Officer.com Police Blogs & Podcasts

Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

No, these aren’t necessarily related topics, but I needed to get both of them out of the way.

You may have noticed that the “Online Events” section of the O.com home page now includes a link to the Officer.com Podcast. I thought that podcasts were a pretty well-known phenomenon, but it seems like every other policeperson I mention this to asks me, “What the hell’s a podcast?” So, indulge me for a moment while I explain.

The web, and blogs, evened the publishing playing field by making it possible for the common man to get his musings out to the world. It used to be that one could only do this if they owned a publishing company, or were in the good graces of someone that did. Podcasting has done this for radio. You still can’t tune your car radio to the podcast from your favorite person or organization, but you can obtain the same program by listening to it through the web, or downloading it to an iPod or other MP3 music player. Since you see a lot more people listening to personal music players than to broadcast radio these days, the market penetration potentially outshines radio.

A podcast is an audio program, configured in an MP3 format (a sound file that is relatively small, yet preserves most of the sound quality of the original), and made available over the internet. They can be music, speech, or some combination of the two. The software to create them is available for free, and just about anyone can create one with a typical computer. There are thousands (maybe millions) of these available through web sites or distributors like iTunes. They are almost always free. Programs range from three minutes to a couple of hours long.

We intend to produce a weekly Officer.com podcast, although it’s going to take some time to ramp up to that frequency. The content of our podcasts will be much like what you see here and in the other editorial features of Officer.com–whatever we think might be interesting or that you’ve asked us to produce. Typically, they’re going to be some commentary on stories of the day, and as often as possible, interviews with people involved with those stories. The interviews are going to be mostly over the telephone, then edited to remove all the errs, aahs, and dead space when no one could think of anything to say. But this isn’t 60 Minutes. We’re not going to do two hours of interview and then publish only the juiciest ten minutes (you did know they did that, didn’t you?).

If you have something that you would like to see included in a podcast, even if it’s you, let me know via an e-mail to editor@officer.com. You can always leave a comment below (as you can with any podcast, as the podcast pages use this same blog format), but the e-mail messages are a little easier to keep track of.

The current podcast is called “What Happened to ASLET?” This was and is a topic dear to my heart, as I was an active ASLET member for 17 years. In its heyday, ASLET was far and away the largest and most active police trainers’ association in the world. It shut its doors in December 2006, and most of the members never learned what brought this about. Pat Martin, the last chair of the ASLET executive board, and I talk about ASLET’s final days, and hopefully dispel some of the mysteries.

You can get this episode and future editions of the Officer.com Podcast by clicking on the link on the home page, or going directly to www.Officer.com/podcast (took us a while to think up that one). If you don’t have a music player you want to download to, you can always play the podcast directly from the web page in “streaming” mode. If you’re an iTunes user, you can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes. This last method will automatically fetch each new episode as it’s released, and download it to your player when you sync it.

Please give this a try, and by all means, your feedback. If you’re not getting what you want, there’s no point in us putting it out there.

Professionalism

Sorry, I just couldn’t come up with a better segue.

Several information streams caused me to do some thinking about this topic over the past week. One was Bill Harvey’s excellent article called Businesslike Approach to Today’s Management, where he discusses the reluctance of some managers and executives to get any more training than the minimum required. Another was a discussion thread in the Officer.com Forums, titled Are Police Officers Professionals? Finally, I considered the feedback I received to my last blog entry, called Drunken Cops. Anytime the comment count starts to approach 40, I know I’ve touched a nerve.

There are a number of defining characteristics that distinguish a “profession” from just a “job,” and which of those should be applied is a major bone of contention in the discussion forum thread. Separate from that, one factor I’ve noticed is that there seems to be a significant number of cops that resist the evolution of the job, profession, whatever. They don’t want to undergo any training or education beyond the basic requirement, and they’ll complain bitterly if the instructors for those sessions take the entire time allotted for the class. They don’t want to see the minimum educational standards raised. They don’t want the training academies to be extended to cover subjects in more detail. They protest at the mention of introducing minimum physical fitness requirements for in-service officers. In short, they want to keep things exactly as they are, or maybe even slack off a bit.

I think any occupation that can call itself a “profession” has got to have its members working to improve the art, whatever that might be. People naturally resist change, usually because it threatens to make them go outside their “comfort zone.” And change is not always good. But you have to try the change to see if it’s going to work or not. In the 1960s, the idea that women could do mainstream police work was just laughable. In my day, my fellow officers thought I was a few bubbles left of plumb because I was always looking for ways to apply computer technology to the job (well, truth be told, this wasn’t the only reason, but we won’t go there). Police officer appointments used to be through the “spoils” system, where whatever political party was in power got to give jobs to all their friends, and fire all the people from the previous administration. And it wasn’t all that long ago when every police department with any ambition at all ran an active “pad,” where local merchants and crooks made regular payments to the designated bagman if they wanted to continue their business as usual. Every one of these practices and ideas was actively defended and allowed to remain in place until something or someone forced a change.

In law enforcement, much of the resistance to change isn’t so much because of the comfort zone factor as it is that the stakeholders have a vested interest in keeping things the way they are. Increased in-service training requirements mean less time for other things, or God forbid, that the officer might have to use his own time and money to maintain his certification (news bulletin: this is quite common in other occupations). An increased education requirement might eventually lead to the officer having to go back to school. A physical fitness requirement could mean that he would have to exercise. And to enforce ethical standards more aggressively might mean that not only would he not be able to drive his buddy home after he was stopped for drunk driving, but that he wouldn’t be able to expect the same treatment himself.

I’ll always believe that police work is different from most other occupations for a number of reasons that I’ve listed before (and taken heat for so doing). But all organisms have to adapt to their environment, or die. Each officer has to decide which he chooses to do.