Fancy Words Are Destroying Law Enforcement

Mar 01, 2024

The first two decades of my career I never heard the word “police reform” but that doesn’t mean the profession isn’t constantly improving. From generation to generation, long before we started using fancy words, the profession improved.

My father began his law enforcement career in 1972 and he witnessed a significant decline in officer deaths while the crime rate plummeted in his 27 years of service. It was the era of officer survival training, spurred by change agents such as Chuck Remsberg, and the advent of technologies such as ballistic vests and retention holsters that reduced felonious deaths from a horrific period leading into the 1980’s.

Source: FiveThirtyEight.com

In the last 30 years, I watched as ashtrays in the squad room were replaced with a wide variety of wellness and fitness programs and until a decade ago, we furthered the work from the previous generation as crime continued to fall and officer safety initiatives such as Below 100 were embraced as an additional tool to the excellent survival training that we were handed by those before us.

Crime Rate (MacroTrends.net)

Fancy Words

A decade ago, something went very wrong in the law enforcement profession. While our leaders no doubt witnessed the success from those before us, there was a quick and dynamic shift in what had proven to save lives not only within the profession but in our communities as well.

We discovered and embraced fancy words and as each word became the slogan of the year, all we had accomplished in years past have been seemingly destroyed. Officer Survival training became associated with the warrior mindset. Our organizations, such as the IACP endorsed a “guardian” only mantra and while anyone with a few brain cells understands that law enforcement should be both guardian and warrior, our leaders took the comfortable path while disrespecting our fallen by even disregarding and dismantling the thin blue line.

While major case law on use of force, stops, etc. have not changed in decades, we quickly placed fancy words such as “sanctity of life” in our policy, furthering the sick narrative that cops didn’t care about lives. We used words like “equity” to stop making traffic stops which has resulted in devastating consequences to Americans, with African Americans dying at a much larger rate and our leaders have permitted the Department of Justice to ravage our communities with consent decrees in the name of “reform,” causing a level of violence and police exodus that we have never seen before.

Dr. Roland Fryer’s research on the topic of consent decrees said it best, when he said, “There is no free lunch. If the price of policing increases, officers are rational to retreat. And, retreating disproportionately costs black lives.”

A Failed Generation

For the first time in 50 years, the last 5 years saw a 33% increase in felonious line of duty deaths than the previous 5 years. Consequently, depending on the data source, the violent crime rate has risen 33% in the last 5 years.

My generation of law enforcement is the first generation that handed off a profession in worse shape than when we began and the decline is continuing.

The failure of our leadership is apparent to anyone paying attention. Retention and recruiting is lower while crime is up and for the first time in our history, we are seeing law enforcement agencies disband, giving away to contract agencies as we try to recover from the words “defund” and “abolish.”

Solutions

Many of our leaders haven’t even made it past the first stage of grief as they continue to deny what is happening all around them. I see it each week in my seminars as I discuss these issues but I discuss it because until we accept what has happened, we will never be able to move forward with correcting it.

Fancy words or pledges will not get us out of this because if they helped, we surely would have been a perfect profession by now. Our leaders must get back to the basics of our mission…”law”and “enforcement,” and we have to stop apologizing for it.

Like the past generations of law enforcement, we can change for the better while at the same time embracing our sole mission, crime reduction. It doesn’t have to be one or the other and frankly, any change that further threatens the safety of our citizens and officers is not the change that is needed.

Leadership

The only way out of this gutter is a complete paradigm shift in leadership. I’d be all for suspending the plaques and “I Love Me” walls until our leadership training actually transitioned to our practices.

We should abandon “theory” and embrace “caring.”
We should focus less on communicating with the media (that hates us) and communicate with our community and employees.
Before we listen and act based on a community activist, we should make sure that it will actually help the community in regard to safety.
If we embrace technology over our people, leaders have no business with the technology.
We must rely on data, research and truth and anyone not playing within those rules should be discarded to social media where they can vent all day rather than the liars having the ability to interject within our policy, training, and best practices.
Training that does not give our officers the tools and resources to further our mission of crime reduction while incorporating risk management within the job should be relegated to where it belongs…The trash or online.

Politics and fancy words have no business in a profession that stands before good and evil, with lives in the balance. We are more diverse, better trained, and more equipped than our profession has ever been and that should make everyone wonder why so much seems to be going in the other direction.

The answer is simple.

Without leadership…real leadership…none of that matters.

Dr. Travis Yates retired as a commander with a large municipal police department after 30 years of service. He is the author of “The Courageous Police Leader: A Survival Guide for Combating Cowards, Chaos & Lies.” His risk management and leadership seminars have been taught to thousands of professionals across the world. He is a graduate of the FBI National Academy with a Doctorate Degree in Strategic Leadership and the CEO of the Courageous Police Leadership Alliance.