Tag: patrol officers

Interview with Retired Patrol Officer Steve Baker

In 1988, 23 year old Steve Baker joined the Brooklyn Park, MN police department. Having already spent a couple of years in junior college, trying out elementary education and wildlife biology and deciding they weren’t for him, he decided to pursue a law enforcement career through a vo-tech. As Baker put it, chuckling, “maybe I wouldn’t have to work that hard on studies”. Following his successful completion of the field training program in Brooklyn Park, Baker did the obligatory 18 months of shift rotation before he was able to bid for his patrol shift.

A suburb of Minneapolis with a population of over 80,000, Brooklyn Park is Minnesota’s sixth largest city. The 26.5 square mile city, which is dispatched through Hennepin County, is divided into four patrol areas. While officers could bid their shift, they rotated weekly through the four patrol areas (which Baker preferred because it allowed him to get to know the whole city). Initially when he started they ran  8-hour days with three shifts, (day shift from 0600-1400, afternoon from 1400-2200 and dogwatch from 2200-0600) plus a night power shift from 1800-0200. Baker gained experience working all the different patrol areas and shifts, starting with afternoons and eventually changing to nights  Later in his career, as a day shift officer, the department ran 12-hour shifts (4 days on, 4 days off) although officers were now also able to bid their patrol area as well. However, as Baker noted,

“…you rarely stayed in your own area, ’cause at that time we probably had four cops working, that was our minimum, and once somebody got a call-a lot of our calls were two person calls, that was the type of city we were in-a lot of domestics, a lot of in-progress calls, so half of the shift [officers] is tied up on one call, and if another report comes out in somebody’s area that was tied up on a call, you went there. There wasn’t a lot of, I guess I’ve heard the term area integrity, or whatever, but you couldn’t ever plan on staying in your area for a shift because there was always something going on.”

During his time with the Brooklyn Park PD, Baker, in addition to his patrol work, was also a dog handler, worked general investigations and the drug task force, was a field training officer, a 25 year firearms instructor, as well as a long-term member of both SWAT entry and sniper teams. In addition to earning numerous commendations, Baker was also awarded the Medal of Valor twice, the first time, for his efforts, while technically off-duty, to save a driver trapped in a fiery wreck following a head-on collision, and the second, for his actions as a SWAT member in an active shooter hostage situation inside a manufacturing facility.

Steve Baker retired in 2016 from the Brooklyn Park PD after a nearly 28 year career in law enforcement. I had the opportunity recently to talk with Steve about his thoughts and insights into patrol work, policing, the public, and the challenges police officers face.

FH: How would you tend to describe Brooklyn Park-a high crime rate, a solid community-how would you characterize working that city?

SB: I think Brooklyn Park could probably best be described as a very economically and socially diverse city. There’s a significant amount of low income housing, there’s a very significant amount of middle income housing, and there’s a portion of the city that has $800,000 homes in it so you could see it all in a 15 to 20 minute drive.

FH: Any particular crime problems that were a little more prominent in the city itself or anything that stuck out as a problem that always needed to be addressed?

SB: Well I think domestics were the one consistent problem and you would have waves of other things that would bounce up, somebody would become interested in burglary and you get a rash of burglaries or a group of burglars that worked together would be on the run for three, four months at a time. Robberies would be a big call load certain times, especially with the advent of cellphones and Craigslist and people selling things on Craigslist; unsuspecting people going, oh I’m going to go meet this guy at a park and sell him my iPad or buy his iPad. I’m showing up to buy an iPad, the guy gets out of his car, and it’s a robbery. He never had an iPad and now he’s got $300 in cash. And the criminals found out “boy, that’s easy pickings,” and it became a fad.

We call them car prowlers, during school break we always knew that we were gonna find car prowlers. Kids going and sneaking out late at night and breaking into cars, stealing change out of the cup holders, or stereos, or whatever they could find. I don’t think there was any predominant crime but we had a little bit of everything. And it depended on who was active and what was going on. When methamphetamine became a big problem, mail theft became a big problem. Because the people that couldn’t afford their meth would go mailbox to mailbox and steal everybody’s mail, hoping to get a credit card or a check they could wash and turn into their own. Financial crimes were on the uptick with the popularity of methamphetamine.

FH: When you were working patrol what were the things you liked best about it?

SB: The unpredictability. You never know what’s going to happen that day when you’re going to work. And if there’s nothing happening, you can make stuff happen, you can be-if there’s time to be proactive, you can be proactive and go find bad guys. You don’t have to wait for somebody to call. You’re dealing with the widest variety of people you could imagine, from people that are down and out, and destitute to millionaires. I’ve dealt with professional ball players and people who couldn’t rub two pennies together and I don’t know that there’s another job in the world that has the diversity and the amount of variety in their work that a patrol officer does in a police department.

FH: Given that, anything you really didn’t like about patrol, anything that was a pain, stuff you could have just as well done without?

SB: Oh, I don’t know. I guess my least favorite call would probably be shoplifters, or alarm calls. ‘Cause alarm calls were bogus 95% of the time, ya know? It’s a waste of time to me. Shoplifters were just…a pain because its usually a very small dollar amount and people are stealing for the thrill of it. Its not even “I can’t feed my kids, I need diapers,” it’s going to grab a porterhouse and run like crazy! (laughs) So those are frustrating because there’s also really no penalty for a misdemeanor theft. So it’s kind of a waste of time in my mind.

FH: When you were working SWAT, did you work that for a while? How did you feel about working SWAT?

SB: I loved the SWAT team. I stayed on it till the day that I retired. At one point there was an opening, it was probably about 10 years before I retired so I was in my early 40’s and…it’s a taxing job. I mean you have to be physically fit, you have to be able to lift, and carry, and run, and jump and everything else. And I was in my early 40’s and went-you know, maybe it’s time to slow down a little bit, so I applied for a spot on the rifle team as a sniper. Got accepted to the sniper team, there are four snipers that are assigned to the SWAT team, and we were all previously on the entry team. Shortly after I joined the sniper team to give my body a break and try to slow down a little bit, the SWAT administrative people said, “you know what, you guys on sniper team have too much experience on the entry team, and you’re all still capable operators, we want you to cross train [as] both entries and snipers.” So, it was just twice as much time out of my month, we train monthly, both entry team and sniper team. So it ended up being more training, more time committed rather than less. But I really enjoyed it, kinda one of those things that I really loved, and stayed with it till the end.

FH: Since you started your law enforcement career, what do you think were some of the most helpful tools or innovations that you’ve put to use in your work? What were some of the things you found really useful to have in police work in general?

