Last year at a conference I was introduced to South Carolina State Representative Brandon Guffey. His son Gavin, the oldest of his children who recently graduated from high school, died at 17 by suicide in 2022. He was a very cool and popular kid who probably never considered suicide once in his life, but overwhelmed, influenced, and instantly compromised in a sextortion scheme it took less than an hour. The father, proudly and lovingly engaged in his children’s lives, while engrossed in his campaign for state house just rooms away, says that when he heard his son “hit the floor like a bowling ball” his heartbreaking moment had only just begun.

Representative Guffey and one of his younger sons were later harassed online by the scammers who had been posing as a female to Gavin and had convinced him to provide nude photos of himself. Following Gavin’s death, the scammers attempted to financially blackmail Guffey and his younger son with the threat of releasing photos of Gavin.

DHS Action

This previous weekend at a conference near Washington D.C., I was honored to attend a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) presentation by Agent Kate Kennedy of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI.) She is a driving force behind the rapidly growing campaign, Know2Protect. I’ve seen firsthand the monumental effort invested by HSI agents. One of my best friends is a HSI agent earning hard won promotions over the years, so I am intimately aware of the courage and the tenacity of these investigators.

From the Know2Protect about page: “In 2023, in recognition of the growing importance of this work, the department added its first new mission since 2003: combating crimes of exploitation and protecting victims. This step reflects the department’s emphasis on stopping perpetrators and supporting victims and survivors.”

The severe, even deadly, actions of foreign bad actors have cascaded today on our youth like a tidal wave. It is our job to see this threat before it comes in, and to respond adequately to protect our young ones.

Today, we can barely see them. Representative Guffey later found out that Gavin had an additional three accounts that his parents didn’t even know about. From everything that I know, Gavin wasn’t a bad kid, and from knowing his parents, there is no doubt that he knew he was loved.

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Statistical Rise

The most recent data from 2025 shows there were 1.4 million reports of online enticement, up 158% from 2024. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) received reports in 2025 averaging 137 per day, an increase of 37% over 2024. Due to the 2024 enactment of the REPORT Act, there was a new requirement for Electronic Service Providers to share enticement and extortion in addition to previous requirements to document child sexual abuse material.

The percentages are shocking, but we don’t have the real trending stats. The REPORT act opens our eyes to see how many instances were not previously reported. Analysis of current data is clear, online exploitation, enticement and manipulation are rising dramatically.

Exploitation of children is nothing new.

Before the iPhone hit the market a 19 years ago, and before mobile high speed and immersive endless and addictive scroll apps pushed their way into the marketplace in 2012, there was a crime category of crimes against children. Long before detectives had internet capable PCs at their desks, states had legislated sex offender registries that included high risk offenders registered as sexual predators. There was still a great need for trained investigators and specialized squads. Better laws were named for the victims in Florida including Adam Walsh, Jessica Lunsford, and Jimmy Ryce.

What’s changed today, especially if you are the parent of a 15-year-old born in 2011, is that these present online dangers weren’t even created and were not in the ‘new parent’ manual when your child was born. As the use of the internet became widespread in the late 1990s, it was billed as the information superhighway, but by 2000 pornography quickly became the second largest consumer of bandwidth.

Today, foreign bad actors treat their destructive scams as full-time employment similar to the sales bullpen in Glengarry Glen Ross. Across oceans and time zones, criminals work to compromise, even kill and destroy, the children of our nation. With a few keystrokes in a game chat, message board, or on an app, these money motivated scammers treat our children like their lucky slot machine or worse. Without a doubt, many in this filthy business would be on an offender registry if they were in this country. This has been the dramatic shift where the foreign adversary’s primary interest to damage the American child is not rooted in satisfying their prurient desires but for financial gain. A search on video hosting platforms interviewing these degenerates demonstrates the absolute coldness of their apathy toward their juvenile victims.

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NCMEC, what used to be called ‘The Center’, is seeing a dramatic rise in incoming complaints with compliance to the REPORT Act beginning in 2024. That will be a noticeable statistical bump, but it is already obvious that within many categories, year to year increases in the foreseeable future will be profound and gravely concerning.

How we must respond

We must be honest and recognize that this threat to national security and our nation’s citizens will be marked with multiple casualties. Today, The Center documents three dozen teenage boys have taken their own lives due to providing elicit content and being blackmailed. I’m sadly certain that figure is low by the hundreds.

The currency of espionage has always been sexual compromise. Who wouldn’t break a rule, violate a policy, or even betray their own government to save their child? Who can say that this hasn’t happened already?

This is why it is so important to recognize the mission of the Department of Homeland Security. Their campaign, Know2Protect, is the keystone necessary for arch of investigation, prevention, education and enforcement to be solid and effective. I wish it was as easy as we are going to have a briefing, throw on some tactical gear, and jump in a van with the best of the best.

Instead, we are up against trans-national terrorist organizations, many state-sanctioned who target us and our children. It used to be the only group we had to protect our children from were perverts and documented sex offenders. Today it is foreign nations using financial means to undermine family structures with the goal to blackmail elected officials and other power brokers.

This is one of the very few scenarios where I admit that law enforcement cannot physically arrest their way out of the problem. To succeed for our youth, we must adopt an Apollo 11 mindset: failure is not an option! Our laser focused goal must be to arm every parent and child with each an effective age-appropriate message on how to succeed online and in the family. The DHS and their investigative arm HSI deserve our full support and engagement.

Today, let’s keep all our peace officers in your prayers, especially the ICAC and HSI task force agents protecting all our children!

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Roland Clee served a major Florida police department as a Community Service Officer for more than 26 years. His career included uniformed patrol, training, media relations, intelligence, criminal investigations, and chief’s staff. He writes the American Peace Officer newsletter, speaks at public safety, recruiting and leadership conferences and helps local governments and public safety agencies through his business, CommandStaffConsulting.com.

His work is frequently featured on LawOfficer.com, the only law enforcement owned major media presence in the public safety realm.

For media interviews and podcast appearances, click here: http://bit.ly/40pT3NS

References

https://www.dhs.gov/know2protect

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/13/us/brandon-guffey-gavin-sextortion-law-cec

https://us.missingkids.org/gethelpnow/cybertipline/cybertiplinedata

It’s not often that I have the opportunity to speak with an accomplished journalist who understands both the perspective of the law enforcement officer and the mutual importance of avoiding both police and citizen injuries.

