Leaders vs. Managers?
Have you ever said, “How did this guy get into a leadership role?”
Well you are not the only one then. I have stated hundreds of times that in our agency you don’t move up the ladder of success, you get pulled up by someone your buddies with. This, in my opinion, only promulgates the continuing failure of leadership at the top most hierarchy of the agency. I am a firm believer in blind testing and open interviews for supervisory positions conducted by outside individuals. This truly rules out any rumors of friendship promotions and puts the best candidate available into an open supervisory position. Sometimes you need a transfusion of new blood into the management in order to make advancements in the way the agency breathes. Read more…
The goal is to identify officers who pose a liability to the department and themselves. Even though obtaining a position in corrections and law enforcement is a difficult process at best we must consider the individuals who slip through the cracks. These are the officers who get the most complaints and consider themselves the mavericks or rock stars of the agency. These officers are the superheroes of the shift whose arrests or forcible takedowns are sometimes questionable and overly aggressive. 
In my previous article I made mention that “When it comes right down to it, many officers do not even know what constitutes Misconduct, or how it’s investigated in the first place.” Incredibly, I know that a few of you probably said to yourself that misconduct could never happen to me or at my agency. As you read the following TRUE articles pulled out of recent news papers ask yourself this question, “Do I really know myself, and what I would do in situations like these?” 
According to the governor’s office, two people have been taken hostage by a prisoner with a knife at the Maine State Prison in Warren. The incident began mid-afternoon and a negotiating team has made limited contact with the prisoner. Official have not identified the inmate but say he is in jail for robbery and aggravated assault. One hostage is a prisoner and one hostage is prison staff. Family members of the hostages have been notified. 
I thought that I knew how to verbally de-escalate individuals and generate voluntary compliance through my emanation of authority, that is, until my first day with inmates. When I was a police officer I was very confident in my weapons systems and had a clear understanding of the use of force continuum and where I stood as it related to my abilities. Verbal de-escalation was just a required term of action that I placed into my reports in order to justify the physical slam that just occurred. 
In the course of a day the average correctional officer can be deceived more often than they are spoken the truth. Inmates will mix truthful information with lies when speaking to officers and you need to be able to pick out the truths and discard the deceptions. Inmates rely on deception, manipulation and bewilderment in order to gain favors, outside contraband, a phone call or items such as an extra bar of soap. 
Before I started working behind the fence I always thought of manipulations as my three year old twins throwing a fit in the grocery store in order to get a sucker. Or my fifteen year old daughter crying and demanding that I answer the question “why” she cannot go to the basketball game, relentlessly. Well, as it turns out this is all a form of manipulation and in a sense, I as a parent, giving into their tantrums was teaching them from an early age that manipulation is an effective tool. So it should not have come as a surprise to me when I started to work in corrections that the incarcerated inmates were very adept at the art of manipulations. But today inmate manipulation is married to violence and aggression to keep an officer off balance out of bewilderment and fear. 
AKRON, Ohio — Stephen Krendick was identified this afternoon as the Summit County Sheriff’s deputy responsible for stomping on the head of inmate Mark D. McCullaugh Jr. during the fatal 2006 struggle at the county jail. Fellow deputy Keith Murray, who witnessed the struggle in McCullaugh’s fouled cell in the jail’s mental health unit, testified that McCullaugh was kneeling on the cell floor — his head over his bunk, his hands cuffed behind his back and his legs shackled — with four or five other deputies around him. ”I observed Deputy Krendick standing on the bunk, and I observed Deputy Krendick striking Mr. McCullaugh in the head with the bottom of his foot,” Murray said in questioning on the witness stand. 
Every time you interact with a citizen or inmate it seems that they are constantly complaining that you have violated their rights or treated them poorly or wronged them in some way. When it comes right down to it, many officers do not even know what constitutes “Misconduct” or how it’s investigated in the first place.