Mr. Criminal Goes to Washington

Many of you can remember the 1939 classic movie titled “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” For a refresher, it was a story about a naïve man who is appointed to fill a vacant U.S. Senate seat. He enters a Washington, D.C. that is filled with corruption. All the elected people in Congress have been compromised unbeknownst to Smith as he tries to make a difference and clean things up.

I use this backdrop because Washington D.C. remains the same place today that was depicted in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” In Washington, they are narcissists, oblivious to the world of pain and suffering around them. The political class is totally disconnected from the world, or in this case the country around them. They live in a bubble, a cocoon while insensitive to the plight of Americans living way out there dealing with real-life issues that need attention, things like inflation, rising food costs and rising fuel costs. Rent costs are rising, as is household debt. Rising interest rates have put owning a home out of reach. And then there is another crisis that people are experiencing that the political class in Washington has been insulated from, at least until now.

Crime, violence and disorder have ravaged cities all across America, as the D.C. elites live in area full of security and police and described in news stories as swanky neighborhoods. They haven’t had to live with the murder, assaults and armed robberies that go on unabated in every large urban city in America including neighborhoods surrounding the federal district. The neighborhoods surrounding the federal district have always been crime-ridden, but it was contained therein because elites live in neighborhoods that had been immune from real life outside the federal district. They got away with simply expressing faux concern and virtue signaled in front of television cameras when it happened to somebody else, but in truth they didn’t really care. But their arrogant indifference and attitude that those things happen over there, and not here, has caught up with them.

Several recent crime incidents have grabbed headlines. Now, we have the attention of D.C. media and of the political elite. It has been noted that carjackings in D.C. have smashed the total number that occurred in 2022, and that was a record year. Last year there were 360 carjackings in Washington, D.C. So far this year, there have been 757 incidents. Keep in mind that we are only in October so the total will undoubtedly continue to rise. More notably, several members of Congress have been victimized. Democrat U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar was recently carjacked outside his Navy Yard neighborhood apartment. Reports indicate that three young, masked males with guns drawn demanded his car along with his phone and luggage. Cuellar went on TV and said that Washington is about two or three times more dangerous than at the border in his district in Laredo, Texas- “and we certainly see it now.” Really? He only certainly sees it now? He even found some humor in recounting the incident by saying that he was more disappointed in losing his sushi that was in the car. This is a perfect example on how oblivious these elites in Washington feel and how disconnected they are from what everyday Americans have been dealing with for the last five or ten years of rising rates of crime, violence and disorder. But as long as crime doesn’t visit D.C. politicians, they whistle past the graveyard. I spent a 40-year career dealing with crime victims. I never saw a victim of a crime of violence joke about it later. Cuellar should get out of the bubble of Washington and visit some crime victim care centers or hospitals where victims of violence are being treated.

There is more indication that we see these elitists getting a dose of reality. Another news story was written that talked about how some D.C. lawmakers are so fearful about crime in the District that they are hunkering down and sleeping in their offices at the Capitol because it has become “very dangerous” after dark. This same U.S. Rep. said, “I don’t want to walk back and forth from an apartment in D.C. at night or in the early morning to get to work. It’s not a safe environment.” Oh really? I have to ask where the everyday citizen goes for respite from the dangers of the streets in their neighborhood that happen in broad daylight? They can’t hunker down in a taxpayer-funded office. The same congressman said that “It’s insane to even own a car in D.C. because it is likely to get broken into and you are likely to get carjacked.” Is this guy just now figuring out what life for the rest of the country is like? Yet another lawmaker said in response to the crime surge that, “Any reasonable person would be afraid of the increase in crime and the danger of being in the capital.” Wait a minute. Is it only important to do something about it because it is happening to them? I want to make something very clear. I don’t wish that crime and violence happen to anybody, but if it has to happen, I can’t think of more worthy people to be victimized than members of the elitist political class, many of them Democrats, who either voiced support for the cop haters after Ferguson, Missouri or after George Floyd that started the movement for defunding police, and if they didn’t say so publicly, their silence in the face of this war on police spoke volumns.

Yes, indeed, Mr. Criminal has gone to the Federal District in Washington. The only difference is that Mr. Criminal is not some naïve guy who doesn’t know what he is up against. Mr. Criminal isn’t there to make things better. He is taking advantage of the naïveté of the political elites. He is there to perpetrate misery and suffering. What political elitists don’t understand is that crime rates are like water. They seeks their own level. You can only put up so many sandbags or walls to protect or insulate yourself from a flood of crime and violence. If it doesn’t stop raining criminals, eventually they will find their way into, over and around any protective barriers.

Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. is former Sheriff of Milwaukee Co, Wisconsin, President of America’s Sheriff LLC, President of Rise Up Wisconsin INC, Board member of the Crime Research Center, author of the book Cop Under Fire: Beyond Hashtags of Race Crime and Politics for a Better America. To learn more visit www.americassheriff.com

PASSING THE TORCH

By: Joel E. Gordon

The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Abraham Lincoln

When my youngest son turned 21 and began to drive for our local ambulance service, already having volunteered with our local volunteer fire company for three years by then, I found myself reminiscing about my own calling in choosing law enforcement over a career in fire or EMS and thinking in greater detail about our future generation’s choices for their own career paths.

Way back when I was a single rookie cop and I remember some veteran officers saying if you’re looking for a date, tell any prospective companions that you’re a paramedic, or better yet firefighter, but don’t admit that you’re police. “People have more respect for firefighters” they would say. (Fortunately, I found a special lady who loves her law enforcement officer along with her EMT son).

I have seen many words used to describe these honorable professions in public safety such as: loyal, brave, trustworthy, courageous, strong, honored, dedicated, rescuer, heroes, fearless, warriors, guardians and protectors to name some, which describe all three areas of emergency responders being law enforcement/fire/EMS. The words smoke and fire really belong solely to the fire service however.

My son Evan, as a firefighter, has already experienced the heat, smoke and flames of a burning structure on multiple occasions. I always thought that he would follow in my footsteps as a law enforcement officer, but it may turn out that he will follow more in his mom’s former path. Sharon was an ambulance driver herself many years ago. While my son was still evaluating fulfilling a desire to become a West Virginia State Trooper, continued and seemingly unrelenting vilification of our police has given him some pause and reevaluation. Either way, the calling to public service runs in our family and is clearly in his blood.

In my case, in a different time and era, I had no doubt that I preferred a career in law enforcement. I had that belief reinforced on a cold winter dayshift. While on patrol, I was frantically waved down by a woman along the road. “Help me, help me” she said. “My grandchildren are in the house and it’s on fire”!

I immediately called out at the location and was quickly met by another officer as I grabbed my hat. We quickly entered a burning row house whose kitchen was ablaze. Immediately, although attempting to use my hat as a filter, I began to get choked back by the heavy smoke. We were of the belief that the children were on the second floor and we made it about halfway up the stairs until the heat and smoke became too overwhelming. As we turned to head back toward the exit I felt something strike me in my chest. Exiting the front door hacking and coughing from smoke inhalation I saw a small kitten jump off of my chest area from my winter uniform coat. It turned out that the grandchildren weren’t in the house after all but around the corner at a friend’s house.

The fire department was quickly on scene extinguishing the fire, returning me to service after having at least saved the kitten. To this day I am hopeful that I will never again be in a burning building.

Other more numerous incidents involving medical emergencies from assaults, gunshot wounds, stabbings, accidents and natural causes of which I found myself to be the first responder on-scene left no doubt in my mind that fire and EMS services were best left to others. I was always glad when an ambulance arrived to take over any medical emergency. I have seen amazing lifesaving procedures performed in the back of ambulances by dedicated EMT’s and paramedics.

I know that many law enforcement families besides mine also have future generations wanting to answer the call of others in need of help. It is my hope and prayer that each makes the best decisions for their own career paths and that success and safety follow them in all of the days of their lives as we pass the torch of public service.

We all must strive to make a positive difference in ways that we think we have the most to offer. In my own son’s case, he has become an emergency medical technician, swift water rescue, HAZMAT, and rope rescue certified firefighter, and has recently been employed by Monongalia County EMS in the home county of West Virginia University.

I do have one suggestion to those now beginning their own public service career paths: Keep a daily journal of your experiences and thoughts. Someday you’ll be glad that you did. You may even write your own memoir as you look back upon the career you created some day.

Kudos go out to all our deserving and brave firefighters, EMTs, police officers, sheriff’s deputies, dispatchers and paramedics. We have great respect, love, concern and admiration for all of you.

Joel E. Gordon, Managing Editor of BLUE Magazine, is a former Field Training Officer with the Baltimore City Police Department and is a past Chief of Police for the city of Kingwood, West Virginia. He has also served as vice-chair of a multi-jurisdictional regional narcotics task force. An award winning journalist, he is author of the book Still Seeking Justice: One Officer's Story and founded the Facebook group Police Authors Seeking Justice. Look him up at stillseekingjustice.com

Are People Finally Coming to Their Senses?

Several news stories that came out during the Labor Day holiday caught my attention. Several school districts are asking for a return to cops in schools as resource officers after they kicked them out in an overreaction to the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers. That incident had absolutely nothing to do with schools or resource officers. Now Minnesota schools have a different problem.

The Minnesota state legislature is being forced back into session after numerous police agencies pulled their officers from schools one week before classes begin. The reason for the decision comes after a new state law that limits physical restraints that can be used on students. Officers now are prohibited from using any type of restraint that impacts on a violent student's ability to breathe, including holds that put a student face down on the ground. One legislator said, “and we want to make sure they are being handled in a way that respects the fact that they are young, they’re children.” Let me stop there. First of all, we are not talking about “children”. For the most part we are talking about students in their teens. And second, there is this: What about the fact that these students have no respect for the fact that their behavior is disrupting the other students who are being denied learning time and that it might endanger other students in the immediate area? And what about injury to the officer trying to get the miscreant under control?

This creates a dilemma for responding officers. Any officer who has had to restrain somebody resisting arrest knows how difficult this can be and that you cannot predict the actions of the person they are trying to get under control. Officers have to be able to use all reasonable force under the circumstances to effect an arrest. The U.S. Supreme Court says so. Trying in the moment to decide how much and what kind of physical force to use cannot be based on some sterile how-to instruction sheet. Not to mention that this subjects officers to legal peril for not doing enough and sooner to gain control of a situation if other students or teachers are injured as a result. The legislature is still trying to resolve the concerns of this expanded policy with law enforcement executives. Too bad they didn’t have the foresight of getting law enforcement trainers involved when they were crafting this policy. This could have been avoided. Then again, this is what happens when politicians involve themselves in a science they know nothing about.

Next, let’s turn to a situation plaguing law enforcement for the last at least five years: the inability of agencies to fill vacancies. The exodus of officers taking early retirement or flat-out leaving the profession due to a number of reasons including defunding, lack of respect for the police, no support from the political class or law enforcement executives is exceeding the ability to hire replacements. Larger urban agencies are having a harder time with this than are smaller agencies that hire one officer at a time and can lure them from larger agencies by offering better pay and benefits. Hiring a cop is a lot more complex than hiring someone to work at Amazon, for instance. If agencies start lowering their hiring standards, they will pay for that down the road. History has shown that to be the case. California and Illinois have recently passed legislation to allow illegal aliens to apply for law enforcement positions. What the hell are they thinking about? How in the heck are they going to do a thorough background check? There is no way that they are going to be able to research this applicant's history. Many South and Central American countries do not have the record-keeping systems that we have on people. In fact, we are not going to be sure that the applicant is who they say they are, especially if they use an alias to apply.

