Pushing stats in todays anti-law enforcement enviorment
The average experience level in Patrol today is about two years. When your Superiors are pushing stat driven activity, you naturally want to please your bosses right? This runs the gambit of overzealous types that spend their every free minute writing citations or chasing warrants because a lot of the area checks, interacting with the public, house checks etc, doesn't show a stat. Now I am not a anti-stat guy, during a typical 12hr shift you certainly should see solid police activity that is worthy of producing a stat. We all were two year deps at some point. I can remember my first couple of years of barely scratching the surface of learning this job and I was constantly getting exposed to investigations and legal matters that I had never encountered before. A key difference between my generation and todays generation was most of my generation had a variety of life experience prior to getting this job. Most of us either had previous LEO experience, military, or worked in a variety of other jobs prior to doing this one. Today, most are coming straight out of college, or still living with mom and dad, and this is their first real job. In todays anti-police environment, I fear that pushing stats for stats sake is only going to lead to more confrontation with deps that have little experience. So much focus is on the low stat guys that virtually no one pays attention to the quality of the high stat producers. Chicken-Shit stats cause far more damage to the agencies image with the public. We should be just as wary of that.