Second Day Vigilance
Remaining consistent through your career starts here
Policing exposes people to a series of “firsts” all the time. First day at the Academy, first day of field training, first day on your own, first arrest, and so on. It never ends as even with over twenty years on the job I still have new experiences through people and situations I hadn’t encountered before. We process through the “firsts” and move on. Less talked about but more readily seen are the days that come after.
This idea of “second day vigilance” comes from a focus on the push for consistent growth based on discipline through our careers. Like the Eternal Flame in the Waterfall in New York pictured above, the most amazing things happen when viewed through the disciplined lens of time in contrast to the surrounding circumstances. The first day only becomes significant when subsequent days of disciplined routine follow. Therefore, I submit second day vigilance is the marker for success not the first day of toe-dipping into something new.
Shifting Discipline, Shifting Standards
Recently, the New York Police Department changed their physical requirements through the hiring process. Regardless of where you end up on this, it is indicative of the shift we are living through in our culture today. Physical standards do not represent the metric for hiring, but rather provide an initial filter for recruiters to use to gauge whether a candidate has shown discipline to get into shape preparing for the rigors of the police academy and beyond.
By eliminating the 1.5 mile run from the hiring process, candidates are more empowered to treat the process and rigid requirements of the job as mere suggestions to fit into how they “best learn and perform.” Policing isn’t Burger King - you can’t have it your way.
Again, it has nothing to do with the measurement of cardiovascular fitness. It has to do with exposing the core beliefs someone has who will face some of the most unimaginable things on the planet. If someone fails the run for hiring, they can choose to reapply when and if they are prepared. If the run is slow, they can choose to improve. Through it all, the candidate can make a choice to embrace discipline to improve or have the hard talk with themselves that this may not be the career for them.
That’s why standards exist in the first place. Were it not so, anyone with a nod to employment could get into a police academy and conceivably graduate as a police officer. Roland Clee, author of the American Peace Officer gives a detailed treatment of this topic at length that is worth the read. I remember serving as a Squad Rep in the first few years on the job. The Chief at that time would meet with the Squad Reps once a month for one hour to hear line-level issues and to offer ways to contribute to the solutions together. I recall one meeting where the topic of physical standards for hiring as well as standards for current officers was discussed at length. I advocated openly that officers should be held to a set of physical standards when on the job, especially when serving in Patrol. The backlash I received in that room was immediate and severe. Not one other officer supported that idea. At the time I truly believed it was because they wanted an easy way to be lazy. That wasn’t it, though, as many of them still worked out regularly. Only through the years have I understood what that moment was teaching. The officers had shifted from the discipline they had to outperform the expectations of the academy into the comfort on the job of complacency. As disciple goes, so do the standards.
Politics over tactics
Dr. Travis Yates recently released a podcast where he discusses a societal push to move away from the carotid control in law enforcement. It is a concise summary of how this is even being discussed and how eliminating that tactic does not address the root issue causing the discussion to occur to begin with. All of it is politics. And please understand this point - there are two different areas we deal with in life: what’s in our control and what’s out of our control. The dissonance comes when we extend ourselves into what we can’t control and fail to act in the areas we can control.
Look at the diagram. How and where are you spending your influence? This is an epidemic in law enforcement. Too many cowardly leaders extend their rank into areas where they hold little competency to curry favor with loud cymbal-striking political groups to “go along to get along.” How’s that working out so far?
Strategies to combat these anti-leaders’ rhetoric (because that’s usually all we see sprinkled with an unnecessary reform here and there) are grounded in the foundation forged in courageous nobility. Take a look at how that’s defined and applied by clicking a previous article I authored on the topic linked here. A great action item I would hope a courageous leader would put into practice would be to highlight what a second-day vigilance would offer their agency. Leaders need to set the course through innovation and vision that should be a well-thought out path of travel their agency can follow. It looks like what courageous leaders Lt. Col. Jeoff Williams at the Texas Department of Safety and Chief Jay Callaghan at Colorado State University are living out. Give the rhetoric and follow through with a tangible action plan to make your staff and community thrive.
It does not look like tossing complete change of course practices to appease a vocal minority thereby isolating the very people you need to do the job in the first place from any buy-in at all.
A Path Forward
There is a clear path forward. As a movie guy, the path forward is summed up to me from a great line in “The Untouchables” from the late Sir Sean Connery. Kevin Costner plays “Eliot Ness” and asks Connery’s character “Jim Malone”, where to start when trying to shut down the mob’s bootlegging alcohol business. Malone looks over and says: “Mr. Ness, everybody knows where the booze is. The problem isn't finding it, the problem is who wants to cross Capone.”
We know what the problem is and what door to kick down to fight the coward-peddling bootleggers of the policing world. It looks like a lack of institutional courage to base an agency’s direction on the solid moral foundation of what serves the staff and community in cooperation to make everyone involved thrive in relational, cultural, and economic growth. Are we willing to cross over the line to make change? The solution is found in Courageous Leadership. It’s that leadership that lets people start down the path of change with the zeal of the first day cop, and watch that same attitude prevail through twenty years or more on the job. It means doing hard things on Day 1 and getting up on Day 2 to do it all over again. It’s Discipline, Vigilance, and Integrity. This is what it means to Serve and Protect!
My challenge to everyone who reads this is to ask themselves the hard question: Is this me? Are you the disciplined leader taking a “Second Day Vigilance” to the way your agency is run? Or are you a part of the ball of twine we need to unravel before it can be used correctly? Either way, you have this moment in time to do something great. Join Dr. Travis Yates and others as a collective tribe of courageous leaders looking for the same push for excellence together throughout the world is being assembled. The collective gathering for all of this is finally here. Sign up to be a part of this at the Courageous Police Leadership Alliance here. Or go directly to www.cplalliance.org to see what a non-profit focused on advocating the core principles of Courageous Leadership is all about.
I encourage your comments as we build on this discipline and consistency to train and equip courageous leaders to maximize their effectiveness while building up other courageous leaders in their path!
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 over 20 years in law-enforcement working through patrol, investigations, and special operations both at the line level and as a supervisor. Through the last 20 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.