That leads me to the situation with the Austin, Texas, police department. They are the latest to be hit with the vacancy dilemma. This was a city whose political class caved to the defund police advocates. The Austin Police Department had its budget cut by $150 million in 2020. The city council engaged in the left’s social engineering experiment of reimagining policing. Combine that with an overzealous political activist prosecutor who has indicted 20, yes 20 Austin police officers since 2020 and you can guess what the result has been: a mass stampede of officers leaving the department. And the hiring has not kept up, resulting in a vacancy gap. Since 2017, they have lost 800 officers. A crime surge has predictably followed, with car thefts up 77%, murders up 30% and aggravated assaults up 18% since the budget cuts in 2020. Wow, I never could have guessed that. You can plug and play any large urban area into this situation. Most are dealing with the same garbage, yet many political officials continue down the same path and make the same mindless decisions.

Austin police have been forced to pull detectives off of cases to answer 911 calls, meaning serious crimes go unsolved leaving perpetrators on the street to continue wreaking havoc. City residents and businesses are experiencing longer response times for serious calls for service. One business owner said he had to wait 10 days for police to respond to take a report for a non-emergency incident. The store owner said, “This isn’t working. You take away the police force and then ask us not to have weapons or anything in our stores to protect ourselves.” My attitude as a former sheriff was to remind citizens that they are the first line of defense in their own safety. I reminded them that they have a duty to protect themselves and that calling 911 may not always be their best option.

Law-abiding people have had it with this crap. More are taking matters into their own hands. Good for them. There is a growing sense of resignation in people’s confidence that government is adequately doing what is their most important responsibility, that being the personal safety of citizens.

It is going to take a long time to reverse this damage done to public safety. My message to law-abiding citizens is that you are being abandoned by your government when it comes to law and order. Their message through inaction is that you are on your own. I won’t tell you what to do, but I know I am prepared to protect myself. I have a sign in the front window of my home that depicts a handgun and a Rottweiler, and it reads: We don’t dial 911.

Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. is the former Sheriff of Milwaukee Co, Wisconsin, President of America’s Sheriff LLC, President of Rise Up Wisconsin INC, Board member of the Crime Research Center, author of the book Cop Under Fire: Beyond Hashtags of Race Crime and Politics for a Better America. To learn more visit www.americassheriff.com

My Take: TRY THAT IN A SMALL TOWN

By: Joel E. Gordon

Baltimore City MD - Population (est.) 585,462 Crofton MD - Population (est.) 27,348 Kingwood WV - Population (est.) 3,116

Masontown WV - Population 535 Whether policing a small-town West Virginia county seat, a Washington, D.C. suburb or a police post in the city of Baltimore, and whether located in an affluent area or one on the other end of the socioeconomic scale, my primary area of responsibility or home base was always my own "small town." Why would that be? Because the relationships in a small-town atmosphere are conducive to public safety. Knowledge of an area facilitates a low-crime, respectful atmosphere reminiscent of days gone by. Think Mayberry.

Getting to know the people in your primary area of responsibility, be they residents, business owners, troublemakers (or all three – lol) allows you to keep your finger on the pulse of any area and provides investigative resources which otherwise might not be available. Earned trust and belonging is really what it’s all about.

When listening to the hit Jason Aldean song Try that in a small town, I fail to correlate the lyrics or music video images to a racial reference but rather why small-town mentality and atmosphere lends itself to a greater sense of peace, tranquility and overall safety.

Progressivism or other political ideologies become much less of a factor when we reduce our needs to be explained in the simple terms of the father of modern psychology, Abraham Maslow: >Affection: we care and are cared about. >Belonging: common goals such as peace and safety as a group endeavor. >Recognition: acknowledgment of our achievements along with any deficits needing improvement. We are all alike in our needs. It is a simple but effective way to understand the human equation.

Familiarity with others within the small-town atmosphere lends itself to greater accountability for one’s actions. As a Drug Abuse Resistance Education instructor, one of the lessons I taught was one of rights versus responsibility. For example, if you have the right to be heard (you do) then you have a responsibility to listen to others (you should). This was a simple lesson for my fifth- and sixth-grade students to grasp and understand so it should be easy for all to live by, but somehow seems diminished in the age of cancel culture. When dealing with others on a respectful basic humanistic level, priorities become more clearly aligned with universally desired results.

Merit, fairness, kindness, apathy and togetherness are among the many positive traits of small-town life. For me, life in my adopted home town of Masontown, West Virginia, provides the quality of life sought by myself and apparently many others looking for a better way of life for themselves and their families. Preston County (population 34,426) is home to Masontown, located in North Central West Virginia, which is listed among the fastest-growing counties in the state. I have resided in Preston County since 1992 and am glad that I had the foresight to do so.

Perhaps my perspective is a result from being born and raised in the City of Baltimore and then working and residing in a variety of atmospheres during my lifetime and career in law enforcement. But my belief that a small-town mindset is best for quality of life remains steadfast. As someone wishing to be heard, I am open to listening to the view of others, but to my way of thinking, Try that in a small town was written to heighten awareness of quality of life in any locale with small-town beliefs and respect for the rights of other law-abiding inhabitants.

Joel E. Gordon, Managing Editor of BLUE Magazine, is a former Field Training Officer with the Baltimore City Police Department and is a past Chief of Police for the city of Kingwood, West Virginia. He has also served as vice-chair of a multi-jurisdictional regional narcotics task force. An award winning journalist, he is author of the book Still Seeking Justice: One Officer's Story and founded the Facebook group Police Authors Seeking Justice. Look him up at stillseekingjustice.com

Re-Imagining Policing Goes Up In Smoke

Ever since the war on cops began in earnest nearly ten years ago, cop-hating activists masquerading as sociologists have begun deconstructing American policing by turning the profession into something that was bound to fail. Reform panels began popping up in every major urban city across America. Even former President Barack Obama convened a Task Force on 21st Century Policing that produced a work product of recommendations that were supposed to solve all the problems within policing. These panels included people who knew nothing about the science of policing, including what works and why. Notorious anti-police members of local Black Lives Matter chapters sat on the reform panels as they deconstructed decades of proven methods that enable officers to keep the peace and protect law and order. The things they suggested were inane, and I predicted that this would lead to an increase in crime and get officers and civilians killed and injured. Nonetheless, city leaders and elected officials moved forward.

We are now witnessing a byproduct of this reform effort. De-policing is occurring. Cops are not being as assertive as they need to be. Adding to that are state prosecutors who are on their own capitulation jihad to criminals by refusing to charge career violent offenders. A recent study showed that 69% of criminal cases have been tossed out by New York State prosecutors. That’s right, outright dismissed. And to top it off, legislative policies are being enacted like no bail for some serious criminal behavior. New York Mayor Eric Adams has lost all control of the subway system and then blamed the media for paying too much attention to crime. This as his soft on crime Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Adams finally admits that even he is fearful of crime on the New York subway system as rape, aggravated assaults and turnstile jumping have become a part of the experience for the tens of thousands of strap-hangers using the system daily.

The cluelessness from these elected officials just keeps finding new lows. In Chicago, the newly elected Mayor Brandon Johnson is failing miserably in his responsibility to keep his city safe from crime and disorder. In his infinite wisdom in dealing with a spate of mobs of out-of-control youths, instead of ordering Chicago police administrators to crack down on this untenable behavior, he decided to rename what we all know is unacceptable and criminal behavior. At a recent news conference after what is becoming the norm in the Windy City as weekend street violence reaches staggering levels, he scolded a reporter who referred to these roving bands as a mob. He said, and I am not making this up, “it is important to speak of these dynamics in an appropriate way”. He called them “large gatherings”. He then commended the Chicago police for “attempting to engage with our young people and give them as much warning as they possibly could”. Mass looting occurred and store owners said that this was the second such incident in as many weeks. Police reported that they made 40 arrests. What will happen with those cases remains to be seen in light of this decriminalization era we are in. In Washington D.C., over 60 percent of arrests lead to no charge being issued by the prosecutor’s office. Now, let’s dissect some of that.

So now the plan is to just rename criminal behavior so that it is no longer unlawful. The left tried this previously in calling riots “peaceful protests.” Mayor Johnson participated in this re-imagining by calling mobs, “large gatherings”. Heck, why stop there, mayor? Instead of calling the theft of a retail businesses’ property looting, why not just call it a form of reparations for slavery? This is leading business owners and employees to take matters into their own hands. Several videos are going viral where employees move in to stop the thieves with physical force. Law-abiding people are fed up with the lack of police response to crime and disorder and so they feel that they have no recourse but to take matters into their own hands.

Governments at the state and local level have as their most important responsibility to ensure the personal safety of citizens. Today, they are failing at it and failing miserably. You can’t go one day without reading a newspaper story or seeing on television news or an online account of the out-of-control criminal chaos going on in every large city in America. If the government is not willing to live up to its most important responsibility, then they have to allow and provide the means with which the individual can protect themselves. A few suggestions are to pass stand your ground and castle doctrine laws and make it easier for law-abiding citizens to arm themselves for their protection. Instead, these liberal elected officials are making it more difficult for people to protect themselves and their families, and when they do get into a scenario where they confront a threat to their survival, woke prosecutors look for ways to charge the victim instead of the perpetrator. Ask Daniel Penny, the strap-hanger on a New York subway car who felt, and reasonably I might add, that he and fellow passengers were being threatened by a crazed lunatic. The perp died from a chokehold during the encounter. Penny is facing several serious felony charges including manslaughter. This wasn’t reckless, it was an accidental death. He performed in a way that his military training taught him. Prosecutors cannot hold citizens to a standard we do with trained law enforcement officers. An Illinois sheriff issued a stern warning to prosecutors urging them not to be overzealous in targeting victims who use force to defend themselves. I second that motion.

Law-abiding people have had it being murdered, raped, threatened, assaulted, and having their property taken with no recourse. I am with them. Enough of this lawlessness.

Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. is former Sheriff of Milwaukee Co, Wisconsin, President of America’s Sheriff LLC, President of Rise Up Wisconsin INC, Board member of the Crime Research Center, author of the book Cop Under Fire: Beyond Hashtags of Race Crime and Politics for a Better America. To learn more visit www.americassheriff.com

The Great Escape: EVOLUTION TO EXODUS

By: Joel E. Gordon

What a challenging time we continue to find ourselves in.

During the last many months and years, the trust people have placed in every level of government has greatly diminished. One result is the many new plans and restrictions that are being proposed and implemented in an attempt to hold police accountable. Where however, are the plans to hold those for criminal acts and all of the chaos and destruction accountable? Where are the plans to reduce the violence? Where are the plans to improve community relations instead using such divisive measures that only serve to portray police as the enemy? 

So who are the people that are mostly proposing plans for reform and police oversight? Is it professionals with extensive knowledge of the law, a perspective on the evolution of law enforcement and of the job itself? No, instead in many communities it is comprised of politicians and ordinary citizens with anti-police agendas; facts be damned. Would you want a committee of non-medical people organized to monitor doctors or non-educational persons to educate educators? Maybe there should be a committee of non-aviation people to tell pilots how to fly aircraft? 

Law Enforcement has evolved from a Reactionary Policing model to Proactive Policing to Community Policing to Broken Windows Theory to Intelligence Lead Policing into Evidence Based Policing. What is referred to as Evidence Based Policing is subjective and is the brainchild of academia. It makes judgments on outcomes opening the door to many unresolved contradictory ideas which routinely override long established mandates and opportunity for personal growth and promotion. Since subjective to the whims of political correctness many unintended consequences are resulting in an environment which is untenable to the newer generation of law enforcement leaders who were, in fact, in many cases born of the culture of the importance of the diversity philosophy.

Ever watched dominoes falling in real time? The sad reality is that many in law enforcement are throwing in the towel and just can't take it anymore. The pressure of the job and sudden pivot away from decades old reforms for diversity, increased training with community policing and de-escalation techniques being replaced by a cry for sweeping defunding have resulted in reevaluation of many considering entering the profession along with many resignations of many tenured and highly respected law enforcement leaders, a substantial number many of which who identified as minority professionals that successfully earned their way up in the ranks. From Dallas to Seattle. to an entire command staff in Rochester New York, along with many other chiefs nationwide, the time to move out of law enforcement had come on the heels of their defiance against those with an anti-police mindset, ideology and agenda. 

