LET: Jan - On Your Watch

If you’re like me, turning on the television news has become a game of chicken: I watch it until I can’t stand it anymore, then turn it back off. The main reason I bail is because I can’t stand to listen to any more anti-police rhetoric, and as you well know, that rhetoric fills the airwaves.

Even TV stations that purport to like and support law enforcement officers run the same inflammatory videos over and over and — even worse — give untold hours of publicity to protestors. The result: more people show up, the protests grow more violent and police are, once again, tested.

Who can blame officers for feeling as though they have targets painted on their backs? No matter how much a LEO works to be fair and do his or her job with honor and distinction, there’s someone out there ready to paint every cop with the broad brush of public condemnation. Sadly, they’re doing a good job of it.

But there are things you can do to help boost agency morale. Here are five suggestions you may not have considered:

• Reduce paperwork. It may not seem like there’s a direct correlation to hours spent filling out forms, but streamlining your process not only allows officers to spend more time on their beats, it also decreases their frustration with the system. Even though most of what police do these days is by computer, it’s tedious. Try to eliminate duplication and unnecessary time spent filling in the blanks.
• Encourage more — not less – use of officer discretion. Police officers who are accustomed to thinking in terms of gray and not in black and white, should make better decisions because they’re used to thinking for themselves. If an officer is never allowed to vary from the rulebook, they’ll be unable to make good judgment calls when things go sideways. It’s like raising a teenager: at some point you have to trust you’ve done a good job and give your charges a wide enough berth to make their owns calls. Blind adherence to departmental policies and regulations benefits no one.
• Take a look at your shifts. Do officers come to work exhausted and drained? Do they often have to go straight from a midnight shift to court? Be the solution and find ways to modify shifts so that you’re not putting worn-out officers on the street. A tired cop makes mistakes. If your way is lacking, find a better way to deploy your troops.
• Examine your supervisory staff. Face it, not everyone who wears stripes or bars should be leading troops. Take a frank look at your leadership and their fitness for duty. When I was on the line, I had one supervisor who had no use for female officers. He made every shift pure hell. I loved my job unless it included this misogynist. Do your best to root out supervisors who should have retired years ago and limit their exposure (and damage) to troops.
• Reward good behavior. That said, I also worked for supervisors who were fair, honest, tough and capable. They taught me to bring high standards to the job and never shrink from doing the right thing, even if it was difficult. Make sure you not only keep those kinds of supervisors on board, ask for their input. No one knows the people under their command better than a first line supervisor.

There are plenty of other things you can do to bring morale up. We’ll talk about them in future columns. In the meantime, here’s hoping all of LET’s readers have a safe and uneventful beginning to the new year.