Book Review, the Sequel

Today’s title is Emotional Survival for Law Enforcement by Kevin M. Gilmartin, Ph.D. This book was recommended to me by a police officer buddy of mine, and he told me it was absolutely essential reading material for anybody working in the field or wanting to. After reading it, I have to agree.

Gilmartin was an officer himself for many years and has devoted himself to the special study of police psychology. The premise of the book is that departments spend vast amounts of resources teaching their employees “street survival” skills, but almost completely neglect the necessity of teaching officers how to emotionally thrive in a job that has a suicide rate three times higher than that of the general population. The book accurately describes how and why police officers become cynical, unmotivated, self-perceived victims, and goes on to give strategies for overcoming this tendency.

As I mentioned in my review of Conlon’s book, after reading Emotional Survival I went back through and saw to my amazement that Gilmartin had very accurately described Conlon’s first few years on the job. Conlon’s personal life is girlfriend to girlfriend and he finds himself rooming with and spending the majority of his personal time with other cops. He has epic struggles with oppressive, unjust, and incompetent superiors that take every ounce of joy and motivation out of him. He finds himself assigned to sifting through the wreckage of the World Trade Center day after day, with no end in sight. Conlon deals with these things in his own unique way, but Gilmartin traces the symptoms of failure to thrive emotionally and shows us that Conlon clearly could have benefited immensely from some training in emotional survival.

Emotional Survival is an easy read thanks to Gilmartin’s conversational style and contains information that I would consider vital to any person desiring to work or currently working in Law Enforcement. His analysis is legitimate, extremely practical, and uncannily accurate, and even as a recruit without any time on the job of my own I gleaned a great deal of valuable information that I hope to put to good use some day soon.

All Dressed Up

This week I got my academy uniforms in.  It was a nice confirmation that yes, this whole thing is actually happening.  Basic uniform really, white shirt (just like Cincinnati!) with blue pants, a patch over the left pocket and a nameplate over the other.  I’d be happier about it if I didn’t have to spend ungodly amounts of money on them, but I am happy nonetheless.

Think Before You Type

Today I found a blog post entitled “7 Reasons the Police will always be able to abuse power with impunity”. While it’s true that there are police officers and departments that abuse their power, if you look at the entire nation it’s far from the norm in American society. Try to read through the article without coughing up your lunch, then read my responses.

1. If it didn’t happen to you, it doesn’t matter

Complacency is a real problem in American society in many different ways. This rule applies to police doing good things as it does to police doing bad things, however. If all you do is read news, you will have an opinion of the police that is filtered by the media – which will be very negative and far from the actual truth, I can assure you.

2. If it happened to someone who is deemed trash, you don’t care

“Underclass” is and has always been a social problem in all human communities. This is why police departments have been making great strides these days with Community-Oriented Policing. Police leaders have recognized that the old system of simply stomping on the underclass to keep the overclass happy hasn’t worked, and steps are being taken to bring the underclass up rather than keep them down.

3. People feel safer is the person attacked is black or Hispanic (which they usually are), guilty or not

This point is related to #2, and both are true thanks to human nature. I am not here to argue that police abuse doesn’t happen. It most certainly does. This point subliminally implies that all police action taken against blacks and Hispanics is abusive, which is obviously false.

4. The police are glamorized, deified in popular culture, despite serving no practical purpose

This is the point at which the article deviates from accurate descriptions of human nature into ignorance of who the police are and what they actually do. Police are indeed glamorized in pop culture, however it is only a small fraction of police work that is glamorized. The gun-slinging, crime-fighting, foot/car pursuing, handcuff-slapping cop in today’s movies and TV shows is not representative of how the police serve the community.

“What do they do, really?” asks the author. The reality is that close to 90% of police activity has nothing to do with fighting crime, consisting rather of service to the citizenry. Police respond to every traffic crash, every missing person report, every vehicle stranded on a motorway, every parade and other large civic function, and on and on and on. The sheer ignorance of the author’s statement “I have never heard of the police actually protecting anybody” overwhelms me. If you really think that police only deal with criminals, then you have bought in to the media version of police work. You’re duped, and you should really take steps to research what the police really do before you make sweeping denouncements of them.

5. Schadenfreude

The author now takes a very pessimistic view of the human condition. Not even the most hardened, bitter, cynical street cop would say that humans have “no capacity for empathy and no common sense.” It’s clear that many, most in fact, do. Many people these days are outraged by police abuse of power, and that’s why the Taser is such a big deal in the news lately. That’s just one tiny little example.

