At minimum, an LASD reserve officer's service will include logging 20 hours a month regardless of obligations posed by the reserve's regular job and family responsibilities. He may find himself working his own patrol car, standing guard in the cold along a parade route, or handling that "change of shift" report nobody else wanted.
March 4, 2014
Can the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department assert itself as one of the best and most innovative departments in the country? Can it say that it serves its communities as vigilantly and as well as other law enforcement agencies? Can it say that it still enjoys the reputation in the profession that it once did?
February 4, 2014
I couldn't help but note how the absence of supervisorial intervention had played out for others elsewhere; how their failure to stem some cancerous problem exacted ever greater tolls later. What might have culminated with a written reprimand or a punitive day off instead ended up being the irrevocable loss of careers, families, and freedoms. A few employees ended up taking their lives.
January 20, 2014
Officer Evan Wright chased after a gang member who fled and reached for his pocket while running. A flying tackle sent the two men into the middle of a residential driveway where some 20 guests were observing a quinceanera party in the front yard.
January 17, 2014
But whatever Baca’s priorities, I have reason to question that the welfare of his personnel and countrymen were high among them. His tax dollar-funded support of a department Muslim Community Affairs Unit was less concerning to my mind than his open advocacy of other questionable Muslim entities such as CAIR. Also his mea culpa parading of contrite Century deputies in the aftermath of a shooting proved more embarrassing than mollifying.
January 7, 2014
As for those who have tried to damn those officers, I wonder what they would hope they might do if they'd seen 12-year-old Nevada teenager Jose Reyes whip out a firearm on teacher Michael Lansberry.
November 4, 2013
The wife says that there is usually justification to my umbrage—it's my bail schedule that sucks. And so mine has been a history of strained associations, parted companies, and dissolved friendships.
September 11, 2013
Unlike most cornered suspects, the active, retired, or terminated cop who fights his former peers does so with a weapons cache that is wholly different from that of the usual suspects, one that comes with the experience, training, and tactical awareness unique to those who have worked in the profession.
May 21, 2013
I'd sleep better knowing that those tasked with the power of making life or death decisions were those most capable of doing so.
May 16, 2013
Belmontez raised the knife and charged at the officers with rapid steps. That the man had a wooden leg had already been made known to Brown. What he didn't expect was that the 250-pound man had long ago become accustomed to walking with it.
May 15, 2013
If he worked in one of those small towns that prohibits the exhibition of elephants in a city park on the Sabbath, you could bet that he'd somehow find a way to be booking a pachyderm into evidence Sunday night.
May 2, 2013
It's been said that a truly good cop could have worked any era in law enforcement and done quite well. When my mind revisits those cops that I used to work with, around, and to varying degrees tolerated, there are two groups that stand out predominantly for their diametrically opposite approaches to patrol.
March 28, 2013
Once while attending a force training seminar, I spoke quite critically of a deputy-involved shooting wherein a pregnant bystander was shot and killed. It was the kind of thing that was easy to grandstand on—or so I thought—and so I did. A lieutenant who was more intimately acquainted with the details of the incident quickly set me straight. The dressing down I received was pretty severe, and I didn't like it one bit. But I had it coming. In spades.
November 8, 2012
If given the opportunity to make a difference in people's lives, are you more apt to toss a lifeline or an anchor?
September 27, 2012
The dawn of the contemporary female officer came in 1972. It was a moment in time where law enforcement's and the public's attitude toward women with badges began to change and female officers began to be perceived as "real police."
September 21, 2012