Tactical Police Leadership: Recent Episodes
eric aguiar
When the community looks to you for leadership you have two main responsibilities. One is to make sure that your team is qualified and prepared to serve and two that the community that you protect understands their role and is capable of performing it.
There are many aspects that effect the success of the mission.
Having a standard:
To be able to enforce a standard you must first become a team that good people want to be on.
Would you join or would your family even approve of you joining a profession wherein you face daily possibility of being killed, getting hurt or getting sued and be held to a higher standard in exchange for nothing?
Would you join a profession where you feel like your leaders don’t care about you and where you are expected to fully invest in an entity that will not return the investment?
If the answer is no to both of these questions than it is time to make the necessary improvements to a field.
There are agencies that have done a work climate survey. Several departments (more than acceptable) were found to have over 50 % of their employees say that they would leave if an opportunity presented itself.
Reasons why people leave according to the survey were: no growth potential, low pay and bad leadership.
Having qualified quality people:
Law Enforcement needs good and qualified people to carry out its objective.
How do you retain quality? You offer it.
Community buy in:
The best customer service that a department can offer the public that it protects is a highly trained officer.
Keep in mind that when your emergency strikes the officers responding will only be as effective as they are allowed to (and compelled to) train.
Training:
If it was meant to be a fair fight police officers would be issued boxing gloves.
Train for the possibility and you will be ready. Train for the likelihood and you will be caught unprepared.
The first on scene to most emergencies that the world faces is the patrol officer.
We will cover topics that will be of interest to the law enforcement professional who has realized that patrolling is more than just driving or walking around and that specialized training is critical at the patrol level.
Technology is there to carry out missions where danger would be present for a human. Subjecting life to unnecessary risk for the perception of mission is potentially neglectful command.
Tactical Police Leadership please step up.
Technology exists why risk human life unnecessarily for the perception of service?
Tactical Police Leadership step up
This is a call to all departments to step up to their role as Tactical Police Leaders (TPL).
In the advent of a nationally declared emergency TPL’s must be careful to strategize how units are deployed.
Crime Prevention is more than just addressing the crime trend and informing the public. Every aspect of a police department that is not improved and maintained directly and indirectly affects how successful an agency is in preventing crime.
The phrase coined here is Crime Preemption. From recruiting to bow agencies promote affect their ability to prevent crime.
Sharing information during briefing before the shift is a critical time and must be comprehensive. Throughout the shift leadership decisions may have to be made. That is why it is imperative that all officers become Tactical Police Leaders
A Tactical Police Leader patrols differently because they have come to understand that their decisions on and off duty affect the big picture of the public safety mission.