Officer.com Police Blogs & Podcasts

Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

After almost two and a half years as the editor of Officer.com, I’m moving on. I have taken a job with another publisher and I’ll have to find someone else to read my rantings.

I just tried to count how many editorials I have written since I came here in August 2005, and it’s very close to 100. I actually got 103, but about half of them were published as regular web pages before we moved to the blog format, and we re-published some of the web pages here to keep it from looking quite so bare when we started.

As with a police career, this was not everything I expected it would be, and more. When I started, we had no editorial content, and we were eating the competition’s dust in terms of site visitors and page views, the two metrics on which commercial web sites live and die. Those numbers have almost doubled in that time, and we’ve left the other guys way behind. We went from zero to 38 regular contributors, and we have more original feature content each month than most industry print magazines.

The editorial topics reflected what was going on in the law enforcement world, as well as in mine. I wrote about the contrast between the images of firefighters and police, deadly bacteria, and the passing of my own wife. One column generated a death threat, not because of what I said about policing, but rather because of my ignorance of the stature of a lady wrestler. The critics that were especially vocal in their criticisms of my work were offered an opportunity to write their own opposing view and have it posted here. None took me up on it.

I’m proud of what we have done here, and I mean that “we” sincerely. I produce only a small fraction of the words, the rest coming from a talented group of subject matter experts I recruited. One of them, Frank Borelli, is my successor as editor-in-chief, and I wish him every success. The electrons that have to line up in a certain way to make the words and pictures visible are wrangled by an extensive technical staff who labor away in their cubes in Maryland and Wisconsin. The lights are kept on and my mortgage payments are met through the efforts of an enthusiastic sales team. There is a lot more to this than one guy tapping on a keyboard.

All that said, there are a few parting shots I’m going to take in regard to the police community. I’ve alluded to several of these before. This is the condensed version.

• If you’re an executive or a supervisor, are you doing anything to recognize the middle-of-the-road performers in your agency? I’m talking about the men and women who don’t often produce flashy arrests or fabulous stats, but make it to work every day, in the right uniform and on time, and do a job that is filled with negativity? Might some of those people perform better if you found a reason to praise them or reward them for their consistent effort? Cops then to think of their supervisors as people who are there to catch them doing something wrong. Have you tried to catch them doing something right?
• Does your procedure and policy manual rival the Greater LA phone book for bulk? Are those policies workable, and are they enforced for everyone? If you have some obscure rule few people know and even fewer follow, get rid of it. Make your mission clear to the troops, and emphasize that every decision and action should further the mission. In the absence of an applicable procedure, the one created on the fly that is most compatible with the mission is going to be respected. This will blow up on you now and then, but eventually you’ll get officers that make better decisions.
• Accepting a free cup of coffee or a half price Whopper is not the sure road to ruin, immediately followed by dealing heroin out of your patrol car. But it cheapens you and your profession. Gratuities are small incentives you provide to people in servant-type work: bellmen, waitresses, porters and cab drivers. Every one of these jobs is a perfectly honorable way to earn a living, but most of us aspire to something with a little more social status. You don’t tip professionals. Try to imagine the reaction from my dentist if I were to end an appointment with, “Smokin’ root canal there, doc. Here’s a twenty. Take yourself to lunch.” I also don’t like the idea of being in debt to the next person I pull over for speeding.
• In my travels, I’ve seen cops sitting in their patrol cars, windows rolled up, reading a newspaper and drinking coffee while the common folk go about their business. You know the cop is on the clock, but he’s decided to engage in this conspicuous form of leisure mainly because he can. Many people that see this sort of thing immediately think of what would happen to them if they tried that at work, or remember every $800 toilet seat and lavish junket that was paid for with their tax dollars, which are also paying the officer’s salary. These folks don’t need another reason to resent you.
• Even if your agency doesn’t pay you to work out or keep fit, are you only letting yourself down by allowing your gut to obscure the buckle on your Sam Browne? How about the cops that might have no other choice but you for backup? How about your family, who are likely to see your life expectancy reduced just because of your line of work, exclusive of your overall health? How about the next kid that sees you? At some point in our lives, there was a cop that we chose for a role model. The cop could have been real or a TV character, but the image was probably closer to Clint Eastwood than Dennis Franz. When you were a wannabee, as all of us are at some point, would you have promised to work out every day and stay in shape if they would give you that badge? What became of that guy?

If I couldn’t maintain some attachment to law enforcement, my life would be far less fulfilling. I treasure the experiences policing gave me, and the friends I have made because of it. I thank all of you who have let me ride along for a few more shifts, and I wish you only good things over the holidays and in the coming year.

Stay safe. Wear your vest. Next time we meet, I’ll buy coffee.