Officer.com Police Blogs & Podcasts

Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

The news last week was not good. Houston police officer Rodney Johnson was shot and killed by an arrestee who was handcuffed and placed inside the prisoner cage of his patrol car. Although I don’t know any more about this incident than anyone else capable of reading a newspaper, I suspect that the investigation will reveal that the prisoner was carrying a handgun that was missed by the officer during the search incident to arrest.

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Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

As I mentioned in my previous blog entry from the IAWP conference, Canada is a startling place for Americans, or at least, for me. You forget that you’re not in the states, and then something comes along to slap you in the teeth and remind you.

Yesterday, it was a presentation at the conference on detection of armed persons. Most of the presentation contained information that is valuable for cops from anywhere. The presenter, John Peatfield, discussed telltale behaviors that can tip an officer, or anyone else, to detecting someone carrying a concealed firearm. The slap-in-the-teeth part was the Canadian perspective on handguns generally.

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Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

Given that I don’t fit the demographic, I’ve gotten a lot of odd looks the past couple of days en route to and attending the 44th annual conference of the International Association of Women Police. This is a first time conference for me, but it might be the best-organized police convention I’ve ever seen, including the ones I helped to organize. Sessions begin and end on time, and there is a volunteer shuttle service to take participants just about anywhere they care to go. And, unlike every other cop gathering, people don’t fill meeting room chairs from the back to the front and from the outside rows in.

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Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

Today was one of those personal dates we have all have and observe, and I observed this one by calling the lady that was the matron of honor at my wedding, fifteen years ago.  Helen (not her real name, but her name is kind of distinctive, and I don’t want to embarass her) and my wife were police academy classmates and running buddies. Like my wife, Helen was also a rookie police officer at my agency, but she didn’t feel comfortable in the job, so she left. When she did, there was the predictable Monday morning quarterbacking of the decision to hire her.

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Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

Every generation seems to have a moment they will remember forever, what they were doing or where they were when they heard the news. For my parents, it was the bombing of Pearl Harbor. With my birth cohort, it was the assassination of JFK. For our children, it was the Challenger blowing up. And for anyone ten or more years old today, it will be the second they heard that terrorists had flown airliners into the World Trade Center.

That event united the country as much as the Pearl Harbor attack did, and for many of the same reasons. We are unaccustomed to being attacked on our own soil. We have always taken the fight to the aggressor. And to have the attack take place on the commerce capital of the country, if not the world, was unthinkable. I doubt if Osama and his merry men even considered how the infidel would become so unified against them by striking as they did.

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Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

This blog entry should rightfully be divided into separate topics, but it’s been a full week and I haven’t been able to post as often as I wanted. And I wanted to get this one up before the weekend started, as we are going to have a special “9/11/01: Five Years After” edition of Officer.com on Monday, and there will be a new entry for that day. So, here goes:

On Dressing Lady Cops

Okay, this isn’t going to be nearly as racy as it might sound. Sue Grant’s column for this month discussed the need for officers to assimilate with their colleagues. She used the difference between men’s and women’s uniforms as an illustration, and it works well. Every new officer has that excited-but-terrifying moment the first time he or she walks into the roll call room (Sue would call it “parade”) and sees all those veterans waiting for the festivities to begin. The rookie wants to blend in with the crowd, more so than anything they’ve ever wanted to do. But they can’t. The rookie wears the FNG (for the uninitiated, that’s “f***ing new guy”) label as much as if he had been branded. Sue’s column bemoans the ill-fitting uniforms that she wore in her rookie years.

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Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

When Warren Jeffs, one of the members of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List was captured this last week, most of the story was focused on his religious sect, an unauthorized spin-off of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Jeffs practiced polygamy, which is condemned by the mainstream LDS, and arranged or performed hundreds of marriages of young girls to much older men. Without getting into a debate on religious freedom, I think we’re better off with him out of circulation.

What got less notice was that Jeffs was located, identified, and captured not by the estimable Federal Bureau of Investigation, but rather by a Mark I model of the World’s Most Effective Crime Suppression Device: a uniformed patrol officer.

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