Gordon Graham here! Fifty-one years ago, the California Highway Patrol took a chance and hired me – and what a great career I had there, retiring in 2006. I have also been honored to share my experiences and address problems within public safety proactively since 1977. I continue to try to learn something new every day. To achieve this goal, I talk with everyone I can in an effort to learn from those who truly understand what’s happening in law enforcement operations nationally.
Having said this, some conversations over the last three years have been troubling and I think that needs to be addressed. Quite often well-meaning people, undoubtedly with good hearts and intentions, have thrown something like this into our conversation: “Well Gordon, you know the problem is George Soros,” (or variations in place of “George Soros,” including “Black Lives Matter,” “progressive prosecutors,” “ignorant politicians,” “an uneducated public,” “an anti-police media” or other external group.
I fully agree that there are too many outside of law enforcement who say and do things that are questionable and do not consider the consequences of their words or actions. However, we have little or no control over their words and actions except to vote responsibly and continuously educate the public as to why and how we do what we do.
My belief, and I am not alone in this thinking, is that we need to focus inside law enforcement operations rather than outside our operations when tragedies occur. We need to ask, internally, “Did we have problems lying in wait within our operations that ultimately caused this tragedy?”
Questions to ask include:
- How do we select our personnel? Is there a better way to hire smart people from within our community?
- When was the last time the involved law enforcement officer/deputy/trooper/ranger/constable/detective was trained and tested on how to do the task that led to the tragedy?
- Where was the involved employee’s supervisor during this event? Was that supervisor really behaving like a supervisor?
- In past performance evaluations, was the involved employee truly and honestly rated? Or was this employee overrated simply because the evaluating supervisor was lazy and didn’t want to hold the employee accountable?
So many tragedies could be averted if we flip the mirror and look inside our operations rather than placing the blame externally. How to address the myriad “problems lying in wait” is the focus of UVA’s Master of Public Safety program. Program graduates learn how to address problems proactively instead of reactively. Personally, it is a great honor to be involved as an MPS lecturer and be associated with Dr. Gustafson and the great team he has put together. My goal is to give students proven strategies and tactics, allowing them to make their specific department a “high-reliability organization” that makes excellence the norm – not the deviation.