SB: I gotta think about that one. I mean I didn’t really have a lot of propriety in my job too because I did DARE for two and half years, I was on the SWAT team, I was a field training officer so I was the guy the rookie jumped in the car with for a month at a time. I was a firearms instructor for 25 years. I did general investigation for  year, I did drug task force for two years. So there was a lot of variety in my job. I think the thing that I disliked the most was the technology because I’m not a techie person, I’m not a computer person. I prefer sitting down and writing down what happened, or having a dispatcher tell me over the radio what the call was that I’m going to and telling me the address so I can write it down on a piece of paper instead of it popping up on a computer screen with a description of the call, address, and nothing else. The techie stuff is actually what bothered me the most. I really can’t put my finger on anything that was most helpful, other than, I mean, with such a variety of duties, I was the jack of all trades and master of none, but I had enough knowledge in all those things that I felt I was successful at them. And the administration must have thought so also ’cause they kept letting me do it all. But yeah, I can’t think of a thing that really helped me out or was a favorite.

FH: Are there things in the way of innovations, tactics, equipment, that you felt was lacking or something that you really felt you should have or that is essential?

SB: I always thought drones would be an incredible help to us, especially on something like a SWAT callout where there may be a hostage inside, or there may be an unknown problem, or a suicidal person and you don’t know if they’re still alive or not. I always tried to get our police department to employ a drone. We had a robot, but robots, Minnesota weather, don’t always mix. The robot we had could climb stairs pretty well but if it got tipped and went down the stairs, we couldn’t necessarily right it every time. And I thought, boy if we just had a drone with a camera on it, we could do a little reconnaissance, find out what’s going on in there, but because of the privacy issues and what-not, we never did, while I was working. I don’t think anything has changed since then.

FH: When you were with the department did you experience a lot of change in administration; a lot of changes with the chief, or a lot of new lieutenants, captains cycling through, or was it a pretty stable command structure?

SB: We had actually a very stable command structure. Obviously as the older generations retired it was filled in with younger, within a few years I’m working for people I trained, so I was happy to have had a say in their training, but the chiefs ended up staying quite a while really. The chief that hired me was there for probably 20 years, I’d say. I know it was ten years after I started that he left, it was a retirement thing. Hell, he got to that age and said I had enough. The chief that replaced him wasn’t there a long time and ended up moving into a job with the BCA, Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. The chief that replaced him was probably 5 or 6 years and he ended up going to Boston for an administrative job with the PD there. And now the Chief that is there now is actually the first guy I trained in 1991, he was the first person I was an FTO for and he’s been the chief for 6 or 7 years now. He’s a good guy, good chief, and I think he’ll probably be there for another 5 years before he’s at retirement age, five to seven. Even with the sergeants getting promoted to lieutenants, getting promoted to captains, or whatever, there wasn’t a lot of turnover. Once they were there, they stayed there. I was lucky to work for good people, that took care of the troops, and kept us informed, and kept us safe, and everything else.

FH: So they stayed supportive. You didn’t feel like they [administration] got stuck in a rut, with having long-term people, the same people from within the department? It still seemed like they maintained that support for the ground troops, and still kept trying to move forward in their thinking?

SB: Yeah, for the most part. In any group of people you’re going to find the few that you don’t want to work for, or don’t want to have work for you, or whatever it is. So there were those. For the most part I was able to avoid ’em for most of my career because I got lucky when I was young and got assigned to good shifts. And by the time I was old enough to choose my shift, I think I may have been working for somebody for a couple of years, a few years, throughout my career that I didn’t appreciate, but for the most part, I had wonderful supervisors. They’ve got a tough job too because we’re all brought up together, you become very close friends when you’re working the same shift and then they get promoted, now they’re your boss. I’ve talked to a lot of our supervisors and they all said, “Yeah I been called into the Chief’s office today and was told I can’t hang out with you guys anymore ’cause we have to have a separation.” And we always talked about that as a crock of…baloney, and I always told my bosses, “they’re my friends too,” and if I do something wrong and I needed to get slapped on the wrist or whatever it is, I know you’re gonna be fair about it and you know I’m not gonna complain about it because I know when I screw up, so we always had a good understanding, I least I did, with my bosses. There was never any animosity or anything like that if things were gonna go wrong.

FH: Being you were very experienced in a lot of different areas, and the department liked what you were doing, did you feel like they wanted to, or tried to, utilize you as a resource, whether they were looking at a policy change, maybe looking at different approaches, tactics? Did you feel like they looked at you and other veteran officers as a resource?

SB: No (laughs). The policy writers in the department are usually pretty high ranking and even though I worked with them when we were young, I may have trained some of them, once you get to that position you’re in a different world. You can’t write the position or the policy as though you were working on the street. I butted heads a lotta times with our administration over-Boy this is silly. “Well that’s the way it is.” Yeah, I get that, but it’s silly. But they have their reasons they have to put these policies in effect or they have to be worded they way they are. But I don’t have to agree with them as a patrol officer. I don’t have to agree with them, I just have to follow them. You keep your nose clean, and follow the policies, and make the best of it.

FH: Through the past few decades, there’s been changes in the way policing has been approached. There’s been problem-oriented policing, community-oriented policing, intelligence-led policing; in your time there, did your department try to adopt some of these approaches and policies to put them in effect in the department?

SB: Yeah, in the early ’90’s, the department created a community-oriented policing program and they had one detective, and two patrol officers, and a sergeant if I remember correctly. And the patrol officers were aggressive, creative thinkers, the detective was an aggressive, creative thinker, and the sergeant was an administrator. And the officers and detective would come up with these ideas to pinpoint problem areas-let’s use a bait car, let use whatever-and they would be shot down because there was a liability here, or it wasn’t a good idea, or there wasn’t staffing, so they kinda fought that problem for a while. The community-oriented policing, at least in our department, was more, or it seemed to morph into more, of a, “we’re gonna have a picnic with the community” type of a thing, and making friends, which I think you do that as a patrol officer anyway. You stop and say hi to a business, you get to know people in the neighborhood who are constantly outside or whatever. When you have time you make contacts, but you’re also solving problems at the same time. I don’t think that our community-oriented policing was allowed to necessarily be proactive and focus on problems areas in a different way than a patrol officer did in its early days and I think that was frustrating for the officers and detective involved in it.

But we also-I think it was 5 or 6 years ago-the city of Brooklyn Park received a grant to take part in a program put on by a major university, and it was a collective efficacy program. Which was-when I learned about it, it seemed like community policing re-invented. So they collected all this data of problem areas and I, specifically, was assigned to a strip mall in my patrol area, and I had never been to a call there in my patrol area for two years. I said I’ve never been to a call here, how can it be a problem area, look at all the problems over here. “But this is what the data shows.” Ok, so I went and contacted all the people in that patrol area, all the businesses in the strip mall said we haven’t had a problem here in years since that one business moved out that was causing all the problems, and creating problems. So I went back to our administration and said here’s the deal; the information you guys have is old, there hasn’t been a call there. I looked back in the computer, there’s been seven calls there in two years, that’s pretty darn good. And they went, “Well, it’s the data we used, so go with it.” Ok (laughs). It may have been a wonderful program but unless your using current data to choose the areas you’re participating in or with, you’re not doing any good.

