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Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

Just when you thought it was safe to come back to the blog because IACP had come and gone…

Actually, this surfaced in the Boston Herald on the last day of the 2006 IACP convention in Boston, which ended last week. The Herald is not regarded as an especially pro-police newspaper, tending to spin any news involving the cops into something negative. Then again, sometimes these things don’t require any spin at all.

There were two stories: the lesser one involved a Nigerian police official who alledgedly propositioned and groped one of the convention center security officers. IACP revoked his conference credentials and sent him packing, which I think most of us would regard as the right thing to do. If the Republic of Nigeria is upset with us for that, they’ll have to get over it. Maybe we can make amends by sharing with them the proceeds from this bank account that my uncle, a former government official, established before he was cast out of office by despots. Just send me all the information necessary to access your bank accounts, and I’ll let you in for a taste, too. But, I digress.

The other, and larger, concern of the Herald was the allocation of manpower and overtime funds for uniformed police personnel during the week that IACP was in town. Officers were pulled from regular patrol beats for traffic control, chauffeuring, VIP escorts, and plain old standing around while Boston PD is facing one of its worst manpower crises in history. BPD acknowledged that 160 officers were assigned to IACP in some capacity. In addition, virtually every other area law enforcement agency, especially the Massachusetts State Police, had officers performing work dedicated to the IACP meeting. Sometimes there were so many that they were bumping into one another. The Herald had one photo of the aftermath of a collision between a State Patrol cruiser and a Cambridge PD motorcycle. The motorcycle officer was escorting an IACP speaker.

One of the more damaging claims was the Herald’s report of officers being “summoned by tipsy out-of-town chiefs by cell phones for rides home from barrooms.” That probably didn’t play real well with Boston’s citizenry.

Is this anything unusual? Did Boston PD go overboard in providing hospitality for the visiting chiefs? Having attended the last ten or so IACP meetings, my casual and unscientific assessment is that they did not, at least not by prior years’ standards. The Situation Room at the White House is probably a bit more secure than the convention center of a typical IACP meeting. To and from the convention center, it is likely there will be a traffic cop at every major intersection. There will be cops at every exterior door, at most interior doors, and often standing fixed posts every 100 feet or so outside meeting rooms.

One might wonder why police chiefs, many of whom are rumored to have been working cops at one time, and whom are still empowered to carry firearms and make arrests, require all this security. The reason has a lot more to do with face and reputation than a security need. No chief wants there to be an “incident” at IACP while it’s in his or her city. For a police administrator, that would be a faux pas on the order of using a shrimp fork to eat one’s chateaubriand, or wearing white after Labor Day. It is not done.

The agency that hosts a meeting of law enforcement officers always has to commit some resources to the event. That’s what “hosting” involves. But I attend a fair number of these meetings, and I don’t expect to have traffic held back so that my transit to the meeting place from the hotel is expedited, or that a uniformed officer will be available to drive me wherever I want to go. I don’t happen to use alcohol, but the people I know who do appear to accept that they need to make provisions to get home after drinking, either through a designated driver or a service available in most cities, called a “taxi cab.”

I’ve hinted at this before, so let me come out and say it: IACP is much more effective as a political and networking association than it is as a force to advance the science of law enforcement. They occasionally do some good, meaningful things, but prominence in the IACP has a lot more to do with connections and image than it does with accomplishment and ability. One chief told me that he never attends IACP because it’s far too expensive, and there’s no return on investment for him. He goes to his state chief’s meetings, where they focus more on solving problems and sharing resources and information. And, at those meetings, the attendees are expected to provide for their own security and rides home.

These lavish expenditures of resources to host IACP meetings take place because the taxpayers don’t appreciate the impact that the events are going to have on their local police protection and costs until after the damage has been done. If the IACP had to reimburse local law enforcement for the costs of supplying manpower, vehicles, etc., you can bet that the meetings of next year and beyond would have an entirely different look to them.
But I think next year’s meeting in New Orleans will look a lot like this one did.

And, by the way: no matter how far you are from home or how cute she looks, trying to feel up the security officer at the convention hall is probably not going to end well.