• You are not alone. Long nights on solo patrol it is easy to forget that you are part of a team. You have a radio, use it.
• More than that, not just in the day-to-day stuff but also in a serious crisis, you are not alone. Your agency has decades or centuries of experience to draw from. Never be afraid to ask for advice or guidance, or just tips on how to do a better job.
• You have a radio for a reason. That ties into the above. Just add—don’t get lazy. Call in every stop. Just because the last three hundred stops went fine is no indication that the next one will. Someone needs to know where you are and what you are doing. You will use the radio far more than you will use any weapon or force option. Get good at it.
• It is not a game. There is no ref, no time limit, and the stakes are higher than any game. Do not go into this thinking in contest terms. The job gets done. There is no “I’ll be the best cop I can, and he’ll be the best crook he can, and we’ll see who wins.” There is no ‘see who wins.’ You get the job done. You are not permitted to lose or draw. You have a responsibility to the citizens.
• You don’t need to prove your masculinity. I think I’ve said this three different ways now. Sinking in?
You have a responsibility to keep yourself safe. You have a job to do and you cannot do it if you are dead or injured. A dead officer is not just a heroic or tragic icon, a dead officer is also a wasted resource.
The most succinctly I have ever heard this concept explained was at Combat Medic training at Fort Sam Houston. The instructors drilled a simple truth into our heads: A dead medic never saved anybody. This simple truth is just as true for officers.
An officer who gets himself killed or seriously injured becomes part of the problem. He can’t help anyone else. He can’t save the damsel in distress. Worse, the people needed to save the damsel now need to allocate resources to saving the stupid guy too.
When an officer gets killed in the line of duty training units and individual officers all over the country will try to find out what happened in as much detail as possible. Hoping to find out where the officer made a mistake. Mistakes can be fixed. Bad luck can’t.
Long ago, an officer and friend sent a message out into cyberspace. A friend of his had been killed. The friend was a good officer: fit, alert, well-trained, good judgment. Everything you would want in an officer and a partner. He had come around a corner and been shot in the face. Game over.
When an officer dies, we always hope it was a mistake, because we might be able to protect ourselves and our rookies from a mistake. Getting our heads blown off coming around a corner…not much you can do.
The Immutable Order was originally codified for hostage rescue. It is a cold and logical assessment of who is more important—the officer, the hostage, the bystanders, or the threat. It is not about love or duty or nobility, but simply a cold look at goals and resources.
The operator (officer)’s safety comes first because the officer is needed to save the hostages. If the officer becomes a casualty, not only is he out of the equation but also every other operator, accessory, and piece of equipment needed to save him cannot help to save the hostages.
Second come the hostages. They are the reason for being there.
Third come the bystanders and civilians. Yes, they are important. Yes, they shouldn’t be hurt…but they also shouldn’t be there at all. They should be safely away. Unlike the hostages, the bystanders have a choice and have some responsibility if stray bullets or collapsing buildings come their way.
Lastly are the hostage takers. All life is precious and all that, but the bad guys (BG) created the situation. The primary job is making sure that no citizen dies for the BG’s anger, greed, or stupidity. If the only way to ensure that is with the death of the bad guy…sorry, pal. You should have made a different choice.
Putting the officer first seems cold and it is—but do the math.
The “Immutable Order” is not a statement of value. It is not saying that the life of the officer is more valuable than the lives of the hostages. It is the way the resources, goals, and obstacles must be prioritized in order to get the job done. If an officer in a hot patrol area really valued his own life over even random strangers, he wouldn’t be in this business.
At the Columbine School shooting, the first responding officers started to go in and were called back by cooler-headed administrators. They were told to do what policy said: Set up a perimeter and wait for the SWAT team. More children died while they waited.
There was a huge outcry from citizens, the media, politicians, and even the officers themselves. Doctrine was changed, and, almost nationwide, the current standard for an active shooter scenario is to go in, immediately, with the first four officers on the scene. (This is changing too, and some agencies are experimenting with going in with the first officer or first pair on the scene.)
Everyone involved felt like they were doing the right thing: The first officers followed their instincts—very little hits you harder at a gut level than someone killing kids. The administrators who called them back were doing what they had trained, and what they had been taught was the best solution. The citizens and politicians and media were rightly outraged, and demanded change, and they got it.
But I have trained this scenario a lot—usually playing the bad guy. Every time, EVERY TIME, all of the responding officers die,* and I am free to go back to shooting kids. But it’s policy now, and that makes it officially the right thing to do.
This example isn’t about politics, or who is right, or who is wrong. It is about something you will see every day on the job—screwed-up situations where every last person involved is trying to do the right thing. I’ve trained the scenario. I know the officers die. But in my heart, I’m with the first group of officers who went in anyway.
Rule #2: The criminal goes to jail
This isn’t worded the same for all branches of law enforcement. For Corrections, the criminal stays in jail. For Parole and Probation, you try to prevent the criminal victimizing more people. For bailiffs, you keep the courtroom under control.
The essence is that you have a job to do. Do the job. Sometimes it’s hard and sometimes it’s boring and sometimes it’s terrifying and sometimes you don’t care. Tough. Do the job.
This is an easy job to burnout on. You see the worst of humanity at its worst. People lie to you. Even people who are good people get a little nervous when talking to cops and they try to make themselves sound better. It’s human nature to distrust and even dislike people who lie to you.
Dealing with the victims will hit you harder than dealing with the predators. Sometimes a predator is so cold as to seem alien. He or she can shake your assumptions about what it means to be human. You will meet predators who do not distinguish between a mate, a child, and a toy: They are all just possessions to be used. It will bother you, but it doesn’t hurt. Dealing with the victims, with the tears and blood, will hurt. Sometimes, it will seem easier to quit paying attention, to quit caring.
Rule #2 is simple. (Don’t forget that Rule #1 is the prerequisite—If you are injured or dead, you can’t do the job.) Do the job. Do it well. Do it like a professional. Not like a crusader. Definitely not like a self-righteous, angry prick. No matter how you feel, do a professional job. You get more convictions that way.
These concepts have to be hammered into new recruits hard and are an integral part of training. Most rookies come to the job with a hero complex. They want to save the world. They want to make a difference.
That’s great. One of the big goals of training is to preserve these dreams but implant the practical skills necessary to make the dreams work.
HARD TRUTH #5
You can’t achieve a dream by dreaming.
Training will never be quite right. It