAT team. More children died while they waited.
There was a huge outcry from citizens, the media, politicians, and even the officers themselves. Doctrine was changed, and, almost nationwide, the current standard for an active shooter scenario is to go in, immediately, with the first four officers on the scene. (This is changing too, and some agencies are experimenting with going in with the first officer or first pair on the scene.)
Everyone involved felt like they were doing the right thing: The first officers followed their instincts—very little hits you harder at a gut level than someone killing kids. The administrators who called them back were doing what they had trained, and what they had been taught was the best solution. The citizens and politicians and media were rightly outraged, and demanded change, and they got it.
But I have trained this scenario a lot—usually playing the bad guy. Every time, EVERY TIME, all of the responding officers die,* and I am free to go back to shooting kids. But it’s policy now, and that makes it officially the right thing to do.
This example isn’t about politics, or who is right, or who is wrong. It is about something you will see every day on the job—screwed-up situations where every last person involved is trying to do the right thing. I’ve trained the scenario. I know the officers die. But in my heart, I’m with the first group of officers who went in anyway.
Rule #2: The criminal goes to jail
This isn’t worded the same for all branches of law enforcement. For Corrections, the criminal stays in jail. For Parole and Probation, you try to prevent the criminal victimizing more people. For bailiffs, you keep the courtroom under control.
The essence is that you have a job to do. Do the job. Sometimes it’s hard and sometimes it’s boring and sometimes it’s terrifying and sometimes you don’t care. Tough. Do the job.
This is an easy job to burnout on. You see the worst of humanity at its worst. People lie to you. Even people who are good people get a little nervous when talking to cops and they try to make themselves sound better. It’s human nature to distrust and even dislike people who lie to you.
Dealing with the victims will hit you harder than dealing with the predators. Sometimes a predator is so cold as to seem alien. He or she can shake your assumptions about what it means to be human. You will meet predators who do not distinguish between a mate, a child, and a toy: They are all just possessions to be used. It will bother you, but it doesn’t hurt. Dealing with the victims, with the tears and blood, will hurt. Sometimes, it will seem easier to quit paying attention, to quit caring.
Rule #2 is simple. (Don’t forget that Rule #1 is the prerequisite—If you are injured or dead, you can’t do the job.) Do the job. Do it well. Do it like a professional. Not like a crusader. Definitely not like a self-righteous, angry prick. No matter how you feel, do a professional job. You get more convictions that way.
These concepts have to be hammered into new recruits hard and are an integral part of training. Most rookies come to the job with a hero complex. They want to save the world. They want to make a difference.
That’s great. One of the big goals of training is to preserve these dreams but implant the practical skills necessary to make the dreams work.
HARD TRUTH #5
You can’t achieve a dream by dreaming.
Training will never be quite right. It will never be enough—not enough to ensure that all the rookies will make good decisions or even that all the rookies will survive. All of us come to the job with assumptions built into the image of doing the right thing. We think that if we save a life, it will be a good person or an innocent child, and they will be grateful, and the world will be a better, safer place. We aren’t ready for saving a bum from drowning, and having him complain because we let him get wet. We aren’t prepared for the day we actually stop a rape in progress, and the rapist sues because his neck or elbow hurt afterwards.
Once in a great while, you will hear, “Thank you.”
This is the real secret: The people who do this job well for a long time don’t do it for the rewards or the recognition. They don’t do it (after the first year or two) for the rush. They don’t even do it to make the world a better place.
They do it because they can and most people can’t. Every shattered body they see, every terrifying brawl in the dark, and every interminable wait for blood tests to see if they have been exposed to a disease that might change or end their lives, are experiences that no one else needs to have.
Rookies need to learn to do the job, and do it like a professional, not like a TV hero. That way lies madness.
Litigation is a hallmark of modern society. From their earliest training, officers are taught to fear lawsuits. They are taught that anything they do can be twisted in court, and cost them their house, their savings, and their retirement.
In reality, that is rarely the case. As long as the officer stays within his or her agency policy and law, any liability stays with that agency. Reality doesn’t make the fear any less real. In the excellent book, Deadly Force Encounters, Alexis Arwohl and Loren Christensen point out that in actual shootings, with bullets flying at them and their lives in imminent peril, officers were almost universally plagued with the thought, “I’m gonna get sued.” That’s not a thought you can afford when your life is on the line.
There has been a sea change since I started in this profession. Years ago, there was a presumption that the officers were the good guys and the criminal was the bad guy. It seems to a lot of officers that this has changed.
One of the ways it has affected the job is in how reports were written. When I started this job, I was specifically told that when we used force, the reports were to be as minimal as possible. I was told, “What you don’t put in, they can’t use against you.” “They,” of course, were civil litigation attorneys, internal affairs…anyone who might have a reason to scrutinize what you did. We also were often told to write reports only on incidents that were likely to result in scrutiny—“No blood, no foul.”
It was wrong and must have made it much easier to cover abuses when they did happen…but thinking had already begun to change. Attorneys are smart and they fully understand that there are lies of omission as well as commission. Now, the reports are expected to be excruciatingly thorough, to cover everything you did and everything you saw. It was a big change, but it resulted in an important lesson.
The key to Rule #3, to being successful in litigation, or prevent litigation altogether is to