6. You are dumb enough to believe that they are a threat only to the criminals

The point is made here that police officers are just humans too, with all the limitations and problems that come with it. That’s true. Most (in the United States, at least) live up to the oath they have sworn, though. The author then says that the aforementioned view of cops “comes from the fact that the majority of people’s only knowledge of how law-enforcement operates comes from TV, and TV is basically about propaganda.” Ironically, the author clearly hasn’t looked anywhere else for an opinion about law enforcement, either.

7. Most people feel safest as humble serfs needing the protection of stronger people

The police are necessary to keep criminal activity in check. The crux of what we call “law” is the fact that the magistrate has a divine authority to punish law-breakers. Without that authority, there is no law. Police officers are the first and foremost manifestation of the authority of the law. Without such officers, there would be no compliance with laws and consequently chaos and anarchy. All that being said, the police still need to be “policed”. In fairness to the author, some of the points accurately describe why corruption does find its way into police departments.

However, I would recommend to the author of this article two things. Try to find out what police officers really do, rather than just buying into the negative media hype about them. Doing a few ride-alongs would be my first suggestion, followed up by attending a “citizen police academy” which many good departments will host. I would also recommend getting out and enjoying life a bit, because you sound rather depressed.

Thieves in Your Head

Yesterday my mom called me and frantically told me that her purse was stolen right out of our house. She walked in and set her purse down in the living room, then walked around a corner into the dining room. She heard some noise and thought it was my sister, then came back a bit later to find that the purse was gone!

It would have been the most brazen act of daytime house-breaking I’ve heard of in a long time, except for the fact that she had actually set the purse down in a bedroom somewhere and forgotten about it.

Walking Into a Real Hornet’s Nest

So a big story this week comes out of Waukesha, Wisconsin, where a study has been done concluding that sledding is dangerous. Waukesha Children’s Hospital brought in a police officer to clock the speed of sledders with radar, and discovered that sledders indeed go at an appreciable rate of speed – up to 19mph in some cases. The next step is of course the “you should wear a helmet” vigilante-ism.

Also not surprising about this story are some of the reactions from the public against the police officer in the article, Officer Jake Trussoni, as seen in some of the comments on Don Surber’s blog. It’s the standard party line: he should be out catching criminals, not oppressing the innocent citizen-sledders. In my opinion these people have completely missed the point of the article and the message it sends. It seems rather ridiculous to me to jump down the officer’s throat, when he was no doubt assigned to be there by his superiors in the name of “Community-Oriented Policing”.

People shouldn’t be so quick to jump all over the police officer. Jump all over the Children’s Hospital, or jump all over whoever was too lazy to buy their own radar equipment. But give some credit to a police department that doesn’t mind assigning expensive and much-needed resources to a community project.

Fuzzy Logic

I have many different circles of friends, one of which I lovingly refer to as the “skids”. These are mostly kids that have either abandoned or been abandoned by their families in their late teens, and find themselves frittering away their college years on drugs, booze, sex, and metal. Skids aren’t hardened criminals, by and large; in general they stick to engaging in vice-related minor crime. My relations with the group have cooled noticeably since I announced my L.E. aspirations, and the conversations are always entertaining.

Skids doing their thing.

A typical one starts out with, “You’re going to be a cop?! Duuuuude, I hate cops!”. Being the understanding type, I calmly ask them what makes them feel the way they do. What normally happens at this juncture is I listen for the next 20 minutes while the individual rattles off a long litany of DUI stops, busted hotbox parties, MIPs, and bogus “police brutality” stories involving their ex-ex-ex-boyfriend that tried to run. At the end they put all the blame for these negative experiences squarely on the shoulders of the police officers doing their job.

The fuzzy logic, which I point out to them as often as I can, is that they are abdicating responsibility for their own actions by blaming police officers for problems they are creating for themselves. If they didn’t drink or drive, or possess and consume controlled substances, or drink underage, or try to run from the police, things like the above rarely happen. Oddly enough, even the most anti-intellectual skid will often agree with this assessment.

The problem here is that skids actually hate the law, not cops. The law-hating behavior began when they were children and weren’t taught to respect their parents’ rules, and manifested itself later on as not having any respect whatsoever for society’s rules. They definitely don’t know what to do with me, because in general I’m rather friendly and can make anybody feel comfortable. Cops aren’t like that in their world of petty misdemeanors.