Any police official traveling to Orlando for the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) annual conference has a great reason to stay in Orlando with their family for a couple of extra days.

Most law enforcement training begins once the threat is obvious but FOCUS teaches officers to recognize the behavioral indicators that exist and appear before violence occurs.

Developed by Dr. and his research team, FOCUS (Field Observable Cues for Unknown Situations) is a research-based behavioral recognition framework built from validated science and real-world law enforcement experience.

Participants learn a repeatable system for identifying pre-attack indicators and making better decisions during rapidly evolving encounters.

We don’t just need to train cops, we need to train prosecutors, union reps, and legal advisors to understand that these action are with the scope of a peace officer.

If you’re with me, we are the pioneers. An old saying says you can tell the pioneers by the arrows in their backs.

Please keep all peace officers in your prayers!

Roland Clee served a major Florida police department as a Community Service Officer for more than 26 years. His career included uniformed patrol, training, media relations, intelligence, criminal investigations, and chief’s staff. He writes the American Peace Officer newsletter, speaks at public safety, recruiting and leadership conferences and helps local governments and public safety agencies through his business, CommandStaffConsulting.com.

His work is frequently featured on LawOfficer.com, the only law enforcement owned major media presence in the public safety realm.

For media interviews and podcast appearances, click here: http://bit.ly/40pT3NS

On Monday, August 31, the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) revoked all right of way permits for Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs). It wasn’t mentioned by name, but it was widely understood that this was rooted in the bad publicity related to Flock Safety systems. While they are the best known or perhaps better said, the most notorious, it is not certain that the majority of right-of-way ALPRs were Flock Safety camera feeds.

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Flock Safety is a problem, but not THE PROBLEM

My daily news feed had frequent stories regarding law enforcement officers accessing Flock Safety databases where both male and female officers were abusing the system to keep tabs on current or former romantic interests. In a previous article, citing recent cases, all the Florida officers identified had not simply abused the Flock Safety database, but had also committed criminal acts involving Criminal Justice Information Systems (CJIS) data and the Florida’s Driver And Vehicle Information Database (DAVID).

About two years prior to retirement, I was selected to be the administrator for DAVID in my agency. I was the administrator for a couple of other important state databases, so I was a logical fit. It came at a time where the state had identified where law enforcement organizations had fallen behind on a comprehensive audit regime and abuses were not being discovered until violators were subject to termination and criminal charges. The goal by the agency and the state was training, compliance, and near zero violations. In 2018 and 2019 violators would be both disciplined, and if necessary, prosecuted. The two-pronged education program by the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles was nothing less than clear. Perfect records were stained by being sustained for minor DAVID violations. That was a great influence force working for you. Discipline delivered the message rapidly via informal channels.

The auditing trouble

I saw the problem right away: the smaller the agency, the more an internal audit puts the auditor’s own career on the line. Supervisors are supposed to provide cover, but what happens if the violator is their boss’s boss?

Our usernames were a combination of surnames and employee numbers so while they would have a degree of anonymity for those outside our agency, those on the inside would immediately recognize seniority and likely identity the user without a query into our personnel database. At the time I recognized the conflict that an auditor in another role might sense.

At the time I was assigned to chief’s staff, so if I recognized a manager or command staff member attributed to suspicious transactions, I had the liberty to go to the chief of staff or even the chief himself for guidance. However, if the auditor was a sergeant climbing a promotion list, he might find a violation by his or her captain easy to skip or intentionally miss. Analysts or Emergency Communication Specialists (ECS) would find themselves in an even more dicey situation where it is very challenging to initiate an inquiry of someone in middle or upper management. Recently I ran into a friend who is now the police chief of a small department. Can you imagine the pressure of bringing forth violations in a department of less than two dozen sworn?

Not a technology issue, a leadership issue

We need to recognize that the public issues with ALPRs and their associated databases is not that they are inherently life invading surveillance devices. Let me be on record as saying that there has been no reasonable explanation for a 30-day database retention policy. Everyone intertwines exigent Amber or Silver Alerts with ‘who-dun-it’ homicide cases.

Clearly, ALPRs are the frontier of technology to be properly tamed and managed. The privacy of innocent motorists and the undeniable public safety benefits must be strictly balanced. Every bit of technology since 1997, when most people joined the internet age, has been a Pandora’s box of infinite settings with such an overwhelming array of choices, that many stick to the default settings.

Given the stakes of the current decisions being made, law enforcement does not have the luxury of failing to go deep into the custom settings of the feeds entering our agency’s networks. I’ve spoken to several friends over the past few days who are obligated to deal with both the controversy and the fallout from the FDOT decision to cancel right-of-way permits to ALPRs. When we discuss the Flock Safety 30-day default setting, as mentioned two paragraphs earlier, I’ve been told that the data that goes that far back is vital in major cases yet with no cases cited, but the valid testimonies on the effectiveness of the technology are how it provides critical immediate leads and connections during exigent circumstances like Amber Alerts.

The path forward

Additional oversight is necessary for trust to be restored in the officers and agencies entrusted with these data repositories. As mentioned previously, most of the Flock Safety violators were committing non-criminal violations, until they crossed the line to criminal stalking, but as many as were arrested were charged with violating criminal statutes regarding CJIS and DAVID data.

It is clear at this point that a complete overhaul of all the information systems audits is necessary in every agency.

A wise man told me, you can’t audit yourself. You can no more audit yourself than be your own accountability partner.

The obvious solution to me is to have agencies audit one another blind. Whether it is a 30-member agency anonymously audit another 30-member agency doesn’t matter. That is the work of a rules committee. When the auditor knows the agency from the reports but has zero association or relationship with anyone in that organization, real accountability will take place. Today is the long overdue moment for law enforcement agencies to tighten up on every protected information source.

Please keep all law enforcement officers in your prayers!

Roland Clee served a major Florida police department as a Community Service Officer for more than 26 years. His career included uniformed patrol, training, media relations, intelligence, criminal investigations, and chief’s staff. He writes the American Peace Officer newsletter, speaks at public safety, recruiting and leadership conferences and helps local governments and public safety agencies through his business, CommandStaffConsulting.com.

His work is frequently featured on LawOfficer.com, the only law enforcement owned major media presence in the public safety realm.

For media interviews and podcast appearances, click here: http://bit.ly/40pT3NS

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Five years from now, hopefully, FOCUS Certified training will be basic Academy Law Enforcement Training. If you knew that this training would preserve the health and well being of officers, as well as suspects, would you do it? Register buy clicking the image below.