And we were required to spend a certain amount of time in our efficacy area every shift. Well, the businesses in my strip mall, every time I would go in there, they’d go, “There’s nothing going on here” and I’m-well I got do this, you got anything? “No, we got nothing.” I’ll tell you what, I’m required to be here x amount of time on every shift, so when I have a slow time, I’m gonna park in your parking lot, and if you guys got a problem, come out and talk to me. And they were like “Yeah, good, ’cause we don’t have time for you to interrupt our business. We’re trying to deal with customers here.” I get it. I get it. You’re trying to deal with customers, I’m interrupting you, you may not want the police in your business because it looks bad, and you just don’t have anything to tell me anyway.

FH: Well, Fargo [ND PD] had a Beat Ops Plan. Taking crime analyst data, crunching the numbers and saying, “here’s where your problem areas are” and the officers had the same thing “Go to the movie theater and spend time there” but there’s no problems there. So it quickly became one of these things where [officers say] “I know where I’m supposed to be and it’s not where you’re trying to tell me I should be at.”

SB: Right, I know where the problems are because I was there three times yesterday. So I’m gonna go there today and spend some extra time there and give them some extra attention and see if we can get to the root of the problem. You won’t have that data for me for the next two weeks, at the earliest, by the time it gets through the system, so just let me do my job and let me take care of problems as they pop up. And I get that some of those problems are very deep rooted and you can’t deal with them from a squad car, but I think the officer working patrol has a better idea of where problems are, and what problems are there, than someone analyzing the data weeks or months later. It changes, it flows, it’s a meandering course that the problems are on. You can’t just predict, “Oh this place is gonna be a problem next week, because this place was last week, and this place was this week.” It’s not the way it goes.

FH: Sometimes departments will change patrol focuses depending on upticks in particular crimes, for instance a department may want officers to crack down on DUIs, but after a few months, in the wake of a few burglaries, then want officers to shift their focus to burglaries. Did you get a lot of expectations from the department on patrol focuses, expectations on what you should be doing, or did you have more of a free hand to, in a sense, analyze your own problems?

SB: We were always lucky enough to have a very free hand. Brooklyn Park was a community that had a lot of calls for service. There wasn’t a ton of down-time to go be proactive. That said, we did do traffic and there were people that loved to do DUIs. We had a traffic unit for probably 20 years, there was only two officers, but we had a traffic unit. They went and wrote tickets, that was their focus. We were pretty much-we had a shift briefing before every shift, so day shift knew what night shift had done. Dogwatch would come in and tell us what they did, or what the problems were. We would do the same thing, pass that on to them-ok, here’s where the problem are-at the beginning of their shift at six o’clock at night. But in the meantime, the supervisors would pretty much just let us, be us. We were lucky enough to have a very good group of personnel working on patrol that identified problems and accepted the challenge of calming down that hotspot, or solving that problem, or whatever. So we were lucky that way. There weren’t a whole lot of, “I’m going to assign you to this intersection, you need to watch for stop sign violations” or “there’s been robberies, so make sure you go hang out this intersection and watch for the robber” because we liked arresting people and catching the bad guy. And when bad things are happening to good people, that’s kind of what gets are hackles up and we wanna go get the bad guy, they need to let the good people alone.

FH: When you look at the roles that police officers engage in, there’s typically a three pronged approach; the law enforcement aspect, order maintenance, and service to the community-helping out the guy who’s lost, or helping the driver change a flat tire. When you were with Brooklyn Park did you feel like you able to engage in a mix of those roles, or did you  end up being oriented more one way than others? How did you feel in those different roles?

SB: I think our biggest role, just because of the makeup of the city and the calls for service that we got, our biggest role was enforcement. Especially the night shift, and there aren’t a lot of things you can do on the night shift-it’s a little different now that it starts at 6 pm rather than 10 pm-early in my career when I went to work at 10 o’clock, most of the normal people were sleeping (laughs). So there weren’t a lot of people to go help or do public service with, or anything like that, between 10 pm and 6 am. Now, today’s night shift has it a little different because they are actually starting at 1800 hours. So they have a few hours when families are awake and businesses are open, but even at the end of my career, when I was working night shift, at the end of my night shift career, there just wasn’t a lot of time for that. And there wasn’t a lot of opportunity for it either because of our calls for service, there always seemed to be something going on. And like I said, with a minimum of four to six police officers, depending on what time frame were looking at through the years, it doesn’t take much for everybody to get busy. They’re [roles] all important and the community support that we get is amazing when you think about how rare it is for us to go out and  one-on-one do something in the community, with the community. Now there’s a lot more programs where-Cops and Kids soccer, Cops and Kids golfing, things like that, where the officers get to meet with the community in a special event, so I think that helps a lot.

FH: In that vein, with increased media attention on officer involved shootings and movements like Black Lives Matter, as that came more to the forefront, did you see a more negative perception of the police, negative attitudes and behaviors when you were working in the different kinds of citizen contacts you had?

SB: It was just the opposite of what you’d expect. I was on day shift when that media hype really started coming, with the anti-police stuff, and we would start our shift at 6 o’clock. 7 o’clock, 7:30, we’re stopping for coffee or breakfast and every day of the week, somebody would walk up to our table and go, “Hey, thank you for what you do”. That never happened in the first 20 years of my career. Never. In the last 7, 8 years of my career, it was a daily occurrence where somebody would walk up and [say] “can I buy your coffee”, can I buy your lunch”, can I buy your breakfast” and no, thank you very much, but no. “We support you, I don’t care what they say on the news, I don’t care what’s going on, we support you. We need you.” And it was wonderful to be able to point that out to new officers on the department, who only saw the negative on the news, and in the newspaper, and whatever media they were looking at-C’mon, were gonna go to breakfast-we’d sit down and someone would come up and thank us for our service.

I was driving down Brooklyn Boulevard one day and a Black guy pulled up next to me at a red light. We looked at each other, he nodded at me, I nodded back. Light turned green and we took off and came up to the next red light. I looked over at him and he’s motioning to me to roll down my window. Well I don’t know what’s going to happen, so I’m a little leery. I roll down my passenger window and he goes, “Hey, just so you know, I got your back”. I go-really? “Yeah, that shit you see on TV, that ain’t us, that ain’t for real, I got your back. My people got your back. You don’t worry about what’s going on the TV.” We got a green light and he drove away. I had no idea who he was, he had no reason to speak nice to me, but he did. And that I think was real, and its not the media hype and the small vocal groups that get media attention.