Will this result in more feckless police leadership remaining in office or in being hired who will be willing to put their officers in unsafe, retreating or defenseless positions at the behest of those lacking sufficient knowledge to make informed or rational judgments? Society can’t reasonably expect law enforcement to succumb to violence without responding in such a fashion as to protect the very lives of the protectors themselves. No one signed up to be physically harmed by becoming a law enforcement officer.

Although the job remains largely one of regulating human behavior, the desire to help others continues to be the driving motivational force and reason that some still answer the calling to keep the peace.

The bottom line appears to be that regardless of the current preferred practiced model of policing, or the high level of professional training implemented, the idea that the police are unwanted (until needed for selfish or individual safety reasons) has become the guiding principle of those politicians holding the power of life and death over our future.

The way forward remains a mystery. I have long professed that we must reject an "us versus them" mentality. In this current environment, through the actions of many others, it seems increasingly difficult to maintain this mindset. The truth remains, however, we are all in this TOGETHER. Unfortunately though, if things continue on their current trajectory this clearly isn’t likely to be ending well for the common good.

Joel E. Gordon, Managing Editor of BLUE Magazine, is a former Field Training Officer with the Baltimore City Police Department and is a past Chief of Police for the city of Kingwood, West Virginia. He has also served as vice-chair of a multi-jurisdictional regional narcotics task force. An award winning journalist, he is author of the book Still Seeking Justice: One Officer's Story and founded the Facebook group Police Authors Seeking Justice. Look him up at stillseekingjustice.com

From Coast to Coast

There was a time in policing circles where being a cop in an agency like NYPD, LAPD, Chicago Police Department or any other large urban police department came with a sense of pride, and among your friends and neighbors you were considered to be your community’s finest. Not so much anymore.

A recent Los Angeles Times story details how the vice president of the Los Angeles Police union took to social media to post the following comment. “Go somewhere that respects the work you do and don’t have to beg for a great contract. Go somewhere that has a city council or city manager that openly acknowledges the great work you do, go somewhere that doesn’t have two or more city council members who hate you (no exaggeration).”

My initial reaction to reading this was that it’s about freaking time someone said what needs to be said. My only disagreement with the post was that she later deleted it. But why? She said after removing it that she stood by her words. Then why not say what you mean and mean what you say and leave it posted?

I have long maintained that it is the police unions, fraternal order of police organizations and Police Benevolence Associations that have to take the lead in pushing back on local governments that are not supporting police agencies the way they should be, and on top of that these officers for sure are not getting the support they need and deserve from their top brass as I detailed in my last column posted on this very site. The only way police unions are going to get the attention of city officials is to become more vocal and to not pull any punches. The LAPD union vice president articulated among the grievances of being a cop in L.A. are a ban on displaying the thin blue line flag and a lack of a great contract. I find it commonplace that city officials find no urgency in getting a contract offer to police unions on time like they do other city employee unions. In fact, the L.A. city council president said that he was hopeful that a proposed contract deal could be reached when the council returns from its summer break. Oh, how nice. We wouldn’t want to disrupt their summer recess just to get a new police contract done. This is an insult. It signals to the officer that this is not a priority for them. They vacation while officers grind it out in the heat and during the busiest time of the year with calls for service. The thin blue line flag ban came down from L.A. police chief Michael Moore. It was an act of capitulation by Moore to pressure from cop haters who call the flag a symbol of right-wing extremism. Moore knows that it is not, but then again, maybe he doesn’t know it is not.

I don’t blame the union vice president for hinting that LAPD cops consider leaving their department. Working for a large urban agency has become an impossible and thankless endeavor. LAPD is already hemorrhaging officers with a flood of retirements and resignations as are most large police departments in the aftermath of the defund the police movement and because of politically active state prosecutors who won’t charge repeat violent offenders but are quick to charge officers for actions caused through no fault of their own. These officers made this decision to leave on their own and in this anti-police environment, who would blame them?
Now onto the East Coast where New York City continues to disintegrate into chaos under Mayor Eric Adams.

Recently, New York City agreed to a nearly $14 million class action settlement with people arrested by NYPD officers in May of 2020 after the George Floyd incident. Over 1300 people were arrested at the time. News stories point out that what started out as peaceful protest in these cities devolved into rioting, looting, arson of businesses and public buildings. This is always the case. It starts out well-intentioned, but it eventually evolves into a riot. Police are expected to keep the peace and protect life and property. They have to use every reasonable tactic to accomplish this. Those include mass arrests, tear gas and the deployment of other less-than-lethal options. I don’t doubt that a few people not participating in looting and arson get caught up in the melee. How are the police in this chaos supposed to determine on a case-by-case basis who is doing what? It is mass pandemonium. The cops are being attacked and assaulted, are having rocks, bottles and other objects hurled at them. Some suffered significant injuries.

This settlement in New York City is not the first. Other cities with criminal-sympathizing and cop-hating elected officials have handed out cash settlements to rioters. In Philadelphia, they agreed to an over $9 million giveaway over allegations of “physical and emotional injuries” by police. What about the “physical and emotional injuries” suffered by police officers in these riots? Have these people thought about how suicide is now the leading cause of death for police and that no other profession is at crisis level for suicides due in part to the emotional strain of police work? And then there is Denver, Colorado, that has paid out nearly $4 million to settle protesters’ claims, and a jury awarded a $14 million verdict to settle protesters’ claims.

Folks, we have lost our minds. Cities capitulating to rioters is entering a very dark place on the subject of law and order. There should be no class action suits on this stuff, only individual claims where a person claiming harm has to present in court specific evidence of harm against a specific police officer. Smearing an entire agency leaves all the officers not involved bitter. They get no chance to defend their reputations. City officials could care less that the integrity of the police department will now come into question. Rioting has become a lawfully sanctioned activity in urban centers.

And one more thing. Where is the settlement for the businesses that were looted, with some completely destroyed as officers were given stand-down orders from police executives? It is estimated that $2 billion in property damage occurred nationally from the Black Lives Matter riots. What about the insurance deductibles that had to be covered by the business owner, and keep in mind that some policies didn’t include loss from riots? Where is the settlement for the business owners from these cities? And how about the officers who were injured and killed? Where is their settlement from the city for not providing them with the necessary equipment to quell a riot after the agencies were defunded?

Every time I think we have seen the worst in this war on cops, liberal city officials find a new low to take us to. This gives relevance to the saying that ethically, the elevator of liberal elected politicians has no bottom floor.

Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. is former Sheriff of Milwaukee Co, Wisconsin, President of America’s Sheriff LLC, President of Rise Up Wisconsin INC, Board member of the Crime Research Center, author of the book Cop Under Fire: Beyond Hashtags of Race Crime and Politics for a Better America. To learn more visit www.americassheriff.com

Welcome to the Club

A recent news story details that police departments across the country are experiencing a mad dash for the exits by police chiefs in large metropolitan departments across the country and that these agencies are finding it difficult to find replacements. Boy is that a switch. My experience after 40 years in law enforcement in a large urban city and county and having served as sheriff for nearly 16 years has been that these positions were highly coveted and extremely competitive. Every one of my four elections were hotly contested. How could this have happened? I am about to tell you why these positions are no longer desired.

Let’s look at the reasons given by several chief executives after first looking at some data. A Gallup poll shows that confidence in law enforcement as a whole is at its lowest level in 30 years, with only 45% of respondents saying they had confidence. A Washington Post poll showed that only 39% believe that cops are properly trained in the use of force and only 41% said that police treat black and white people equally. The news story pointed out that heightened media scrutiny has chipped away at the public’s view of the policing profession.

Here are some comments from now-retired police chiefs. One said, “You are seeing the manifestation of the negative view of law enforcement for the last 10 years and it’s becoming more and more huge.” Another said, “… command staff will not accept a promotion because as you progress through your career, you want stability, you want to maintain your retirement. Wandering into that minefield of being a police chief can really put your whole career and financial security at risk.” I would be remiss if I didn’t jump on that comment like a bum on a baloney sandwich. This statement reeks of a sense that the best interest of his retirement is more important than the best interest of the organization and the people he leads. No wonder many of these self-serving people kept their head down as the profession was under attack.

Now this police chief knows what officers on the front line have been dealing with since the start of the war on cops began, after Ferguson, Missouri, officer Darren Wilson lawfully defended himself against a thug named Mike Brown who was trying to disarm the officer. I was one of the only law enforcement executives at the time standing up and publicly defending the honor, courage, integrity, commitment and sacrifice of the front-line police officers against this full-throated assault against this profession. Many chief executives stood by muted against these smears. Some even joined with the cop haters. I saw one picture of a California chief standing with Black Lives Matter agitators, and he held a sign that read Black Lives Matter. Other executives joined panels and task forces pushing police reform and BLM was represented at the table. BLM is a Marxist movement. They are straight-up cop haters. Why would any police chief sit down with people trying to destroy the profession? Additionally, some chiefs have banned the display of the thin blue line flag after complaints from Black Lives Matter. These chiefs said the flag doesn’t represent the values of the agency or the profession. Some chiefs quickly made the decision to fire officers involved in deadly use of force even before the investigation was concluded. This happened in Louisville and Baltimore. Due process was thrown overboard before court proceedings to appease an angry mob and to try to ward off riots. Some of the officers were exonerated. How do you put that toothpaste back in the tube?

What was needed was a counter-narrative by law enforcement bosses that could easily shoot down the lies being spread about police officers and thereby influence public opinion the other way and in support of police. Instead, we got capitulation and virtue signaling in an attempt to appease those making life miserable for front-line officers. All the public heard were the lies and misinformation. There is no evidence that supports any of the lies about police use of force. There are ample studies and data that shows that white officers are more likely to use deadly force against white perpetrators, not black perps. News stories left out the fact that many of the black perps killed by police were armed. Additionally, the use of deadly force has actually gone down significantly over the last decade.

I said at the time in 2014 that the damage being done to this profession would be profound and hard to reverse. I said it would hurt recruiting efforts in the future. Well, that day has arrived as agencies try to keep up with the flood of officers leaving the profession while hiring has stagnated. The front-line street cops needed to hear their agency head publicly defend them against the lies being promoted by the cop haters from Black Lives Matter, Antifa and Democrat politicians who got into bed with them. There should have been an aggressive pushback strategy against any attempt by mayors eager to enter into a consent decree with the United States Department of Justice. These hamper effective crime-fighting strategies The silence from chief executives on this was deafening.

Leadership was absent and only now we are hearing from chiefs. Most of them have their pension secured. Meanwhile the rank-and-file officers were leaving the profession, many of whom did not reach retirement age. All these years of service went up in smoke. It just wasn’t worth it anymore. I talk to law enforcement officers all across the country. The number one thing they say to me is that they don’t feel they have the support of their department head. That is very telling.

Another problem is the musical chairs played by chief executives who hop from one agency to another. They quit one agency and then are hired by another. This merry-go-round is the creation of the Police Executive Research Foundation. They advise mayors on who to hire. This has been a failed head-hunting experiment and needs to stop. And let the police union and Fraternal Order of Police have a seat at the table when the search is in progress and not after a selection has been made.

And only now are we hearing about how tough it has been from police chief executives. Myself? I don’t want to hear them whine and lament about how tough they had it while making salaries that average a quarter of a million dollars a year. How many of them have been injured or killed in the line of duty? And while rank and file cops are experiencing record numbers of suicides due to the stresses of the work environment, how many chiefs have committed suicide?

In the end I only want to hear from street cops. The executives can just go away.

Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. is former Sheriff of Milwaukee Co, Wisconsin, President of America’s Sheriff LLC, President of Rise Up Wisconsin INC, Board member of the Crime Research Center, author of the book Cop Under Fire: Beyond Hashtags of Race Crime and Politics for a Better America. To learn more visit www.americassheriff.com

CRIME REDUCTION or DUPING THE GULLIBLE?

