I was a guest lecturer years ago at the state’s police training facility in Meriden. The subject was ‘ethics’ and the audience was a sampling of local police officers with management responsibilities.
I was extraordinary, of course, but I actually heard another lecturer say something smarter than what I said.
He advised the assembled officers that the first thing every new cop should be told after he is hired is what exactly to do if he pulls somebody over for drunk driving — and that guy happens to be the mayor of the town.
Sure, if you’re assembled at the police academy for a solemn chat about ethics, you know the correct answer: Treat the mayor just like anyone else.
But the cops in the classroom knew what the speaker was getting at. Law enforcement — especially the retail brand handed out on the streets of the average city and town — reeks of discretion and judgment and surprises and last-minute decisions that don’t always look so good the next afternoon.
For the kind of snap-judgment calls that the average patrolling cops have to make every day, the speaker’s idea of, quite literally, creating some ground rules in advance for the most discomforting situations isn’t a bad idea.
Of course, it’s easier talked about in a classroom than in real life. How exactly would a local police department go about having a little discussion about whether bigshots get treated any differently — or why it is even a good idea to have such a discussion — without waking up the next morning and seeing yourself written about in an unflattering way by the local newspaper? Even if the chat confirmed to cops that justice was blind and that friends, relatives and mayors deserved no special treatment, the very fact that the conversation was held could be uncomfortable.
The ethics lecture came to mind following the recent messy business in Windsor Locks, where the police department apparently failed to investigate one of its own with sufficient vigor, after a fatal car-bike accident, and, apparently, after the cop who was driving had been drinking for a number of hours. Adding to the nightmare, according to the information to date, the officer’s dad was, for a while, in charge of the investigation.
Oh, yes, there will be investigations and lawsuits and stern directives about objective investigations, now that the case is out in the open — but it does bring to mind what the lecturer had to say: Sit the boys down, before anything happens, and lay out some terrible scenarios in advance — and how they should be handled.
Of course, every police investigation is not necessarily subject to moral angst — even when other officers are involved. In the midst of the Windsor Locks revelations, an off-duty cop just up the road from Windsor Locks, in Springfield, Mass., was arrested on charges of drunk-driving and leaving the scene of an accident. The arrested cop is the brother of a former Springfield mayor. No fuss. No evasions on the part of the local cops. Job well done.
This is all familiar territory for a sub-specialty in the public relations field known as ‘crisis communication.’ The key to handling issues and message in the midst of a horror story is to have it planned in advance, before anything awful happens.
“Strategic planning” departments in some corporations also are empowered to generate embarrassing, worst-case scenarios, to prepare the enterprise for appropriate action — based on something more reassuring than a last-minute snap judgment.
The unsettling reality: Don’t assume everything is going to be just fine. The mayor may be driving drunk.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
