Blog Archives
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Never Tap Out
By Frank Borelli - Monday July 7, 2008Frank Borelli Editor-in-Chief Officer.com I have to give credit where credit is due. I'd LIKE to be able to say that I came up with the idea for this blog all on my own, but that wouldn't be the truth. The idea for this blog - that our attitude and how we display / reinforce it matters a great deal - came from a gentleman I met at Police Week working in the " Never Tap Out " booth. Then and there I knew this blog would get written. NEVER TAP OUT . It's kinda like JUST DON'T QUIT. Fight back. Never say die. Never Surrender. NEVER TAP OUT . I like it. It was displayed on a t-shirt that I had to have for my daughter who is in the Army. It made me think about all the other apparel items we see that have cool sayings on them that we... -
He isn't missing...
By Carole Moore - Wednesday July 2, 2008Carole Moore Missing Persons Contributor Officer.com "...he knows where he is." Sound familiar? I know I heard that joke over and over when taking missing persons reports on adults. And most of the time, the missing person turned out to be a runaway or just someone who needed to put some time and distance between himself and his "real" life. But not always. It's the "not always" cases we're going to talk about here. The child who disappears while walking home from school. The young mother who drops off the face of the earth. The college student or grandfather or construction worker who vanish, leaving behind a confused and deeply concerned family and a primary jurisdiction that hasn't got the manpower to chase these cases unless... -
Science Fiction vs. Science Fact
By Frank Borelli - Wednesday July 2, 2008Frank Borelli Editor-in-Chief Officer.com This is a different type of blog for me. This is a "for fun" blog. Trekkies will like it; other readers may just endure it. I'm going to visit science-fiction, then science-fact, back to science fiction and then, just as a special twist, I'm going to weave in some observations about the 2nd Amendment in the 24th century. Come with me now as we travel back to the mid-1960s... wee do... wee do... wee do... (see the Scooby Doo squiggling lines on your screen?) The year is 1966. A television show called Star Trek is new on the screen. NBC aired the first episode on September 8, 1966 and in doing so led America into a different way of thinking... or at least tried to. In the midst of the... -
Supreme Court & The 2nd Amendment
By Frank Borelli - Thursday June 26, 2008Frank Borelli Editor-in-Chief Officer.com Well, Pilgrims... they've issued their "verdict". The Supreme Court has ruled, in a 5-4 decision, that the 2nd Amendment does not permit "the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home." While that one line seems like the Supreme Court wanted to strike down the DC law in question without stepping so far as to say the 2nd Amendment guaranteed an individual right, the 157 page opinion is quite explicit. The Supreme Court held that, "The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home." (emphasis mine) Further... -
Red Light & Speeding Cameras
By Frank Borelli - Friday June 20, 2008Frank Borelli Editor-in-Chief Officer.com I remember, in the late '90s, having a heated discussion with my father about Red Light Cameras. Speeding cameras hadn't come along yet. Why did such a conversation matter? I was a cop. My dad was a District Court Judge. As a cop you'd think I'd have been all in favor of Red Light cameras because they would help enforce the law. My loss in understanding was how someone could be fined without there ever being ANY proof that they committed the crime. Judge Dad tried to explain to me that the Red Light Camera enforcement was based on an old English law that allowed the Queen to seize vessels caught committing acts of piracy on the high seas. It didn't matter whether or not the vessel's... -
Our Nation's Capital
By Frank Borelli - Tuesday June 17, 2008Frank Borelli Editor-in-Chief Officer.com So, as I sat doing my morning work it occurred to me that things are a bit... ah... off in our nation's capital city: Washington DC. It would seem to me that our capital should be the ONE place that EVERY law is not only just consistent with the Constitution, but is ground breaking; trend setting; progressive. In other words, it shouldn't just be another city but should be the MODEL city for all other U.S. cities to try to follow. However... Washington DC is rarely (if ever) in the news for some trend-setting action or program. Instead, it seems like the city is most often in the news for something controversial that the city government or police department is doing. Let's look back at the... -
Constitutional vs. Convenient
By Frank Borelli - Monday June 9, 2008Frank Borelli Editor-in-Chief Officer.com Recently, in our nation's capital, Washington D.C., the police department put an operation into effect empowering their officers to check the occupants of every vehicle coming into a given PUBLIC area to find out whether or not they had valid business there. On the one hand, as a police officer, I can see the obvious deterrent value of this action. On the other hand, as a free American citizen, I'm offended by the audacity of a police department that feels it can demand me to justify why I'm traveling on a public road. As I considered both sides of this argument I felt that this might be a topic of interest and decided to outline it before "fleshing it out". Here's what I came up with... -
Set the government’s sights on crime within our borders
By Ronnie Garrett - Wednesday June 4, 2008Ronnie Garrett Editorial Director Law Enforcement Technology magazine You know you’re growing “older†– let’s make that more mature – when you find yourself uttering the things you promised you’d never say. For instance, my husband continually rants about the “hooligans†next door, while I echo my grandfather’s complaints about government policing and having it in for “the man.†Now this blog is not intended to get into a political discussion – after all my parents visit this Web site too – and we are definitely not on the same political page. But here’s my problem: The Bush Administration has not been kind to law enforcement and it’s... -
Rumor Control Isn't
By Frank Borelli - Wednesday June 4, 2008Frank Borelli Editor-in-Chief Officer.com "Rumor control isn't" is one of the first things I was told when I became a police officer. What I couldn't understand was, WHY NOT? In a business where we arrest people - we take their freedom from them - based on a collection of facts that compiled comprise the commission of a crime. How come we can't have that same fact-gathering and decision-making outlook toward the parts of our lives that aren't law enforcement? No, rumor control isn't controlled in any way. The old line about "If you don't have something nice to say then don't say anything at all" seems to be lost at times... most of the time in fact. Sure, there are officers out there that I don't care for much. They don't... -
Community Policing Today
By Frank Borelli - Sunday June 1, 2008Frank Borelli Editor-in-Chief Officer.com I remember, oh so well, in the early '90s when "Community Oriented Policing" became the new buzzwords in law enforcement how so many agencies all of a sudden started teaching classes for the subject. As a person who had been a municipal police officer for my entire police career to that point, I couldn't for the life of me figure out why agencies who dealt with HUGE jurisdictions felt they should be teaching classes on something COMMUNITY oriented. Let me explain. Freely admitting that I was never around to see beat cops walking their couple of blocks of a given jurisdiction I can only assume that this was the closest a cop ever came to true Community Oriented Policing. These cops intimately...
