In nearly every buddy cop movie I see, the two heroes always get hauled before some deskbound chief (lieutenant?) at some point who proceeds to scream at them and bawl them out. There’s hundreds of examples eg Beverley Hills Cop, Lethal Weapon - seems to happen in nearly every cop movie I see.
Usually the cops give some flippant back answer and get out of there. But I wondered - does this actually happen in real life? Does the lieutenant shout at everybody all the time? Don’t they get a bit tired of shouting all the time?
In this thread, I asked pretty much the same thing, based on my experiences with two retired cops who became Security Supervisors where I used to work. So far, no one has responded.
But in my personal experience in dealing with retired cops, YES. They’re single mindedly lacking in personnel skills. I can only assume that such things are neither taught nor valued in Police Work.
My Director (Retired cop, former head of SWAT), at a time when our management consisted of her and an Assistant Director, was more interested in doing the high profile executive level work. Whenever a personnel issue came up, she directly showed her exasperation and lack of respect for her officers. The most common expression was to throw up her hands and say “I don’t want to hear it!”. (Tough shit, it’s part of your job. Do it or go home!) Hell, despite an HR investigation into the department, they kept her on. In the end, they tried to solve the problem of mismanagement by adding MORE management on the theory that she didn’t have time for it. No, not in my experience. The real problem was that she neither wanted to, or had the professional competence to deal with personnel issues.
Our Assistant Director, who was SUPPOSED to handle the personnel issues, had the personnel handling skills of a paperclip. On more than one occasion, I was able to use skillful, indirect teaching tactics to point out unprofessional behavior on her part and get her to change. (Like yelling at people over the radio for five minutes at a crack. Which not only prevented anyone from calling in emergencies or anything else during that time, and was not only heard by every officer on campus, but by every person within earshot of our officers. NOT COOL.)
Then we got two new supervisors who were retired cops. They’re the two I mention in that thread.
Cops are, more than ever, paramilitary. Military leadership prizes directness at pretty much any cost - it doesn’t take much for a career NCO (especially) to feel he’s sugarcoating the issue. And many cops are ex-servicepeople.
IMHO, it adds up to a culture where bluntness is a positive value, indicating honesty and leadership, and diplomacy is more or less negative because it indicates insincerity and in decisiveness.
Unfortunately, the bluntness only goes one direction: Down. The Wild Eyed Panic at the very idea that a subordinate would “tell me how to do my job”, know more than them or question their orders was incredible. We on the lower end had to be very diplomatic in telling them just how full of shit they were about certain things.
The Retired Cop/Reservation Chief-cum-Security Supervisor had my respect for a brief time, as he was very open when I had to take charge of a late night situation and train him on how to handle it. However, he completely lost that respect when I brought up the incident in front of the other supervisor and he threw a minor fit, claiming that he’d known how to handle it all along and that I was out of line that night trying to tell him how to do his job. Damn shame his ego was so fragile that he’d rather lie and destroy his relationship with subordinates than admit - in front of another supervisor / retired cop - that he didn’t know something and accepted being taught by a subordinate.
Well, that and the child-like tantrum I mentioned in the other thread.
Strangely, the Career Military guy I had as a supervisor before the retired cop came in was the all around best supervisor there. He chipped in and did the work, always made sure we had help, listened to our concerns and honestly did his best to address them. It was only the Career Police that were flaming jackasses. The only downside with CMGuy was that he firmly believed that you NEVER criticized your boss under any circumstances or told them they were wrong, so he was never willing to do anything about their obvious mismanagement of certain things, even when it was obvious to us in reading his body language that he wasn’t happy about it.
So I suppose the answer could be then that the kind of behaviour that would be seen as out of order/positively bizarre in a civilian type situation such as Chimera describes is seen as positively desirable in a police/military environment.
I wonder whether cops watch fictional TV cop shows like Law and Order, Hill Street Blues, Columbo etc?
I’d wanna tell someone that “I’m gonna bust their ass so low they’ll be directing traffic in kindergarten. Now GET OUTTA HERE”"
When I got on the job in the very early 80’s well more than half were vets. And almost nobody had college degrees.
Going through the roster of the department I retired from last year (100+ officers), less than 15% were vets, and everyone had at least an Associate Degree, more than half a Bachelors.
I retired as a Lieutenant in a very large department. I never raised my voice in my capacity as a commander, in fact I do not raise my voice in any capacity. The loud mouth abusive commander is a construct of Hollywood so that the viewer will be more sympathetic toward the protagonist. That is not to say that there are not overbearing asses who are police commanders. Certainly there are. The nature of the job sometimes draws questionable personalities. I am merely saying that it is not normally the case that a commander will act in such a manner. People with such an approach are not frequently seen as promotable by enlightened and progressive departments. With regard to remarks to the absence of “people skills” and a culture that does not value those skills, I would disagree. One finds that one is far more successful in police work if one can deal appropriately with people, whether subordinates, the public, suspects, witnesses or victims. We are not all the knuckle-dragging thugs that some here make us out to be. I would repsetcfully warn against committing an ecological fallacy in this regard. Just because one knows or has had contact with an example of poor behavior, one shopuld not assume that we all are that way. That is the basis of racism and every other bigotry in our society.
