Some of the best things I ever learned about the habits of burglars I learned from a late-night janitor, who had been cleaning offices in commercial areas for over 30 years. I picked up more about defensive police driving from an NHTSA statistician and a Rocky Mountain snowplow operator than I’ve learned from several LE and State Department emergency and VIP-protection driving courses. I learned more about tracking from an elderly poacher-hunting game warden than from all other military and LE sources put together.
In the process I came to realize wisdom is wherever you find it, and a good sergeant’s greatest talent in life is the ability to pick the pebbles of genius from the boulders of bullshit. There are lessons to be taken from things as trivial as plastic bags, cheap desserts — and blimps.
THE MUTT-MITTS METHOD
I’ve shared a lot of my life with a succession of big dogs — usually two or three at a time — and learned it’s a lot like being a police sergeant with a good squad. You teach them some skills and manners, and they teach you about loyalty, courage, supervision — and misbehavior. One unavoidable aspect of the position is — the piles of poop in the yard. Yeah, shit happens — lots of it — and it’s your job to clean it up.
Plastic “Mutt Mitts” are a wonderful invention. If you’re owned by a dog and you don’t know about ’em, go online and find out. They’re the fastest, cleanest, most efficient method for minimizing that poop-pile problem I’ve ever found.
Those piles aren’t going to go away on their own. You can whine and complain about them — wasting time and energy and establishing yourself as a sniveler. You can ignore those piles until they overwhelm your senses and you can’t set foot anywhere without stepping in shit. Or, you can continually seek better, more effective ways to deal with the problem, become a better master, and enjoy your position more because of it. The choice is yours. Citizen complaints, internal investigations, or the by-products of canine kibble — they all stink, and they must be cleaned up. Deal with it fast and smart, and don’t get any on you.
THE JELL-O EFFECT
Take a big, smooth wall at headquarters — you know, the kind you find departmental announcements and informational posters on — a dozen inch-thick slabs of green JELL-O, a fistful of finishing nails and a hammer. Now, nail the JELL-O to the wall. Go ahead; give it your best shot.
Those slabs of JELL-O are bright new socially-engineered programs, “philosophies of community-oriented policing,” and whiz-bang ideas spun out of administrative conference rooms, top-level “brainstorming sessions,” management workshops at posh “retreat” resorts, and desperate attempts to satisfy political demands for positive media exposure.
No matter what color or flavor the JELL-O is, or how many festive little chunks of pineapple or cherry it contains, unless it has some stiffening agent — an inner core of real substance — it’s not going to stick. You can hammer ’till your arms fall off, and all you’ll have are bent nails on a screwed up wall. Any program not built on a foundation of real enforcement and crime prevention is just flavored gelatin with fruit-bits. ?It will slump to the deck, where working cops will have to slip and slog through it to get on with their jobs.
If the Lighter-Than-Air Section insists the JELL-O be ingested, then selectively spoon-feed a little to your troops and remind them: This is just a decorative dessert — not the main course. The meat and potatoes are out there off Main Street and Park Avenue, guys — go get ’em.
THE GOOD & BAD OF GASBAGS
On any fair weather day you’ll find blimps lazily trundling about through the skies: Goodyear blimps, Fuji blimps, even military and law enforcement blimps. They’re really, really big, they’re much higher up than we are — and they attract a lot of attention. But essentially, they’re just enormous holes in the atmosphere, wrapped in fine, shiny, sometimes-colorful material, and filled with gas. Some contain expensive though inert gases, and others are just full of hot air. Are we starting to see some analogies here?
Often, blimps only serve a public-imagery purpose, acting as visible high-level symbols of organizations without actually doing any of that organization’s work. With their tiny motors and controls, they pretty much go where the changing winds blow them, but they usually have cameras running, and they erratically transmit images of what’s happening beneath them.
Most of the time, they don’t really know the significance or intelligence value of what they see — they just spew video-bites down to the grunts on the ground. Making any sense out of it, and putting it to operational use — that’s our challenge. It can be tough working in a blimp’s shadow and living with the knowledge it could suddenly descend without warning and crush you. You could easily spend all your time watching their seemingly pointless maneuvers, trying to stay out of the way and worrying about where they’ll land. That’s wasteful — and gutless.
Just remember, blimps often float around places we’ll never see, and they do have the advantage of an elevated view. And, when unseen powerful forces take high-caliber shots at organizations, sometimes it’s that big, visible gasbag that takes the hit and falls in flames — not you.
Do you know how many varieties there are of SPAM? In the end though, they’re all SPAM. Think about that one — and what a sergeant can learn from canned meat.
If you think you’ve got the SPAM solution, contact Lt. Morrison at StreetLevelOne@Yahoo.com
First published in the Jan/Feb 2007 issue of American COP.
