“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
—Theodore Roosevelt
Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910
A recent online rant against police has prompted this post. The rant started out about tactics but also covered other aspects of how lame a cop could be. The rant was fueled by a video that came out last week (and probably something else as well), that showed an agency trying to end a carjacking. A shooting resulted where the officer was injured, almost had his patrol car taken, and then the incident finally ended when another officer ran the perp over while he was attempting to carjack someone else.
BLUF: The rant was not incorrect, most law enforcement (LE) do not know how to shoot and do not understand tactics and how to use them. And by the way, neither does anyone else, including the vast majority of the military.
LE in America is an interesting concept, one that seems to escape most critics of the individual members and their fighting abilities. LE is not about hiring the best fighters. I wish it were so, but it is not. It is about hiring people who can cover a very diverse set of skills and circumstances, only one of which is protecting the public through use of force. But wait, there is more.
Protecting the public does not mean that any given officer needs to be a better boxer than the perp he is fighting with. Nor better at jiu-jitsu, nor shooting, nor tactics. I have tried to change that over the course of my career, but tilting at windmills has never been very successful.
What protecting the public does mean is that the LE agency that is faced with a criminal threat, will win the day, one way or another, and hopefully while minimizing LE and civilian casualties. This is usually accomplished through sheer numbers. If you and your bank robbing gang want to rob banks in my jurisdiction, I will bring 10, 20 or 30 dudes with me and we will put an end to your bank robbing. If need be, I will bring way more than 30. Those guys may be SWAT guys that stakeout the gang, or they may be investigators who locate the bad guys so that SWAT can take care of them. One way or another, LE always wins. The military takes a very similar approach.
In the video that prompted this post, LE won, and no civilians were further injured. I don’t know if any were injured or killed initially, but there is literally nothing any LE agency can do in the moment about that. It is up to you, as I’m sure you are well aware.
Please don’t misunderstand. I’m not excusing poor tactics and training. But in the big picture, they are less important to society, and more important to the officer currently engaged with a bad guy. I did not want to ever lose a fight on the street so before I became a cop, I learned and trained as much as possible. I continued throughout my career and now into retirement. It worked out pretty well. Agencies cannot force individual officers to do that, which is why minimum standards exist. And they are minimal, to be sure. Yet the work still gets done. Not always as well or as cleanly as we would like, to be sure.
It is also likely that the officer in the video was not experienced at that sort of thing. Units and people often don’t do well their first time out. Maybe he had been correctly trained at some point, but if so, he was unable to draw on that training. It is human nature to fail at first and then hopefully learn from our mistakes. The wise learn from other people’s mistakes, but most people are forced to learn from their own.
In the grand scheme of humans fighting with humans, all throughout history only a very small percentage were truly skilled. Most wars are won by the side with more resources. It is no different in modern day America. So while I agree with the rant in theory, and have certainly felt that frustration, it is unrealistic to hold large groups of people to high standards, in law enforcement or the military. Having been the fortunate recipient of many hundreds of thousands of dollars in training, equipment, and deployments, I try to have a little perspective on those who have not had that benefit. Of course, that benefit was sought and earned, not simply given.