FH: In regards to that, if you’re looking at and trying to improve perceptions of the police, improve those officer-citizen contacts, whether if it’s a traffic stop, or field stop, or anything like that, do you think that in trying to improve those relations, does it lie with individual officers and how they approach things, is it the department failing to lead, or does it have to do with citizens changing their perceptions of how police officers are, and how they think.

SB: That’s a tough question. The officers that I know, and I’m thinking of many different departments, not just Brooklyn Park, they treat people with respect, as long as they’re respectful people. It’s hard to be nice to someone that’s acting like an animal, and, unfortunately, we see that a lot. And it doesn’t matter the economic background, the social background, the religious or the racial background. It don’t matter. It matters that you’re a good person. Maybe you’re a good person that’s in a bad place, but you’re going to be respectful about what’s going on and you’re going to be treated with respect. We’re all human, we all make mistakes, so you do something wrong that’s going to bring the police into your life in a negative way, you can still deal with it in a respectful way.

Now that said, are there cops that shouldn’t be working? Absolutely. And those are the people that the rest of us try to push out as hard as we can because its one sour apple that spoils the bushel, right? You got a police department with a hundred cops on it but there’s one bad person that makes a bad name for the police. And that’s who everybody talks about, and that’s who portrays the rest of us, or who’s pictured when the rest of us are walking up to a car, is that one guy who was a jerk to so many people, or a bad cop. So we didn’t want that guy around either, and the general public doesn’t understand that, but at the same time the general public has been very supportive of the police since all of this…stuff started the magnifying glass being shined on police departments.

FH: When you’re working in diverse communities with varying societal conditions and problems, the different kinds of offending you deal with, you deal with average citizens, criminals, crime victims, in a sense you wear a lot of different hats; you’re a social worker, you’re a law enforcer, you’re a peacekeeper. What do you think are some of the most important traits or characteristics that a person should have to be a good patrol officer, or be a good police officer?

SB: That’s a long list (chuckles). In my mind, and I’m not going to say this right, you have to be aggressive, you have to be a hunter, but you have to have the ability to, what’s called de-escalating, now, you have to be able to turn off the hunting part of you, and the aggressive part of you, and be there, and listen to what people say. And its not just listening to their words but its reading them too. You have to read them emotionally and physically and see where they’re coming from. There are so many different hats, its next to impossible to be a really, really, really good cop that’s never gonna screw up. Because you have to be able to deal with exactly what you said, the irate crime victim, and then you got the criminal that doesn’t wanna go to jail, then you got the little kid that forgot to get off the school bus and doesn’t know his address and you gotta find home for him-its, I just think being able to read people, being able to keep your emotions in check-but not like old school, where you don’t talk about anything that happened. My dad was a WII vet, up until the last few years of his life I had no idea what his military career held, what he experienced because that’s the way we used to be. I got a brother who’s a Vietnam vet. Still, I have no idea what he did in Vietnam as a marine, because you don’t talk about things like that. As a cop, firefighter, medic, any of that, you need to be able to deal with all that stuff but you also need to be able to share it with others and not let it fester and not let it pollute you and infect you.

FH: Do you think having these qualities, these traits, that it’s something you have a sense of or start out with if you’re going to a police officer or is this something that develops as you become a police officer?

SB: I think a lot of it is just in you. Because I’ve had friends and family that said, “Gee, I think I’d like to do this, can I come ride along with you,” and then they do it and go “Yeah, I can’t do this” or “Wow, that was really cool, I think I’m gonna go into it.” So many people say…I coached a lot of ball for my kid and the lady, the mom, that I coached with, when we were looking for players for our travel team, she would say “I don’t care what they played before. I can take an athlete and turn her into a ball player.” I agree with that. I can’t take John Q. Public off the street and turn him into a cop. Because you have to have a mindset…I think we’re-cops, firemen, medics, military-I think we’re kind of pre-wired for most of what we do because when non-police sit down with a group of us and we start telling war stories and they go “Ahh, how do you deal with that?” And we’re laughing, well it’s just normal, ya know? I don’t know if you internalize it, compartmentalize it, or if we’re just so blind to other people’s normal feelings that we just don’t get it, I don’t know. But I don’t think you can teach that. I can take an athlete and turn them into a baseball player or a soccer layer but I can’t take a normal person off the street and turn them into a cop or a fireman or a medic, or a soldier.

FH: You just gotta have that mindset, that mentality, that will, that mental fortitude…

SB: I don’t even know that it’s that ’cause I’ve seen people that are very gutsy people, they have the intestinal fortitude but then, when they’re face to face with somebody else’s tragedy, there’s a freezing point, “I can’t deal with this, I’m done, I’m out.” I wish there was a way to explain it but the people who say it’s a calling are probably pretty close. You’ve got it in you, I had no-going through school  I was not saying I was going to be a cop, it was kind of like I thought it would be cool. I worked constriction, I did this, I did that, so yeah, I’ll go to cop school, it sounds like it’s easy and it could be fun. Well there I was 28 years later with a successful career, had a great time, and didn’t necessarily lose my marbles, maybe I didn’t have them in the first place (chuckles).

One thing I would like to mention-police, public service, and military-suicides are at an all time high and I don’t know what that’s about either. Is it the pressure put on by media? It is not the public, it’s not administrations, is it a problem in the hiring process? You know there’s always been a stigma with mental illness and things like that and I think that may be one of the biggest battles that all public service people deal with, that, “I’m on the front lines so I can’t have any weaknesses, so I can’t admit that I need help.” I don’t know, but I hope somebody, someday, can figure out what that is and stop  the rash of people taking their own lives because its just…not ok. You’ve done a good job, you’ve done well for community, you’ve done well for your family-what is it that’s making people do that?

FH: When you were with Brooklyn Park, did the department have any kind of a program or plan that helped officers deal with things like depression, suicide, anxiety, PTSD, things like that? Did they have a strong program in place to assist with things like that?

SB: Well, there was assistance available. A program called TEAM, it was anonymous help that you could get if you needed it but the stigma was still there. Who’s gonna do that? Every time there was a critical incident we would have critical incident stress debriefings, after our shooting, after that head-on crash where I got my first medal of valor, they offered it and I’m like-No, I’m ok. I mean it happened, and I was fine with it. It’s just one of those things. But they offered it, so that was good. I didn’t turn it down because I was worried about what my partners would think, it was just another day to me. But it is available but there’s still the stigma of, “Oh, you’re doing that,”-that we need to get rid of. Public safety people or military people, it hits everybody. If you got a problem, get it taken care of because I want you, to be you. I don’t want you to be this person affected by a mental health problem, depression, bipolar, anxiety, whatever it is, because we need our people good and healthy. I don’t know what we can do to promote that.

