1. Know Your Turf
You should know your beat, work area and your neighborhoods like the back of your hand. Under stress, the best cops can get to the hot spots without having to stop and consult their map books.Know Your Turf
You should know your beat, work area and your neighborhoods like the back of your hand. Under stress, the best cops can get to the hot spots without having to stop and consult their map books.


2. Organize Intelligence
There’s only so much you can know. Things happen when you aren’t around. Stay up to speed on crooks and crimes by talking to everyone, including your beat partners, cops from other agencies, detectives, citizens, kids, mail carriers, and, of course, your informants.


3. Interagency Operations
In the post-9/11 world, it’s not about credit for the arrest; it’s about sharing intel. If you’re in the city, talk to the sheriff’s deputies at jail or in areas adjoining your beat. If you’re working rural areas, talk to city cops about crooks and crimes. Make friends with state troopers, state investigators, and local federal agents assigned to your region.


4. Diagnose
There’s usually one major problem in an area and many smaller ones. Every neighborhood has crime or at least the potential. Certain neighborhoods seem to attract certain types of crimes. Smart cops can smell the major problem on their first pass through.


5. Travel Light
The average cop is loaded down with about 30 pounds of gear — add heavy boots, a backup weapon, radio and this weighty number creeps even higher. The average fleeing felon wears shorts, really expensive basketball shoes and a tank top. Decide what you need versus what’s nice to have.


6. Train And Trust Them
This is for lieutenants in general and sergeants in particular: put your best troops in charge and let them do good work. Cops work best when they have a goal — random patrol isn’t a goal. Each squad has someone who can run the show when supervisors aren’t in the field or on other assignments. These cops make good decisions and shouldn’t need to wait for approval to get the job done.


7. Find An Adviser
Besides a snitch or a CI, you may be able to cultivate a talking relationship with a delivery guy, security guard, or convenience store clerk. Face facts: there are people in your area who know what’s really going on or what might be going down.


8. Rank Vs Talent
Every squad has officers whom others turn to, based on expertise and internal leadership — not necessarily created by stripes and bars. There are cops who’ve been on for 25 years and are worthless and cops who’ve been on for five and are the real go-getters, the searchers for felony crooks.


9. Be There
One reason so many departments made the move toward community-oriented policing is it forces cops to get out of their cars and meet citizens.  Contrary to popular jaded police belief, not all people are jerks. Most normal people want to live their lives in peace, free from worries about crime and they want you in their neighborhoods.


10. Have A Plan
One reason why routine patrol is so boring: it’s mostly aimless driving. You should hit the field every day with the idea to rid your community of some far too active human scourge. Police work is more than just dirtbag control; it should be driven by daily and weekly goals and by projects pertaining to each shift.


11. Avoid Knee Jerk Responses
There are the reasons why you think something happened and there’s the real reason it did. There are long-standing neighborhood feuds going on before you got there and will continue long after you leave. You can’t always make assumptions based on what you think you already know.


12. Prepare For Handover
At some point, you’ll change shifts, leave your beat or your division, get promoted, go to an investigative or, Heaven forbid, administrative assignment. Make your replacement’s path easier by sitting down and briefing him about who’s who and what’s what in the area.


13. Build Trusted Networks
“This is the true meaning of the phrase ‘hearts and minds,’ which comprises two separate components. ‘Hearts’ means persuading people their best interests are served by your success; ‘minds’ means convincing them you can protect them, and resisting you is pointless.  Note neither concept has to do with whether people like you.”


14. Start Easy
You can’t get everyone to love you or even like you; you can, through time, win them over and start to give you help, information or support. Don’t try to lock up the local street gang leader on your first day in a new neighborhood. Figure out who supports the gang and who doesn’t. Then charm the socks off the second group — who’d just as soon see the guy dead. They’re much more likely to give you information leading to his arrest.


15. Seek Early Victories
Gain a lot of credibility by solving little problems for people. Fixing a longtime parking problem with new red curbs, getting rid of the renters in a chronic party call house or getting the local homeless, psycho drunk locked away or into rehab, can earn you a lot of bonus points. Knock down the easy pins first — then go for the big strikes.


