Control What You Can: Fitness, Training, and Mindset
Train, prepare, and hope that common sense policies return.
As cops you go out and are tasked with enforcing the law. You’re supposed to be trained, prepared, and then sent out into the world to protect the public. Or serve the public…I am still not sure yet.
Either way the public is your customer, and I would argue the vast majority of cops sign up to protect good people. No matter what they look like, or where they live, or what language they speak…you go into the neighborhoods that most people only know exist from the news or movies. You do your best to navigate the dysfunction.
The patrol cop cannot control what laws are prosecuted. Patrol cops can’t control new use of force policies. Patrol cops can’t control how their job is covered by journalists. You are in the fish bowl, everyone is watching, and I don’t think that is necessarily a bad thing. All power structures in society need to be checked, monitored, and constantly refined and reformed.
I know some departments and officers are constantly improving. Maybe you went from a driver side approach to a passenger side on a traffic stop due to some lessons learned. Or you signed up for BJJ classes because you got into a fight and realized that practicing body control might end a fight early. Both with less injuries for you and the suspect. Or that old school method of just writing everyone tickets probably wasn’t the best way to gain trust in certain neighborhoods. Maybe you learned giving people a break over time created opportunities for you to be given a hint for where the truly violent criminals are. You are only as good as your best informant.
I write all of this because your personal fitness and training is somewhat controllable. Yes, I know your department still has to provide training to hit the magical number of hours to keep you current. Nevertheless, there are almost 9,000 hours in a year. The minimum hours in some states are shockingly low. There is a lot of white space for you to train.
I recommend filling that space with almost daily strength and conditioning, just 20-30 minutes. Then maybe pick one task you want to drill. Some days maybe a few minutes of dry fire practice, other days maybe you read up on new case law. You don’t have a normal job. Your job is a lifestyle.
Why am I hitting this today? I can only imagine if you are a cop in certain major metropolitan areas you are burnt out, frustrated, and maybe demoralized. The reason being is because a lot of the frustrations you are feeling are completely out of your control. Control what you can. You never know when you are going to be tested.
You can’t control if someone who murdered their grandmother and stabbed someone with a screw driver is still out walking around the street, later randomly attacking a stranger.
You have no control if a man with 20 arrests and 3 felony convictions was out walking around before randomly attacking two different people with a knife (New York Post 2022).
You can’t control if another individual with several prior arrests, one being a robbery, is out walking around and attacks a woman with a hammer, stealing her valuables.
You also can’t control if in broad daylight a man attacks an FDNY EMS worker and stabs her over 20 times, with her later succumbing to her wounds. Lt. Alison Russo-Elling was 61 years old. Her resume includes responding to the September 11th attacks (New York Post 2022). Pray for her family. The criminal history of the individual has not been released yet, but if I had to guess it will be similar to the others.
It might look like I am picking on NYC. I am not. The city recently has just been in the news, probably because NYC is the largest city in the US. It is also because these attacks have been unfortunately regularly occurring across the country. These are not unique to NYC. However, policy in this city does seem to set the tone for the rest of the country.
For whatever reason, people emotionally process violence in high crime areas much easier. Read a headline where almost 60 individuals are shot in a night in Chicago and people barely flinch. They just see it as a fixture in those communities. Unless of course it spills into their neighborhood, then the outrage is there. I know you see it, and I know it wears on you. To this day even after two combat rotations to Afghanistan I’ve still treated more gun shot wounds on young African Americans, and saw too many dead bodies before even heading overseas as a prior cop. I feel your frustration.
Attacks like these, where someone who is probably mentally ill, drug addicted, or both…attacks a total stranger without provocation…is just terrifying. For the people who actually live in these conditions I truly feel for them. They must have a constant cloud of anxiety in their lives. How do you take the subway to work right now without these attacks at least in the back of your mind?
It is easy to point fingers. We all do it sometimes. In the end like most things it just doesn’t matter. The problem is here, how do we fix it? What is the next phase of policing in America where we balance the concerns of the public while also trying to mitigate those disasters above? I have some ideas and will discuss them for some future articles.
Regardless, my ideas will be from the training and enforcement perspective. It is what I know. For them to work there needs to be some serious policy ideas on how we deal with the street level crime and mental illness we have in this country. I am all about reasonable second chances for people that make mistakes or come from rough backgrounds. Those people who make those mistakes should be afforded the opportunity to improve themselves and become productive members of society. I am bias, but for some I think the military might be their best option…with some caveats of course.
One of those caveats being when the arrest record starts creeping up to 20-30 arrests, often progressing to felony convictions like one of the examples from above. At a minimum, when we are approaching 20+ arrests, should they be out just wandering the street? Should they be roaming the subway if they murdered their grandmother?
I’ll let you answer that. Let’s get back to my initial point for the heroes out there still doing this job. I know you all contact suspects like the individuals above quite often, they just don’t always detonate on that day.
Honestly ask yourself…are you in the best physical shape you can be in to deal with those people above? Have you been training? Rehearsing? Those are things that are in your control. Does your department have a strength and conditioning program? If not, have you tried to help set it up?
A good friend and mentor of mine who is still an outstanding strength coach, told me a quote from an old acquaintance of his back during his wayward youth. This individual had committed multiple strong arm robberies. My friend asked him if he ever felt bad for doing what he did people.
What was his response?
“If God didn’t want them sheared he wouldn’t have made them sheep.”
Now whether that mantra was born from nature, nurture, faulty wiring, whatever…it doesn’t matter what your use of force policy is at your department, or if you think your department will back you in the event you have to make a split second decision. If you bump into an individual with that kind of life philosophy, what do you look like to him? Do you look like someone he considers a sheep, or are you a confident and physically fit Officer? Please control what you can right now so you can protect the public, your team, and yourself.
Hopefully common sense policy will return.
For custom individual/group programming or facility design, please see below:
Beautifully written article