Officer.com Police Blogs & Podcasts

Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

I’m writing this on my way back from Wheeling, Illinois, after spending the last week at the annual conference of the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association (ILEETA) conference. The original plan was to blog more or less daily from the conference, but that plan went sideways due to an incident you may have heard about at Virginia Tech. Despite the downer starting the week, it was still a great conference.

If you’re coming in late to the panoply of police training organizations, allow me to summarize. Roughly 30 years ago, there was an organization called the Justice Systems Training Association. That one had most of the serious police trainers in the country involved, and the bearers of JSTA credentials didn’t hesitate to let you know who they were. Unfortunately, the head honcho of JSTA tried to establish himself as the gatekeeper to a career in police training, and if you didn’t have his approval and paperwork, his plan was that your training program would be assigned a level of prestige similar to the whiteboard sessions used to recruit people into Amway. Folks started to see the JSTA guy as a modern Il Duce and JSTA fell from grace.

In 1987, a group of Monadnock instructors at their annual international training conference decided to give it another go with the American Society of Law Enforcement Trainers (ASLET). ASLET was intended as a more democratic organization, with a board of directors elected by the membership. Although it lasted 20 years and did a lot of good, it was plagued with infighting almost from the start. First, there was the belief among some members that the core of the organization was and would always be the “Monadnock Mafia,” and that anyone that wasn’t affiliated with Monadnock could never aspire to a leadership role. Then two consecutive executive directors were accused of irregularities with finances, and the members of the board of directors that supported each of the accuseds were deemed guilty by association. This ended in a flurry of lawsuits and internal hearing committees, and ASLET flamed out late last year, just short of 20 years old. Ye Olde Editor was embroiled in the final evolutions of this, so I’ll spare you the specifics. The fact pattern shows me to be a martyr or an unindicted co-conspirator, depending on who you talk to.

A few years back, Ed Nowicki established ILEETA. Ed was one of the founding members of ASLET, and its first executive director. There were a total of three executive directors, and Ed was the only one who wasn’t involved in a scandal. Ed stayed involved with ASLET until the first wars got nasty, then returned for a time as it looked like the ugliness was over, and finally left for good when the second wave hit. I don’t mean to infer that he is a quitter or a fair-weather friend. The unpleasantness within ASLET would have moved Mister Rogers to violence. Ed had a vision of what a police trainers’ organization should be, and it was a good vision. Learning from history, he created ILEETA with a core of people he knew and trusted not to subvert it for their own benefit. So far, the plan is working.

ILEETA is a benevolent dictatorship, but everyone likes the dictator. Ed Nowicki is one of those one in a million people that is exactly what he appears to be, and he appears to be a good guy. When he asks, “How you doin’?” he’s actually interested in the answer. He’s used the templates of JSTA and ASLET as a pattern of what not to do. There are no ILEETA-based certifications. You can earn a long list of instructor certifications at an ILEETA conference, but all of them are from attending organizations like TASER and Monadnock. ILEETA just provides the venue. There are no elections, as Ed has a hand-picked advisory board who advise, while he manages. This doesn’t mean that he runs ILEETA autocratically, as he constantly solicits suggestions and advice, and he involves any member that wants to be involved, plus the random draftee. Each ILEETA application is vetted by Ed or someone close to him. If you’re not the Real McCoy where your bona fides are concerned, you don’t get in.

The conference has a one hour opening ceremony that includes time allocated to the keynote speaker. There is no rubber chicken banquet/gala (the banquets at ASLET had been known to run longer than the Academy Awards, but with uglier people). Activities other than classes are fun and occasionally self-deprecating, such as the World Cop Donut Eating Championship and the Flatfoot Five Run/Walk. Any activity that raises money is either cost recovery or split between ILEETA and the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund.

ILEETA conference attendees come home with an impressive amount of schwag. Beyond what I brought with me, I am returning with two golf-type shirts, one pullover sweatshirt, one zip-up hoodie sweatshirt, a gym bag, and two briefcase-type bags, all with embroidered logos (I won one of the briefcases in a drawing). I have quite a collection of briefcase and gym-type bags from the conferences I’ve attended–if you need one, stop by the house.

I also got a canister of OC spray, an LED light that is much nicer than the typical giveaway, another smaller flashlight, two USB thumb drives (1 GB and 512 MB, respectively), several magazines, and a bunch of other stuff I’ve forgotten about. This year’s conference fee was $325, but you could argue that you get a good chunk of that back.

I joined ASLET in 1989, and attended every one of its annual conferences from 1990 until the last one in 2006. The conferences of the early years, when I was blissfully ignorant of the infighting, were spiritually replenishing. I was at a very low point in terms of my enthusiasm for law enforcement then, and I came away from those conferences recharged and rededicated. The ILEETA conferences bring that spirit back again. The people that go are working cops, not dilettante desk jockeys enjoying another excuse not to do anything. There are no strangers, just friends you haven’t met yet.

The 2008 ILEETA conference is planned for just about this time next year, and will be at the same venue, the Westin Hotel in Wheeling. It’s already on my calendar. I recommend it highly.