By: Joel E. Gordon

A Group Violence Reduction Strategy (GVRS) was implemented by the Baltimore City Police Department. This strategy aims to address the norms perpetuating violence in Baltimore by focusing resources on individuals identified as being at the highest acute risk of involvement in gun violence. GVRS is also known as focused deterrence requiring sufficient manpower to step up police interactions in crime-ridden zones.

With limited manpower and shifting coverage priorities, the question has become whether crime is being actually reduced or simply being moved or displaced.

Baltimore’s Mayor and former Police Commissioner Michael Harrison claimed there was no evidence of Crime Displacement but the numbers may tell a different story.

"It is important to note, a recent study from the University of Pennsylvania’s crime and justice policy lab found no evidence of displacement when analyzing whether the focus population moved from the Western District to adjacent districts," said Harrison.

So, people are asking why is crime to the north and south on the rise? In the Northeastern District specifically, homicides have exploded by 111% in the last year. And in the Southern District, they've jumped 28%. Meanwhile, city-wide homicides have still surpassed 300 for the 8th straight year in 2022.

"Displacement is a real thing. Displacement is something that we do see when any type of enforcement or criminal justice strategy is employed in a particular area, we do tend to see increases elsewhere," said former Baltimore Police Deputy Commissioner Jason Johnson.

A police presence can be a deterrent for criminal behavior. My own goal as a community cop with a primary area of responsibility was to eradicate criminal behavior on my watch in my area of responsibility. In fact, I was always proud to belong to a shift or agency where crime prevention, to the extent possible, was a number one goal behind staying safe and returning home unharmed at the end of each tour of duty.

One evening just past dusk back in my inner-city policing days, I remember noticing a young teenager standing on a corner near a hardware store. This didn’t look right, as he appeared to be nervous. I did not tip my hand, driving past him and parking out of his sight. He must have either frozen, or maybe I really tricked him into thinking I wasn’t paying attention, because he failed to sound the customary “5-0” signal verbalizing a police presence (as in Hawaii 5-0). Upon my walking back toward the store, I saw that the kid was a lookout and his accomplice was chiseling out cinder blocks with a hammer in an attempt break in to the store without activating its alarm. Both were arrested before they could gain access to the inside of the store. In a response to attempt to reduce crime and juvenile mischief later at night, the city had enacted a curfew law for those underage. (By the way a new curfew has been recently enacted despite police manpower shortages).

Then there was the group of teenagers who were breaking into businesses on my post while I was working midnight shift in the summer of 1982. In Baltimore City, the curfew existed for school-age youth past 10 p.m. on weekdays and 11 p.m. on weekends where they were not allowed on the street without adult supervision. Numerous burglaries were occurring on my post in ways not easily detected, such as through rooftop ductwork and the like. Mind you, I was very good at “trying up” or checking to see that my businesses were locked up tight. In the winter, supervisors would occasionally meet you to see if you had been out of the car checking by feeling to see if your badge was cold. I would also leave “tell tales” at areas and doorways already checked. A tree branch or Coke bottle would do. When I spotlighted past these areas, the “tell-tale” would have to have been moved for an intrusion to have occurred at that potential point of entry. In spite of this, just about every day of the week, dayshift was getting a call at one of my businesses for a burglary.

I stepped up my patrol efforts and began to discover a group of four or five teenagers in violation of curfew, nightly. I would catch them and transport them to the “Best Western” as we would refer to our station. There they would wait for their parents to sign for their future court appearance and pick them up. They were back out before I completed my paperwork on them. After several nights of charging the same kids for curfew violations, my problems with businesses being broken into ceased. Being the most southwestern post in the Western District, the Southwestern District was at the southern and western boundary to my post. The officers who worked on the other side of the street worked off of a different radio frequency than I did and reported to a different station for roll call. It was really not much different than if we worked for different jurisdictions.

You see, the curfew violators got tired of dealing with me and my burglary problem stopped. But 834 post of the Southwestern District, to the south of my Baltimore Street boundary, saw a sudden spike in midnight shift commercial burglaries. The police and the criminals know these artificial boundaries and the juveniles just moved their activity to the south. Although I never caught them at it, they were the burglars.

I learned a valuable lesson from this that would later serve me well as a security consultant in the private sector years later: You can’t always truly prevent crime, but you can move it by taking opportunity away through increased risk of being caught. This is why signage and a well-placed alarm/surveillance system reduces your chances of being a victim and increases your unprotected neighbor’s chances of a break-in.

Although displacement of crime is real; do police ever truly prevent crime? Yes, but in the absence of incarceration, diversion or rehabilitation of the offenders, crime displacement based solely upon street-level police enforcement efforts is, in fact, often a likely result.

In spite of what is known, Baltimore’s new police commissioner, Rich Worley, has vowed to continue the GVRS strategy despite a turnover in personnel in the unit; even bringing back a previously retired police commander to lead the effort. Let’s hope that lessons learned will bring about real solutions to positively impact crime rates in Baltimore and elsewhere.

Joel E. Gordon, Managing Editor of BLUE Magazine, is a former Field Training Officer with the Baltimore City Police Department and is a past Chief of Police for the city of Kingwood, West Virginia. He has also served as vice-chair of a multi-jurisdictional regional narcotics task force. An award winning journalist, he is author of the book Still Seeking Justice: One Officer's Story and founded the Facebook group Police Authors Seeking Justice. Look him up at stillseekingjustice.com

NYPD Blues

In the popular ‘60s TV show “Batman,” Gotham City, which is the fictional name for New York City, had a police commissioner named James Gordon who had the difficult task of maintaining law and order and keeping the peace. Gordon relied on Batman and Robin, who were his duly deputized agents of the law. He had a hotline to immediately contact the dynamic duo. The mayor of Gotham City wasn’t mentioned. The police commissioner ran the department. That, however, is not real life for today’s big city police executives.

Once upon a time there was a clear line of separation between the political class and the police. The thinking was to keep politics from seeping into law enforcement. Political decisions in policing can lead to a mistrust of law enforcement agencies. With political interference, people begin to wonder if certain decisions on things like enforcement strategies are politically motivated. That day is over, however, as more mayors and city councils are exerting their influence over their police departments. In most cities, the mayor has the final say over the selection of a chief, superintendent or commissioner. That makes it very clear that the person chosen will be accountable to the mayor. In and of itself that is understandable, as a mayor is responsible for things going on in municipalities. Their political survival can rise or fall based on public safety. But how much kibitzing is too much? That is the dilemma for today’s police executive and city mayors.

Recently this reared its ugly head in Gotham City. NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell recently resigned after a year and a half in the position. She didn’t provide a reason for her departure, but according to one newspaper story, an unnamed source said that, “She was fed up and she was tired of being their puppet.” This was a reference to Mayor Adams interfering in day-to-day operations. The story indicated that Sewell’s relationship with City Hall deteriorated in recent months, and she felt constrained when making important department decisions even in the area of promotions where she, according to a source, had to run these moves past Adams. A follow-up news story said that a source told them that a third-grade detective was really running the department and that he had a direct line to Mayor Adams. Personnel decisions should be up to Sewell. That is untenable. I would talk to the mayor about it first and demand that it stop. Then I would move the shadow detective to a desk assignment. Then I would remind Adams that I was hired to run the NYPD and if he didn’t like that directness then dare him to fire me. With all the other problems New York City is facing, Adams doesn’t need this public relations disaster with the NYPD.

Personnel decisions are policy. It makes it clear what she wants done and how she wants it done. If the mayor makes the choice, then that person’s loyalty will not be to Sewell but to Adams. Another source said that her abrupt resignation caught the mayor off-guard. Really?

Let me make a few observations here. First of all, when she took the position, she had to know that she would be serving at the pleasure of the mayor. She should have known that she would not have complete autonomy. Adams, being a former NYPD commander, for sure wants to run the largest police agency in practically the entire world with a reported 55,000 members. It has been his dream. After becoming mayor, he created several new positions to oversee the NYPD. That in and of itself made it difficult for Sewell to run the agency without the sense that someone was looking over her shoulder.

Every New York mayor wants to run the NYPD, some less so and some more so. In fact, even former Commissioner William Bratton ran into personality clashes with then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani after awhile and the increasing friction led to his departure even with all the success they had driving down crime, violence and disorder. Personality clashes got in the way. Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg was less hands-on while former Mayor Bill DeBlasio was very hands-on. To be honest, it’s my thought that Adams wasn’t caught off-guard. He wanted her resignation. It’s better politically if she resigns rather than him firing the first female police commissioner of the NYPD. Also, in a city with the media coverage of New York, this continuing head-butting would eventually have their toxic and deteriorating relationship make its way into tabloid media sites. Nobody benefits from that, especially internally with the rank and file who become confused as to who is in charge and who they should show allegiance to. Some will even exploit it to get ahead. I give Sewell credit for resigning rather than waiting to be fired and claiming victim status.

Adams was asked at one news conference about his micro-managing, heavy-handed style to which he replied, “Let me be clear because this is important. The people of the city of New York elected one mayor, Eric Adams. That’s who they elected.” That tells you all you need to know about Adams’ personality. It is all about him. The people of the city of New York elected him to run the city in general, and in defense of Adams I must say that he is responsible for all city departments. A better style of leadership, however, is to appoint competent people to run specific agencies and then have the wherewithal to stay out of the way and let them do what they know how to do. Periodic staff meetings with department heads can keep Adams in the loop. Inevitably the mayor is responsible, and holding his appointees accountable is fine. Finding that sweet spot of trusting your staff is the challenge of effective leadership. Adams, it seems, has a long way to go in that area.

How does the saga for NYPD end? The “Batman” TV series episodes would always sign off by telling viewers to stay tuned. Same bat time, same bat station.

Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. is former Sheriff of Milwaukee Co, Wisconsin, President of America’s Sheriff LLC, President of Rise Up Wisconsin INC, Board member of the Crime Research Center, author of the book Cop Under Fire: Beyond Hashtags of Race Crime and Politics for a Better America. To learn more visit www.americassheriff.com

GOOD NEWS? A Native Baltimorean Emerges as the New Police Commissioner

By: Joel E. Gordon

As a former Baltimore police officer, I have long advocated for promotions from within the department. I have referenced my belief repeatedly on this topic citing the need for someone already with their finger on the pulse of the city who could potentially have a head start on restoring faith to the department and the community as its commissioner. Was anyone listening? Perhaps that message has gotten through. Michael Harrison, who has led the Baltimore department through federal reforms for the last four years, is stepping down from his position.

Richard Worley, is a son of Baltimore and a 25-year Baltimore police veteran who had risen through the ranks to Deputy Commissioner of operations. Mayor Brandon Scott nominated Worley as interim Baltimore police department commissioner and said he intends to nominate him to the position permanently. Worley’s Baltimore roots, experience within the department and his approach to the broader community were of importance in the decision, the mayor said.

Harrison was hired as a reform Commissioner with a primary focus on consent decree implementation. He previously led the New Orleans Louisiana Police Department, where he worked that department toward compliance with its federal consent decree. Gun violence and staffing issues have been extremely troublesome during Harrison’s tenure in Baltimore.

Prior to his departure, Harrison became an issue during a police budget hearing, when City Councilman Eric Costello tried to get Harrison to say whether he intended to serve out the rest of his contract to March 2024. Harrison responded, saying that he serves “at the pleasure of the mayor” and in order to answer the question “I have to know where the mayor stands on that answer before I can actually answer the question.” Harrison said he had “said no to many opportunities that have come, but there may be a consideration that I may have to consider if it comes, if and when it comes, I may have to make that consideration.”