FH: Do you think the stigma lies in the idea that if you seek some kind of mental health that you’re not going to be reliable on the street, in some way? Or is it that you just ended up being labeled, the guy who went to see the mental health professional?

SB: I don’t know. I think there may be a fear that if I admit that I’m having a problem, they’re not going to let me be a detective in the future, or they’re not going to let me be on the SWAT team. I think maybe there’s a fear of that. The fears in our world run so deep-I went and got hearing aids, probably three years before I retired, it was all noise induced hearing loss because of the sirens, dogs, firearms, alarms, everything, and my hearing loss was drastic. I started telling other people about it and their going, “Really, I can’t hear anything, if the TV is on and something is running in the background I can’t hear the TV”, “If I  go out with my wife for dinner, I can’t hear her through the restaurant noise”, and I’m like-exactly what I was dealing with. You guys go get your hearing aids. And every one of them went, “No way, no way.” I’m like-why? “Well, they’ll throw me off the SWAT team”, “They won’t let me a firearms instructor”, “No, I wanna be a dog handler in a few years and I don’t wanna be banned from that because I have hearing aids.” That’s something physical, imagine what the mental health stigma must be, ya know? It kinda blew me away, wow. I don’t know what the answer is but I think that’s the biggest problem public service and military are dealing with today is suicide. I don’t know what the root is.

FH It’s obviously an issue that needs more attention and focus on it to see what they can start to parse out, what they can do, what’s going to be effective.

SB And how do we get people to buy into the fact that if you need help, go get it.

FH It’s hard enough to get the average person to do it but when your particular job duties might depend on…

SB: Well, the egos of police and fire, and medics, and military, the I’m-bigger-than-life persona that we try and put out there-I’m not afraid of anything, nothing’s going to beat me-I love that attitude because that the way you have to be to survive in those jobs where you’re fighting, you’re in a struggle, or in a bad spot-you need to know you can survive. You need to be a little cocky and little arrogant, so that’s great. Now tell that person it’s ok to get help if you don’t feel good. You can admit that your weak (chuckles). It’s a struggle to get people to accept it I think. I just hope somebody, someday, figures out how to do it.

Welcome to Criminal Justice Access

This month, at CJ Access, be sure to check out

At Issue-Reviewing the literature on School Resource Officer effectiveness and evaluation, including the measures used, whether SROs inappropriately criminalize students, and what constitutes a good SRO program

Research Briefs-looking at professional criminals with a cost benefit analysis of bank robbery, defining professionalism in marijuana cultivation, and constructing a typology for contract killers

Original Research-My 2012 Master’s thesis exploring assessments and recommendations in addressing domestic illegal firearms trafficking

Beat Integrity-A Beat Management Philosophy

While I was gathering data from my dissertation (a qualitative analysis of patrol officer behavior and decision making), during the analysis coding of officer statements, I saw the formation of what could be best described as a beat management philosophy. Twenty-nine percent of the officers I interviewed mentioned the term “beat integrity” as an ideal of  how to manage your area of responsibility. That coding process teased out some of the details in how this philosophy is regarded and constructed as well as a related concept of “jumping calls”. Below, drawing on content from my dissertation, including quotes from officers, is a discussion of the characteristics of “beat integrity, and how it was viewed and used in the study department. Full of quotes from officers, it provides a sense of how patrol officers think beats can and should be managed to both the public benefit and in service to their fellow officers. Hopefully this will lead to future research and, in our current context and forum, to discussion on what other departments and officers experience and utilize.

Introduction

In asking patrol officers whether they held any particular philosophy regarding how patrol should be conducted or their beat managed, most officers expressed general ideas about conducting patrol but nothing really akin to a philosophy. However, a beat management philosophy became evident in the exploration and discussion of the beat integrity concept and in the practice of jumping calls. A review of the literature did not reference this term in the context of a beat management philosophy. However, some components of the concept have been discussed in the literature. Mazerolle, Adams, Budz, Cockerill, and Vance (2003) mentioned the concept of beat ownership as a component of beat policing and Paoline III, Myers, and Worden, (2000) stated that beat knowledge, generated from stable beat assignments, was a component of community oriented policing. In a similar vein, researchers have examined the use and adherence to informal work rules (Ricksheim and Chermak, 1993; Paulson, 2004; Cope, 2004; Stroshine, Alpert, and Dunham, 2008; Worrall, 2013), unwritten expectations of officer workplace behaviors dictated by the behaviors and expectations of co-workers as well as workplace conditions. Beat integrity incorporates some of these components into an articulable philosophy that guides officer attitude and behavior. It also provides an understanding of what officers value in their own, and other officers, work performance and provides a guide for further research in analyzing the way officers manage their beat.

Defining Beat Integrity

Two concepts regarding officers’ management of their area of responsibility emerged during the interviews that, while both could be considered positive, may also at times be at odds with one another; the concept of beat integrity, and the concept of being a team player by jumping calls, that is taking a dispatch call not specifically assigned to the officer. Neither of these concepts were known to me prior to data collection and the interview guide did not contain any questions pertaining to the concepts. Both concepts and their interrelatedness came about through the transcript analysis process; as the terms and definitions became apparent, additional coding and analysis was conducted to develop the concepts and their relationship.

While some officers referred to the concept that came to be defined as beat integrity as beat ownership, examination of the concept revealed that beat ownership is a dimension of beat integrity. Beat integrity is a mindset; a way of approaching and understanding your own beat that’s in concert with other officers in the department.

Seventeen officers (29%) made reference to the concept of beat integrity. From officers’ descriptions and mentions of beat integrity three characteristics of the concept were identified; beat knowledge, beat ownership, and beat work ethic. While they are distinct, these characteristics are also inter-related. If officers have a sense of ownership, then it should stand to reason they should have or want to develop knowledge about their beat and serve their beat through a good work ethic. Wanting to, and being able to, handle your calls effectively and efficiently (good work ethic) is driven by a sense of ownership and facilitated by beat knowledge. Developing beat knowledge is contingent on being involved with and having that sense of ownership and experiencing and handling the types of calls present on the officer’s beat.

