I don’t listen to Joe Rogan often (or ever). In fact, I make fun of Josh when he starts a sentence with “I heard on Joe Rogan…”
However, I was intrigued when Rogan interviewed President Trump a few weeks ago, and wanted to hear the interview.
Both men are very pro-police, and one part of the interview stuck out in particular.
They were discussing the “Defund the Police” movement, and the impact it’s had on the policing profession. Rogan said (35:06):
“I think cops are just like everybody else. Most of them are great. They’re just like everybody else. But if you run into one carpenter and he does a sh**** job on your house, and you say ‘carpenters f**** suck’…but they don’t suck. Most of them are great. And that’s what they do with cops…and these cops are suffering the consequences of it”.
Essentially, most professions get the benefit of the doubt when you encounter one bad apple.
Not policing.
Unfortunately, the “bad apples” in policing are the ones that make national news and provide fodder for movements like “Defund the Police”.
But are they really bad apples?
Maybe some. But with psych exams, polygraphs, interviews, and the overall rigidity of the background process, I find it hard to believe that police departments across the country are continually hiring bad apples.
I believe that they are normal people. Most are hired young, and asked from a young age to solve adult problems that they’ve never even encountered themselves (domestic violence calls, for example). They see trauma on a daily basis that most people don’t encounter in their lifetime.
Some come from military and active combat, who are struggling with PTSD from combat and asked to assimilate with few (if any) resources on how to do that.
They all have personal trauma and issues that ALL humans deal with, on top of handling murders, abuse, shootings, car accidents, rape…the list goes on. They live in constant fight or flight from both their personal and professional lives.
So is it a “we’re hiring the wrong people” issue, or a “we’re not taking care of our people” issue?
Hint: it’s mostly the latter.
When I first took over the Early Intervention program for Las Vegas Metro PD, I needed to wrap my head around why the program was ineffective. In looking at the data, we were tracking all the normal things that EI should track…use of force, complaints, vehicle pursuits, etc. As we dug into the data more, we noticed we WEREN’T tracking significant emotional events in employees' lives.
Whether that was a traumatic call at work (child abuse/death, a particularly horrific murder, etc) or trauma going on in their personal lives (divorce, child custody disputes, death in the family, etc). So we asked supervisors to start documenting significant/wellness events, and send them to us to track. We called them Significant Event Reports.
As we did, a pattern emerged. Nearly every officer that was having some kind of misconduct issue was also dealing with a wellness issue.
Let me give you an example.
As Significant Event Reports started flooding in, we came across a report of an officer that had responded to a call where a two year-old baby had drowned in a pool. The officer was distraught, and peer support was called.
A couple months later, this same officer was involved in two separate calls involving deceased infants in a two week period that he stated deeply impacted him.
A few months after that, it was discovered that he began to be significantly late for work, and was sleeping abnormally long hours. His squad had approached their sergeant and told him that this officer had been showing up late for work, and had cried a few times about his marriage and homelife, and they were concerned about his well being. Come to find out, he was going through a divorce, couch surfing, and was not as active at work as he should have been.
All of this information came in at once, and we were able to call his captain, ask that he not be dispatched to any more child abuse/death calls, and get him the resources he needed to find permanent residency and help with his divorce.
Looking at the macro level, this officer was engaged in misconduct. He was showing up late for work consistently and wasn’t being productive. He was actually flagged for misconduct in our EI system for these things.
But when you look at ALL the data points, was he engaging in misconduct because he was a “bad apple”? Or was it because he had traumatic experiences at work AND at home happen all at once, and he desperately needed help dealing with both?
Agencies do themselves and their officers a disservice by not looking at wellness along with misconduct. So how can they do that?
Documentation. It was (and still is) LVMPD’s policy that when supervisors learn of a significant event in an officer’s life, whether in or out of work, that they document it. This helped give our Early Intervention program context to the misconduct. It also helped us identify resources needed even when there was no misconduct.
Early Intervention that encompasses wellness. Having an Early Intervention program that looks at the documented wellness issues, and takes them into account as a data point.
Have the hard conversations. If we truly want to change police culture and take care of our officers, it starts by having the hard conversations about how their work AND personal life is going. Supervisors can’t document wellness issues if they don’t know these issues are happening.
Trust. The hard conversations can’t happen if officers don’t trust that their supervisors really care about their wellness. This goes back to leadership 101.
If agencies truly want to get involved in wellness and taking care of their officers, documenting wellness, using it as a data point, and getting officers the resources they need EARLY, before they become a liability to themselves or their department is the way to do that.
Not sure where to start? Reach out, and I can help you. You don’t need a fancy system to begin to track wellness.
Jenna
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