Five Washington state law enforcement officers—four at once—have been gunned down in two months because their guard went down for just long enough.
On Halloween night, Seattle Officer Timothy Brenton died as he sat in his cruiser, working on a report. (His trainee, Officer Britt Sweeney, escaped injured but alive.) The Sunday morning after Thanksgiving, Lakewood Sgt. Mark Renninger, along with Officers Ronald Owens, Tina Griswold, and Greg Richards, died in a coffee shop as they, too, worked on reports.
More than one police blog has been posted with the advice to stay vigilant, think tactically, don’t let your guard down. Always remember the officer safety principles you were taught in training, and never, ever give the bad guys the advantage.
Easier said than done.
The longer you work in a community, the more familiar it becomes. You get to know people, places, buildings; even if you still sit in a restaurant with your back to the wall and your eye on the door, even if you have a favorite parking lot to sit and work in because of its bright lights and wide-open spaces, you start to think more in terms of all the paperwork you have to do—not the personal danger. A certain level of cognitive distortion sets in. What are the odds, after all, that your life will be threatened tonight? Besides, you can’t be paranoid 24/7.
Then a tragedy like these happens, and even though you know your duties must stay the same, you may find yourself “re-tasking” to be more vigilant. As one officer told me on Twitter, “I just think when talking with someone I may appear more distracted and less interested, which will come across as being less friendly and sincere.”
Can a tactically thinking officer really do community policing?
Think about that. An officer who is thinking tactically is thinking about people who can do him harm. There is a fundamental lack of trust. Yet community policing is all about establishing trust. To ask citizens to trust you, you must show them that—at least to some extent—you trust them to be partners in their own safety.
Is a balance possible? In other words, is it possible to think tactically even when you feel completely familiar with your community and residents and secure enough in your experience to believe you will recognize trouble when it’s coming? Likewise, is it possible to trust when you put your own safety first?
Veteran patrol officers say yes. Not only can you not be paranoid 24/7, but you also have to face the idea that sometimes, while you can minimize your risks, you can never fully eliminate them. Dr. Laurence Miller (no relation) discusses these ideas extensively in his article for PoliceOne.com:
You can learn to control your attention, to make it flexible, effective, and responsive to the moment-to-moment needs of your patrol situation. That way, you don’t have to maintain white-knuckled concentration to keep safe. Instead, your well-trained attention control system will act like a mental firewall, automatically scanning the environment so that it will be hard to catch you off guard.
Can the same be said for social media?
I started writing this blog with the intention of drawing parallels to the online world—the importance of being vigilant, of constant training and learning the structures and paths and people who inhabit these sites—because online risk management is something that can be learned as well as offline.
And yet it is not the same. A bad day on Twitter or Facebook might mean, worst case, that someone loses a job. It’s possible to identify threats and protect oneself from cyber-stalkers; there are no fatal online ambushes. Even though losing a job in this economy can certainly feel like a fatal blow—it is not.
So I’ll leave it at this: Miller stresses the need for practice of attentional control. Many blog posts by now have been written about social media time management in one’s everyday work flow. This, too, is a necessary skill to be practiced, one that can take months to perfect. Lack of attention—to constituents’ opinions, to department representatives’ word choices, to the greater online world—can lead to PR disaster.
So can cops think tactically and still engage with their community? Yes, they can. They have to if they are to survive.
Christa M. Miller is founder and co-author of Cops 2.0. A freelance trade journalist turned public relations and social media consultant, she has specialized in public safety issues for the past eight years. She resides in Greenville, SC and can be reached at christammiller@gmail.com.
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Aloha Christa!
@ISA_808 tweeted, “Safety is being aware of your environment, whether online or off”. And personal interactions play a crucial role in being “aware of your environment”. Through our contacts with one another, relationships may develop which runs parallel to the development of trusts. With trusts, there will be some degree of “openness”. But being “open” does not always equate to being vulnerable. Instead, it may indicate that you are approachable.
And isn’t that what Community Policing is about?
That the public can come to police officers and vice versa?
The challenge for the officers is being aware of their “online” environment by realizing the limitations that Internet technology imposes on the users.
Thanks Chris! Right — thinking about what comprises LE training, it starts with “the basics,” the technique which then leads into lots and lots of practice! The more practice you have, the more confident you become — confidence which shows in your interactions, helps keep situations from spinning out of control. As you said, this works a little differently online than in the physical world. But training and practice is what makes the difference.