References

https://www.city-journal.org/article/automated-license-plate-readers-flock-ban

Today, few topics are being discussed with such rare and robust bipartisan consensus and formidable misinformation as Flock Safety surveillance cameras. The hot topics are the surveillance and privacy concerns related to privately owned cameras and the collection and storage of data with no criminal predicate. Almost daily we are hearing stories of police officers misusing the Flock Safety databases and usually it involves stalking love interests or former romantic partners.

The Flock Safety business

The uniform negativity toward Flock Safety cameras is complicated. Flock achieved what many companies in their space aspire: to become synonymous with whatever service you’re selling, in this case with automated license plate readers (ALPR) in public spaces. During the early primitive days, I had the opportunity to work with my agency’s auto theft unit deploying the first ALPRs on some unmarked vehicles. The first thing I learned was that it wasn’t the camera as any camera of a minimum resolution and framerate would do, but the magic happened in the optical camera text recognition software remotely paired with a database of ‘hot’ license plates. These would be tied to a missing person, a wanted person or a stolen vehicle

My point, to the privacy activists and the Sawzall-wielding vandals, is the real problem is the data. One lawsuit sums it up eloquently: Flock creates a mosaic of the patterns of free people without their permission. Without a doubt, that is concerning and it is not merely a feature of data retention. It is an open-ended intrusion of privacy and absent some meaningful legislation, it will continue to have a high likelihood of abuse.

Police misuse of Flock data

Every sworn member of law enforcement who misuses Flock data is without excuse. All law enforcement information systems require both training, often requiring a documented justification for the data query including a case number. Any law enforcement employee that may be exposed to Criminal Justice Information Systems (CJIS) data, including janitors and help-desk staff, are required to train on the requirements every two years. My CJIS certified interns pulled criminal histories on all felony arrests and had to log each ‘transaction’ on an independent freestanding data table for the agency for our audits.

According to The Washington Post: “Authorities have charged or accused at least 50 law-enforcement officers of using license-plate readers for unauthorized purposes, including to stalk women without their knowledge or consent, a Post analysis of police and court records found.”

In one case, a former romantic interest of the Braselton, Georgia police chief was tracked using Flock system and their far-reaching network. “By the time she understood what was happening, (Chief Michael) Steffman had looked up the tags for her and her teenage daughter roughly 600 times, according to Have I Been Flocked, a website that aggregates police search logs made available through public records.” Steffman ended his life before trial.

While the Post provided ample speculation on this case, and nearly fifty other cases with 90% or greater involving Flock Safety, there actually was nothing else that could or should have been done on the part of the private company. Every law enforcement officer in this country should know that this information, should at the minimum be treated like be treated like CJIS information.

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This investigation turned up this key piece of information. City Journal reports:

“… Flock cameras default to retaining data for no more than 30 days, a setting that most jurisdictions leave unchanged.”

I find it extremely disquieting to find out that my data, from an enormous collection network would by default keep my information for 30 days. That is too long by nearly 30 days. I would consider 30 days to be a long-term log for information that is not being held in relation to known crime.

What is the collection pool? The Post reports from Flock that “…more than 120,000 shoebox-size cameras now scan the roads of more than 6,000 communities and record 20 billion plate scans a month.” We need to be reminded that despite their catchy name, they are by no means the only game in town.

Not bad apples

There are more terrible stories from Wisconsin, Florida, and Idaho of criminal activity, apart from the crime of using data as an instrumentality of a crime.

When rules were less rigid, a colleague of mine told me to just look up a person on the state driver license database. Fortunately, I did have a criminal predicate, but he wouldn’t have cared. Years later another colleague looked up a prominent government official for no good reason, and no surprise, that account was flagged, and the state came looking for his badge. Fortunately for him, he kept his career.

I’ve learned that both biometric and access cards are being rolled out for physical Criminal Justice Information Systems (CJIS) security. Five years ago, you had to put in a justification to submit a query. The driver license database had a pull-down menu of very specific reason codes plus entering a case reference number. The list did not have an ‘other’ general choice; you had to choose a very specific reason code.

The reason I never accept the ‘bad apples’ theory is because it asserts that corruption is contagious. It is never acceptable to apply that to a principled and dedicated profession. There have been cases of widespread corruption within law enforcement, but with nearly 800,000 sworn officers serving in 18,000 agencies, scandals are noteworthy based on their scarcity. We wouldn’t dare allege that the malpractice of one doctor causes corruption of all the doctors in a hospital.

Perhaps the most important point being missed as these stories dominate our news feeds, is that in most cases, the officer was also misusing federal CJIS data, state crime information center information, and state license and registration data, all of which are prosecutable crimes, in addition to Flock databases. In Florida, a Sumter County detective was arrested and fired. Orlando’s Fox 35 reported: “According to investigators, (Deputy) Almany improperly accessed the Comprehensive Case Information System (CCIS), the Flock automated license plate recognition system and the Florida Driver and Vehicle Information Database (DAVID).”

In the Florida Keys, “…Monroe County Sheriff’s Office, 28-year-old Deputy Lamar Eliseo Roman was working security detail on the set of the television show “Bad Monkey” when a group of women arrived on a bus for extras. Roman reportedly ‘began whistling’ at one of the women who got off the bus and cat called her.

Roman allegedly later used police databases to learn more information about the woman and to put her license plate into a “hotlist” which would alert him if her license plate was detected by license plate readers.”

Using the information provided by the woman he targeted, he was able to find her license plate number by using the DAVID system and then add her to a Flock Safety ‘hotlist.’ After receiving an alert, a hit on her tag, he then conducted an illegal traffic stop on her. Just reading the brief article, Roman’s conduct at the security detail was full of red flags.

A Niceville, FL city press release regarding the arrest and termination of Officer Coty Hall states: “…An internal audit conducted between January 2025 and October 2025 identified numerous unauthorized personal information inquiries Officer Hall made through various Law Enforcement databases. The information from these inquiries were used to harass a fellow law enforcement officer and their spouse.” Another Flock Safety case, but his stalking and harassment were also facilitated by illegal use of federal and state restricted databases.

Disproportionate media coverage

To illustrate how concentrated the focus is on police misconduct using Flock Systems, where The Washinton Post has identified ‘at least 50’ criminal cases, let’s contrast that to the most recent data on drunk driving fatalities according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In 2024, 11,904 people lost their lives to impaired drivers, or an average of one fatality every 44 minutes. This is not to diminish stalking, a documented dangerous precursor to intimate partner violence and fatalities. It is to illustrate how selective media is in delivering relevant news.

