Finishing the Bridge

There is a way to not only survive through a career in law enforcement, but to thrive as you serve others

Photo by Joe Yates on Unsplash

The calling on whether or not to join the ranks of law enforcement is not a weak one. It changes every single thing in a person’s life. It can take your body, mind, and soul and leave you absolutely empty at its end. Or it can be looked back on as the greatest legacy of character building and impacting lives anyone ever saw. After almost 25 years in public safety teaching around the country and interacting with thousands of people, I am assured this is true. But you don’t need a quarter century to figure this out. Like I have read and heard before, if you know you know.

This is a natural follow-up to an article I wrote called Walking in the Desert late last year. I encourage you to read that at some point if you haven’t through my Substack as it grabs the idea of serving nobly and moves it through and into our profession. In fact, these are the two talks I was privileged to give at the 2023 Breaching the Barricade conference in Elkhart, Indiana in early October. For those who couldn’t attend the conference, I wanted to summarize the lessons I learned and what I hope was taken away by others.

The Challenge

Consider the picture above. Now, think of that with this story. A father and son are on one side of a massive canyon called Where they Were. A father points out across the canyon to the other side and tells his son that cliff is called, “That’s Where we Want to Be.” The father then spends his life with the son showing him how to build the bridge to get across with what he says, how he acts, and through what he believes every day. He shows him where to get the building material, how to design and build a bridge, and how it looks to do the work to start across and finish at the other side.

The father stops a short distance away from the other side, far enough away where more work needed to be done, and tells the son, “I have done all I can do.  I have taught you all I can.  To get from Where you Were to Where you Want to Be means you will now have to Finish the Bridge on your own.” The son looks at the father and tells him he doesn’t know how to do it.  The father reminds him of where his hope was to see the other side in the beginning, what he has both seen and helped him with along the way and affirms that he is ready to do the work on his own now.

This story typifies the path we should take in law enforcement. Strong, experienced leaders that mentor the next generation through their career. There are great examples of men and women with whom I’ve worked that understand this concept, but they are few and far between. Most of the people in titled leadership are simply in a holding pattern waiting for another opportunity to promote themselves into a higher position quickly and callously forgetting the people that helped them along the way.

Running in Sand

There is a point for everyone in law enforcement when they reflect on the value of the effort they are putting out compared to the gain they receive. That gain sometimes is measured in promotions, pay, respect, assignments, or could be seen through lives changed, cases solved, bad guys put away, and victims served. Honestly, I have been through the entire continuum in my career so far. From the new rookie who can’t believe they are allowed to work as a cop on their own to the twenty-year veteran who can’t believe the courts let that guy out again, the “why bother?” rhetoric grows like a weed in your chest.

I have been involved in the training of new officers in defensive tactics and public speaking for over twenty years. I keep as a mantra that if my students can train harder and with more intensity than what they believe will face on the street then they will go home to their loved ones every day. That’s why we make our officers engage in grueling PT with instructors. It’s also why we throw officers of all rank together and make everyone stand up and speak about themselves to the group within the first five minutes of a class. We show what it feels like to run through sand - that is, spending lots of energy to move very little. I’ve learned to help people see the same paradigm in their careers. And this has led to crystalizing some key lessons to finish building the bridge.

Engage in unseen transparency

Good news, the real issue IS NOT the real issue.

In case you missed that, let’s explain it another way. At the academy where I teach criminal law, defensive tactics, and laws of arrest for starters, there is a prescribed structure for how the recruits absorb knowledge. It’s based on the geriatric model followed by our public school’s system currently. Teach, build, assess, repeat. It’s the same in the college classes I teach as well. If the goal is to crank out “officers” from the academy setting, well, this is the way. Same with “graduates” from high school or college. I have spoken/written/argued about this approach since I started. There is no way to build into this the most important piece: application.

Knowledge for its own sake never changed the world. Knowledge in the ongoing pursuit of wisdom is the foundation on which all other change happens.

So, how is it we are teaching people in law enforcement to apply knowledge? We need to be pushing for community engagement and involvement. Remember, the real issue is not the real issue, right? Take the laws and policies learned and be with a community that desperately needs stability on their lives. Locking up someone to just do it again the next day doesn’t address the issue. What if we were to be honest and spend time in the muck of people’s lives to try and make their world a little better that day? What if playing basketball with kids drew in their parents, who then get to see how an officer can impact someone’s life?

In 2014 in the immediate moments following Ferguson, everyone in law enforcement was made to feel ashamed for doing their job. This was started by the lunacy of former President Barak Obama in 2008 where he painted our profession with a political brush regardless of facts that existed (fact check me if you’d like as Dr. Travis Yates does a full breakdown of this in his book, “The Courageous Police Leader.”) As a white supervisor working in a Black and Hispanic area, I was viewed with suspicion at all times by the people I was committing to serving.

