Articles - Careers & Training

Every time someone tries to kick our butts and we have him fully subdued and cuffed and searched we should look deeply into his eyes and say, "Thanks, I needed that!"

Inmates at Douglas County Detention Center in Colorado are indeed being punished, but the deputies who work there don't style themselves as punishers. Rather, they work as enforcers and facilitators-maintaining order and teaching life skills that will hopefully reduce the number of "repeat customers" to the jail.

I find the world is filled with more and more "noise" that makes it difficult to find the actual "signal" that is the information we truly need.

An elderly woman passed us rather crisply and we were aghast to read the back of her shirt: "I'm 65 and a grandmother, but I'm ahead of YOU!"

With tax revenues declining and budgets under water, many agencies are feeling the strain. But help is on the way.

Often, the techniques we teach fail to address fully the reality of a violent, unpredictable attack aimed at taking away an officer's gun. Attacks are varied and unpredictable; our responses must be the same. The key is to balance structured techniques with options and variation.

When it comes to policing the especially permeable maritime borders running through the Great Lakes, security requires an "all hands on deck" approach.

I suspect a lot of agencies are probably not doing enough "no sight" or limited vision training and should consider its application in the training of defensive tactics, electronic control devices, OC spray, and addressing simple job specific tasks such as handling the equipment on our duty belts.

One of the strangest things we do in our crime fighting career is play a strange game I like to call, "You Bet Your Badge." Just graduating from the academy and having the thrill of that badge being pinned to your chest instantly enters you in the game where things you do and say can cause that wonderfully important piece of metal to be removed.

Dealing with incidents when you're off duty can be very different from working in uniform. Before you involve yourself in an off-duty incident, it is imperative that you have a game plan in place. As my former boss often told us, "Failure to plan is planning to fail."