My oldest brother was a captain of 8 years, on the force for sixteen (he is now a lieutenant with an eye on asst. chief). He says he has never raised his voice toward any subordinate in any situation. He has a very low key management style. In fact I can’t imagine him screaming or bullying anyone, it just isn’t in his nature. He is not ex-military, holds a masters in criminology, and is working on his doctorate right now. The face of police management is changing in most major cities. Though my father was a cop as well and was also a very calm man with a rational and organized mind. I find the some of the descriptions in this thread completely alien to what I know about most cops. My brother is no-nonsense to be sure, but directness is not equivalent to biligerance.
Thanks for the response. Please note that this was my particular experience with four individuals at one employer. Three of which were hired specifically because they were long-time cronies of the Director, not because of their professional qualifications. She was building a little fief with people she could trust to support her, in a larger organization filled with back-stabbing politics.
I have worked with police officers and retired police officers in other jobs and in other situations, and had good experiences. I’d say it’s not a job for assholes, but then, I lived in Minneapolis for 17 years and worked there for several years before and after, and that department has a very well earned reputation for thuggishness, corruption, mismanagement and assholishness. Surprise surprise, the Director and two of her cronies were retired Minneapolis cops. :rolleyes:
I know exactly that sort of cop and department. It is unfortunate that some departments have such a culture. I hope you do not think I was doubting you or denigrating your experience. In any department, the job itself draws asses with fragile egos like moths to a flame. In some departments the culture is conducive to corruption. In progressive departments, these people are never hired, or never complete probation.
Relevant only to previous statements regarding background, perhaps I should mention that I am a veteran, assigned in the military to a special forces tasking. Further, I hold a Ph.D. and M.A. in sociology. This may explain my sometimes twisted view.
True enough. As a consultant, I was once yelled at, threatened and called names by my supervisor in our client’s lobby!.
At the place I worked Armored for, one of the Supervisors who was clearly on his way out screamed at me in the middle of the garage. Twice, five minutes apart. Over something so petty that they would have disciplined him for it if he hadn’t already been on the way out.
At the retailer Distribution Center I worked at for a year, the General Manager was known (and I personally witnessed him do this) to scream at his managers and call them names, right in the middle of the floor, or in his office with the door open. That’s really unprofessional.
Any info on my follow-up question about whether cops generally watch fictional cop TV shows or do they avoid them like the plague? How realistic are they?
And a related question to CateAyo - are the commanders in special forces a different kettle of fish to those in ordinary military ie less “shouty”? I get the impression that there would be more of a team ethic than a “I’m in charge of you - you do what I say” ethic - if that makes any sense.
This brings to mind a subplot of “So I Married an Ax Murderer.” The young detective played by Anthony LaPaglia is utterly disappointed that his chief, played by Alan Arkin, is such a nice, mellow guy who NEVER yells at him the way LaPaglia thinks (after years of exposure to TV cop shows) a chief is supposed to yell at his men.
From time to time, Arkin TRIES to chew out LaPaglia, or call him ethnic slurs, just to keep him happy.
More seriously, even if there once WAS an element of truth to that stereotype, the sense I get is that, nowadays, major city police forces nowadays are increasingly looking for commanders with management and media skills, which is why you see more “yuppie” chiefs (and a lot more female chiefs, for that matter) than ever before.
I wonder how much their lack of people skills had to do with the retirement of the people Chimera mentioned. The ex-SWAT boss is a different kind of animal, but I’ve met many people who never understood why they wouldn’t get a certain promotion, when it was obvious to everybody else that they were not and would not likely ever be ready for it. The most extreme case was a barely-literate guy who wanted to be warehouse manager and never moved beyond “warehouse worker, no special qualification”.
I can’t tell about cops, but my SiL used to watch tons of medical shows when she was in medical school or newly-minted. She’d believe every single bit of technical info in Hospital Central or House, give it as much credit as to the information she’d gotten in class. Once she got a few months of ER under her own belt, she got better.
To address boith points, I have normally found police shows too unrealistic to even be enjoyable. In other cases, the shows highlight the wrong things. The typical cop drama is riddled with technical errors and behaviors that would get one fired, sued or arrested. Most cops in dramatic shows have no interest in justice and are motivated by retribution. There is nothing in particular that is erroneous about shows like COPS except that it leaves you with a number of wrong impressions, such as the notion that the bad guys are always people of color or lower class whites, and the cops are always white. These shows are packaged to reflect the biases of the public in general, so they will not create conflict with held impressions and will sell a product
To your second point, I would respond that “shouty” is a trait not rewarded or widely held in the military at all. I think that impression is made by drill instructors, who are indeed frequently “shouty”.
I got bitched out by the sheriff once, in front of prisoners over something very minor. He was a terrible boss in all ways. Some of the prisoners even told me later how the sheriff was out of line to talk to me like that. He lost the next election, for many reasons.
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