I was working swings at around 9pm in a fully marked police Tahoe heading back to the station to do the 100 hours a day of paperwork sergeants need to do when a black 300M flies through the intersection I am at around 70mph. Everyone around me looks at my car and me and I know I need to make the stop. I catch the car and can’t see inside because of the limo tint windows. As I exited my car four sets of hands fly out of the windows. I approach the driver and ask the four Black teen males to put their hands down. The driver remarked he did that because he didn’t want to be shot.

The real issue is not the real issue.

These young people were expressing a hatemongered, manufactured fear towards all law enforcement without taking accountability for any of their own actions and responses. I explained this including why I stopped them for the excessive speed. I then was transparent and told them how hard it was to be a righteous, God-fearing man with a badge who no one listened to because they couldn’t see past my job or skin color to the man I was. I chose to listen to them and see the situation differently.

I found out they had been told by their parents and friends that white cops will kill black kids on traffic stops so watch out. I told them that was just wrong as I stopped them for speeding, and I couldn’t see who was in the car as the tint was too dark. I then commented to the driver wearing a gold cross necklace if he had a faith of his own or if that was just a gift. He said it was a gift from his grandma who was religious. I asked them all about their faith. I asked if grandma wanted them speeding around in a car begging to get the attention of a young motor cop who would absolutely write them numerous citations. All of them admitted it wouldn’t have made their family proud.

I got all of them out of the car moving into 15 minutes or so at this point.  I shared on the curb how hard it was doing the job and being judged by everyone. I transparently shared that I was a recovering alcoholic because of all the stuff I had been forced to see, but because God loved me and sent His SON to pay for all my drama, I could live the way He made me. Not as a White cop but as a Christian looking to serve people. We were all just talking, and I asked all four in a semi-circle around me on the curb, all bigger than me, if I could just pray for all of them and their families and they said yes! I was praying and missed dispatch checking on me. That’s a mistake as I supervised a team of young military guys at the time. Two of my guys on my squad came barreling down the road - one a Marine and the other Army infantry - and jumped out starting to run thinking I was surrounded and fighting as we all had our hands on each other’s shoulders praying. I looked up as they yelled, “Sarge!”

I stopped them immediately and told them I was talking with these good men as all of us had tears in our eyes. My officers stood there stunned watching as I finished praying for the guys, gave them my business card to call if they needed something, and gave them all bro hugs before giving a warning on speed. And told them if they wanted to know more about how to live free to just call me or grandma. My cops couldn’t believe it!  They told me they were raised in faith but just didn’t think that was in their life anymore but realized it would be okay as they saw their boss engage with transparency with those men.

Engaging the community where they were in transparency based on my firm foundation of faith changed the lives of those four teens, my two cops, and whoever else they all would tell the story to later in their lives. I got asked a lot, “Aren’t you worried someone would call and complain?”  I served and protected those teens and my officers better than I had done the entire day previously, so no, I had no fear at all.

Knowing what and why you believe what you do lets you do the job you were called to with Nobility.  Finishing the bridge requires more. It requires personal investment in the lives of people, and the courageous nobility to act where you see a need.

People Matter - Act Like It

Ultimately, to finish the bridge well and leave a legacy worth mattering, we need to change the way we see ourselves in law enforcement. We are not step-and-fetch servants who rely upon citizen’s generosity in paying our salary to do their whims. We are highly trained and educated guardians of democracy as Plato wrote, and warriors who face off against the evil of society people pretend doesn’t exist.

It’s with great temerity I serve each day in the appointed role of my God-created calling. It’s with a humble heart and gratitude that I walk into the toughest days of people’s lives just to tell them it’s okay. And it’s with a rock-solid resolve I know that people matter more than the things or tasks that we ask of them. So, why don’t we live this way? I will leave you with the same challenge I left the conference attenders:

BE PROACTIVE AND NOT REACTIVE!

Find a mentor, build off of your firm foundation, and take the risk of seeing people differently and you will put the last brick on to the path between Where you Were…to Where you Want to Be!

Your career is a job that affects the way society operates. But I submit to you that it can be so much more!  It’s a Noble calling where lives can be changed daily by your influence. Use it well to finish the bridge!

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***A new opportunity to link arms in proclaiming truth is here! Click the link to listen and download the episodes of the Trust the Truth podcast with Jeff Daukas here, where conversations on the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth are chased down!***

Sergeant Daukas is committed to the principles of Courageous Leadership and is the lead instructor for the foundational principle of Courageous Nobility. You can listen to Jeff discuss this vital principle on a recent Courageous Leadership Podcast.  He has almost 25 years in law-enforcement working through patrol, investigations, and special operations both at the line level and as a supervisor. Through the last 25 years, Jeff has embraced his passion instructing officers and civilians through the nobility of policing. He is a certified FranklinCovey Nobility of Policing instructor, as well as a certified instructor for the Blue Courage curriculum. Jeff holds a master’s degree in criminal justice with a focus on terrorism and homeland security and teaches in that discipline at the college level.  He is a graduate of the FBI-LEEDA Supervisor Leadership Institute program consistently implementing servant-leadership into training the next generation of law-enforcement professionals in both courageous leadership and followership.