Not a fair fight

I stepped into the police academy class yesterday morning. Officer Chris Ehrhorn was teaching a great course he's developed on follow-up investigation. I was particularly interested in a discussion Chris had with the trainees about using the resources of coworkers to your advantage. He was talking about the wealth of skill, experience, and knowledge that individual officers bring to their job, and how accessing what your coworker might know can be incredibly helpful. Police work, though often done by a single officer alone, is in many respects a team endeavor, too.

A few times each year, I will deal with someone who is upset that after encountering a small team of officers during a resisted arrest. "Not a fair fight" is the theme. They are right. When it comes to crimes and arrests, we're not like a bowling league where everyone has a handicap to equalize the competition more even. We're more like the army: it is not our aim to fight fair or on equal terms with an adversary. We try mightily to get the odds decisively in our favor by whatever means are available--albeit within the rules of engagement established by the Constitution, laws, court precedents, and policies.

When a suspended driver bails from the traffic stop and flees on foot, we do not give him a half-block head start. If circumstances allow, we would actually consider it perfectly sporting to let the pursued wear himself out (nobody outruns radio waves) while we vector in more help, including somebody like Mark Fluitt, or the fleet-footed Kony.

Teamwork occurs on many different levels. During the police academy, I teach a course called "Information Resources" to our new police trainees. The object of the course is to acquaint the students with the resources available in our Records Management System and other data systems. After the classroom portion, the new recruits spend a half day working through a series of exercises designed to take them into many of the nooks and crannies of the LPD information stream. The primary purpose, though, is to teach them to practice two things:

1. Think creatively about how you might bring information to bear on a case or a problem.
2. Work collaboratively to solve problems: two heads are better than one.

That's how we do it in the real world. If I'm trying to find some information and I can't remember how, or don't know where to go, I get help from others. In a group of officers, somebody is more likely to have an idea. This is also true if I'm trying to conceive an interview strategy, think about a possible motive, identify a potential suspect, come up with a good solution, and so forth. Working independently is not nearly as effective as working collaboratively with others.

This shift in thinking isn't always easy to accomplish. Our police recruits are used to doing their own work in school. They've been taught not to plagiarize, not to look at anyone else's paper, to keep quiet during quizzes, and so forth. Now, I want them to do just the reverse--things that might be cheating in a college test. On this "test", I need them to talk with each other. Rather than everyone working every problem, divide the labor and share your answers. Get the answer any way you can. It takes a while for them to get the difference.

Practice helps, so a couple of times after the Information Resources class, I've popped into the classroom, asked them a question, and told them to find the best answer. Today, I relied on a couple of emails that other officers sent out department-wide over the weekend. One officer had recovered a blue Schwinn girls bike that had been abandoned. A second officer had recovered a Stihl chainsaw. Both were alerting other officers and looking for anyone who might have taken a report of a similar stolen item. I asked the recruits if they, too, had received the emails. They had. So I gave them this impromptu assignment:

Give me the most likely case numbers of the offenses that match these
found property descriptions.

It didn't take long before the designated messenger, Mark Kounovsky emailed the results to me. He provided the case number of a recent bicycle theft with a description that was very similar to the found bike, and not too far away. He had the case number of a recent burglary with a promising description of a Stihl chainsaw. The recruits were in other classes all day, so they must have worked on this during their short breaks. Here's what I really appreciated, though--not just the find, but the signature line:

Chief,

We have the two original case numbers for the bike and chainsaw for
you. The chainsaw case number is A7-043428. We think the bike case number is
A7-029815.

Thanks,
Academy Recruit Class

Everyone shares the credit. Ten heads are much, much better than one.