16. Deterrent Patrolling
We’re not successful if bad guys are attacking, assaulting, ambushing, or shooting at us first. Work constantly to change and adapt your methods to keep the bad guys off balance. Keep them guessing with new approaches.


17. Prepare For Setbacks
Cops get injured or killed while doing this job. We win way more deadly force encounters than we lose. You can — will — and do make a difference in the lives of people in your community.


18. The Global Audience
Everything you do can, might or will show up on a video tape, a cell phone camera or even on Internet. Be wary of what Col. Kilcullen calls “the scripted enemy,” meaning those contacts or encounters involving contrived or staged situations concocted by a community irritator to be part of a media ambush. They want to get you on camera saying or doing something dumb, seemingly racist or unnecessarily violent.


19. Women And Children
Women are connectors to your crooks. They know where the guns are stored, where the dope is being bought and who did what to whom last Saturday in the parking lot. Learn when and how to separate them from their men to get the real story.
Kids take guns to school or carry them on the streets to kill their rivals. They’ll certainly not stop just because you’re on scene. If you are not prepared to engage in a deadly firefight with someone who looks like your son or nephew, quit now and go sell shoes.


20. Take Stock
What can I improve? What equipment do I need to add to my belt, car or trunk? What equipment do I need to remove either because it loads me down or more importantly, haven’t trained with it enough to be tactically perfect. Good cops measure their performance.


21. Single Narrative
What is my “mission statement” for my beat or service area? What is the one thing I can tell everyone that I’ll do this week, this month or during my years working here? Take back one drug corner, no matter how many arrests I have to make? Drive the parolees and registered sex offenders out of my area?  Take back a park, a shopping mall or a neighborhood, so normal people can feel safe again?


22. Mirror The Enemy
You know you can trust no one, especially CIs or other crooks. At the end of the day, you should always be in control of the flow of information, what it means and what it’s leading to. People who work with you to provide information can put themselves at extreme risk. Even the suspicion someone — civilian or hood — is working with the cops can cause that person or his or her family to be intimidated, tortured or killed.


23. Armed Civil Affairs
In many cities and towns police are the problem-solvers for the community. While people may rely on the Fire Department for medical, accidental or thermal stuff, it’s the cops they call when they need help with frightening, life-threatening events. A big part of your job is to become good at solving problems that make civilized life possible.


24. Small Is Beautiful
Good ideas are good ideas anywhere. Low-key crime fighting efforts in one neighborhood often work in another. But your experience should already tell you good and small ideas often fail when they try to become big and bold. Creating a task force or taking a “if three cops were successful, then 23 cops will be better” approach is doomed. The KISS acronym also stands for Keep it Simple and Small.


25. Build Solutions
Only attack the enemy when he gets in the way. Police work can turn into a game of keep-away, chasing the same crooks while they thumb their noses at our efforts to lock them up permanently. Sometimes it helps to use selective enforcement and ding some bad guys again and again; other times it can be a distraction from your overall mission of community safety. Catch the big fish with a sharp hook and stop sweeping the ocean with a tattered net, looking for small fry.


26. Keep A Secret
Don’t tell the citizens or street people anything about yourself. Don’t discuss your kids, family or even what part of town you live in. Don’t tell them you’re about to go off duty, when shift changes or how many other cops are in the area. The smallest piece of information can be “socially engineered” into too much news about you, your colleagues or your plans.


27. The Initiative
Col. Kilcullen puts it succinctly: “If the enemy is reacting to you, you control the environment.” We need to keep them guessing and show up when and where they don’t expect us. We need to use tactics and procedures they haven’t seen, including cutting-edge searching and handcuffing techniques, assertive and unique vehicle stop methods and out of the box responses to radio calls.


28. Fight Strategy, Not Forces
There are always going to be more crooks than cops and more people who want to use guns, drugs or alcohol and use fear to get their ways. You can’t stop or catch them all. Spend a lot of your quality work time interrupting their opportunities. Seek to be visible and protective for the public and be visible and proactive toward the crooks.