Nomination for Hero Badge

Usually a nomination for hero badge involves the actions of an individual cop or unit involved in one particular incident.  Arlington (TX) Police have upped the number to fifteen engaged in activity as part of a continuing course of conduct.

An ongoing debate/battle between management and the rank and file is;”how do you measure police productivity?” Management likes checklists and numbers because it requires little to no thought or effort.  If police managers wanted to be challenged by thinking and working, they would have remained patrol officers. So the default is to count things like traffic contacts, warnings, citations and arrests, self initiated activity (called on sights by cops) and arrests.

Texas law bans police departments from requiring police officers to write a specific number of traffic citations, typically called a quota, for purposes of evaluation or compensation.  The knee jerk reaction is counting tickets and talking about performance is a violation of the quota law. Maybe.

Texas DPS used to count the number of traffic contacts per shift and divide the shift mileage by the number of contacts. Management claimed they were measuring the miles between contacts, as a measure of efficiency.

Arlington Patrol Sergeants have the power to approve off-duty employment. Policy dictates when and where such employment can be performed.  It is up to the Sergeant to sign off on a request. Some Sergeants started to refuse to sign off on the off-duty job requests requested by less than motivated patrol officers. Every patrol officer knows priority number one is to keep your Sergeant happy.  An unhappy Sergeant can negatively impact your life in so many ways and never mention the term “disciplinary action”. These patrol officers, I’m going to refer to them as the “Mensa Society” when asked to write more tickets hit upon an alternate solution.

The Mensa Society resorted to Falsified Traffic Stops.  This wasn’t a good idea thirty years ago, when I was writing tickets.  It didn’t improve with age.  Let me count the ways.

Modern patrol cars are equipped with a radio, Mobile Data Terminal (MDT) or Laptop, and video camera.  Most radio systems are equipped with GPS technology. This is so the dispatcher can find an officer in the event of an emergency or as a matter of routine pick the nearest patrol car to assign backup responsibility.  The MDT/Laptop allows the officer to check suspects for warrants, criminal history, driving history and any other contacts with law enforcement.  Finally, there is the video camera, it is activated automatically when the emergency lights are activated.  It can also be manually activated (or deactivated) by the operator.  The camera provides an audio and video record of the events transpiring within its view. Depending on the sophistication  of the system used, the radio,GPS and video can be monitored in real time by supervisors.  All of this information is recorded and is available for review at a future date.

The Mensa Society reported making traffic stops that weren’t otherwise verified by the video.  I predict that GPS will show that in many instances the patrol car was not anywhere near the location of the alleged stop.

If these officers are found to have lied then every case they have been involved with, in the past, is in jeopardy.  As for future cases, they will be unable to testify in any court so their usefulness as police officers is over.

There are ways of measuring individual effectiveness among police officers but it takes an effort.  I haven’t given away any secrets, the Mensa Society had to know the information to unravel their scheme was readily available, but they did it anyways.  What does this say about the level of supervision at APD?