Officer.com Police Blogs & Podcasts

Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

I had intended to make this a daily event, but our parent division, the Cygnus Public Safety Group, had their Innovations awards ceremonies last night, and I got elected as the photographer, as someone who knew what they were doing was not available. Then, this morning, I destroyed the display on my faithful laptop computer, so I am limited to doing my computing on borrowed machines, this one in the lobby of the Sheraton. So, if this ends abruptly, it will probably be because the system booted me off.

After two days of roaming the floor of the world’s biggest police equipment trade show, I can’t say that I’ve seen anything that had that “oh, wow” quality. The closest things to it were these two (from different manufacturers) massive tactical vehicles with all sorts of police lights and stuff on them (I took pictures, but those are on the laptop, too). If you did a traffic stop with them, you could elect to place the suspect ride either in front of or under your vehicle. The only thing more amusing than the facial expression of some bandanna-wearing gangbanger seeing one of these in his rear view mirror would be seeing the song and dance some chief or sheriff would have to do to justify buying one. Just wait, though - someone will get a Homeland Security grant for one.

Marshall Schmitt from LaserMax (afterthought: when I first made this post, I had Marshall associated with LaserShot, a fine but altogether different company) did tell me about a laser sight his company has for J-frame S&W revovers (and other guns) that will sell for $138. That could be pretty cool. I hope to make it over to see him tomorrow. (second afterthought: I did get to see Marshall on the last day, and their new J-Max laser for the Chief’s Special-size revolvers is, in fact, very cool, and will fit in most standard holsters).
I’ve attended a few more educational sesssions, which have been mostly underwhelming. With a few exceptions, IACP educational sessions seem to be like the IACP’s magazine - testimonials of what a truly wonderful person the author of the article is, and monuments to the great things he or she has done. I know from previous experience that most articles that appear in the magazine under the byline of the chief are not usually written by that chief, but rather by one or more of his minions. I haven’t seen enough IACP workshops to prove this of those efforts, but I’ll keep checking.

One observation that has impressed me is the number of chiefs that have stopped by to talk, and tell me that they read articles from Officer.com every day. Those same chiefs copy articles to distribute in their roll calls and discuss how this incident could have been handled better, or how that officer’s death could easily have been avoided. These are chiefs that clearly care about their troops and are leading, rather than managing.

Many of the security posts in the conference center are being manned by newly-minted Boston police officers who graduated from their academy only last Friday. They will get their district station assignments sometime this week. I’ve been meeting and congratulating as many of them as I can, and because rookie cops are so poorly paid, giving them Officer.com t-shirts. Giving a t-shirt to a cop is like feeding a starving stray dog - both will love you forever for doing it.

On the last day of my police academy, one of our tactical officers told us, “I envy you guys, because you’re going to have more fun than you ever thought possible.” I didn’t understand what he meant then, but today I’ve repeated that comment to a number of these baby cops. I know what it means now, and it’s still true. For all the grief it can bring, policing is still the best job in the world.