“Dave, I haven’t slept for two nights. If some asshole jumps in a lake to get away from me, am I supposed to jump in after him? Are they gonna come after me if I don’t?”

These questions, from a member of the LEO labor organization I lead, started a meltdown. He hadn’t slept. I know this guy — he was off. “What? Hell no!” I shot back loudly. “Are you kidding me? That’s not how we operate. And I will personally kick your ass if you ever risk your life doing something that stupid, assuming you still have an ass to kick.” This guy knows me, too. We came up together, so he understood this meltdown came from the heart. I told him to forget the news and the political foolishness happening two cities over. “We get support here,” I assured him, giving him a pat on the back. He grinned. I’m pretty sure he got some sleep that night. I was hot over how those cops were being treated. And here in Glendale, Arizona, June is hot enough as it is.

Political foolishness

My buddy’s restlessness stemmed from an incident that occurred in late May 2022. Officers in a nearby jurisdiction reportedly encountered a man with an arrest warrant. He decided to climb over a barrier and, despite their warnings, jump into a lake. Body cameras recorded the man casually swimming away. They then captured panic as, some distance from shore, he started taking on water. He went under, only to resurface during subsequent body recovery efforts.

This wasn’t a child. This was a grown, noncompliant man. Of course, the officers did not jump in after him. Had they, two or three bodies may have been recovered from that lake instead of one. Forget that any expert on water rescue will tell you the same. The gear anchoring us down equips us to run toward gunshots, not act as lifeguards. Common sense, right?

Media, predictably, got ahold of the body camera footage. And I can assure you that common sense doesn’t pay their bills. As you can imagine, the coverage was unrelenting. So many in our society like to gorge themselves on the death our body cameras capture, especially when it’s flavored by media-driven controversy. The story, as they say, grew legs. Click-baiting headlines from across the country brought the bloated to the feast. “Arizona Man Drowns as Police Watch, Footage Appears to Show,” was the eye-catching headline from one national news outlet. A click-whorish media went on to craft a portrayal of heartless officers who just sat back and watched a victim drown. What bullshit.

Making matters worse, local politicians in that jurisdiction said little, if anything, publicly to support their officers. Then, their chief placed them on paid administrative leave pending an “outside investigation.” Why an outside investigation (or any investigation, for that matter) was needed to shed light on something so plainly illuminated by common sense, I’ll never know. It didn’t help. By that point, it just seasoned the gluttony — another angle gladly fed by the media. The frenzy grew.

Heavy lifting

The lift of maintaining officer morale is heavy enough without the bedlam wreaked by media as they exploit police stories like this one from May of 2022. If you are a LEO labor leader, consider these points as you work to maintain officer morale:

• Make sure your members know they are expected to remain focused and get home safely.
  Training guides our actions, not the media. Emphasize that.
• Educate your members regarding the political nuances of local government. If you are fortunate enough to have supportive local leadership, make sure your members know that. Assure them that as long as their actions are within policy, they can expect to be supported.
• If your members have due process rights codified into state law (Law Enforcement Officer Bill of Rights/
  LEOBR), remind them of that. Educate them as to their rights. Assure them that such rights are a hedge against political sacrifice.
• Communicate how you are working to build support from local political leaders and stakeholders. Educate political leaders and stakeholders regarding the police staffing crisis in this country and the relationship between officer morale and employee retention. Ask for and expect political support when the media attempt to exploit member actions that are within policy.
• Try working with police leadership on unified support for your members when their justified actions are being exploited by the media. LEO labor and executive police leadership can form a powerful front against unfair media coverage.
• Come out swiftly, strongly and publicly in support of your members who are justified in their actions with or without support from police leadership. Build a strong social media program and use it to counter
  exploitative media coverage. Many people get their news from social media. Be prepared to take advantage of this opportunity.
• Make sure your members know about the times when police and local political leadership are supportive. Communicate the wins.
• Within the limits of the law, fight like hell with whatever else you have. If you are a LEO labor leader, this is the righteous battle for which you signed up. Far too many sheepdogs have been sacrificed to a media machine that is financially incentivized to trash them, while local leaders either turned their backs or sat around with their thumbs up their asses.

You won’t be surprised to learn that those officers were eventually cleared by that outside investigation. Of course, there were no apologies. The media just moved on. The bloated, after all, hunger not for stories of vindicated cops. And while I don’t work for that agency two cities over, how those officers were treated still gets me hot. It wasn’t just an attack on them — it was a hit job on all of us. If you bleed blue, you’ve probably had a few of your own meltdowns during similar seasons of political foolishness. But after the meltdowns, we LEOs can renew with stiffness and prepare for a righteous battle. Unified, we can fight for our careers, morale and the confidence to follow our training, without hesitation, so that we go home after each shift. Start preparing now. And may your restlessness be soothed by the knowledge that with you in the trenches are those who charge toward the gunshots.