The first characteristic, beat knowledge, was having knowledge of your beat and a focus—the geographic layout of the beat, who the “problem people” are and where the hotspot and high call volume (“problem”) areas are, and what activities the officer should be or can be engaging in. For example, Officer 66 spoke about the beat knowledge component relating to geographic layout, “For the most part I know the short cuts, that kind of stuff. It is one of the fastest growing beats, a lot on the edges I don’t know necessarily by the name or the address. You give me a name and address, if it’s a named street some of those I’m not real familiar with however we got the map system which is nice. Other than that, I’m comfortable with business and residential sections. But that’s part of beat integrity, you learn it and especially if you’re sent there once or twice you’re gonna remember it then.” Officer 72 spoke about the aspect of understanding the problems on the beat and what officers should focus on, “I think a lot of it is that beat ownership, beat integrity, beat ownership, all that kind of stuff. This is a problem and if I don’t find a way to take care of this problem or issue, I’ll have a supervisor telling me this is a problem, let’s fix it. So if I can nip it in the bud before it becomes a problem, or gets to the attention of my supervisor, I think I’ve accomplished my job.”

The second characteristic was having a sense of beat ownership—that the area “belongs” to the officer, they are responsible for what goes on within their beat and are responsible to the citizens and businesses on the beat, as well as wanting to be on their beat and not elsewhere. The concept of beat ownership was mentioned by Mazerolle, Adams, Budz, Cockerill, and Vance (2003) when they examined “beat policing” in Queensland, Australia. They defined “beat policing” as relying “on an intelligence-driven, proactive police response” where officers “are assigned to a defined geographical location and are encouraged to take ownership of that area by responding in a proactive manner to problems within their beat” (p. 1). Officers in the current study also had that sense of beat ownership. For example, Officer 57 said, “I drive my beat and try to keep an eye out for whatever I can and be around so if we do get a call I’m near usually. I usually don’t stray far from my beat, it’s kinda my responsibility to be around here.” Officer 34 also noted, “I try and stay within my district, I don’t usually go to other districts, I just try to work my beat the most, obviously, ‘cause it’s my beat and I take pride in my beat.” A couple officers said that having assigned beats increased the sense of beat ownership. For example, Officer 66 said, “Talking about beat integrity, it used to be when you didn’t know what beat you were gonna be on, you didn’t really care about your beat. You’d come to work, take your calls, and that was it. Now you try and be more pro-active, being visible…” This accords with Kane’s (2000) study of permanent beats within the context of community oriented policing; he found that officers with permanent beats engaged in more proactive activity, suggesting a sense of increased beat ownership. Some officers also felt that the sense of ownership in beat integrity should extend to district integrity. For example, Officer 50 said,

This isn’t my beat but it sure the hell is my district. So talking about responsibility, I’m responsible to my beat and then I’m responsible to my district. I’m not responsible for this other district… I think efficiency for patrol and effectiveness comes down to district ownership. I own my district. We have a lieutenant, three sergeants, and nine police officers. We own that district. Yes, I will go off my district for a short duty, for an assault, something that’s a type one call or activity, that’s not what I’m talking about. Ninety-five percent of the day to day we cover, I don’t go off my district, I stay within my district, it’s my responsibility to make sure—you can call it power shift, power-aid for officers, call it whatever you want but we’re meeting the requirement for whatever happens in that district. So we can handle all our calls, all our traffic. The way I see it, we should be a police department within our district.

The third characteristic, beat work ethic, was being able to handle your calls for service— being able to finish your calls and move on to the next without getting overwhelmed with calls and requiring other officers to come over to your beat and take some of your calls. Officer 33 explained, “Also having that beat integrity, having some ownership of what’s going on in your area, your calls are your calls, make sure you resolve them, don’t push them off on other people. So having that ownership and work ethic.”. Officer 62 also mentioned that desire to handle their own calls, “… at Fargo PD every officer is good at beat integrity. If it’s a call on your beat, you might not be the first one there but it’s your report, you’re taking it. And everybody cares about their beat. If I was busy on something and someone on [Beat] X gets sent to a shoplifter on [officer’s beat] Y, I’m like ‘crap, crap, crap’, I wanna take that, it’s my responsibility.” Officer 34 also addressed the importance of handling calls on beat and in your district, “Other officers do this as well, if you hear on the radio when people from other districts are getting sent to your district, you try to cancel them because when you start crossing like that, and we’re traveling further distances, and then it backs up everybody, ‘cause then our response time is slower, so now you clear that up and you try to go to a call in your district where now you’re way out in another district, so that slows us down. So that’s an inefficiency issue also.”

Beat integrity acts as a set of informal work rules for officers as to how they should manage their area of responsibility. It is an expectation for officers themselves that they feel a sense of ownership and have knowledge of their beat, and are determined to “work” their beat the best way they can. It is the way they believe a patrol officer should manage their work environment. It requires them to be self-sufficient, motivated, and knowledgeable and officers have that expectation of themselves as well as expecting it from other officers.

Challenges to Beat Integrity

 While the concept of beat integrity seemed important and useful to officers, they also faced challenges to that beat integrity. Situations and circumstances could make keeping and establishing beat integrity difficult, including having to engage in assigned tasks, changing beat assignments (exacerbated by short staffing on the shift), and heavy call volume.

While one officer mentioned that assigned tasks, for example CSI (crime scene investigation), take away from officers’ beat integrity, eight of the 17 officers that spoke of beat integrity mentioned feeling a loss of beat integrity when being called to or assigned to a different beat. Officer 50 mentioned how during a time in the department without assigned beats, beat integrity suffered, “When I first got here we weren’t doing COPs and you got assigned a different beat every day, you were all over the place. They had no ownership, no real knowledge of that beat, or that area ‘cause they’re all over hell. It’s totally ineffective but because I work in the same area every day, it’s nice to have those communications, it’s nice to have the crime reporting statistics thing but the biggest thing is I’m out here.”

Situations, however, would arise where officers are assigned or dispatched off their normal beat. Some officers noted the rotating shift structure allowed for officers to occasionally be assigned to other beats. Beats that are not assigned an officer must be covered by other officers and officers can be moved off their beat to cover an open one. Officer 36 explained, “Generally speaking, on each shift there’s two officers assigned to each beat but you’re generally opposite of each other so on my Monday and Friday [Officer Y] and I work [our same beat], so if were short, I’m gonna get bumped [moved] off my beat [to cover an open beat] so you lose that sense of ownership. It’s like that’s my area, that’s where I work, I don’t wanna go over there, I wanna be over here.” As one officer noted, “[Officer X] and I are responsible for taking calls on our beats as well as [Beat Y]. And there’s also no [Beat X] car so that’s left open, and that’s the beat we’re close to, so it’s going to be—dispatch will…the right answer would be is to send us. The problem is it’s not our district and it’s not our area of responsibility, it’s not an area we focus patrol on, things like that so when we get sent over there to work it frustrates us when we have to go over to focus on issues that aren’t related to our area.”. While noting that staffing problems contributed to a loss of beat integrity, this officer recognized that having to assign or dispatch officers to a different beat was necessary to serve the public need, “And the whole idea of patrolling your own beat and your own sector just goes out the window ‘cause you’re just getting pulled over to help other people on their beats. But, that’s what you gotta do when you don’t have enough people. You can’t keep people waiting forever. I know if I call the cops I don’t wanna wait an hour and a half for them to get there. And I see that happens pretty frequently.”