Due to the outsized attention by the media, there really should be no good reason for any officer to become tomorrow’s Flock Safety misuse headline, but unfortunately it is likely. One would think that the frequency of news stories, seemingly every day, would shock some sense into those who haven’t been caught yet, but that clearly hasn’t happened yet.

We must also notice that stalking of potential and past love interests appears to dominate the motives rather than idle curiosity. Without conducting a meta-analysis on every Flock Safety police misuse case, of the cases presented recently by the media, every case that I researched has elements of creepy stalking behavior.

But this does not completely vindicate Flock Safety and their hands off approach or absolve them of responsibility. The private sector currently can legally record and warehouse your data without your consent. Laws can be passed to determine how much access law enforcement agencies should have to balance our privacy and safety needs. Access to thirty days of free citizens movements without any type of criminal predicate needs to change legislatively now.

Please keep all peace officers in your prayers.

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Roland Clee served a major Florida police department as a Community Service Officer for more than 26 years. His career included uniformed patrol, training, media relations, intelligence, criminal investigations, and chief’s staff. He writes the American Peace Officer newsletter, speaks at public safety, recruiting and leadership conferences and helps local governments and public safety agencies through his business, CommandStaffConsulting.com. His work is frequently featured on LawOfficer.com, the only law enforcement owned major media presence in the public safety realm.

References

https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/drunk-driving

https://www.city-journal.org/article/automated-license-plate-readers-flock?utm

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/08/02/how-police-officers-used-vast-network-cameras-spy-their-exes/

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/30/us/flock-camera-vandalism-protests-cec

https://gbi.georgia.gov/press-releases/2025-11-19/gbi-arrests-braselton-police-chief-harassment-and-stalking

https://abcnews.com/US/officer-allegedly-flock-license-plate-cameras-track-boyfriends/story?id=135418955

https://www.facebook.com/nicevillepd

https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/sumter-county-sheriffs-detective-fired-arrested-over-alleged-database-misuse

https://local12.com/news/nation-world/police-officer-stalking-woman-tv-set-database-license-plate-reader-cop-department-bad-monkey-roman-cat-call-flirt-flirting-stalked-stalker-stalk-almost-cause-crash-boyfriend-woman-extra-television-show

Let’s begin with some humor. A motorist is pulled over for speeding by a police officer. After he passes his license, insurance and registration, he asks the officer, “Isn’t there something more important you could be doing right now than pulling me over?” The officer answers politely, “Yes.”

I’ve been answering that question. What is the most important thing I can be doing right now?

In 1994, the police academy taught me one pre-attack indicator. If a subject isn’t listening to what you are saying and starts taking off clothing and removing jewelry, it is a red flag that you are about to be attacked.

Hospitals train their staff on pre-attack indicators. So do corrections institutions. Almost every high-risk occupation trains for this. Hospitals and jails go deep, with a catalog of behaviors, a framework for reading them, and enough repetition that recognition becomes reflex. Law enforcement, the profession where the subject is most likely to be armed and least likely to be restrained, barely addresses it.

I didn’t know how wide that gap was until Dr. Travis Yates showed me the research. What follows is why I have committed to closing it in Florida.

The most important thing

On social media, the question was asked: what advice did you receive in the academy that you wish you had followed once you got on the street? Mine was easy. I wish I had listened when I was told to let the fire department beat you to the scene. Car fire smoke stays in your uniform the rest of your shift. A residential fire stays in your car’s air conditioning for weeks.

Experience gives us the wisdom of priorities and timing. Whether a law enforcement career is spent behind the steering wheel of a marked unit or behind a desk with stars on the collar, perspective is both gained and earned.

I’ve lost too many friends and family members recently, and our proximity in age gave me pause. It shuffled my priorities, not negatively but positively. My schedule today is full: caregiving, my church, important family projects, civic responsibilities including Crime Stoppers, my consulting work, and the articles I write for American Peace Officer. That may sound like a lot, but it is perfect. I live in paradise with my beautiful, supportive wife and we are both thankful and full of gratitude. I have the content to assemble and publish a book on policing, but what I was compelled to write first was a book on the grace of God, and it is coming out soon.

My friend and colleague Dr. has identified the risk factors for law enforcement that have been buried for decades. Does his name sound familiar? Thirteen years ago, I sat in a Below 100 train-the-trainer event, a course that Yates developed that has saved countless officer and even suspect lives, and took him all over the country, including my jurisdiction. He is also the author of The Courageous Police Leader, a book I own both in paperback and on my Kindle.

He has spent more than three decades inside law enforcement, not consulting from the outside but working, leading and training from within. He is the founder of the Tactical Behavior Academy and the Courageous Leadership platform, and a recognized expert in behavioral threat management, pre-attack indicators and officer safety. More than 10,000 officers have come through his training, with 47 states represented, including the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, Pinal County Sheriff’s Office, Duluth Police Department, Henderson Police Department and the FBI National Academy. He’s the real deal.

From the earliest articles I published on American Peace Officer, I enjoyed his support. In 2023, we organized a successful ticketed seminar in Orlando. I have known his work long enough to recognize when he has built something different, and I was honored to have the privilege of watching this one take shape while it was still in progress.

FOCUS did not appear overnight. Dr. Yates has put thousands of hours into this curriculum, in methodical review of body-worn camera video and the literature behind it.

He addressed the problem head on. Most use-of-force training begins after the threat is already visible. Officers are left relying on instinct where they should have a trained, repeatable system. My 1994 academy experience was not an anomaly. It was the standard, and in too many places it still is.

The good news is the entire reason for this article. This can be and must be taught. The science exists; it simply has not been getting to the field. Officers can be trained to read what is in front of them before it becomes a fight, and when they are, it saves lives and reduces injuries for officers and suspects alike.

We must train this.

FOCUS stands for Field Observable Cues for Unknown Situations, and each word matters. Field: observable in real environments, not controlled ones. Observable: visible behavioral cues an officer can identify and act on with the right training. Cues: specific pre-attack indicators grounded in research. Unknown: applied to any contact, any environment, any threat level. Situations: the real-world scenarios where the framework earns its keep.

