Ask a Cop: The Realities of Law Enforcement

July 28, 2016
No matter what the talking heads on television say, street officers know the truth. If you can handle it, ask them.

I wrote Use of Force Investigations: A Manual for Law Enforcement (2012; Responder Media) based on several cases I’d worked as an expert witness where officers had been charged with crimes in perfectly legal use of force incidents.

Listen to my percipient words then, “Now, like never before, law enforcement use of force is under the microscope.  Go to any news website and chances are you’ll see a link to the video of a police use of force.  Matter-of-fact, oftentimes multiple cell phone camera videos of the same incident will be posted on YouTube the night of an incident.  Talking heads, oftentimes former police chiefs or defrocked ex-police investigators, with little knowledge about use of force, will appear on cable news while a looped segment of a police use of force plays will offer their grandiose opinion of why a punch to a violent criminal suspect’s face is “excessive force.”

“Special interest groups with traveling “activists” will arrive in a town post use of force incident and make condemning statements about a police agency, its methods, corruption, racial bias and more.  With no accountability they ignore the truth and facts of a case in an effort to raise funds for their organization or themselves.”

These words were written prior to the Michael Brown shooting, the Black Lives Matter movement starting and the riots in Ferguson, Missouri and elsewhere.

Yeah I know, I’m not happy I was right or that the scope of these problems based on use of force incidents have grown to the extent they have…

No Psychic

No, I was not psychic when I wrote these words in ’12 but I was, and am, experienced with law enforcement and the politics of police use of force.  It has been clear based on politicians making specious and erroneous statements about use of force and race, activists groups getting traction in the White House, former and current LE personnel and trainers using police use of force as a springboard to sell their programs to agencies, media that had been developing anti-police agendas, popular culture which was vilifying law enforcement, that intense scrutiny was becoming the norm.  Indeed, this scrutiny and standards was impossibly high for officers to meet based on the realities of human beings in times of peril, and ignorant of the laws of use of force as dictated by the Supreme Court in Graham v. Connor and lesser court rulings.

One thing I was not foretelling was that current and former LEO’s would attack the very things that had been increasing officer’s safety since the violent times of the 1970’s.

Strawmen and Vacuous Attacks

What LE has been attacked with are strawman arguments and factually baseless notions.  Take for instance the “warrior vs. guardian” attack which has been proposed by former cops as the reason for police shootings and use of force.  Baseless, pure and simple with no research to support the hypothesis.  Attacks against modern street survival training are as baseless.

Facts are that three things have helped contribute to reduced officer deaths since the 1970’s:

  1. Modern body armor
  2. Advancements in medical trauma care
  3. Street survival or officer survival training

Street survival pioneered by Pierce Brooks and his seminal book “…officer down, code three” (1975; Motorola Teleprograms) was advanced by Street Survival – Tactics for Armed Encounters by Remsberg, Adams and McTernan (1980; Calibre Press).

The “Street Survival” seminars brought state-of-the-art police training to local police officers with their two and then three day programs.  Back then there was no internet, no way to get this type of training, which brought threat awareness and trends to officers, with movies, stories and early dashboard or handheld videos.  It was a wake-up call to law enforcement, and not a program which created unreasonable fear.  Facts are that officers were being killed in the line of duty because they did not understand the dangers and risks of law enforcement or that safer more tactically sound methods existed.  I am proud to call Chuck Remsberg a friend and mentor and say that this training saved my life and which I passed on to the officers I began training, saved their lives as well.

I recently watched a two-hour CNN special on police, use of force and race.  *That’s two hours of my life which I won’t get back, offered no positive solutions, and was amazingly anti-cop.  I was disturbed when host Don Lemon gave a LE trainer the microphone who then went on a tirade about the KKK and white supremacists being widespread through law enforcement.  Besides my blood pressure rising, my eyes rolling and my stomach churning, I thought how disappointing that CNN’s Lemon did not call the man on this flagrant nonsensical diatribe.  In case you didn’t know it, this BS goes back to a 2006 FBI Intelligence Assessment about White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement.  It is not about how they have infiltrated LE but about how they wanted to infiltrate.  There is absolutely no basis for this black helicopters, UN soldiers taking over the U.S. conspiracy nonsense!  I’ve been a cop for over 34 years.  I have known black and white racist officers.  They may have shot their mouths off in private but their work was within the law or I would not have tolerated it.

The warrior nomenclature was simply a reference to professional “guardians” in history who trained and prepared, who made a life commitment to skill at arms, as well as all manner of encounter and confrontation including – verbal communications, pursuit and emergency response driving, dealing with emotionally disturbed individuals and the mentally ill in crisis, non-deadly use of force as well as deadly.  This warrior mentality did not produce paranoid, fearful or aggressive officers.  Quite the contrary, training develops competence and then confidence which reduces the impact of the SNS response and enable better decision making!

So too, the improvement of police tactical operations and teams did not militarize Mayberry as its critiques improperly propose.  Rather, professional police tactical team and team leader training, as advocated and instructed by the National Tactical Officers Association as well as similar state tactical associations, improved training and increased standards.  This professionalization improved performance under stress and reduced use of force, specifically shootings, by focusing on control, communications and negotiations, and less-lethal, whenever possible.  Quite simply, improved tactical team training reduces violence for everyone involved!

Street Cops Know

Over the last couple of years, I have conducted informal polling at courses I’ve taught. 

Questions asked:

  • Have you ever had an encounter where you could have used lawful deadly force and chose not to?
  • Is your agency training more since the economic downturn of 2008?
  • Do you worry about being thrown under the bus in a lawful use of force captured on video?
  • Have you backed off in officer initiated stops and enforcement based on the current political/social tenor in this country?

The overwhelming number of officers from around the country have indicated that they are training less than ever, 90% or more could have shot a suspect and chose not to, they worry that their careers and freedom is at risk from a videotaped use of force improperly interpreted based on politics, and they have backed off from proactive enforcement.

These notions are common sense to us in law enforcement.  All anyone – politician or media type – has to do is ask a cop.  But what no one will ask us is: do we feel safer and is crime worse?  Because, they don’t want to know the truth…

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