It didn’t take long for the truth on Harrison’s departure to be revealed. Mayor Scott said that after “numerous conversations over the past few weeks it became clear to both of he and Harrison that this was the right time to make this transition.” Harrison stated that he has no current offers and has not yet interviewed for any other jobs. “The first thing is for me is to breathe. The second thing is to make sure I’m here to help the new police commissioner get acclimated to the work.”

Harrison had largely lost the confidence of the city’s Fraternal Order of Police leadership and many in the community.

The Baltimore City Fraternal Order of Police responded via Twitter:

(Today), FOP3 learned that PC Harrison will be leaving @BaltimorePolice after 4 long years. The #1 responsibility of a PC is to protect its citizens from violent criminals today, tomorrow, and next week rather than to holistically plan for decades of social work. That is for others. How many have lost their lives from this failed approach? We know Acting PC Worley and we communicate well with him. It is our desire to continue to do so and we hope that he focuses on retention and recruitment because without those numbers increasing we cannot fulfill our first priority to protect our citizens.

Will the new police commissioner be a positive leap forward? Time is of the essence. Let’s all hope he is successful in his earned position.

Joel E. Gordon, Managing Editor of BLUE Magazine, is a former Field Training Officer with the Baltimore City Police Department and is a past Chief of Police for the city of Kingwood, West Virginia. He has also served as vice-chair of a multi-jurisdictional regional narcotics task force. An award winning journalist, he is author of the book Still Seeking Justice: One Officer's Story and founded the Facebook group Police Authors Seeking Justice. Look him up at stillseekingjustice.com

Where Is The Plan, Dammit?

So, the unofficial start of the summer season began with the observance of Memorial Day weekend. And like has happened for about the last five years, street violence in obscene numbers broke out in urban cities. Chicago has become the poster child for murders, nonfatal shootings and roving bands of youths taking over public spaces while tourists are attacked. In Chicago over the Memorial Day weekend, 52 people were shot, leaving 11 dead. In Milwaukee over the same Memorial Day weekend, 13 people were shot, leaving 3 dead. The following weekend had 46 shot, nine dead in Chicago and a one-year-old shot and killed after being struck by an errant gunshot during a gun battle in Milwaukee. Major news outlets basically ignored it. Over the past 12 months, 682 people have been murdered in Chicago and 489 have been Black, yet nothing from the NAACP or Black Lives Matter. The newly elected Democrat mayor had a busy weekend schedule and didn’t take the time to comment on the violence. It appears that the plan to address the violence is to not talk about it as in nothing to see here, move along. That is not an operational plan.

MoneyGeek, a personal finance technology company, listed the 15 most dangerous cities in America. They came up with the list by analyzing FBI crime statistics for 2021. Among those cities are the usual suspect locations: Chicago, St Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, Memphis, Cleveland, Oakland and Philadelphia. The state of Louisiana had 3 cities that made the most dangerous list. The common denominator with all these cities is that they all are led by a Democrat political class. The same people who supported, and in many cases did in fact defund police departments and passed no-bail legislation for most crimes including some serious felony offenses. MoneyGeek pointed out the economic impact of crime on cities and also pointed out that their information can help people learn about what to expect from visiting or living in those locations. This is what is referred to as quality of life issues.

This crime trend has been going on for at least the last 5 years. Drilling further down into the data shows more stunning information. More analysis from the site World Population Review on crime in 2018 showed a slight decrease in violent crime. They attributed the slight decline to a relaunch of Project Safe Neighborhoods, an initiative that, “brings together law enforcement, prosecutors and community leaders to develop comprehensive remedies for the most pressing crime issues.” Let me stop and expand on that. Notice that the emphasis was on attacking crime. Repeat offenders were identified, arrested, faced certain prosecution and incarceration. This was the same approach that led to the great crime decline of the late 1980s, and all throughout the following decade and into early 2000. Removing these actors from law-abiding society led to historic decreases in crime, violence and disorder all across he same cities that are currently experiencing out-of-control record numbers of crime, violence and disorder. What changed that led us to this current surge in crime? Criminal apologists went on their jihad against the criminal justice system. This was the same time frame that the War On Cops began in earnest. Many of the current class of George Soros-supported woke political activist prosecutors were elected to office in St. Louis, Chicago, Baltimore, New York and Milwaukee. This along with defunding police agencies and enacting no bail policies show that it is not a coincidence that most of these same cities are among the head of the class of most dangerous cities in America. This soft on crime approach is the antithesis of Project Safe Neighbor. But there is more.

The World Population Review analysis shows that the areas with the highest crime rates have poor housing conditions, large families with small incomes, failing schools, high poverty, bad health problems and homes with parents who have previously been in trouble with the law and that the motivation for violent crime has led to the formation of gangs. To put it bluntly, these are the characteristics that create ghettos. They are the result of failed urban policies. These urban pathologies nurture cultural dysfunction and cultural rot. This is what happens when your city has an over-abundance of single-parent homes, ineffective parenting, no work history, school failure, drug and alcohol abuse and questionable lifestyle choices by young people. Poverty becomes a lifestyle that leads to permanent membership in the underclass and government dependency.

This is why I point out that reducing crime, violence and disorder is a combination of elected officials creating better public policy along with more effective public safety efforts. Instead, these inept officials continue on the path of creating government dependency for a voting base and then thrust all of this chaos into the lap of law enforcement agencies to fix. I have incessantly pointed out that most of what we send police to deal with are not things police should be involved in in the first place. For instance, traffic enforcement, while necessary for the smooth flow of transportation, too often is used for revenue purposes. Many of the use of force and deadly force situations occur during a traffic stop. Then, after a police deadly use of force, these same incompetent city officials call for police reform instead of acknowledging that their own failure contributed to the conditions leading to a need for and over-reliance on law enforcement. Police reform is the low-hanging fruit and the most convenient thing for feckless politicians to reach for to keep the heat off themselves.

So what should happen? Two things. First, law enforcement executives need to continue to demand additional funding. The two sources I used for crime data point out that a lack of additional police funding is contributing to the increase in crime, violence and disorder. Additionally, these police executives need to demonstrate the courage to point out the failed urban policies and name names. Stop trying to cover for these incompetent mayors and city councils in an effort to save your job. What about the front-line street cops? They are the ones whose lives and careers are in danger.

And finally, come up with an operational plan to attack crime. I am seeing too many law enforcement executives who have gone down the rabbit hole of uttering catchy buzz phrases like “community partnering” and other abstract nonsense. These are social engineering experiments developed in schools of social welfare by people who have no real-life experience inside ghettos. These inane ideas don’t work. These experiments have transformed street cops away from being crime fighters and instead turned them into community ambassadors. Look at and copy the Project Safe Neighborhoods model.

Stop trying to fix the police. That is working on the wrong thing. Fix the ghetto instead.

Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. is former Sheriff of Milwaukee Co, Wisconsin, President of America’s Sheriff LLC, President of Rise Up Wisconsin INC, Board member of the Crime Research Center, author of the book Cop Under Fire: Beyond Hashtags of Race Crime and Politics for a Better America. To learn more visit www.americassheriff.com

Maintaining Safety in the Topsy-Turvy World Around Us

By: Joel E. Gordon

Defense is defined as action(s) of defending from or resisting attack.

“Self defense is not just a set of techniques, it's a state of mind that begins with the belief that you are worth defending” - Rorion Gracie: Jiu-Jitsu Grand Master technical adviser for the 1987 movie Lethal Weapon.

Where the head goes the body will follow' is an athletic axiom that coaches teach.

A great memorable quote from the The Karate Kid, Part III (1989) movie - Thomas Ian Griffith as Terry Silver: "A man can't breathe, he can't fight."

New York City

Perhaps all of the above are what Daniel Penny, the 24-year-old Marine veteran who subdued a deranged lunatic on the F train in Manhattan was thinking.

According to witnesses, Jordan Neely, a thirty-year-old homeless man was pacing madly and throwing trash at passengers trapped in a sealed subway car with him. He said he did not mind “going to jail or getting life in prison” and was “ready to die.”

Many locals knew Jordan Neely. He liked to hang out in Times Square, where he would perform dressed up like Michael Jackson—the side slide, the crotch grab, and the moonwalk were his signature moves. Law-enforcement and public-health officials also knew him. He had been arrested more than forty times. From January 2020 to August 2021, he was arrested for public lewdness after pulling down his pants and exposing himself to a female stranger, misdemeanor assault for hitting a woman in the face, and criminal contempt for violating a restraining order. All three cases were dismissed.

He had a history of mental illness. Neely had been involuntarily hospitalized, at Bellevue, in 2021 but, like so many other patients, Neely walked out of the hospital and onto the street. For a while, he lived at a homeless shelter and ultimately, fell through the cracks.

There are believed to be more than two hundred thousand residents of New York City living with severe mental illness. Although not specific to then unknown background details pertaining to Neely, it was obvious to the trained Marine that Neely was a credible threat through observed actions and his overall demeanor.

The ex-Marine quietly stepped behind Neely and put him in a chokehold to hold him for the police and protect everyone on that subway car. In fact, Neely struggled so much that two other men had to help secure him. Neely died in the skirmish.

In response to his death, a lot of people held protests, demanding “justice” for the man making the threats. We’re supposed to be impressed that Neely hadn’t punched anyone on the subway car yet, that he was merely throwing garbage and threatening to hurt them?

Penny’s intent was to protect himself and every other innocent person in that subway car. So now he’s got to pay by being prosecuted for manslaughter by city of New York prosecutor Alvin Bragg?

Baltimore

A Baltimore City police officer shot a 17-year old youth upon reasonable suspicion that based upon training, the officer believed the youth to be armed. Baltimore is experiencing a marked increase in teen violence this year and is actively working, within constraints of a federal consent decree, to use techniques and units assigned to specially designated zones to curtail this alarming trend.

Investigators say the officer was interacting with the community sitting on a stoop talking to a resident when he saw the youth.

"I can't tell you what the officer saw but when they called it out they said the individual was characteristics of an armed person. That's why they started to approach him," said Rich Worley, Deputy Commissioner of the Baltimore City Police Department.

Police say the youth ran off and a foot pursuit occurred.

Investigators say the youth was found to be holding a gun and upon ignoring officers' commands to drop the weapon one officer fired more than one gunshot hitting the teen.

"Well at that point when they realize there's a weapon, they understand that it's a dangerous situation and they have a right to act," said Nixon.

But in Baltimore instead of gratitude that the threat of harm by the youth was stopped, the media focus has been on police training and what criteria were used in the initial assessment that the youth was exhibiting behaviors of being armed. Never mind the job being done to promote if not ensure community safety.

In our topsy-turvy world, results that impact in favor of the greater good are damned. When unlawful aggressors pose a threat, it appears that there are too many of the belief that those posing a threat have lives more worthy of defending than the safety, peace and lives of the rest of us.

As for me, I am grateful to those willing to stand among the protectors. Thank you for your service and sacrifice one and all!

Joel E. Gordon, Managing Editor of BLUE Magazine, is a former Field Training Officer with the Baltimore City Police Department and is a past Chief of Police for the city of Kingwood, West Virginia. He has also served as vice-chair of a multi-jurisdictional regional narcotics task force. An award winning journalist, he is author of the book Still Seeking Justice: One Officer's Story and founded the Facebook group Police Authors Seeking Justice. Look him up at stillseekingjustice.com

Wanting A Do-Over

At the height of the War On Cops attacks on the profession of policing, there was a move by public school officials to remove law enforcement resource officers from school. The result was inevitable. There has been an increase in student fights and weapons being brought to schools. Why did school officials think this was a good policy? Because they got caught up in all the hysteria based on the George Floyd incident, an incident that had no correlation to school safety. Major public policy change should never be made in an emotional state. A better policy approach is to wait until initial outcry subsides so people can think more rationally than emotionally. Next step is to put together a work group to provide several policy proposals based on an examination of the data and research. I like using what is called the logic model. It is based on asking three simple questions. First: Are you working hard? Second: Are you working smart? Finally: Are you working on the right thing? In other words, if you misdiagnose the problem you think you have, you will apply the wrong treatment.