Calls for service volume may also dictate that officers are pulled away from their beats to assist other officers or to focus on problem areas on other beats. One officer explained,

Beat X is a humongous beat. Beat X is on the [direction] edge of town and I’m constantly getting sucked downtown, they need staffing downtown, they got problems downtown. Last night I spent—I think I did one traffic stop on my beat last night and the rest I was pretty much downtown… my former lieutenant, you could say he was pretty much willing to take a hit on crime increase on Beat X if by me spending all my time during the first half of the shift, on Friday nights and Saturday nights downtown, to help them reduce crime on Beat 11 which is downtown. Sooo, that’s what he wanted, so that’s what we did. I don’t always feel an obligation that my beat is my beat and (inaudible) than downtown.

While officers had to contend with assigned tasks, short staffing, and call volume as a challenge to establishing and keeping beat integrity, another factor existed, the desire to engage in, and practice of, jumping calls, which could influence officers’ perception and understanding of beat integrity.

Jumping Calls

The underlying concept of beat integrity is beat and, in some instances, district management. The desire and ability to manage an area of responsibility, both for their own benefit, and for the benefit of other officers, can prompt officers to “jump calls”. Officers, based on their own awareness, or the dispatch screen in the car terminal, identify that an officer, usually on a different beat in their district, is falling behind in answering calls. Officers referred to falling behind in your calls for service with terms such as calls are “stacked”, “getting buried”, or “getting slammed”. The observing officer would then “jump” a call, that is take the call themselves, that was dispatched to the officer falling behind. The observing officer would radio in and request dispatch to assign the call to them. This officer then leaves their beat and proceeds to the location of the jumped call.

I witnessed a strong sense of solidarity amongst officers and they try to demonstrate this support by being a “team player’ and helping out other officers. For example, Officer 45 related this during the interview process:

Participant: …a lot if you’re gonna have two beats to patrol. Just remember that you’re gonna want guys to help you.

Interviewer: So you gotta show, in a sense, that you’re a team player…

Participant: Oh it’s about being a team, absolutely. You don’t wanna be the guy that’s not helping out, you don’t wanna let a district partner have three reports holding and you not help him out, it’s just not ok as a district partner. You’ll see guys who check the call logs, we got a District 2 guy down in (inaudible), we just got one call but he’s a District 2 guy so I wanna make sure he doesn’t get dogged with reports. He helps me out a lot, we go on a lot of calls together, so I try and be mindful if he’s out of the district.

Jumping calls sometimes occurs when officers are looking for action or trying to gain experience with different types of calls, though it more typically occurs because officers are trying to help their busy beat and district partners manage an area of responsibility. For example, Officer 16 said, “Basically I jump a lot of runs, might not get assigned a lot, but I jump a lot just ‘cause it’s not fair the guy downtown gets 30 calls and I get two, you know, so if I can I’ll jump calls. I probably jumped five or six yesterday.”  Another officer expressed a similar view of trying to make a fair distribution of work, “On day shift, anyway, there’s a group of us who are pretty good if people are busy and getting blasted, you jump calls for service to get things done or help ‘em out or you end up with five reports and nobody [else] was doing anything all day. Maybe you take some of the reports or calls for service for them, ‘cause you know they’re working on reports.” Officers typically get behind in answering their calls because of call volume, or the complexity of calls and the time involved in handling them. One officer explained,

And it’s not just calls for service on my beat. [adjoining beat] has one of the highest calls for service, you have complex calls, a lot of domestics, fights, thefts, tons of shoplifters ‘cause of [a local mall]. Call volume kinda puts you out there. If there’s a night where he’s getting multiple shoplifters, he gets bogged down, and I’ll go and back him up just ‘cause we take care of each other in my sector [district]. If he’s getting his butt slammed, I’m gonna go up there and help him out and try to alleviate some of his work load. And he does the same thing for me.”

Conflict Between Beat Integrity and Jumping Calls

There were indications that the concept of beat integrity and the practice of jumping calls did not always mesh smoothly. Some of the responses indicated that a few officers felt certain officers exhibited what might be characterized as low beat integrity and took advantage of other officers’ willingness to jump calls. Though I did not observe this behavior, it was reported that these officers may be slow in doing their work, or slow to respond to calls they do not like, knowing that if they get too swamped with calls, other officers will help them out. Therefore, they allow other officers to jump calls on their beat, thus avoiding their own work. One officer explained,

Now on the flip side of that not every patrol officer is willing to put that effort in [establishing beat integrity]. You need to have buy-in from the patrol officers, the patrol officer has to take ownership of the problem or trying to solve the problem. And sometimes that takes a lot of effort to get that, sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes you have officers who’re ‘Great, I want to do my job, I wanna work hard, I wanna do this’ and sometimes you have officers who are lazy, I’m not going to sugarcoat it. I mean there’s people who don’t wanna do this job, they wanna come here, sit and drive around in their car all day and then go home and not take a report, not take a call, and the people—and sometimes the crime statistics in their beat show because of that.

Another officer expressed a similar sentiment noting how officers with low beat integrity negatively affected the other officers working, “I think taking the calls, doing what you need for the call and clearing the scene for the next call to help your—otherwise you end up screwing your beat partners. And there’s people that will milk a call, they’ll take forever and it’s like, really? You got like five calls stacked up on your beat and we’re gonna get sent to them. I’m right in the middle of [Beat X] and [Beat Y]. So if something happens on Y and I’m not doing something, and they need two cars, I’m going. If something is happening on X and they need two cars, I’ll go. So I get pulled both ways so if you milk those calls out people get pissed off at you.”

It was more common, however, for officers to state that certain officers may have very high beat integrity. These officers were characterized as tending to refrain from jumping calls on the other beats because it detracted from their beat integrity by leaving their beat open; nor did they appreciate other officers jumping calls on their beat as it suggested they were losing beat integrity. For example, one officer said, “Usually I jump around beats, when we’re busy I like to go to other districts and help out. I get bored real easy. Some people frown on that, they don’t like you going into their beats which I can understand why but I guess it’s good and bad.” Officer 66 elaborated further, “Like we were talking earlier about helping other officers out in your district. There are people that are so beat oriented that they won’t help another person in their district unless they’re dispatched to do it or (inaudible) come help. Which I can understand the beat integrity but if you’re getting your butt handed to you, you want someone to come and help. If you’re not busy on your beat you should kinda turn that beat integrity into district integrity.”

