Kathryn Botard from the Law Officer Facebook page asked me to discuss the unreasonable paperwork that deters officers from making a stop. I’m surprised by this question because if you’ve read my column, you should be able to predict my answer.
First-Offs
There may be reasons not to make a particular stop. You might want to skip a stop for officer safety reasons if you know all your beat partners are tied up. You might be on your way to a radio call and don’t want to stick your beat partners with your call. You might be working a special assignment and need to concentrate on that. You might need to use the restroom. Bottom line: Extra paperwork isn’t and will never be a valid reason not to make a stop.
Believe me when I tell you, Ol’ Bullethead has been through the ringer with extra paperwork. When it comes to traffic and pedestrian stops, I’ve had to use demographic codes we announced over the radio, after every stop. For a while I had to complete field interview cards for every occupant, in every vehicle I stopped. For a short time they even had us doing face-page reports to document every stop we made.
It made all the cops angry and some of the chumps who weren’t going to stop people anyway used it as just one more excuse to not make stops. Where I work, we managed to clean this up by having some PhD study all that info and determine that in certain areas of the city, we tended to—get this!—stop the people who live there. Wow! All that school and he managed to come up with something any wingnut who drove through the various neighborhoods in our city could have produced at one glance!
Back to the issue. What deters officers from making stops? The officers I know who don’t make stops are deterred by their own lack of respect for themselves and our profession. We all know these types and every agency has them. Many started out that way as bad hires. I don’t know how we end up with these people after all the work that goes into hiring a cop and the fact that, at my agency, there are usually about 300 applicants for every position we have open. How these no-load cops get through that process is a complete mystery to me.
Others used to work but got into hot water for something they did or for some real or perceived punishment they got. These clowns are almost as bad as the first group. They take one slap and they turn tail like a dog that just heard a flashbang go boom. Some of these cops recover. Others become disgruntled, annoying, useless bodies that do nothing but take up space in a black-and-white.
Real cops, the ones who take pride in themselves, their uniform and their profession don’t let paperwork get in their way. When you stop and take even a quick look at the history of policing, you’ll notice right off the bat how much things change. It wasn’t that long ago that a use-of-force report said nothing more than “I used the force necessary …” It wasn’t too much prior to those times when I don’t think cops said or wrote anything about using force.
The same holds true for almost all areas of our profession. Case law, for instance, is constantly changing. It used to be cops would use all sorts of tricks to get people to talk in an interview and then along came Miranda. Does Miranda make it harder to get a statement? Sure it does, but that doesn’t mean we stopped interviewing people. With the availability of audio and video evidence, we’re going through a whole series of other changes. Many of these are related to people not believing what we say because a few people who never should have worn the uniform in the first place got caught lying.
Conclusion
We’re the sheepdogs and it’s our duty to protect the sheep from the wolves. This applies to all levels of enforcement. One day it might mean stopping a person texting while driving. The next day you might stop a gangster approaching a victim. Either way, our job is to make stops regardless of paperwork.
We have a job to do. Some of us do it, while others pitch fits and cry about a few details. If you’re one of those who lets anything stand in the way of doing a good job, you should look for a personal change. Remember why you’re here. Promote or transfer into a position that fits your pace or leave the profession.