This is not instinct and it is not gut feeling. It is a trained skill with a repeatable system behind it. The one-day course covers:

● The science of pre-attack behavioral indicators

● Early recognition

● The full FOCUS framework and its application in the field

● Scenario-based recognition drills

FOCUS Training Saves Lives

The training that will save officers lives

I am hosting the one day FOCUS Certified training on Wednesday, October 28 at Decision Tactical in Sanford, Florida. This training site is located approximately halfway between the Orlando tourist district and Daytona Beach.

The date was not picked by accident. Neither was the venue. This one-day training in greater Orlando falls the day after the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference wraps up at the Orlando/Orange County convention center. Roughly 16,000 attendees from all over the nation and the world will already be here to learn. If you are one of them, you are one day and a short drive from the most consequential training you will take all year. Why not turn the trip into a long weekend with your family?

Venue: Decision Tactical

The venue was not picked by accident. Central Florida leads the world in dedicated event space. Decision Tactical is the world’s inaugural indoor tactical theme park, built initially for civilians and now a practical training site for dozens of law enforcement agencies. Unlike standing in a circle watching three screens, these experiences will elevate your heartrate and force you to engage under stress. It is full of proprietary technology developed with Full Sail University. Nothing on the planet compares to the immersive tactical experience offered there, and for training built on reading what a subject’s body is telling you a half second before he moves, the environment is the point.

When I made the commitment to bring Dr. Travis Yates to Florida, it wasn’t a commitment to Dr. Travis Yates. It was a commitment to the officers and deputies who will go to work the week after this class and meet somebody who has already decided to hurt them. If we have our way, the bad guys are in for a surprise.

Register your officers especially trainers and command staff. This is essential training for union reps and legal advisors too. Please share to invite every decision maker in your organization.

There is nothing more important you could be doing that day.

Please keep all our peace officers in your prayers.

Roland Clee served a major Florida police department as a Community Service Officer for more than 26 years. His career included uniformed patrol, training, media relations, intelligence, criminal investigations, and chief’s staff. He writes the American Peace Officer newsletter, speaks at public safety, recruiting and leadership conferences and helps local governments and public safety agencies through his business, CommandStaffConsulting.com.

His work is frequently featured on LawOfficer.com, the only law enforcement owned major media presence in the public safety realm.

For media interviews and podcast appearances, click here: http://bit.ly/40pT3NS

Decision Tactical YouTube full tour

Laser Ammo Podcast

Crime: Solved

On June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that a Google geofence warrant from a 2019 Virginia bank robbery was fundamentally a search under the Fourth Amendment. The underlying geofence warrant led investigators to identify the bank robber and recover roughly half of the $200,000 stolen from the bank.

A geofence warrant is an investigative tool that shows active devices within a specific geographic location for a specific period. Google’s subpoena compliance department would initially provide anonymized device identifiers, and the police would look at the patterns of movement such as entering or leaving a specific location at a specific time. When investigators and detectives identified the pattern of the suspect they were seeking to identify, then they would request user data from Google.

I’m certain that many investigators were upset when they heard the news. Complaints would vary but essentially include ‘how are we supposed to solve crime after being kneecapped by the United States Supreme Court?’

The current decision, Chatrie v. United States builds upon past cases including Carpenter v. United States and will impact all digital evidence collection on our horizon.

We’ve been there before.

In April 2001, the day after I finished field training my last recruit, finally alone in the patrol car after more than 60 days of trainees, the call came where I was being transferred to our Criminal Investigation Division tomorrow. Wednesday on patrol and Thursday in criminal investigations forced me to address my wardrobe that night. From the time I had applied for the position, the position had been moved from one section to another, and I wound up in the homicide unit.

The perfect place at the perfect time.

Some of the detectives I was working with were Vietnam and Vietnam-era veterans. Computers have been around since the 1940s, but even in the 1960s, we didn’t know that the typewriter keyboard was going to the main computer interface. Watch a 1960s Burt Ward era Batman episode or a William Shatner Star Trek show and no one had a clue that the basic typewriter keyboard would unlock basically everything we do today with data and computers. Now even with phones, everything has a QWERTY keyboard.

Despite being in my early 30s, I was the young guy and owning a home computer, was what made me the computing and data guru. The threshold was remarkably low for guru. Mobile phone data was an outlier in 2002 yet was an essential crime fighting tool in 2003.

It was an ideal time to be forced to learn the importance of cell phone identification data and how they could be located based on antenna connections. Except for Nextel and Blackberrys, telephones at that time were primarily verbal communication devices. It would have annoyed many of my friends, but I considered it cool to be called in on cases prior to the unveiling of the inaugural iPhone.

If you think today is the Wild West, you should have been there twenty years ago. We briefly tried a missing persons unit apart from the homicide unit. I was transferred there to help it succeed. The staff in the unit had been uniformed proactive street level enforcement with limited criminal investigative experience. It wasn’t long until we got a case. My new sergeant insisted that I demand exigent information from a carrier on a habitual missing person – which included the obligation that a valid subpoena would be served later.

My advice, which was a push back, was that if we didn’t have reasonable grounds now, after we get the data, unless something unreasonable and tragic happens, we won’t have the reasonable grounds to get a subpoena from the prosecutor’s office to give to the carrier. His reply was that she could be dead in a ditch somewhere – a problem that the exigent demand would never solve. The situation played out in sync with my concerns, and after the missing person resurfaced hours later following a substance abuse binge, we absolutely didn’t have reasonable grounds to obtain an investigative subpoena from the state attorney’s office to provide to the carrier.

My sergeant and I met together frequently as time went on as I was always trying to smooth out the friction between us, but that episode where I tried to save him from himself always came up. He treated my experienced guidance as rebellious and insubordinate.

A blessing in disguise

We should be appreciative for the direction of the Supreme Court. If a detective is stymied that the Supreme Court took away one of law enforcement’s valuable tools, the real issue is a lack of perspective. It may be hard to believe but the Boomer generation had one of the highest clearance rates for homicides. Tech is a lilypad we jump on and off to get to the solution of a crime. If cases are divided as ‘smoking gun’ or ‘whodunnit’ obviously casting a wide net like a Google geofence will act as an instrument to assist in getting closer to identify the bad guy.

If the pursuit of that grabs the geo-location data of myself, my family, my friend, my dog-sitter, my pastor or even worse, my political community, I will be aware of how intrusive this is. Now let’s change that to your family, your faith, your politics.