An important step in policy options methodology is to discuss the potential outcomes of your decision. In other words, assess the pluses and minuses of each option and consider the unintended consequences of changing course. This step is always skipped and when it is, everybody is shocked about the result. I never am. In fact, I often predict it beforehand. Using this model, let’s analyze the misguided emotional-based policy of removing police from public schools. There is enough of a sample size of data to examine.

One news story reports dozens of cities nationwide are reversing course on removing police from schools. In one Nevada school district, a contract to have officers back in schools was renewed after public outcry when fights broke out along with reports of gang violence and bullying. In a New York school district, leaders from a teachers union are begging school officials to put officers back in schools after fights and gang problems arose. In California, an officer was put back into a high school after a student was stabbed to death. In Virginia, this same news story reports that a school superintendent recommended officers be put back in schools after an increase in student disciplinary violations. The National Association of Resource Officers reports that gun incidents in schools between August to October in 2022 tripled.

There are still some however who oppose returning to the original policy of having officers in schools even in light of the data that suggests that the policy change to remove officers from school was short-sighted and led to an increase of disciplinary-related incidents. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the Republican-controlled state legislature acted on reports of an increase in school violence in the state’s largest school district by inserting into the new budget several million dollars of funding to put officers back in public schools. This move is being resisted by school officials and other anti-cop groups however.

It’s important in this discussion to go back and look at other liberal social engineering experiments going on with school safety that contributed to this resentment of school resource officers. During former President Obama’s administration, he appointed a former superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools, Arne Duncan, as his secretary of education. Both immediately went to work dismantling policies that removed disruptive students from classrooms that utilized expulsions and suspensions as a student conduct control mechanism. Obama called his social engineering experiment the Rethinking School Discipline program. School districts were discouraged from calling police or reporting even serious safety concerns by students. Obama and Duncan were of the belief that removing disruptive kids from class unfairly targeted minorities. They threatened school districts that current disciplinary policies could constitute, “unlawful discrimination under federal civil rights laws”. Obama looked at everything through the lens of race. To him, the bogeyman of race lurked around every corner of life, even in school discipline policy incidents.

Recall what I said previously about police options methodology and an important step is to examine if your change may have unintended consequences. Large school districts got away from disciplining unruly students under the threat of not receiving federal funding from the Department of Education unless they adopted these soft on conduct policies . They replaced punishment for unwanted behavior with an inane idea of restorative justice. This focused on reasons why a student misbehaved. That is easy to determine in a few minutes. They misbehaved because they are unsocialized miscreants who are not disciplined at home and the behaviors they exhibit outside the classrooms are brought with them inside the classrooms. Schools became a threatening and anxiety-filled place to be for other students. Learning suffered, as well. Chaotic classrooms are not conducive for learning to take place. A child’s biggest challenge is to just survive the school day. Nice job, Barack.

Here is the dilemma for officers going back into schools. First, they must have the full support of the administration, parent groups and school board. These three entities must fight against the false narrative that having an officer in the school is a danger to children attending these schools. A one-size-fits-all policy won’t be sufficient, either. For example, larger urban public schools should be staffed with a minimum of two officers and maybe even three. Schools must return to policies that expel or suspend disruptive students. For officers taking these assignments, be advised that these are assignments fraught with peril. Be aware that if you have to use reasonable force to control a student, the video will go viral and an overzealous, politically active prosecutor may offer you up as a sacrificial lamb to appease the angry mob in this anti-police environment. If the force used is against a black kid, no matter how reasonable the force you use is the race baiters will come out from under their sewer covers. Have you seen some of the fights going on in school hallways? They are vicious. Some level of force will undoubtedly have to be used to quell the melee.

So, this is how we got here. It was a combination of bad ideas and bad policies. Personally, I would not volunteer as a school resource officer in an urban school district. It’s not worth it. But that’s your decision, not mine.

Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. is former Sheriff of Milwaukee Co, Wisconsin, President of America’s Sheriff LLC, President of Rise Up Wisconsin INC, Board member of the Crime Research Center, author of the book Cop Under Fire: Beyond Hashtags of Race Crime and Politics for a Better America. To learn more visit www.americassheriff.com

HERE WE GO AGAIN

Like clockwork after the death of a black man at the hands of a white man, the race hustlers, hucksters and other opportunists leaped into action to prime the American public with their slogans and false narrative about the facts and circumstances surrounding the incident.

In case you haven’t heard about what happened on a New York subway train recently, although these days I don’t know how anybody could have missed hearing about it with the media’s 24/7 obsession with headline news every time a black guy dies and a white person is involved. The media and race hustlers have to be upset, however, that the guy who died didn’t do so at the hands of a white law enforcement officer but instead, a white Marine veteran will do for their insidious purposes. Here is what we know thus far. Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old, homeless black man who suffers from mental illness, was on a New York subway train. As people suffering from a particular from of mental illness will sometimes do, he was acting in a menacing fashion according to police officials and subway video. He was harassing passengers and making threats. A reporter on the same train described Neely as screaming in an aggressive manner but he hadn’t attacked anyone. I will add not yet, anyway.

Anybody who rides the New York subway system, and I have, can attest that these rides can be intimidating and filled with tension. For many New Yorkers, the subway is their only means of transportation. Imagine the anxiety they feel each time they go down on the escalator to the train platform to go to work, school or wherever they have to be. It’s dark and often time the smells are not aromatic as street people often use the platform like it’s a restroom. Seeing rats is not all that uncommon. The homeless have made it a refuge. In one story about the incident. one man said that the subway had become a gathering place for panhandlers like himself.

These are quality of life issues that can negatively affect experiences in public spaces. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani hired a head of the New York transit police named William Bratton. When Bratton took over as head of the Transit Authority before becoming head of the NYPD, he made it his mission to clean up the New York subway system. Many of his Broken Windows theory principles were tried and developed by cleaning up the subway. His order maintenance tactics were based on stopping the nuisance-type activities happening on subway platforms like public urination, panhandling, and turnstile jumping. He drove the perpetrators of disorder out of the subway and chased them above ground. Subway rides became less intimidating.

With Mayor Giuliani and Commissioner Bill Bratton gone, the emphasis on quality of life enforcement by police has gone away and been replaced by tolerance for disorderly behavior. The NYPD has been defunded and officers are retiring at a pace outdoing hiring. Not only is crime rising on the streets of New York but down in the subway as well. This is the backdrop of the Neely incident.

Tired of the menacing behavior of Neely, Marine vet Daniel Penny approached Neely and got him in a headlock to restrain him. Two other passengers joined him to assist by holding Neeley’s arms. Neely struggled as the three restrained him. When they got to the next stop, Neely was no longer moving and he was later pronounced dead. The medical examiner ruled the death a homicide due to a compressed windpipe. I do not have all the facts but from what we know thus far we can reasonably make some observations. As a former homicide investigator with the Milwaukee Police Department, I have attended autopsies. Ruling a death a homicide gets people all worked up. There is no need to come unhinged hearing that. Homicide is a manner of death. The others are suicide, natural causes and undetermined. Just because a death is ruled a homicide does not automatically mean that someone is criminally liable for that determination. That gets to the cause of death. In this case, it was a collapsed windpipe as opposed to a gunshot wound, stabbing, overdose or it could be accidental. This investigation is ongoing. However, in my experience as a trained homicide detective, I could easily advise the prosecutor that this was nothing more than an accidental death.

Now let’s get to the actions of the Marine vet. We cannot reasonably expect common citizens to do things in a manner that we would expect say a trained law enforcement officer in the area of arrest tactics like decentralizing someone. A Marine is trained in survival skills. It becomes instinctive. A headlock to subdue somebody with his trained skill set is not unreasonable. Any cop will tell you that some people suffering from mental illness can possess superhuman strength when struggling. I have dealt with it myself. It can take several people to control someone who is violently struggling. Unfortunately, the prosecutor reviewing this is the politically active race baiter Alvin Bragg. He will have a hard time finding a jury pool that isn’t aware of what is going on in the streets of New York. They are tired of reading, hearing and experiencing the rising crime, violence and disorder and policies like no bail for repeat offenders. Bragg’s office, according to one study, has tossed out 69% of criminal cases. Neely, by the way has a rap sheet with 42 arrests. So, these people remain on the streets. Couple that with delayed police response to calls for service and with fewer police on the streets, we see people being more inclined to handling things themselves. They have no other choice. It’s either defend themselves or become crime victims.

When government cannot fulfill its most important responsibility of securing the personal safety of citizens, then it must allow the individual to play a role in protecting themselves. When this happens, prosecutors cannot look at what a better outcome should have been in making a determination. Often times, when citizens engage in these incidents it won’t end perfectly. That doesn’t make it criminal.

The remedy is not to tell citizens not to defend themselves or charge them criminally because it was not a textbook takedown or maneuver to subdue someone. The answer is to restore police resources, empower them and get rid of bad urban policies like no bail and decriminalizing abhorrent behavior. Then people might be willing to rely on police to protect them in public spaces instead of doing it themselves.

Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. is former Sheriff of Milwaukee Co, Wisconsin, President of America’s Sheriff LLC, President of Rise Up Wisconsin INC, Board member of the Crime Research Center, author of the book Cop Under Fire: Beyond Hashtags of Race Crime and Politics for a Better America. To learn more visit www.americassheriff.com

When Will Cities Stop The Bleeding?

As I read the latest on how crime and violence have overtaken urban cities, I am reminded of an element of crime that most elected officials are not. I continually state that crime is like water or wildfires. They seek their own levels. You can only put up so many sandbags along swollen riverbanks to keep rising water from flooding land. It’s like with basements. Keeping water out will always be a challenge. At some point, it will find its way in unless you continually make adjustments and water will inevitably find a way in. Wildfires occur in the same areas every year, yet effective maintenance of dry areas rarely occurs because eco-wacko environmentalists won’t allow it. The same can be said about criminal apologists. They don’t want perpetrators locked up.

  Crime and violence have many of the same properties as water and fire. It is a constant challenge to keep crime under control. Crime will occur at levels and rates of a community’s tolerance for it. Effective urban policies along with effective policing strategies with a goal of suppression, prevention and prosecution of unwanted behavior are the sandbags to keep things under control. Constant maintenance is required. Who gets in the way? Soft-on-crime social engineers who erroneously believe that deeply ingrained criminal behavior can effectively be eliminated with behavior modification strategies that do not allow a role for punishment for unwanted behavior. Political neglect in the area of crime control allows it to bleed into surrounding fertile territories. And it is now spreading.

  We are now seeing reports of lawlessness beginning to affect the business community. Retail giants Walmart, Walgreens, Target Department Store, Macy’s, Best Buy and Whole Foods have reached a point of no return. All these chains have announced they are closing stores in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Milwaukee and other cities. Other stores in Florida and New York malls have shut down for the same reason. They can no longer absorb the millions of dollars in losses due to thefts and other acts of disorder that are threatening their employees and their customers.

These dollar amounts in terms of losses are staggering. It is reported that retailers lost $94.5 billion in 2021 from theft and inventory losses. Target reported losing over $400 million in profits last November and is expecting to lose a total of $600 million by the end of this year due to organized gangs stealing merchandise from their stores. Retail stores are always challenged by outside forces like finding reliable employees and providing goods and services at affordable prices that customers want to purchase. When customers no longer feel that it is safe to venture into areas overtaken by crime, violence and disorder, or if prices rise to offset thefts, it hurts the bottom line of retail stores. That also makes it harder to find reliable employees.

All these stores have a successful business model that thrives in more livable areas surrounding these urban jungles. Yes, I call them urban jungles. These areas are out of control because the social order has collapsed around them. These retail outlets have made many adjustments over the last ten years in an attempt to remain profitable, but to no avail. They have begged city officials for help in suppressing and preventing crime. Their pleas have fallen on deaf ears. In the case of Chicago stores, outgoing Mayor Lori Lightfoot has blamed the businesses for not doing a better job of safeguarding their property as organized gangs of shoplifters clear entire store shelves of property and then walk out. Thieves no longer even feel a need to run out knowing that store employees are ordered not to intervene and that by the time police even respond, they will be long gone, just walking away.

