Blue Canary: For Cops By a Cop

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On May 24th, 2022, a gunman entered the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde County Texas and murdered 19 children and 2 adult teachers.

The police stood by for over an hour while the active killer was on the loose in the school and did nothing.

That’s hard for me to believe.

But it’s true, and as we learn more about the police response or lack thereof, I personally become more disgusted.

That is not what police believe in. That is not what we do and that is not who we are. Unfortunately, we gotta own it.

Our profession failed that day.

It is the most egregious failure of law enforcement in the United States in my lifetime and arguable the worst failure of our profession in its history.

We must ensure that it never happens again.

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What is an FTO?

Well, you should already know by now because you should have gone through an FTO program when you hired on the job. You mean you didn’t have an FTO program? You mean they just handed you the keys to the car, a map, and said call me if you have any problems?

Unfortunately, this is all too familiar.

Now what do we mean by Field Training Officer Program? It is simply an on-the-job training program that assists with the on-boarding and training of brand-new officers to the police department. It does this by having the new officers ride every day with a trained trainer called a Field Training Officer or FTO who teaches, mentors, trains, evaluates, councils, facilitates, and leads the new officer until they have proven they are capable of doing the job by themselves. The Field Training Program ensure that every new officer on the department has the skills and training necessary to do the job. Many people look at this as the first step in a police officer’s career, but the reality is it’s the last step in the selection process. There is no better way to ensure that someone can do the job then having them do the job.

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Training, you are going to hear a lot about training in this season’s episodes. It’s the cornerstone of good police work and unfortunately, we don’t get it when we need it. There are lots of reasons why and we are going to explore those and other training topics on this episode with our interview of Lt. Jim Glennon.

Jim started with the Lombard Illinois Police Department in 1980 and held many positions at the department. In 1998 he became the first Commander of the Dupage County Major Crimes Task Force. He also holds a BA in Psychology and a master’s degree in Police management. He acquired Calibre Press in 2012 and today provides training through books, newsletters, seminars, online training, and in-person training.

Jim took the time to talk with me about the current state of training, the problems with training, and some insight into issues facing law enforcement today.

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Training.

We have talked about it several times on this show. And we are going to talk more about it today. Police reform is a hot button topic today with legislatures all over the US passing law enforcement bills and police reform bills in an effort to improve the professionalism of policing.

But they are missing the mark.

The bills are focusing on specific topics like choke holds, which have been outlawed for decades, and de-escalation, which people struggle to define. Instead of specific topics we need to reform the overall training concepts found in police department across the country and get politicians and administrators focused on the real challenge, proper training.

This episode will focus on the challenges departments face when trying to train their officers and what we need to focus on to improve training for police across the US. We will also hear from Chief Ed Gebhart with the Fishers Police Department in Fishers Indiana and Major Nick Luce with the Indiana University Police Department.

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Season Three is almost here. 

The Blue Canary Podcast team has been hard at work creating new episodes for all of our subscribers and casual listeners.

In just two short weeks we will start dropping brand new episodes.

And we have some great interviews for you.

Here are a few teasers for what’s coming on this season of Blue Canary.

If you are finding us for the first time, check out our episodes from Season 1 and Season 2 and make sure you like, share and subscribe.

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In this final episode of season two, I sit down and have some coffee with Matt Molter the owner of Agency360 and sponsor of Blue Canary to talk about the state of law enforcement and what the future might bring.

https://www.agency360.com/

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In this episode of Blue Canary we will discuss the FBI LEOKA project and the issues regarding officers killed in the line of duty.

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What's the spookiest thing you've ever had to deal with? This is one of those questions that can catch you off guard. Sometimes it will take you a few minutes to come up with an answer, but if you've been in this job for more than a minute you have had something weird, creepy, scary or spooky happen to you. It makes for a perfect true Halloween story. 

This years true creepy story comes to us from a Sheriff's Deputy who had a real life encounter with something very strange a spooky. Thanks Deputy Dave for sharing.

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Throughout most of the United States police salaries are pretty low. That means cops have to figure out ways to make ends meet through side jobs. Some cops are landscapers on the side, some are locksmiths, some work as much overtime as they can get. Robert Garland really did something special when he founded "Fund the First" are crowdsourcing platform for first responders and veterans. 

https://fundthefirst.com/

In this episode of Blue Canary we talk to Robert Garland about how he got into law enforcement and his side job as founder of Fund the First.

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All the small things we tend to take for granted. People look at the uniforms police wear and just assume that the department purchased everything for them. Uniform shirts and pants, gun belt, handcuffs, gun, magazines, ammunition, radio, badge, the list goes on and on. All those small things add up.

In this episode of Blue Canary we are going to look at all of the little things that add up to big things and how many officers around the country have to buy their own equipment out of pocket.