Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Graduation day

It is a big day for seventeen recruits who graduate tonight from the Lincoln Police Department Academy.  They are finishing up their 19th week of training today, and preparing for tonight's ceremony.  I know they are excited, and I am excited for them.  So are three hundred other officers, all of whom remember the anticipation of their first shift on the street.  We all look forward to working with them, and wish them the best as they advance to the next phase of their development: field training. 

This class wraps up the Recruit Blog, a week-by-week account of their training experience that we have published on our public website.  It is a fascinating read, I think, about the experiences these recruits have had during the academy phase of their training.  Their blog has been very popular, and we are hearing from our current applicants that they are all following it.  I think it's a nice recruiting tool for us, that will intrigue more potential applicants.

We are already deep into the process of constituting our next recruit class for the fall.  City employment manager Pat Kant tells me that we had a total of 617 applicants for the fall class, from which we will hire a number in the single digits.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

#1666 - Poor Officer, Should have skipped that number!

Anonymous said...

Boy the way Glen Miller played, songs that made the hit parade....

Anonymous said...

Congratulations to the new officers!

ARRRRG!!!! said...

I remember my graduation.

Anonymous said...

Chief,

Is there a part of training where the recruits are warned that as an Officer, they should expect to regularly have their good, solid arrests be watered down by the rest of the CJ system, with plea deals, wrist-slap sentencing, and revolving door parole boards? From a sideline observer's perspective, that would seem to be one of the hardest things to accept about the job that your troops do every day.

Tom Casady said...

2:55-

Yes. It goes like this:

"You do the best you can. You practice the golden rule: what would you want to happen if your home was burglarized, or someone did $2,000 damage to your car in a hit and run? You can't worry about what the rest of the 'system' does, because you only control your part, and you will drive yourself nuts if you get frustrated by the failure of others to do their part."

Anonymous said...

Chief,

You'd have to have the patience of a saint, or pretty close to it.

If you saw someone that you'd arrested for a serious get soft-pedaled through the system and back out in a hurry, then commit a hurt or kill someone during the time when (if properly prosecuted, sentenced, and incarcerated) they should have still been locked up, it could drive you batty that your so-called allies weren't holding up their end.

Anonymous said...

4:36

That has already happened, many times. But one case is some nimrod crashing his car into a tree at 19th and Stockwell and ultimately taking the life of a 15 yr old girl.

Yeah, he's doing time now, but seriously, I doubt he ever grows up. His father never did.

Anonymous said...

8:20,

I've seen that often. Whenever I see any sort of serious local crime in the news, I go to the Lancaster County Atty site, and the NE Inmate Locator, to look the suspect(s) up for any prior record of cases and convictions. You know, doing the research that the news media is usually too lazy to do, meaning that they just wait for Ofc. Flood to spoon-feed it to them at the daily briefing. Well, that's the easiest way for them, isn't it?

In any case, it's initially shocking how many suspects have re-offended while they are on parole/"good time" early-release, probation, or during the period when they would have been incarcerated - had they been given the maximum sentence for their crime.

My view is that unless a violent offender is prosecuted to the heftiest degree possible, even if that requires the "trouble" and expense of a jury trial, and if convicted, hit with the maximum possible sentence, the judge and/or prosecutor should be held partly responsible for the crime, because it would not have been possible had they really dropped the hammer. If the violent offender re-offends during parole/early-release, all members of the parole board who elected to grant parole should also be held partly responsible for the crime.

We'd see the "softly, softly" approach of the prosecution/courts/corrections toward violent crime evaporate overnight.