Things are compounded because urban policies have for all intents and purposes decriminalized retail theft and public spaces have been surrendered to large bands of roving out-of-control youths, creating a climate of fear around retail areas. Getting state prosecutors to actually charge anybody with criminal offenses is nearly impossible. George Soros-funded state prosecutors are throwing out not just lower level classes of  crimes but serious felony charges as well forcing law abiding people and retailers to wave the white the white flag of surrender. In Milwaukee County for example it is reported that woke District Attorney John Chisholm has not charged 60% of felony cases brought to his office.

  The water has overtaken the proverbial sandbagging attempts to keep it away. Where crime, violence and disorder seemed to be contained within certain sections of neighborhoods, it is now seeping into the business community. For cities to be successful, it requires the five elements that make up a community complimenting each other. You have to have a base of functioning middle-class families that work and pay into supporting the city through taxes, a strong business sector that provides services and jobs, a role for the church to provide moral guidance, successful K-12 schools to provide future employees and a small role for government. This model is failing, however, due to several factors.

  Many large urban centers are in the early stages of decay. This is caused by middle-class families fleeing. Replacing this void are people who require more government assistance. As a result, they are not paying into city operations and are a drain on city services. The K-12 public education systems in these areas are failing in their mission to educate children. Churches are empty and are losing their influence on family life. Businesses are now finding it harder to remain profitable and forced to lay off employees. The role of government is taking on a larger footprint. That is not good nor is it the proper role for government, not to mention that it results in more unnecessary regulation, higher taxes and costs for city services. Government needs to stick to funding effective public safety and providing better public schools along with infrastructure services. Right now, they are trying to do it all and they are failing miserably.

 So, what do we do? First, we get everybody back into their proper lane or role in this equation of how to run a city. The highest priority of any level of government is to secure the personal safety of citizens. Police need to be properly funded back to pre-defunded levels including inflation-adjusted numbers. Police executives need to come up with effective order maintenance strategies with stretch targets with metrics and be held accountable for results. Crime levels have to decrease, or mayors have to replace these law enforcement executives. Police need to reclaim public spaces so law-abiding citizens can return to enjoy them. The business community’s demands for safer areas to remain profitable have got to be addressed and met. K-12 public schools have to return to their original mission of educating students to be able to provide an educated workforce to compete for the jobs of the 21st century. This is the proper role for government. Businesses need an educated workforce to find employees. Families have to become functional and shun lifestyles that lead to abhorrent behavior by young people. The church needs to reclaim its influence in helping distressed families. Once cities become successful in their primary role, the other entities stand a better chance of succeeding.

Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. is former Sheriff of Milwaukee Co, Wisconsin, President of Americas Sheriff LLC, President of Rise Up Wisconsin INC, Board member of the Crime Research Center, author of the book Cop Under Fire: Moving Beyond Hashtags of Race Crime and Politics for a Better America. To learn more visit www.americassheriff.com

OFFICER SAFETY: Is Tombstone Courage the expectation in a world of compartmentalized thinking?

By: Joel E. Gordon

When someone uses a compartmentalized thought process, they look at a subject with a narrowly focused “tunnel vision” and fail to see the whole picture. In psychology, compartmentalization is recognized as an unconscious psychological defense mechanism used to avoid cognitive dissonance or the mental discomfort and anxiety caused by a person's having conflicting values, cognitions, emotions, beliefs, etc. within themselves.

Compartmentalization allows these conflicting ideas to co-exist by inhibiting direct or explicit acknowledgment and interaction between separate compartmentalized self-states.

Compartmentalization may lead to hidden vulnerabilities in those who use it as a major defense mechanism.

With that in mind, I almost entitled this column “what happened to officer safety.”

I have often been critical of law enforcement “experts” with little or no street credentials who have been actively involved in attempting to redefine “modern” policing. Much of this began to take hold in earnest from within law enforcement when the Police Executive Research Forum first released its best practice recommendations, seven years ago, a part of its CRITICAL ISSUES IN POLICING SERIES "30 Guiding Principles- Taking Policing to a Higher Standard." Here in synopsis form for your own “critical” review:

POLICY

1. The sanctity of human life should be at the heart of everything an agency does.

2. Departments should adopt policies that hold themselves to a higher standard than the legal requirements of Graham v. Connor. Agency use-of-force policies should go beyond the legal standard of “objective reasonableness” outlined in this 1989 U.S. Supreme Court decision.

3. Police use of force must meet the test of proportionality. In assessing whether a response is proportional, officers must ask themselves, “How would the general public view the action we took? Would they think it was appropriate to the entire situation and to the severity of the threat posed to me or to the public?”

4. Adopt de-escalation as formal agency policy.

5. The Critical Decision-Making Model provides a new way to approach critical incidents.

6. Duty to intervene: Officers need to prevent other officers from using excessive force.

7. Respect the sanctity of life by promptly rendering first aid.

8. Shooting at vehicles must be strictly prohibited.

9. Prohibit use of deadly force against individuals who pose a danger only to themselves.

10. Document use-of-force incidents and review your data and enforcement practices to ensure that they are fair and non-discriminatory.

11. To build understanding and trust, agencies should issue regular reports to the public on use of force.

12. All critical police incidents resulting in death or serious bodily injury should be reviewed by specially trained personnel.

13. Agencies need to be transparent in providing information following use-of-force incidents.

TRAINING AND TACTICS

14. Training academy content and culture must reflect agency values.

15. Officers should be trained to use a Critical Decision-Making Model.

16. Use Distance, Cover, and Time to replace outdated concepts such as the “21-foot rule” and “drawing a line in the sand.”

17. De-escalation should be a core theme of an agency’s training program.

18. De-escalation starts with effective communications.

19. Mental Illness: Implement a comprehensive agency training program on dealing with people with mental health issues.

20. Tactical training and mental health training need to be interwoven to improve response to critical incidents.

21. Community-based outreach teams can be a valuable component to agencies’ mental health response.

22. Provide a prompt supervisory response to critical incidents to reduce the likelihood of unnecessary force.

23. Training as teams can improve performance in the field.

24. Scenario-based training should be prevalent, challenging, and realistic. In both recruit and in-service programs, agencies should provide use-of-force training that utilizes realistic and challenging scenarios that officers are likely to encounter in the field.

EQUIPMENT

25. Officers need access to and training in less-lethal options.

26. Agencies should consider new options for chemical spray.

27. An Electronic Control Weapons deployment that is not effective does not mean that officers should automatically move to their firearms.

28. Personal protection shields may support de-escalation efforts during critical incidents, including situations involving persons with knives,baseball bats, or other improvised weapons that are not firearms.

INFORMATION ISSUES

29. Well-trained call-takers and dispatchers are essential to the police response to critical incidents.

30. Educate the families of persons with mental health problems on communicating with call-takers.

Although not without merit, the fallacy in these recommended guidelines is that officer safety concerns appear to be secondary to public perception concerns of police actions taken. Top of mind awareness to officer safety must be front and center when implementing best practice techniques and training.

While de-escalation of volatile situations, when possible, can be conducive to officer safety, these techniques can also become counterproductive to officer safety in real world scenarios. Maybe the Police Executive Research Forum should do more to enlighten all the “Monday morning quarterbacks” who wish to review life and death decisions officers must make under duress and in the heat of battle.

What’s next? Disarming police as already implemented by some.

Joel E. Gordon, Managing Editor of BLUE Magazine, is a former Field Training Officer with the Baltimore City Police Department and is a past Chief of Police for the city of Kingwood, West Virginia. He has also served as vice-chair of a multi-jurisdictional regional narcotics task force. An award winning journalist, he is author of the book Still Seeking Justice: One Officer's Story and founded the Facebook group Police Authors Seeking Justice. Look him up at stillseekingjustice.com

There Is A Big Difference

I want to make something clear. There has been an attempt by left-wing media and Democrat politicians to twist the meaning of the call to defund the police and try to intimate that conservatives calling to defund the Federal Bureau of Investigation is the same thing and I am not going to let them get away with it. I find it incredible and disingenuous for these cop-hating people on the left to suddenly leap to defend the FBI after years of attacking the courage, commitment, honor and sacrifice of local police. Some even went so far as defending the Black Lives Matter calls to abolish local police and without any evidence to support the lie that cops are racist.

A recent news report points out that, “Congressman Jim Jordan and other Republicans used to be hysterical about defunding the police. Gone are the days in which Republicans whine hysterically about Democrats and the drive to defund the police.”

I am one of those people on record for calling that the FBI not just be defunded, but abolished. Now let me make the case and explain the difference.

First, it is important to distinguish between the two entities. The FBI is not a police agency. They are an investigative agency. Other than a few who work on task forces with local police, the overwhelming majority of agents are information gatherers. They don’t make arrests without the permission of a United States Department of Justice attorney. Their reports are not heavily scrutinized before going to a grand jury looking for an indictment. From the onset of an arrest by local cops, every aspect is reviewed along the way. Any slight misstep with the arrest or in collecting evidence will get the case thrown out before it ever sees the inside of a courtroom. There is a distinct difference. More on that later.

Additionally, FBI agents do not keep the peace, patrol neighborhoods or come into contact with citizens on a daily basis. The FBI gets to operate in anonymity. They get to hide what they are doing behind the label of their work being classified as top secret or confidential. They don’t wear body cameras that are used by media to know exactly what they are doing 24-7. My point is not to summarily dismiss what their role as information gatherers is, but do not ever mistake or compare what they do as policing. It’s not. It’s not even close.

Back to my previously mentioned comment about FBI agents not having everything they do in investigations being closely scrutinized. I have detailed instances as to why it should be more than just defunding the FBI before today. In one previous column here I wrote, imagine the NYPD, Chicago Police of the LAPD being accused of a long-standing pattern of breaking their own rules on investigations, illegally using informants and undercover agents to spy on politicians, journalists and religious leaders who are engaged in constitutionally protected activities. Let’s say that a local police agency was found to be engaged in the unauthorized use of physical surveillance on people not accused of a crime in 28, yes 28 cases in a one-year period. And what if a local police agency audit found that its department broke its own rules 747 times on sensitive intercepts of electronic communications and that corrective measures did not stop the illegal activity? To be more specific, that is a violation of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. And not one person in the FBI was held accountable.

The American people have no use for a law enforcements agency that operates illegally or in the shadows. At the end of the day, all a law enforcement agency has is its integrity. With the awesome power and authority the FBI possesses, they can ruin and destroy lives. Once they have you in their crosshairs, they force you to plea bargain mainly because you run out of money trying to defend

yourself. I know people who this has happened to. Local police don’t have that kind of authority. Everything that a local cop does is scrutinized. They can’t classify their work as top secret. They don’t get to heavily redact reports they have to release through the Freedom of Information Act or at the exculpatory phase of due process.

People have asked me if calling for abolishing the FBI is too extreme and what we would replace the FBI with. The FBI has become a corrupt runaway bureaucracy. Their behavior has become reminiscent of the Nazi’s Stasi or brownshirts. They do not feel accountable or answerable to congressional oversight. Every time Director Christopher Wray appears before a congressional committee to testify and the answers would embarrass the Bureau, he cites confidentiality and that the release of that information would compromise national security or an ongoing investigation. It’s a lie. Congress is our watchdog on these unelected bureaucracies.