One problem mentioned by officers, and one that can occur in the dispatch process when staffing levels are low as well, is a cascading effect from jumping calls. When officers took calls on other beats, their assigned beat is then left open, which may require a different officer to cover that beat. Officer 54 commented on this cascading effect, ‘Cause inevitably what seems to happen is it creates a domino effect because they’ll pull officers from another district and then they get a call out there that needs attention right away so they’re pulling officers from other districts, it’s almost comical ‘cause you’ll see officers from other districts all over town ‘cause of this cascading effect.”

Cascading can occur on occasions where call volume is heavy or officers engage in injudicious call jumping, leaving officers engaged in activities or answering calls on unfamiliar beats, and a lack of beat integrity on this new beat reduces their effectiveness in their activities. I witnessed this cascading effect on a few occasions where officers were dispatched off their district and while engaged in the call, another call comes into the beat the officer just left, requiring someone else from a different beat to take that call. This can become frustrating for officers as not only did they feel the loss of beat integrity but it gave a sense of disorganization to their activities. This frustration was especially evident when officers were dispatched to drive a lengthy distance to a call in an unfamiliar district. The extra time involved answering that call by dispatching a distant officer, especially on a busy night, suggested to the officer that the dispatch process was unorganized and inefficient, and that it would likely result in some other officer now having to take a call on their beat. One officer half-jokingly predicted that as soon as we arrived at the call destination on the other side of town, a call would come in on his beat, and he was correct.

To ensure they do not become entangled in a jumped call that prevents them from attending to the calls on their own beat, officers must be able to negotiate and balance the expectation of being a team player with that of beat integrity, take into account other officers’ feelings regarding their beat integrity, and account for call volume. This balancing act affects how officers patrol and what activities they engage in while on patrol, to insure they are open to assist other officers quickly if need be, or whether they may even jump a call. Officers might not invest themselves too heavily in any particular activity when the potential and need for jumping calls, or being dispatched on some occasions, might require the officer to break away from that activity.

A District 2 officer noted the practicality of being available and geographically close to areas they may be called to, “Really we’re a North car, so a lot of our calls we spend on District 1. I take a lot of calls on District 1 so I’ll rarely go down to District 2, I spend a lot of time helping these guys. It would leave them short if I spent a lot of time down there, so my patrol is kinda beat specific and I won’t roam as much as probably other beats do, down south, other parts of the district [2] like [Beat X] or [Beat Y]. I won’t roam down there ‘cause downtown’s pretty busy and like you said when you get a two-car run, two cars go there and it’s too busy of a district for me to be all the way down in 21 when he needs help up north.”

Officer 36 mentioned this practicality aspect as well as the expectations of other officers, “I think patrol feeds off of what everyone else is doing now, so we have a lot of cars tied up on stuff right now so I’ll stay closer to downtown ‘cause it doesn’t make sense for me to go all the way up in my beat just to get sent all the way back down again. Especially when you’re down to just two or three [officers], you’re not all looking for traffic stops, you’re staying available. ‘Cause you don’t be that guy, who’s out busting T-stops while everybody else is humping calls.”

Officer 44 also referenced the expectation of other officers, and the public, that officers be available to help answer calls, “If every beat is busy, and I’m not getting a single call and I’m out running traffic, that’s probably not-it’s going to be frowned upon, if I’m running traffic and everybody’s getting slammed with reports, ‘cause I should be helping them out. ‘Cause those are priorities, helping other community members who are calling for our help. We have to help them.”  Negotiating this balance may be difficult at times and for some officers there might be a steep learning curve which can change their view or approach to patrol. Officer 67 related how negotiating this balance affected his outlook.

Some officers have extreme beat integrity, extreme district integrity. I’m not really one of those officers where no matter what I’m not letting another officer take a call on my beat if I can help it. Or if a call comes out to my area or district and I’m free, I’ll help out as I can but I have more of a team wide mentality and the districts and beats have more of a district mentality which is department wide for the most part. I was reassigned to District 2 one night and I’m used to my beat where I patrol and a call came out on the next district over but only a couple blocks away so I went and helped out. Well another call came on my beat and I was asked to clear that call [I was on] in the middle of an interview and afterwards I took a little bit of flak for that. Someone drove past that call [on my beat] to take that [call], the one I was on, because it was their beat and I didn’t really understand all that, so it changed a little how I patrol, help out less in different districts in the areas so I can be available for calls that come out on mine. I don’t really agree with that; I would rather work more team wide but officers from different districts are coming across to help me take calls so I understand why they feel the way they do. But I don’t necessarily agree with it so that changed a little bit of how I approach it.

Officers incorporate the concept of beat integrity, and its three characteristics, beat knowledge, beat ownership and beat work ethic, into how they believe proper management of their area of responsibility should be performed. Officers expressed wanting to have beat integrity, and an understanding that officers expect it of them and they expected it of other officers. However, the degree that officers invest in the concept of beat integrity could vary and beat integrity may run afoul of another concept, the shared responsibility and teamwork that prompts officers to jump calls. Both of these concepts take on the form of informal work rules, which influence officer behavior and are viewed as effective and meaningful, as suggested by Stroshine and colleagues (2008); there was an expectation among the patrol officers that the concepts were accepted and engaged in, and officers who failed to understand or participate in these work concepts were viewed negatively, as they did not demonstrate self-reliance or a desire to be a team player.

Conclusion

The definition and adherence to the concept of beat integrity forms a set of personal and inter-officer informal work rules that dictate how beats should be managed and how officers should behave. Beat integrity, and the inter-related practice of jumping calls, sets out the desirable qualities of officers and beat management in that officers are responsible for their beat, have good beat knowledge, incorporate a good work ethic by handling their calls independently, and willing to function as a team player in the process of managing their beat. While informal work rules are meant to guide behaviors, especially in situations without official mandates or direction, officers in the study indicated that adherence and acceptance of beat integrity were not universal. However, officers who failed to abide by the beat management philosophy were perceived negatively.

When asked specifically, most officers had no articulable beat management philosophy. However, the results of the current study indicate that officers do in fact operate under a beat management philosophy in the form of informal work rules. These results revealed beat integrity, as a beat management philosophy, a concept which was derived from officers’ behavior and statements, may be a unique discovery in policing literature. It is possible that, given the description and utility of the components, that officers in other police departments may use a similar beat management philosophy that takes the form of informal work rules, and may not be recognizable to officers, police departments, or researchers as a specific beat management philosophy.

Given that, lets have some discussion. Have you noticed in your department or agency, a “catch-word” or an overall adherence to a philosophy, regarding the way a district, sector, or beat should be managed or patrolled, one that was developed, practiced, and accepted by officers? Do you, or other officers you know, have an articulable set of informal work rules or guidelines that are followed as a sort of “best practices” in terms of beat management? Let me know your thoughts and send me some feedback.