By Chief Joel F. Shults, Ed.D Twenty-eight-year-old Germaine Davansha Small wasn’t on a casual stroll on the first weekend of April. Hiding a pistol under a shirt draped over his shoulder, Small first engaged in a brief contact with the occupants of a car that had just pulled into the parking lot of a St. Read more »
By Chief Joel F. Shults, Ed.D Not all of the great technology that has been applied in law enforcement has been accessible to small agencies, and some have limited value anyway. The exception appears to be the advent of the drone. More appropriately described as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), the machines became famous in warfare Read more »
By Stephen Owsinski It is widely held that people working in public safety such —police, fire/rescue, and EMS—often work together on incidents requiring feats of selflessness toward incredible lifesaving operations. First responders don’t boast, with words such as “Watch what I can do!” They just do it. They perform the demanding duty at hand. They Read more »
By Chief Joel F. Shults, Ed.D There is a usually good-natured rivalry between police officers and firefighters. Police officers say they are glad to serve because firefighters need heroes to look up to. They say that kids dressed as firefighters on Halloween can’t go to the door until a kid dressed as a police officer Read more »
By Stephen Owsinski I came across footage depicting a brawl at Orlando International Airport whereby a man with two bloated bags (one seemingly shaped like a guitar case) was trying to breach security screening stations by pushing his way past Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents. The general impression was that this individual didn’t feel his Read more »
By Steve Pomper How could I not write about these cops? They brought those of us parched-for-law-and-order folks, “water” in a rule-of-law desert—figuratively and literally. Figuratively because it wasn’t actually H2O, but it literally happened in the desert. Add to that the incident apparently set radical lefties against ordinary lefties and, forget the Burning Man event Read more »
By Chief Joel F. Shults, Ed.D Amid the cries for de-escalation and the protests of police shootings, technology has stepped in to give police officers options other than their handguns when confronting a resistive subject. The term “less lethal” survived as the term of choice even though it is a bit of an oxymoron. Lethality Read more »
By Stephen Owsinski Evolving from the pandemic, the term “remote work” has become synonymous with employees working from home as a protocol, fashioned to preempt exposure to deleterious conditions. For cops, staying home is not necessarily an option when calls for service require a response, especially when reports involve enormous perils engendering catastrophic potential. Law Read more »
By Chief Joel F. Shults, Ed.D I recently watched my Denver Nuggets make an amazing effort to win some trophy or something like that. I am only a sports fan to the extent that I like having conversations with my sports-fanatic son, and as a social prompt to say “How ‘bout them (insert team name). Read more »
By Stephen Owsinski Jurisdictions notorious for gun violence may have ShotSpotter technology implemented to aid law enforcement responses, chronicle firearm discharges, and generate crime data to bolster deployment of dwindled police resources, but some communities are still lukewarm on the use of the alert systems, citing privacy concerns. Speaking of lukewarm, a new study conducted Read more »