Looking Back: Time To Toughen Up!

I believe it would be safe to say that police work now is inherently more complex and more demanding than ever before. It requires a much greater attention to detail and is subjected to more scrutiny than ever. On the one hand this is a good thing in that it tends to keep policing somewhat ‘on-line’ and yet it has a concomitant chilling effect on the initiative that is so essential to effective policing as well.

I was fortunate to have experienced a time in policing when it was not as complex nor as unforgiving as it is now. I am not referring to corrupt police policies or actions by any stretch of the imagination. Those should never be tolerated in any context. I am speaking of the pro-active work that is essential to crime prevention and dare I say, ‘imaginative’ methodologies employed to capture and ensnare nefarious members of the underworld.

In any arrest the probable cause to arrest must be established. Should one employ ‘imaginative’ methods to develop probable cause it would raise eyebrows to be sure. Entrapment might be such a case wherein it could be established that absent the introduction of the police such a crime might never have transpired. In other words it was the police who developed the crime as opposed to the perpetrator developing and initiating the crime.

Having friends who are still gainfully employed in law enforcement, it is related to me that the olden days of roll calls that could be nothing short of eye-wateringly hilarious are a thing of the past. Apparently anyone and everyone are easily offended in our new ‘nerfed-out’ ‘millennial-era,’ and police v. police personnel complaints are initiated at the drop of the hat. This was not so in my time when you really had to have thick skin especially when you were a probationer in a Division.

There was never used to be a sense of entitlement either. You were lucky to be there in the first place so you just took it and asked for more and let it go at that. Imagine with just hours on the job going into a Watch Commander and asking to go home early simply due to the fact that you were stressed out on the first day on the streets. Better yet, imagine demanding that you be provided with a specific shift or days off simply because you wanted them, when you had just two weeks on the job. Cutting a personnel complaint against a partner for foul language might be hilarious if it were not true. (I suppose one could always sue the bad guys for foul language.)

In an era when bad guys are intentionally targeting police it might be a good thing to ‘tighten up the ship’ so to speak and return to a gentler era when tenure meant you could say what you wanted when you meant it and those with less tenure simply endured. Nothing would infuriate me more than some ‘slick-sleeved’, ‘wet-nursed’, ‘do-nothing’ probationer reciting the department manual in conjunction with all their attendant rights and privileges. Especially if they were right.