“I guess that means you’re straight-edge, huh?” – Skid
“I’m so beyond straight-edge it’d make your head hurt.” – Me

Feliz Navidad

Best wishes to all at this time of year, when it seems fitting to rally round the family and celebrate for whatever reason one can come up with. To celebrate, I’m giving you all two great links to my favorite website, the Smoking Gun. One is to a story about another great interpretation of the meaning of Christmas and another, just a little something for the guys, is a mugshot collection of a bunch of cuties.

I’m doing my best to make the most of the festivities surrounding what we Presbyterians like to call “winter solstice” because next year it’s hopefully going to be much different. Good night now!

Well Done

Reading Law Enforcement news can be depressing. Aside from the fact that there is alot of tragedy and evil in the world, the media loves to report when bad things happen to officers and especially loves to report when officers do bad things. It’s hard to track down stories about the police doing good things, and this is not because they’re not doing good things.  It’s because the media seems to take those good things for granted and so rarely decides to report much of the heroism that is displayed by officers on the streets every day.

So I decided to dig a few stories up to balance the scales a bit.

- We’ll start off with a police K9 that saved the life of its partner. I never cease to be amazed at what K9s can do, and dogs in general for that matter. It’s no surprise that the animals are considered by their departments to be officers, not just dogs.

- Next up is a story about a Savannah, GA, officer that shot and killed a fleeing robbery suspect that had fired shots at bystanders and at the officer himself during a foot pursuit. Osteen and other officers then gave the suspect CPR; a great example of being protectors, not just crime fighters.

- And finally, we have here a heart-warming story from Williamsburg, VA where the police department is fixing up abandoned bikes and giving them away to neighborhood kids.

For more information about the bravery and courage that police officers display every day here in the US, visit the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund’s Officer of the Month website.

Book Review: Blue Blood

I picked up Edward Conlon’s Blue Blood in the first few days after becoming interested in law enforcement as a career. I was interested in picking up anything related to police work that looked good, and to do so I went straight for the local Barnes & Noble to see what they had lying around. In addition to seeing Dennis Smith’s book Report from Engine Co. 82 on the shelf in its third edition (which made me very happy), Blue Blood stood out from the rest and made me pull it from the shelf.

Blue Blood is the memoirs of Edward Conlon, a New York City street cop in the late 90s and early 21st Century. One of the reasons the book appealed to me off the bat was because that’s what I really want to be. Conlon goes on at length about his family history and about his experience with the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in NYC. He sticks devotedly to narrative, refraining from giving much analysis or insight of his own into police work as a whole. The story of Conlon’s early career captures the essence of the devoted rookie police officer tackling crime in one of the seediest districts in the United States – New York City’s South Bronx.

The book itself is excellently written and is overall a great read. I was expecting the work to be more focused on police work than it actually was. I was also looking for some more analysis, but Conlon lets you make your own judgments about what happens in the book. Conlon’s early career perfecly captures life as a young police officer, with the hyper-devotion to the job, the deterioration of the personal life off the job, the camaraderie with the squad, and the oppression of superiors. Since I was looking for material specifically dealing with law enforcement, I sometimes found myself skipping through the chapters about Conlon’s childhood and ancestors.   There are however plenty of war stories and detailed descriptions of the ups and downs of the job for the reader to enjoy.

Due to the fact that I read the book before I knew much if anything about what being a police officer is like or what it means, I found myself looking back at it later and re-assessing some of what Conlon describes – especially after reading Emotional Survival for Law Enforcement by Gilmartin, which will be my next review. In summary, Blue Blood makes a great addition to the discerning police recruit’s (and, I assume, officer’s) library.

Early Giftmas Present

I saw this at my favorite shop and had to have it.

This is a Colt Detective Special, chambered for a .38 Special cartridge and manufactured near the end of 1951. The Detective Special is a classic American firearm, first produced in 1927 with production continuing all the way into the late ’70s. I was looking around for a carry weapon that was more “carryable” than my Glock 19, and when I saw this I knew the search was over. I purchased it used, and its former owner is a retired police officer who carried this as his off-duty and backup weapon. I put a few bricks of ammo through it and am thoroughly impressed with its performance. Add that to its credentials as one of the American lawman’s closest allies throughout most of the 20th century and you have a weapon that any aspiring officer would be proud to own.

I also recently picked up a 5.11 Tactical Holster shirt as a “deep cover” carrying option. I would say this item is probably the best holster undershirt available today. It cradles a small-sized handgun perfectly and holds it snugly against your body. My only complaint is that the thicker material of the actual holster areas can be a little bit itchy, but it’s not so bad that you notice. Drawing is as simple as lifting up the other layers and grasping the weapon, although it does take practice to get quick.