Today's Date: Thursday, August 28, 2008

May 2008 State of—Specialization

6/16/2008 12:51 PM

Editor

Join Date: May 2007
Posts: 100

May 2008 State of—Specialization


Do you feel it's now necessary for an officer to specialize in order to succeed? If so, how are you gaining special skills to adv


REPLY  1 - 2 of 2
6/17/2008 7:58 PM #1

Steve Rothstein

Join Date: May 2007
Posts: 249

RE: May 2008 State of—Specialization


In many agencies, some specialization is necessary in order to advance. I deplore this, but I recognize that a supervisor of a specialty unit needs to know something about that unit. The downside of this is that in order to get further ahead, you then need to generalize again. You may be an immediate supervisor in a specialized unit, but management needs to be generalists with the management skills.

Of course, there are people who point out that supervisory and management skills are specialties all unto themselves also.

6/17/2008 10:58 PM #2

wolfva

Join Date: May 2007
Posts: 78

RE: May 2008 State of—Specialization


The 'meat and potatos' of any police force is the patrol officer. They should be 'jacks of all trades' because of the large number of varied incidents they handle. Heck, if you have a jumper, but your 'specialty' is armed robbery, are you going to ask the guy to hold on for a few minutes until the jumper specialist arrives? Or are you going to try to keep him from taking a nosedive?

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