photo from istockphoto.com
“This afternoon, while my son was involved in spring football at Anytown Park, I walked to the baseball diamonds. I walked by an Anytown cop car parked, unoccupied, with its engine running. Watching one of the softball games was a large Anytown cop. I walked back past the car with the engine running, still unoccupied. This attitude needs adjusting. The cops are on a different planet if they leave their cars unoccupied with the engine running to watch a softball game. It demonstrates arrogance and disrespect for the taxpayers.”
This was a comment one of our officers saw on the local paper’s discussion forum, referring to our department, which he passed onto to our union. We were in the middle of contract negotiations where our very careers were at stake and frequently in the newspaper. Within our union, discussion about our relationship with our citizens comes up as well because, well, we care about how we’re perceived.
Overall, we have a good relationship and feel we are involved in positive ways with the community we serve by sponsoring athletic programs, hosting community events and our community oriented policing. But there are always going to be people who disagree. ”Perception is everything”.
I’m sure you’ve seen the above scenario where you live. What was the first thing that came to your mind? The person who wrote the above statement obviously feels the cop wasn’t busy working, was perhaps watching his kid at practice and wasting gas at the taxpayers expense for no reason. Oh, let’s include the judgement of “large” also, to hit upon the whole fat, lazy cop and the donut stereotype. Did you have the same reaction? Or did you feel glad he stopped and was there so you could talk him about a neighborhood problem?
What the citizen didn’t know, or care to know, is that our chief has directed the officers to have a “community oriented contact” at least one time during their shift. This is separate from traffic enforcement, calls for service we dispatch them to and any arrests they make. It’s also not really grabbing a coffee at Starbucks, although that could be considered “Community Oriented Contact” since the community hangs out there. Cops are allowed to grab a coffee or donut while on duty, though the ones I know wouldn’t be caught dead eating a donut in public. We bring them back to the station <grin>.
Community Oriented Contacts can be done at the officer’s discretion; banks, stores, check centers, schools, parks and other public spaces are a part of the community. This officer chose to check out the park and be available where people were congregating. He actually didn’t have any kids there. As for the cop car being left to idle? There are computers and radios and other equipment that will drain the battery if the engine is shut off. If he turns off the equipment running inside, it’s a five-minute warm up/sign on process and that will interfere with his response to a calls for service so it’s the normal practice to leave vehicles running and locked. If there were a better solution, of course we’d do that. We’d love to reduce the gas budget, who wants to spend money on that?
How does a police department change this perception? More often than not, we’re damned if we do, damned if we don’t. Either we’re slacking off at the park and wasting taxpayer money (oh hey, we pay our salary too, by the way) or we’re unapproachable, authoritative pricks who ”are too busy” to shoot the breeze with people at a park. We are never where we should be, doing the thing we should be doing and that applies to everything we are doing. When Joe Citizen calls to demand traffic enforcement in his neighborhood because of all the speeding cars and stop sign violations, but then gets stopped himself for speeding, how often do you suppose we get a thank you for responding to a neighborhood problem instead of “we should be out catching the real bad guys“?
How often do people give the benefit of the doubt to officers doing their job, even if it doesn’t look like what your expectations of police work looks like? And are your expectations of police work accurate? In Anytown USA, it isn’t always cops and robbers and car chases. If only it were that much fun!
By the way- we settled on a contract! In it was a “no contracting out” clause. It’s official as of this week. We are safe for two years. I’ll post more on what I learned with the threat of unemployment looming over me for almost a year.
What is it with people who make a phone call and upon the other side answering, launch immediately into what they need and all the intricate details of why they need it and when they need it and what it is exactly they need before you can even get a question in?
Every morning as I enter the elevator to my comm center, I am reminded of a MAJOR brain fart I pulled with a vendor years ago.
