WHY HAS POLICE WORK CHANGED?
Joe Faulisi

Today there are more police on the streets; there is more technology and equipment at your fingertips. There is more training than your can ask for, any subject that you can think of is out there. So why are more and more police officers getting hurt or killed doing there job? It doesn’t make sense to me. What is the problem? Who is to blame? How do we fix it?

Now I don’t want to get into a debate about politics, race, or religion so I will try to leave those ideas out. Society has changed drastically in the last 10 years. People do not want to admit it, even to the point of covering it up. Everyone in this great country should be able to see the world as it is, especially after September 11, 2001. That devastating day should have been an eye opener that evil walks the earth, and that anything can happen at any time. Unfortunately a lot of people have already forgotten. After that day how could any one say that will never happen to me?

For civilian citizens to understand what a police officer goes through is virtually impossible, but if they don’t know and don’t understand maybe they should try.

Every time you see a police officer on the news or in person who had to bring harm to a subject, remember there two sides to every story. That officer’s job is to protect and serve. They have to protect the lives of the community and their own to fully do their job.

A dead or injured police officer cannot do his/her job.

I won’t say that there haven’t been dirty cops, but that is few and far between. A police officer’s job is a difficult one, and you have to remember that a cop has to protect himself/herself. They have a use of force continuum to follow and a long as they do that they are in the right.

I know police officers who made arrest by the book and still got sued-why? People know that most departments will pay out instead of going to court

Why are so many Police officers getting killed each year?

Every day it seems that when you log on to web sites such as Police one, officer.com, or any of the others that are dedicated to law enforcement news, there are police all over this country getting killed in the line of duty. I feel that we need to do something about this. When you take a police job you know there are risks involved, any call you go on could be your last. Does it have to be that way?

I have written in past articles that complacently is the number one killer of police today. I also feel that there are a lot of other problems out there that need to be addressed. Over the past ten years or so police have lost a lot of respect from the public, this is due to bad press. The dreaded media, they prey on us like a lion on the Serengeti. If a police officer saves the life of a baby from a burning building it will be on for about three seconds after the sports and weather, but if a police officer is accused of brutality bringing in a murder suspect, that’s the first story on the eleven o’clock news, front page in all the papers. You very seldom are told that the suspect tried to kill that officer.

People think that no matter the problem, when a cop shows up it’s over and the bad guy goes to jail. Well we all know that is just not true. Why is it when you make a good arrest, take the bad guy to jail and the judge releases him on bond, the people say “well that cop didn’t do his job”. We are your best friend when we come to help and your enemy when things don’t go your way. So when the media makes us look like the Nazi storm troopers coming to get you, that could be why we are not respected by the public.

Which leads me to the next problem, every department has an image to uphold and that is important. However should you risk your officer’s lives to uphold that image? No one wants bad press, but you officers have a job to do and the most important thing is they need to go home to their families after their shift. A lot of things go through a police officer’s mind, during his/her career, such as if I use deadly force will my department back me up? If I get sued will I lose my house and everything I own? Will I be fired? How do we answer those questions and fix the problems.

I have worked with chiefs that will not even think about answering complaints until they have the officers side, they felt they could trust their men and women of the department, and I have worked with chiefs that do an entire investigation into a complaint without even talking to the officer, they felt that there shouldn’t be any complaints against an officer.

Well how many times have you caught someone red handed in a crime, but their family refused to believe it, even though that person had a prior record for that same crime and had been arrested for that same crime numerous times, it’s called denial. A lot of law enforcement Administration has that same type of denial when it comes to bad press. They think if they punish the officer for a complaint without looking into it the problem goes away. Well now you punished that officer and put him/her back on the street. That officer’s confidence has just gone down to nothing and he/she is afraid to do anything that might be deemed wrong in the eyes of the administration. And how does the public see that officer now? So when it comes a time that the officer may need to use deadly force, they will hesitate and it may cause them their life. Another problem is that when you add all of these things up and then multiply the fact that most people will just have a hard time taking another person’s life when the time comes, you have a real problem.

If you think this is farfetched look at the statistics of a gun fight. Most police conflicts happen between seven and ten feet, but the hit rate is around ten percent. Now as a firearms instructor I try to put a lot of real life scenarios in the training, and I get good results, but they are still paper targets. Take your best shooters and put them in Simunition training and see the results. A lot of men and women just won’t shoot when the time comes. The bad guy will, people think that the police train and train so they have the advantage. That is not true, one a police officer does not want to kill, but a lot of the bad guys do.

People think that the bad guys don’t train, but again they are wrong. Have you ever played some of the video games of today? Not only are they more lifelike, but they also desensitize the player to violence. We are breeding a more violent criminal and we don’t even know it. All the kids want to do is play these games where you are killing and shooting, they think it is fun, and it can be until you realize that it is a little too real. Take a kid who plays these games and has never fired a gun to the range, teach him only the safety rules and let him/her shoot on their own. See what they do, I think that you will see what I am talking about. I tried it and I was scared, not only did the kid know how to operate the weapon, but shot better than a lot of seasoned police officers that I know. Joe Faulisi is currently the head firearms instructor for the Federal Reserve Police Department.