Also by David Griffith

It’s not his fault. But Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge has always reminded me of a particularly ineffective basketball coach at my college. The coach was universally known as a nice guy, and he had this “innovative” way of signaling what play he wanted his team to run by holding up brightly colored cards on the sidelines. Heck, Ridge even looks a little like the guy. Which in my memory is not good. We went 4 and 26 that year.

Almost every chief at the show was looking for ways to stretch budgets without compromising public or officer safety and maintaining officer morale and pride.

There's an old chestnut that says the Chinese word for "crisis" is the same as the Chinese word opportunity.

Tactical show offers look at new equipment for SWAT and patrol.

Anti-terror seminars spell out brutality of the enemy to conference attendees.

If that wasn't bad enough, communications problems among officers from the 25 different agencies involved made it extremely difficult for responders to coordinate the five-hour operation that led to the shooter's surrender.

Many people don't realize it, but the United States is at war. I don't mean the war in Iraq. No disrespect intended to the men and women bravely serving in that conflict, but in the big picture the fight for Iraq is not the war. It is a major campaign in the war.

So now you want to join the ranks of police officers who have invented police products. That’s great, but before you leap, consider the cumulative wisdom of police inventors.

It’s said that necessity is the mother of invention, and that’s clearly true for cops. Sent out on the streets with often outdated or unproven equipment, cops, like soldiers, have been forced to improvise, tweak, jury-rig, or just plain create what they need.

Police organizations and unions should take care when voicing opinions for all cops.

Last June POLICE magazine published an editorial that asked readers to let us know if their agencies had policies that prohibited officers from carrying backup guns. We promised to contact these agencies and ask the reasons for the policies. Calls were made and the following is our agency-by-agency report.

One of the biggest problems with the concept of backup guns is that police administrators have a tendency to confuse backup guns with smaller, often less reliable "hideaway guns."

Cops are dying in California, and prosecutors are coddling their accused killers.

It's not hard to make a strong case for backup guns. The basic contention of backup gun proponents is that old saw that goes: If you absolutely have to have one of something to ensure your survival, then you better have two.

Anyone who wanted a reminder of the deadly serious reason why TREXPO exists needed to look no further than the hallway outside the conference's seminar area.

Twice each year, the Tactical Response Expo (TREXPO), in its East and West Coast versions, offers a showcase for the latest in equipment and services for tactical police operations.

The 9/11 atrocities changed America. But unless they were directly affected, I don't think it really changed individual Americans. In fact, I think it had the opposite effect. If you were liberal before the attack, it made you more liberal; conservative, more conservative; pacifist, more pacifist...

Each year the law enforcement specific portion of the annual Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Trade (SHOT) Show grows larger. This year's show was no exception.

Smoking is about as good for you as drinking toxic waste, although it's a lot more satisfying.

It also means that I've stopped trying to tell the interviewing person what I think he or she wants to hear. Instead, I try to listen to what they have to say and respond with a genuine statement of how I would approach the job.