The ruling

Part of the ruling is already obsolete with regards to the case Chatrie v. United States. Alphabet, a/k/a Google, has changed its location history architecture. The information that previously resided on Google’s servers are now stored on the devices of their users. This limits the company’s ability to respond the geofence requests that were frequent and common. Does these make everything with Chatrie moot? Absolutely not. Are geofence warrant unconstitutional? No, and it stated that those warrants, and those like in other tech enforcement and compliance are perfectly valid if they meet Fourth Amendment standards for search.

I had limited participation in one of the famous media cases in recent history. Eighteen years ago, the defendant was an uncharged murder suspect in a highly publicized case but was about to get released from jail, and upon release was charged with a non-violent third-degree felony, the lowest level of felony in Florida, and later with bond set at $750,000.

We didn’t want the defendant to get out of jail but instead be easy to find when they drop the murder charges, but in doing so they didn’t just violate the defendant’s rights. They violated all of our rights.

I know the gut punch in long high-speed pursuits where the plug gets pulled by a supervisor while the suspect is in sight. I’ve solved cases where the detectives let co-defendants go. They let them go because they weren’t criminally responsible or we just didn’t have enough probable cause. My tunnel vision kicks in forgetting that criminals are the gift that just keep on giving.

Decisions like this reset the framework of successful cases without undoing cases in the past. The court did not declare all geofence warrants unconstitutional. Just that these warrants implicate the Fourth Amendment and must satisfy those standards. They didn’t specifically rule on Chatrie, instead sending it back to the lower courts to determine it on the new constitutional framework.

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In perspective

While some will perceive this as an impediment to solving crime, we must remember the precepts of the American justice system:

“It is better one hundred guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer.”
— Benjamin Franklin, in a letter to Benjamin Vaughan, March 14, 1785

In 2010 a devastating earthquake struck Haiti. The jailers fled. Like Acts 16, the doors of the prisons sprung open, this time releasing a lot of innocent people as well as a lot of violent predatory people. In Haiti, criminals can be held for four years without even hearing the charges against them.

The American system was and is revolutionary and has maintained the highest standards, which are replicated around the world. Our system of ‘tough to charge’ has resulted in the most efficient and innovative law enforcement organizations on the globe, systems that have benefited organized civilizations around the world.

If we are wise, we will welcome this framework vision cast by the Supreme Court, and let this guidance take us to improved systems that take the worst-of-the-worst off the streets for good.

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Please keep all peace officers in your prayers!

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Roland Clee served a major Florida police department as a Community Service Officer for more than 26 years. His career included uniformed patrol, training, media relations, intelligence, criminal investigations, and chief’s staff. He writes the American Peace Officer newsletter, speaks at public safety, recruiting and leadership conferences and helps local governments and public safety agencies through his business, CommandStaffConsulting.com.

His work is frequently featured on LawOfficer.com, the only law enforcement owned major media presence in the public safety realm.

For media interviews and podcast appearances, click here: http://bit.ly/40pT3NS

References:

https://abcnews.com/Politics/supreme-court-limits-geofence-warrants-amid-cellphone-data/story?id=134314228

https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-okello-chatrie-geofence-warrants-a3adee8a3fd32b8ea1b42eb72cbcc35f

https://www.reuters.com/world/us-supreme-court-orders-lower-court-reconsider-geofence-warrant-case-2026-06-29 (Paywalled)

It wasn’t the sole factor that drew me to law enforcement, but it certainly was an impactful one. Officer Jim Bishop of the Orlando Police Department was a household name when I was a teenager in Central Florida. His media presence, on behalf of CrimeLine of Central Florida, had him on all the local television channels as well as several radio shows.

I met him at a lonely table as a trucking trade show at the convention center with the CrimeLine station wagon in the background. To me, as a teenager, it was like meeting a celebrity. In the early 80s, we weren’t tripping over “YouTubers” and content creators, and this officer was on all five local channels. Little did I know that ten years later I would be employed by his agency for nearly three decades and he and I would become friends.

Looking back, that was within the first ten years of modern crime stoppers programs in America. CrimeLine of Central Florida, at that time, was one of the first wildly successful replicas of the model that had begun in Albuquerque in 1976. There were other tip lines, and yes, there were wanted posters offering rewards whether the subject was dead or alive, but nothing completed the essential circle until a New Mexico Detective convinced everyone necessary to put all of the right components in the right sequence together in a loop.

This year, marks 50 years since Crime Stoppers programs began, and the origin story is worth retelling, because it explains why the model still works. In July 1976, Michael Carmen was working an extra shift at an Albuquerque gas station when he was murdered by shotgun during an armed robbery. He was a college student two weeks from getting married. Albuquerque had just been determined nationally to be the most dangerous and violent city in America. Albuquerque Police Detective Greg MacAleese was assigned the case, and after six weeks of dead ends, he had nothing.

It was known that there was no shortage of people who saw or heard something. There was a public unwilling to talk to police, partly out of apathy and partly out of fear of retaliation.

MacAleese tried something no department had tried prior. He produced a video re-enactment of the murder, got a local television station to air it, put up his own money as a reward, and promised callers anonymity. He got with his command staff and developed a board.

The first calls that came in were for unrelated crimes but highly serious crimes, that were solved that wouldn’t have been solved otherwise. The first actionable intelligence acquired was regarding a violent sexual battery that needed only that crime stoppers tip to be solved.

Within 72 hours, a tip led police to the vehicle used in the murder of Carmen, and two suspects were arrested. That arrest became the proof of concept for what Crime Stoppers programs are today: a formal partnership between police, media, and the community. Ultimately, the suspect identified in the case, despite persuasive evidence of guilt, was released on a technicality, but his other crimes resulted in him spending the remainder of his life in prison on other valid charges.

Every program is organized around three commitments that still define Crime Stoppers today:

1) Absolute anonymity for the tipster

2) Cash reward for information that leads to an arrest

3) A board, separate from law enforcement, to manage it

Why it worked, and why it still does

“Anonymity is absolutely the cornerstone for the success of the program,” said MacAleese in a 2002 interview. His wise choice solved both halves of the problem he’d diagnosed. It removed the fear of retaliation, and it removed the social cost of being seen as a snitch. People who would never call a police tip line with their name attached will call one that guarantees they stay unknown.

Crime Stoppers USA is the national network coordinating Crime Stoppers organizations across the country, and the concept has expanded into more than 30 countries.

