School me on policing!

[safellows1967]

Ken Ford and any other LEOS who.wish to chime in. Yes bad cops have been in the news lately. There have been threads where people have commented on personal experiences only to be chastised by those in the know (current and past LEOS) as to what is going on. Specifically, when there is minor involvement required and half the department (sarcasm font off) shows up. We all know that there are "requirements" for tickets and every department has a traffic Nazi. I refuse to believe (not saying guilty of) that people (LEOS) who chose to discount these facts truly have never had personal knowledge of this. So what say you?

 

[strider12]

In

 

[Ken Ford]

I have never worked for an agency that directly or indirectly requires any amount of action.
Citations are left to the discretion of the officer. Some are more picky than others. If I believed their were any abuse by an officer I would have called them on it and disciplined/reported as needed.
Fortunately I never worked with anyone that I knew to be abusing their authority. There are always some that have personalities that seem overbearing but that is the case in any walk of life. As long as they are not violating rights, I figured we could work on the people skills.

 

[JDG.]

This is a country of millions and social media. The ones running the social media are more likely to try to point out negatives than positives. No one cares if a police officer helps you change a flat on the side of the road. But the country just eats up bad news. Its the world we live in now where negative things are more discussed versus positives

 

[mkdhotrod]

Subscribed

 

[Ken Ford]

This is a country of millions and social media. The ones running the social media are more likely to try to point out negatives than positives. No one cares if a police officer helps you change a flat on the side of the road. But the country just eats up bad news. Its the world we live in now where negative things are more discussed versus positives

I've lived/written the reports the media has used for their broadcast/print reports. I usually don't recognize the event until I read the names of the ones involved. Real life is boring and doesn't sell advertisements.
Rumor mill is sometimes funny. I was at a store once and this "disgruntled" family member that claimed to be at the scene where "Ken Ford" worked a family violence crime/arrest. And he knew for sure that Ken Ford had to have made up the whole story cause "he was there".
I asked him what "Ken Ford" looked like and he said something generic. Imagine the look on his face when I introduced myself...

 

[DanKATL]

I've lived/written the reports the media has used for their broadcast/print reports. I usually don't recognize the event until I read the names of the ones involved. Real life is boring and doesn't sell advertisements...

Take the current events in Baltimore and past ones here in Atlanta and elsewhere. Listening to the live communications on a scanner feed, you get an entirely different picture than what the mainstream media portrays. 99% of media feels the need to put a spin on it instead of just reporting. It's not about "reporting the facts", it's all about the spin and ratings.

 

[alleycat]

This is a country of millions and social media. The ones running the social media are more likely to try to point out negatives than positives. No one cares if a police officer helps you change a flat on the side of the road. But the country just eats up bad news. Its the world we live in now where negative things are more discussed versus positives

Sad, but true. Well said....

 

[safellows1967]

I guess I am guilty of a little LEO bashing and I know there are as many good officers out there as there are not so good. The bad sure make news more than something good an officer does. I understand that each officers makes his own judgement calls and has department guidelines to go by. I feel that if LEOS or related want to comment on threads they feel are incorrect, that some care should be taken in writing a response and maybe rather than a short counterpoint that some explanation as to why they disagree would help. If you (KF) worked in media releases, this should make sense.

Example: What is the deal with Cobb County parking 3 patrol cars on each entrance ramp and officers being on foot writing seatbelt tickets and clogging up access to the interstate and inconvenience ing drivers. Seems like it would only take one officer and any more is a waste of resources. Go.

 

[StateLine]

I spent 13 years with the same agency under 3 different Sheriffs. I worked uniformed patrol and plainclothes narcotics. I can honestly say I never saw any blatant racial discrimination or
intentional use of excessive force, and I certainly never saw bribery, extortion, evidence planting, or any other felonies. I'm not trying to say that it couldn't possibly have been going on, I'm saying if it did, it was not nearly as prevalent or obvious as people seem to believe. Obviously this wasn't the LAPD or the NOPD, but cops are cops.

What I did see was the occasional dumbass who simply didn't get it. The agency had a pretty stringent vetting process including multiple interviews both written and oral, detailed background investigations, plus the usual polygraph, drug testing etc. Despite all this, every now and then a "bad apple" would slip through. And when I say bad apple I'm talking general incompetence, laziness, or just plain stupidity which usually involved either a lead foot or a member of the opposite sex. And yes there was an occasional DUI or domestic violence and they were suspended immediately and fired shortly thereafter. Fortunately the stupid, incompetent, and lazy were usually weeded out early in their "careers". The flip side to this is that for every cop who actually did something stupid enough to be fired for there were DOZENS and DOZENS of unfounded complaints. It was a common expression that if you weren't getting an occasional complaint you probably weren't doing your job. Nobody likes to be arrested. Petty criminals won't hesitate to make a false accusation if they think it will make your life difficult. Its just part of the price of doing business.

As far as ticket "quotas", the closest I saw to a ticket quota was when I was assigned to a newly formed traffic enforcement unit. We were expected to write an average of one ticket per hour during our shift. It had less to do with generating revenue and more to do with simply making sure the deputies weren't just hiding out and "eating chicken" when they were supposed to be patrolling. Of course, if you wrote 8 tickets in an hour then you had 7 hours to do whatever you wanted. lol It really was more of a guideline than an actual quota, I don't recall any higher ups actually asking for tallies other than for a quarterly statistical report.

And since we're telling stories, let me address that blue wall of silence. While it is a brotherhood, it is also a very political existence. There are plenty of cops who will gladly throw another cop under the bus, not just because its the right thing to do, but because they think it will help them to get ahead. Cops tend to be clique-ish, competitive, and ambitious. Hell, I've seen people stab each other in the back over who would get a new patrol vehicle. lol. But those same cops would not hesitate to put their own safety on the line to keep each other safe.

They're just humans. Some are smart, some are stupid, most are average. Just like everyone else.