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The Mind
It controls behavior and behavior leads to both extremes, praise or personnel complaints.
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is a deliberate evaluation of the situation with specific tools to help insure that all the bases have been covered !
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Why Are Thinking Skills Vital to Law Enforcement?
If you were going to spend the same amount of money to build a three-room addition onto your house, whom would you rather use to build that addition? Your choices are between a neighbor who has casually picked up enough skills through observation to get by fixing their own house or a trained skilled professional craftsman who has been taught specifically how to use the tools of their trade for excellence beyond personal use.
Like wise, in Law Enforcement where decisions are the key to excellence in behavior and quality of service, a growth in the demand for types of service and increased levels of excellence has occurred. Thus, the evolution of Law Enforcement over the last few decades has made it necessary to build a “three room addition to the house” in the form of increased responsibility for additional decision-making authority. Who should do that job? Should we employ well meaning amateurs who picked up decision-making skills through trial and error along the road of life or should we employ specifically trained professionals that know how to make the best decisions for the circumstances and time frames that they must deal with?
The police function in the United States has undergone close scrutiny and criticism for the last several decades. The demands from the public for greater service from the police stressed that more was expected of the law enforcement function than response to emergencies. The reactive nature of the function was not diminished, but there developed an ever-growing demand for a proactive approach too. As the new demand evolved, community policing has become the primary method to implement that proactive thrust.
In the past decades police administrations did the planning of how to implement the police function. The field police officer was expected to carry out that plan by closely following the department manual. Autonomy of the officers' actions was discouraged for fear of lawsuits as a result of poor decisions. It was thought that the collective wisdom of experience that formed the manuals was the best basis for decisions. Police administrators were realists though and they knew that the manuals were not always followed. The hope was that the officers would use their best judgment for the circumstances that they were confronted by. Academy and in-service training both almost exclusively focused on the instruction of the codes of law and manuals of procedures. Officers were instructed in what to think and not how to think.
In recent years there has been a trend to give officers more autonomy in deciding how they will deal with the people and problems that are unique to their particular section of the community. In the past, discretion always was a large part of the officers' function even in times when the reactivity approach was predominant. Decision-making was therefore a necessary function even in field law enforcement. Now that there is much more non-crises contact with the public and the associated preemptive planning, more demands are made for refined decision making.
Thus, when community policing is taken into consideration, the necessity for greater skills of independent decision-making are specifically called for. The federally funded Community Policing Consortium says in chapter three of their report Understanding Community Policing: A Framework for Action that, “The transition to community policing requires recognizing that the new responsibilities and decision-making power of the neighborhood patrol officers must be supported, guided, and encouraged by the entire organization.” |