The FBI has a culture problem, and it has been corrupted to the point of not being worth being saved. Simply changing directors hasn’t helped change the Bureau’s out-of-control culture. Agents are coming forward as whistleblowers to detail the culture of corruption. They are telling of being met with retaliation internally for doing so. The FBI culture of corruption is anathema to a functioning republic. It is a threat to the very democracy that many Democrat politicians like to talk about. This is beyond a one-off or a few bad apples. It is agency-wide. It’s up, down and across the spectrum. It is beyond fixing. It’s time to abolish it. Start over. We won’t miss much in the interim. In fact, we will be more secure in our our persons, houses, places and effects as written in the U.S. Constitution.

Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. is former Sheriff of Milwaukee Co, Wisconsin, President of Americas Sheriff LLC, President of Rise Up Wisconsin INC, Board member of the Crime Research Center, author of the book Cop Under Fire: Moving Beyond Hashtags of Race Crime and Politics for a Better America. To learn more visit www.americassheriff.com

THE MISSING PIECE

With crime and violence rates surging all across America, people are in search of ways to stem the record number of murders, aggravated assaults (non-fatal shootings) robberies, auto thefts and carjackings. The number one solution being offered to this by policy makers is to throw money at it in the form of social engineering projects like so-called second chance programs, job training and behavior modification programs for career criminals. These are not novel, never-before-tried efforts. These are the same old attempts that have never had much impact previously.  They instead are the same warmed-up leftovers from the past rebranded as new and improved. Renaming something that did not work before gives it no better chance of working the second time around.

Public safety is the first and highest priority of all levels of government. Federal, state and local governments have a vested interest in reasonably securing the personal safety of citizens. A long time ago, we allowed the individual citizen to provide for their own safety. Citizens were their own arbiters of how to carry out justice. People at one point in our history then agreed to turn this over to the government for more consistent and just application of the law. From that point forward, turning our safety over to the government made a crime a violation against society, not the individual. The government would handle this through state prosecution of criminals. It generally works. At least it did up until recently.

The leftists have co-opted our criminal justice system and have bastardized the law. They have decriminalized unlawful behavior that we once considered abhorrent and unacceptable in a civilized society. This same insidious bunch convinced many that our criminal justice system was inherently racist. They refer to jails and prisons as oppressive and with a hidden objective of enslaving black people. It is called the new Jim Crow.

As if that wasn’t bad enough from outside the criminal justice system, now they have infiltrated inside the system.

As you know, the criminal justice system is composed of four elements. It starts with the police who begin the process by an arrest, then it moves to the prosecution stage, then onto the courts. The final player in this system is corrections. In order for this process to be successful in keeping society safe, the entities involved have to each perform their role competently and consistently. It doesn’t solely matter how many people are arrested by police. At any point in this process, an arrestee can be processed out of the system for any number of reasons. I have no problem if there is a better more reasonable way of dealing with an arrest short of a criminal charge being issued and/or a person being sentenced to jail or prison. It’s not a rubber stamp. Prosecutors and judges do have discretion. That discretion currently is being abused. This has turned into a one-size-fits-all. Criminal history no longer matters. Career criminals are given the same leniency as a first-time offender. Even if a person is charged with an offense, there is an over-reliance on probation with no time served. Additionally, serious charges are watered down to misdemeanors and other included charges are dropped in exchange for a plea bargain. These options create what we call the revolving door of criminal justice. Repeat criminals are not deterred from engaging in the same behavior if they are not adequately punished for their criminal behavior. They see that the justice system will not adequately stop them, so they conclude there is no incentive to stop.

The biggest area of the failure of the criminal justice system today is in prosecution. In order for a system to work, each component therein must do its part. I like to use the analogy of a car engine. Let me ask you what the most important part of a car engine is. The answer is the part that isn’t working, because if any one part of the engine isn’t working, the car won’t start of run properly. We’re seeing that with the prosecutors offices all across the United States. Here is some stunning data to emphasize how bad things have become.

Several years ago, billionaire socialist businessman George Soros started a project to weaken America by attacking our criminal justice process. He spent millions on an effort to elect state prosecutors and district attorneys who are called woke. They ran on platforms of pledging to not charge criminals. This is their idea of criminal justice reform. They set policies of no bail for persons arrested even for serious offenses. These two elements have destroyed communities’ efforts to keep crime under control. They have been on this jihad for several years now. We are seeing the success of their mission to weaken America. 

New data is rolling in on several Soros-supported state prosecutors’ efforts to live up to their campaign promise of going soft on crime. A study done by the Manhattan Institute shows that 69% of criminal cases reviewed for prosecution by the New York City prosecutor’s office have been tossed out. This is up from 44% in 2019. They refuse to issue charges. Let that sink in. Sixty-nine percent. At the same time the study points out that felony arrests by police have fallen by 14% when shootings rose by 102% and murders rose by 51%. To deny a correlation here is to deny reality. There is no doubt that police have become frustrated with the prosecutor’s office not charging suspects. Why should they bother?  And it is not only in New York. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a news report details that 60% of felony cases that are forwarded for prosecution are not charged. Additionally, 80% of misdemeanor charges are dropped. The elected district attorney, John Chisholm, another woke politically active prosecutor, has previously professed his allegiance to decriminalizing unlawful behavior. All of this is anathema to what was being done to control and prevent crime in the ‘90s. Order maintenance strategies were enacted that had all four components of the criminal justice system working together and complimenting each other. Arrests were up, as were prosecutions. Courts handed down longer periods of confinement and guess what? We experienced historic record lows of crime and violence. Imagine that.

This version of a criminal justice system is broken. The broken part of the engine is at the prosecution stage. Until that part functions properly, nothing that the police do will control prevent and deter crime. This philosophy by prosecutors basically eliminates the courts and corrections phase. These cases never see the inside of a courtroom or end up before a judge although courts have become dysfunctional too. The ironic part of all of this is that prosecutors’ offices are asking for more money in their budgets whining about a lack of resources.

 Somebody in a legislative body that approves budgets or in the media needs to ask the question begging to be asked. More money for what?

Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. is former Sheriff of Milwaukee Co, Wisconsin, President of Americas Sheriff LLC, President of Rise Up Wisconsin INC, Board member of the Crime Research Center, author of the book Cop Under Fire: Beyond Hashtags of Race Crime and Politics for a Better America. To learn more visit www.americassheriff.com

Brooke Jenkins: A San Francisco Treat?

I don’t want to get too excited too soon, but several news stories out of San Francisco could indicate a pendulum swing out of the district attorney’s office with the election of Brooke Jenkins to lead the prosecutor’s office. You may recall the food dish called Rice-A-Roni-the San Francisco Treat commercials. That jingle came to mind when reading about the new DA in San Francisco. She was elected after the disastrous reign of Chesa Boudin, the cop-hater extraordinaire who was swept into the district attorney’s office with the help of George Soros, who funded progressive prosecutor candidates all across the country who campaigned on using the office as a platform for political activism. Boudin then set about creating policies that would go soft on career criminals and instead emphasized the targeting of law enforcement officers for malicious prosecution.

Some background on Jenkins is noteworthy. She was appointed interim district attorney by liberal San Francisco Mayor London Breed in 2022 after former DA Boudin was successfully recalled. There is no doubt in my mind that the ultra-lefty liberal Mayor Breed chose the centrist Democrat Jenkins because he was undoubtedly feeling the heat from constituents about out-of-control crime that might impact his own re-election bid. Reports are that Jenkins campaigned for the recall of Boudin after she herself resigned, citing constant chaos and turmoil internally that led to many other assistant prosecutors leaving the office. She ran on a tough-on-crime platform. That usually won’t get you elected in the city by the Bay, but residents have had a change of heart after the failed progressive polices of Chesa Boudin led to a surge in crime that other large urban areas experienced after electing woke chief prosecutors. Jenkins also claimed that she resigned because her then=boss Boudin’s leniency on criminals was making San Francisco less safe.

Her biography indicates that she has an undergrad degree from the University of California at Berkeley, a radical leftist academic institution going back to the ‘60s. She also holds a law degree from the University of Chicago. That is where the infamous Saul Alinsky, author of the primer Rules For Radicals, a book he dedicated to Lucifer (Satan himself), was a law professor. He was a socialist and is considered to be the architect of the modern radical or progressive leftist movement. Think of how many current lawyers have had their minds poisoned by him. The University of Chicago was also where Barack Obama taught law. That gives you an idea of the kind of lawyers that school produces. That school does not produce law school graduates who seek employment at conservative law firms or end up being a balls-to-the wall prosecutor. That is a red flag for me about Jenkins, but I will hold that in abeyance for now.

Several early moves are encouraging, as she reorganizes the office to her liking, and are hopefully an indication of how she will govern the office. According to the Washington Examiner newspaper, Jenkins is described as a “centrist Democrat”. Personally, I didn’t know those still existed as the Democrat Party has been hijacked by the radical left wing fringe of the party. They have excommunicated the centrist wing of their cabal. Only full-throated socialist progressives are allowed. Another encouraging sign is that Jenkins has applied for a waiver to the city’s sanctuary city designation so she can arrest two people suspected of a violent crime who may have fled the country. Currently, city laws prohibit the prosecutor’s office from working with federal Border Patrol officials or from the Department of Homeland Security. Jenkins in a statement said, “We won’t let dangerous criminals evade prosecution simply by leaving the United States.” She continues, “What we can’t allow in San Francisco are for people to commit heinous crimes like murder and child rape and then just be able to flee our jurisdiction and avoid prosecution.” The crime in question occurred in 2009 for heaven sakes. It was for domestic violence murder and the suspect in that case had warrants out for child sexual abuse. Boudin could have gone after that guy, too, but he let his politics get in the way and override what was in the best interest of residents of San Francisco.

That brings me to several cases involving law enforcement officers that caught my eye. A SFist news reports that Jenkins announced that she will be dropping manslaughter charges against San Francisco Police Officer Chris Samayoa in what is described as the first-ever case filed against an officer for an on-duty homicide. The officer had only been on the street for four days when he fired shots at a suspect during a carjacking incident. Jenkins said of this case that, “It appeared that the case was filed for political reasons and not in the interest of justice. I cannot pursue this case out of political convenience. Given the conflicts that have arisen, the evidentiary problems and the complete lack of good faith surrounding the filing of this matter, we cannot ethically proceed with this prosecution. Therefore, it is our intention to dismiss the charges made.” That is a wow moment. Many prosecutions against law enforcement today are made to achieve the same political ends: anti-police activism. It is refreshing that this DA, in San Francisco no less, has the courage and morals to put her own political interests aside to achieve the interest of fair and impartial justice. Officer Samayoa is not out of the woods yet as the case has been handed over to the State Attorney General for further review. In light of Jenkins’ strong statement against prosecution, it will be difficult for the state of California to proceed. An attorney for the officer called Boudin’s filing of this case as, “nothing short of reckless irresponsible and politically motivated”.

Another decision by Jenkins is also noteworthy as she reshuffles the priorities of her office. She has cut the number of prosecutors and investigators assigned to a police accountability unit from six down to two. She cut the number of investigators in the unit responsible for investigation police abuse from six down to four. This unit was originally created under former DA George Gascón and was continued under her predecessor Boudin.

Critics of the policy shift in the office of San Francisco district attorney claim these moves signal that Brooke Jenkins will look the other way on complaints of officer misconduct. No, it doesn’t. She didn’t completely shut down the unit. What it signals to me is that in an office facing a surge in street violence and limited prosecutors, she is re-prioritizing her efforts to crack down on career criminal thugs raining holy hell on San Franciscans who have had enough of Boudin’s criminal coddling policies. Jenkins answers to them, not the editorial pages of the San Francisco Chronicle and other left-wing news sources. Her constituents will let her know how they feel about it as she is up for re-election this coming November. I’m betting that they will like a return to law and order and a better quality of life.

Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. is former Sheriff of Milwaukee Co, Wisconsin, President of Americas Sheriff LLC, President of Rise Up Wisconsin INC, Board member of the Crime Research Center, author of the book Cop Under Fire: Beyond Hashtags of Race Crime and Politics for a Better America. To learn more visit www.americassheriff.com