Blog 91 the knocker blog.com
Here we go again another nut case has shot up a school.
Police officers have failed to respond to an obvious action required situation and you are all asking WHY? Why would an officer that has such longevity on a police force fail to recognize when the situation requires that he or she put it all on the line.
I was in policing for 30 years I wrote my book “A view from the street /River City Policing” by S. Henry Knocker on this very subject.
The problem goes much deeper than you might think I wrote my book on this subject Doing the minimum and getting the maximum. This is an attitude that contributes to the failures that we witness throughout the public service arena and in private sector as well.
There are those that work around us that never measure up they can’t or won’t do the job and we tolerate this behavior. They do this to avoid complaints from the public. Doing nothing becomes a habit and when the stuff hits the fan they freeze. They haven’t done anything. They have no experiences to rely on. They have actually trained themselves to do nothing. Police administrations and politicians actually encourage this behavior. Weather it is deliberate or not I can’t say.
I can tell you what happened to me. I had a situation you can read about in my book. I was confronted with a man with a 30/30 rifle advancing toward me my choices were to run or stand my ground. It was a standoff I had my 9MM pointed right at him if he tried to move the rifle up to fire. I would have Shot this fool without one bit of remorse. Something told me not to, I let him walk up to me face to face then I bowled him over. We crashed threw a glass coffee table. I disarmed him and that was that I thought.
Well the New Chief at the time thought I should have run and let his new Swat team deal with a barricaded suspect in a residential area because that is what the book said at the time. Somehow turning my back on a 30/30 in the hands of a Known Nut Case was not that appealing to me at the time. The fool chief’s answer was well the gun turned out not to be loaded, and he put a letter of reprimand in my file.
Over my career both in the military and police force, I have received numerous awards and citations. I also receive a goodly number of complaints that I was over zealous and was picking on certain bad actors in the community.
It was my attitude if I kept getting an invitation to deal with you and you caused me to do paperwork. I was not going to be inclined to give you a break when that little thing cropped up in your life that I was made aware of. On the other hand when you saw the light you got the same breaks I afforded the average Joe. It was Fergie’s incentive program. I was of the mindset that the judge was busy and didn’t need me sending things up to the courts that folks were truly remorseful for. I told a lot of folks “Why should you be charged a couple hundred bucks for a lecture from a lawyer that I could give you for free”. Most folks appreciated the wisdom. The ones that didn’t I just sent them over to the judge and they got the lecture straight from the horse’s mouth.
The whole point is that officers need to be supported properly by their administrations to get the best out of them
If you want to read up on this my book is on amazon. I use the book as a fundraiser for the V F W it is called ” A View from the Street / River City Policing By S. Henry Knocker See Help the Vets at Post 5564 on face book
- Henry Knocker theknockerblog.com
theknockerblog 