Originally Posted by
ssb
I live and work in an area dominated by those small town PDs upon which doubt is apparently being cast. I am not the cops, but I am adjacent to them. Some musings, biased by my own experience:
A small town police chief is accountable to the city council and, ostensibly, the voters that elect their council members.
What do you considered small towns? I ask because in most cities the Chief is accountable to, you guessed it, the Mayor or City Council.
Small town PDs often cannot pay well. I regularly encounter officers who make, hourly, what fast food employees make. You get the people you pay for. Your go-getters either have something else tying them to the agency/locality (home being the most common) or they’re on to bigger and better things once the opportunity presents itself.
This is mostly true. Often small-town officers make less than a good solid blue-collar job in the area. But then again, often city officers make less than workers in good solid blue-collar jobs in their area. While it is often true that small-town officers have a vested interest in the community, they or their significant other may be from the area, there are also other reasons for becoming a small town officer - location being a prime one. Also, while wages may be less in a rural area, the wage usually spreads further.
I know a guy who is a captain, the #2 at the agency; he has barely six years of experience (that’s not to denigrate him at all - he is a motivated officer who learned well, attended good training, and does good case work). He’s on his third “generation” of cops at his department.
I started at what most would consider a small agency, we ran 5 officers per shift when I started. I was running a patrol shift with 8 officers per shift when I left, so the Department grew a little. What I found out was that I had done a fuck-ton more real police work as a patrol officer than the 'big city' officers I later worked with. Largely because I had to do pretty much everything. I quickly learned the difference between a preliminary investigative report taken by a guy who does follow-up and a preliminary report (notice I left out investigative) taken by a guy who just fills in the blanks so the detectives know where to start over on the investigation.
Where the rubber hits the road, it's people who make the difference, not the size of agency they work for.
Speaking of pay, in most of these places the only sure way to increase your pay is to promote. It encourages people who perhaps ought not to be in positions of leadership or specialized slots to continuously apply. In the land of high turnover, eventually your number comes up.
Or, better yet, you promote because of who you are. But, he’s tight with his boss.
As far as I know, most places have service requirements for promotion, and most places, large or small, have folks who apply for ever position they can as soon as they are eligible. Additionally, most large agencies have more 'legacy' cops than small agencies and every agency, large or small, likely has someone stuck to someones backside like a remora fish. These traits certainly aren't limited to small agencies.
A dark side of small town policing is that problematic officers are at times tolerated out of necessity. It’s doubly true in this day and age, where there simply isn’t a long line of people waiting to replace you. Due to whatever you’d like to attribute it to, both hiring and retention are difficult today. Standards seem awfully low at times. An officer will get in trouble at Department A, resign, and within a month or two be working down the road at Department B. It’s almost like nobody’s inquiring with previous employers - or the new employers simply don’t care.
Problematic officers are all too often tolerated at all agencies. Mayb because of unions, maybe because of connections, maybe because it's simply less hassle to tolerate them. Here is an example:
Fifteen years ago, after the Rodney King beating, the Los Angeles Police Department was in crisis. It was accused of racial insensitivity and ill discipline and violence, and the assumption was that those problems had spread broadly throughout the rank and file. In the language of statisticians, it was thought that L.A.P.D.’s troubles had a “normal” distribution—that if you graphed them the result would look like a bell curve, with a small number of officers at one end of the curve, a small number at the other end, and the bulk of the problem situated in the middle. The bell-curve assumption has become so much a part of our mental architecture that we tend to use it to organize experience automatically.
But when the L.A.P.D. was investigated by a special commission headed by Warren Christopher, a very different picture emerged. Between 1986 and 1990, allegations of excessive force or improper tactics were made against eighteen hundred of the eighty-five hundred officers in the L.A.P.D. The broad middle had scarcely been accused of anything. Furthermore, more than fourteen hundred officers had only one or two allegations made against them—and bear in mind that these were not proven charges, that they happened in a four-year period, and that allegations of excessive force are an inevitable feature of urban police work. (The N.Y.P.D. receives about three thousand such complaints a year.)
A hundred and eighty-three officers, however, had four or more complaints against them, forty-four officers had six or more complaints, sixteen had eight or more, and one had sixteen complaints. If you were to graph the troubles of the L.A.P.D., it wouldn’t look like a bell curve. It would look more like a hockey stick. It would follow what statisticians call a “power law” distribution—where all the activity is not in the middle but at one extreme.
The Christopher Commission’s report repeatedly comes back to what it describes as the extreme concentration of problematic officers. One officer had been the subject of thirteen allegations of
excessive use of force, five other complaints, twenty-eight “use of force reports” (that is, documented, internal accounts of inappropriate behavior), and one shooting. Another had six excessive-force
complaints, nineteen other complaints, ten use-of-force reports, and three shootings. A third had twenty-seven use-of-force reports, and a fourth had thirty-five. Another had a file full of complaints for doing things like “striking an arrestee on the back of the neck with the butt of a shotgun for no apparent reason while the arrestee was kneeling and handcuffed,” beating up a thirteen-year-old juvenile,and throwing an arrestee from his chair and kicking him in the back and side of the head while he was handcuffed and lying on his stomach.
The report gives the strong impression that if you fired those forty-four cops the L.A.P.D. would suddenly become a pretty well-functioning police department.
But the report also suggests that the problem is tougher than it seems, because those forty-four bad cops were so bad that the institutional mechanisms in place to get rid of bad apples clearly weren’t working. If you made the mistake of assuming that the department’s troubles fell into a normal distribution, you’d propose solutions that would raise the performance of the middle—like better training or better hiring—when the middle didn’t need help. For those hard-core few who did need help, meanwhile, the medicine that helped the middle wouldn’t be nearly strong enough. (Miilion Dollar Murray, Malcolm Gladwell)
An unintended consequence of all this department hopping is that officers sometimes don’t stick around long enough for their cases to make it to trial. They leave the jurisdiction, stop responding to phone calls, stop cooperating to the point where their old cases get dismissed, and so on and so forth. From an officer experience standpoint, this means many haven’t had to see how their case work held up in court - if they care about such things.
This may be an issue that is more prevalent in your area than other areas. Granted, turnover is a problem with all agencies. In Kansas one small town Chief (15 officers) explained it this way - my guys need to live, if their wife doesn't teach or work at the hospital, they are looking to move east to Hays, and after Hays to Salina. His council understood that and after he did a little work comparing wages and work load with other agencies, he got his guys a significant raise.
It’s a weird dichotomy: on the one hand, policing almost universally represents the largest line item in a municipal budget around here - at times to the detriment of other, necessary services (you haven’t lived until you’ve watched a commission decide to skip buying new tires for the ambulances). On the other, in many instances the citizens are not getting the police they think they’re paying for - in training, experience, equipment, knowledge, or capability.
True. However, very seldom does the level of service increase after that small department goes away and the Sheriff or whomever takes over patrol.
None of this should be taken as me taking a side, but just adding a bit of perspective from a community that’s probably not too dissimilar to Uvalde.
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