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The salty silverback is a staple of cop pop culture. He’s Murphy in “Fort Apache: The Bronx,” showing the young ’un how to disarm a frequent flier before de-escalation was a buzz word.
He’s Art Mullen in “Justified,” keeping a lid on an office full of deputies with impulse control issues, and he’s John Cooper in “Southland,” teaching the rookie everything he knows about surviving the greatest show on earth. He’s the icon, Sergeant Esterhaus in “Hill Street Blues,” admonishing the troops to be careful out there.
The elder officer personifies sound judgment and a hard-won perspective in a chaotic career field, a composed presence showing newer officers that they don’t have to learn their jobs by making every mistake in person. In real life, the seasoned officer is an endangered species, and the decisions that displaced gray hair catalyzed the brain drain threatening the future of policing in the U.S.
The elder officer personifies sound judgment and a hard-won perspective in a chaotic career field, a composed presence showing newer officers that they don’t have to learn their jobs by making every mistake in person. (Getty Images)
Calls to run government agencies like businesses began in earnest in the 1980s, leading to changes in the way budgets are administered, and positions are evaluated. Let’s look at the damage just two of those changes have wrought.
CIVILIANIZING POSITIONS
In the “old days” (and still on TV), there were positions available for patrol officers as they aged out of chasing 20-year-olds over fences. Investigations is a staple, but there were also skilled lateral moves: the “desk sergeant,” courts officers and evidence management, just for starters. Administrators reevaluated these positions with an eye to cost, and in many places redefined them to exclude law enforcement officers, reserving sworn positions only for those imminently in need of a gun.
Still more positions once staffed by sworn officers – photographers, artists, forensics and evidence collections – are now commonly occupied by civilian personnel. Cold cases are pursued by part-time retirees. Burglary and nuisance reports are taken by nonsworn community service officers; they’re cheap. So is private security at a courthouse screening station, if you don’t mind the liability that comes with training measured in days rather than months. A new proposal for traffic enforcement by civilians instead of LEOs shows up in every news cycle.
Civilianizing traditional law enforcement roles and collateral duties looks like progress but it comes with a price unseen on a balance sheet: experienced officers who face increasing pressure to remain in patrol positions leave for a different career field, or retire at the first opportunity. Once that was a problem only in the smallest agencies. It’s not anymore.
RETIREMENT CHANGES
Policing was traditionally a path to a modest middle-class living, with good benefits and a solid retirement. Retirement was the brass ring that made up for low pay, harsh conditions and a shortened life expectancy. It was also the golden handcuffs that kept officers tethered to the job when times were hard and other career fields beckoned. It was a lifeline for a class of workers who are often excluded from participating in Social Security.
That changed around the 2003 recession.
Cities, counties and states slashed retirement benefits, increased retirement ages, and in some cases, abolished their pensions entirely. New hires were enrolled in stock-based defined contribution retirement accounts instead. The promised benefits of this change were twofold: they cost the employers less, and they’re portable, freeing officers from the commitment of 20 or 30 years to keep their retirement contributions.
The promise was a mirage, and not just for the officers. The promised savings to hiring agencies were devoured by the costs of constant hiring and training. Some employers began backtracking on retirement changes or setting up new systems to try to stem the hemorrhage of institutional knowledge and attract new talent for the future.
The changes aren’t coming fast enough to reverse the exodus. Young officers see decades of physically and psychologically draining work ahead of them and move on after a few years, taking their portable retirement accounts with them. Older officers started retiring at the first opportunity. Fewer applicants competed to replace them.
The result in many places is a department without a viable ratio of experienced officers to new ones. In one example, a California officer told me that most of the FTOs in his medium-sized department have less than five years of experience, some of them as little as three.
When that happens, new officers are robbed of the benefit of observing, training with and working alongside older, more experienced officers who have seen all the things, done a lot of them, and developed perspective about which battles to pick, how to go about them most effectively, and which ones to leave for “Officer Time” to handle.
Decision-making, patience and calm under stress take time and experience to develop. Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000-hour” rule of mastery would suggest that five years of full-time policing is the baseline beginning of expertise, depending on the types of calls and investigations an officer has handled.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH RUNNING POLICING LIKE A BUSINESS?
That’s a question with a simple answer. A business exists to exchange a service or produce a good, in order to make a profit. Policing, on the contrary, is a public good, not a business: everyone needs it, anyone can use it, and its existence improves society whether they partake directly or not. Like all public goods, the introduction of profit motive into policing isn’t just counterproductive but can also incentivise corruption.
Decision makers miscalculated the downstream effects of the places they chose to cut costs.
In the case of police retirements and reclassifications, they were looking so intently at one business principle that they forgot another: relative value is calculated in part by looking at the potential costs of replacing what you already have. Cities and states undervalued police experience and institutional knowledge, and now they are chasing the replacement for what has been lost, without success.
GOOD JUDGMENT AND BAD JUDGMENT
“Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.”
Will Rogers said that (or maybe Mark Twain), and he was a wise man, probably because he made plenty of bad decisions on the way to good judgment.
Everybody makes mistakes; it’s just that the stakes are higher when cops make them. That makes a deep well of institutional knowledge in the form of officers with decades on the job one of the most valuable resources a new officer has access to, yet fewer and fewer new officers can have it.
When I worked with high school students in mountain towns haunted by wildfire, every teenage boy who wasn’t headed straight to university wanted to be a firefighter. Hotshots and smokejumpers were heroes every summer, and who doesn’t want to be a hero?
I always nodded and told them to spend their off-season in college every year studying Fire Science, because their bodies wouldn’t let them do hero stuff forever. They should position themselves to be arson investigators and trainers when that day comes. If they wanted to be police officers instead, I wouldn’t know any longer how to advise for the day when old injuries sneak up and silver creeps into their hair.
The positions for those officers have been demolished and it’s ultimately communities and younger officers who are paying the price for that void.
Police1 readers respond
- Veteran officers CAN retire and come back to work part-time in some cases. But many times retirement systems make it impossible because of having to cover health insurance premiums. It’s as if they don’t want veteran officers mentoring new officers and that is a loss.
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It starts at the top. After years on the job, officers have seen how well their commanders treat officers and “have their backs” when the going gets tough. A lack of support from management and city government officials takes a toll over time, and officers can’t wait to get out at the earliest opportunity. When politicians stop catering to the loudest voices in the community and back their officers to a reasonable degree, the resulting improvement in morale will help with retention. In other words, if they make officers “feel valued” instead of sacrificing them to appease extremists, the “old guys” will be willing to stick around a little longer. Poor treatment from command and politicians frankly makes cops feel like they are not welcome or wanted. I know how silly that may sound, but it’s true. I don’t know if we will ever get past this era of knee-jerk reactions to cell phone videos and throwing our officers under the bus just because something “looks bad” instead of taking the time to thoroughly investigate. But unless officers are assured that their “bosses” will back them when they’re right, officers will continue to head for the exits as soon as they can.
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Allow agencies to rehire retired officers in civilian positions. There is a wealth of experience, training and education going to waste. Instead, retirees sit home or find jobs that do not utilize everything they have to offer.
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I think in California, we should re-activate POST certificates for former officers and allow them to take the re-qualification course for 3 weeks, then they can be reinstated to help these agencies raise the younger ones into master patrolmen/women. This could be an emergency response request by the state. Retired/separated former officers get no respect, and new recruits get disrespected. Allow them to be human beings and not robots. More training should be conducted inside the community so the citizens can know who they really are. My training sergeant used to tell me, “You need 3 things to do this job, common sense, a working knowledge of the law and guts!” It’s just that simple.
What do you think? Share your comments in the box below.
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