By the close of 2008, Crime Stoppers USA’s national network was reporting roughly 800,000 arrests and 1.2 million cases cleared since the program’s inception, along with $90 million in rewards paid and billions in recovered property and seized drugs. Crime Stoppers USA also cites a felony conviction rate of approximately 95 percent on cases that originate from a tip.

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The P3 Tips app and the elevation to an investigative resource

For most of Crime Stoppers’ history, the tip line was a phone call. That has changed. Most local Crime Stoppers programs now run on a platform called P3 (the app is marketed as P3 Tips), which lets a tipster submit information, photos, or video from a smartphone instead of a phone call, and — critically — maintain an ongoing, encrypted, two-way conversation with the program afterward, all while staying anonymous. A tipster can be asked a follow-up question, can check on the status of an investigation, or can find out whether a reward was authorized, without ever revealing who they are.

Roughly 70 percent of all tips submitted through P3 now come through the mobile app rather than by phone.

That two-way capability is what turns Crime Stoppers from a one-shot tip line into something closer to a real investigative resource. An investigator who gets a tip with a partial license plate or a blurry photo isn’t stuck with what came in cold. They can go back to that same anonymous source and ask for more, the same way they’d follow up with any other source, just without ever knowing who they’re talking to.

In practice, that means a Crime Stoppers tip is a lead, not evidence. It tells investigators where to look. It still has to be corroborated through independent investigation, surveillance, additional witnesses, physical evidence, or other means before it can support an arrest or search warrant, let alone a conviction.

Fifty years on

What started as one detective’s improvised response to a murder with no known witnesses has become a standing piece of American law enforcement infrastructure, run by citizen boards, funded by donations and rewards, and now carried in people’s pockets through an app instead of a payphone.

The principle hasn’t changed since 1976: most crimes get solved because somebody talks, and most people will only talk if they know they’re protected.

I’m honored to serve as a board member of Crime Stoppers of Northeast Florida and VP of Communications and Programs, I’ve been granted the opportunity to share the capability of crime stopper programs with law enforcement officers who now treat it as their first resource rather than their last resort.

Former police chief and mentor John O’Grady shared this leadership exercise with me. At every decision tree, we need to look at what happens if we do nothing. Police leaders and their advisors are always at this decision point on cases, but on policy we need to make this proven program the first option and resource.

Nothing would honor Detective MacAleese more than another fifty years of cases cleared!

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Please keep all peace officers in your prayers.

Roland Clee served a major Florida police department as a Community Service Officer for more than 26 years. His career included uniformed patrol, training, media relations, intelligence, criminal investigations, and chief’s staff. He writes the American Peace Officer newsletter, speaks at public safety, recruiting and leadership conferences and helps local governments and public safety agencies through his business, CommandStaffConsulting.com.

His work is frequently featured on LawOfficer.com, the only law enforcement owned major media presence in the public safety realm.

For media interviews and podcast appearances, click here: http://bit.ly/40pT3NS

On Monday, May 18, 2026, at approximately 11:43 a.m., the San Diego Police Department received reports of an active shooter at the Islamic Center of San Diego, located in the 7000 block of Eckstrom Avenue in the Clairemont neighborhood. Officers arrived on scene by 11:47 a.m. and encountered three deceased adult victims outside the Center.

The shooters were found nearby in a vehicle. Caleb Vazquez, 18, and Cain Clark, 17, were both found deceased and while the investigation is ongoing, they both appear to have died from self-inflicted gunshot wounds. Detectives and crime scene investigators located a manifesto while white supremacist symbols and writing were present on weapons and a gas canister.

Not just another case

It is a busy news cycle and nationally this story will not remain a headline for long. It is an uncomfortable reality that if there had been greater violence and loss, this case would receive the attention that it deserves. Unfortunately, with so many competing media interests today, it is in danger of being treated as a case of nihilistic violent extremism. That is dead wrong.

I had the opportunity to read the entire manifesto, and I believe that every law enforcement leader, school resource officer and school guardian should read it too. A link to it is below.

of has the right take on this. Graves is a retired police sergeant and a highly respected authoritative voice on protecting houses of worship. Vazquez and Clark were not the model of nihilism, instead, like Dylann Roof, they were accelerationists committed to igniting a race war in our country. The difference between nihilism and accelerationism is the difference between nothing matters and everything matters.

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What the Mosque Attackers Believed: A Field Guide for Pastors, Youth Leaders, and Security Teams

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4 months ago · 78 likes · 11 comments · Keith Graves

Link to the manifesto

Unlike Roof, who they mention with admiration, they were both very intelligent. Reports regarding the 2015 Mother Emanuel AME Church attack, never portrayed Roof as anything other than a man of less than average intelligence, and that also bolstered the narrative that feeble-minded persons are more susceptible believing news, and taking violent action from less credible sources. Instead, everything in the manifesto appears well researched and their thoughts are organized. They express understanding, even hope, that this effort will result in their demise.

Again, listening to mainstream media, you would believe that their presence on Discord servers and calling anything we don’t understand the ‘dark web’ or corners of ‘hate’ online was their isolated and impenetrable subculture. The real problem isn’t the obscure parts of the Internet, but the growing community of platformed characters like Nick Fuentes and similar influencers who provide strings of half-truths and outright lies. They blame their problems on broad groups like women, religious groups, cultures and ethnicities. They praise genocidal maniacs and justify atrocities.

The other trap we can easily avoid is that this was simply an act of Islamophobia. If you had read the manifesto prior to attack, you would be easily convinced that their target would be a Jewish or Christian house of worship. The fact that they attacked a mosque with armed security, killed security guard Amin Abdullah and two others before fleeing and ending their own lives, merits more attention than a two-minute network news story. The mosque was also a school in session with 140 elementary students present during the attack.

One of their inspirations was John Earnest who attempted to burn down the Escondido Mosque prior to his attack on the Poway Synagogue. Below is an excerpt from the manifesto:

Can we agree that during a different news cycle and with a greater death toll, this would be a hotter topic? There is no question that the shooters had an appetite for more carnage. As they left the mosque, they fired shots at landscapers.

In most cases there are warning signs and we must respond

Vazquez was identified more than a year ago for his troubling beliefs. The concerns were so apparent that despite a risk protection order failing to be authorized by the court, parents voluntarily removed firearms and edged weapons from the home.

When Eric Harris, age 18, and Dylan Klebold, age 17, carried out the attack on Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado on April 20, 1999, it fundamentally reshaped how law enforcement, schools, and policymakers approached not just campus security but all active shooter events.

Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz had at least 18 documented opportunities for intervention at the local level. According to Fox News, it was revealed in a closed session of the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees that the FBI received two specific tips, in September 2017 and January 2018, that were mishandled. The 2017 tip alerted the FBI to a YouTube comment by user Nikolas Cruz stating “I’m going to be a professional school shooter.” The tips were closed out without any action, including sharing this information with local law enforcement.

The attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School resulted in lightning quick Florida legislation that changed school security standards, introduced risk-protection orders, and even changed the purchasing age for long guns.

Those events from the past drove change. That is why we need law enforcement leaders and SROs to read this manifesto to comprehend how fully persuaded these young men have become. The fact that this attack took place, despite indicators, should count as a loss. Even when you lose, don’t lose the lesson.

How else can we engage students who are being actively radicalized by deceptive ideological content, the very dynamic that appears to have shaped the worldview of the two gunmen who, while livestreaming, murdered three men? Taking the time to gather an understanding will give us all the indicators necessary to justify a conversation with other violence prone accelerationists. The only solution is for them to receive truth from authoritative sources to combat the counterfeit narratives both in the mainstream and in the subculture. The principle is simple: Bank tellers are trained to detect counterfeit currency by handling real money.

We must take this seriously today as we can be assured that Vazquez and Clark are being venerated in hundreds of new manifestos, just as they praised Harris and Klebold in theirs.

Please keep all peace officers and first responders in your prayers.

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Roland Clee served a major Florida police department as a Community Service Officer for more than 26 years. His career included uniformed patrol, training, media relations, intelligence, criminal investigations, and chief’s staff. He writes the American Peace Officer newsletter, speaks at public safety, recruiting and leadership conferences and helps local governments and public safety agencies through his business, CommandStaffConsulting.com.

His work is frequently featured on LawOfficer.com, the only law enforcement owned major media presence in the public safety realm.

For media interviews and podcast appearances, click here: http://bit.ly/40pT3NS

References

https://www.foxnews.com/us/fbi-staffers-knew-warnings-about-nikolas-cruz-were-related-but-closed-the-case-lawmakers-learn

https://www.khou.com/article/news/nation-world/florida-school-shooting-sheriff-got-18-calls-about-nikolas-cruzs-violence-threats-guns/507-522421411

https://www.sandiego.gov/activeshooter

https://time.com/article/2026/05/18/islamic-center-san-diego-shooting/

Friday was Peace Officers Memorial Day, a day of remembrance established by President Kennedy in 1962. I returned from Washington, D.C., Friday evening after spending the week serving as a citizen lobbyist with the Police Officers Defense Coalition during National Police Week. Even that day, we were able to hold an impromptu meeting with a staff member from Senator John Kennedy’s office in Louisiana.

National Police Week

Over those four days, we walked the halls of the congressional office buildings. We sat down with legislators and their staffs and advocated for legislation that matters. The work was deliberate and focused, and I believe it made a difference. We have reason to believe that it did.

The meetings were only part of the story. What I brought home with me most were the moments spent with the families of fallen officers. Hearing their stories and looking into their eyes gave this mission a weight that no briefing ever could. I met some of them on airport trams, on flights, at the memorial wall, and at evening receptions.

Lobbying for public safety is not a political exercise. Done for the right reasons, it is an act of accountability. It is the proper response to tragedy and a way to honor sacrifice with something more than silence.

The day before I arrived, the Medal of Sacrifice passed the Senate and now awaits the President’s signature. On Friday, the staff member I met with in Senator John Kennedy’s office told me that as many as five pro-police and pro-public safety bills have moved out of Senate committees and are ready for a floor vote. Anyone who understands how slowly Washington moves knows that this is major good news.

A Failed State

I stayed in Columbia Heights and had looked forward to the “vibrant” community my Airbnb host described. The Metro station was half a mile away, and the weather was crisp and perfect for a long walk in dress shoes and a suit. Despite the neighborhood’s reputation for walkability, it did not feel safe for a visitor on foot.

Even the convenience store reflected broader decline. It did not have refrigerated beer, chilled malt beverages, or wine. This was not because it was a classy store. It was completely sketchy.

Two Metropolitan Police Department cruisers sat in the Tiger Mart parking lot with their marker lights on. Meanwhile, groups of unsupervised children dominated the streets, many on app-based scooters and e-bikes moving unpredictably along the sidewalks. Pedestrians were equally chaotic, often blocking the way and intentionally bumping into people. The scene was disorderly beyond anything I expected. The smell of cannabis hung openly in the air.

Driving through MPD-patrolled neighborhoods, despite seeing a noticeable police presence, we did not witness active intervention even as we observed repeated public-order and quality-of-life offenses over the course of a five-mile drive. At other times, we saw armed National Guard units patrolling in teams of three. That response may be effective in the short term, but only temporarily. On my first beat, an area with generational poverty and a transient population dealing with behavioral health and substance abuse, people did not smoke cannabis openly in the streets even in the early morning hours. They still made the effort to conceal their crimes. That norm was gone here.

It is election season in the District of Columbia, and the political machines running Washington, D.C., are promising more of the same. The candidates continue to promote a philosophy centered on government assistance and tax-funded cradle-to-grave security.

The District of Columbia has been part of my life for longer than I can remember. I have lived in both Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, so returning has always felt like a homecoming. I missed the 1990s and the 2000s but lately, this region keeps calling me back, now year after year. Now, my investment in this city and what it represents is very different.

Some of What We Accomplished This Week

The Medal of Sacrifice has passed Congress and now awaits the President’s signature.

Five pro-law-enforcement bills moved out of Senate committee and are now ready for a floor vote.

Advocated pending bills with dozens of members of Congress and their staff.

On Friday, flags flew at half-staff across this nation in their honor. President Kennedy, as mentioned in the beginning of this article, established this day of remembrance in 1962, and more than six decades later, the debt we owe these men and women has only grown.

Earlier last week I stood at the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial, a wall bearing the names of more than 22,000 officers killed in the line of duty. We add an average of 163 names every year.

Those of us who have built our lives around public safety carry a responsibility that does not end when we leave the job. Showing up in the halls of Congress, on behalf of those who can no longer speak for themselves, is not extraordinary.

For this profession, it is simply what we owe.

Rest easy, heroes. We will always remember you.

Please keep all families who lost a peace officer in your prayers.

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Roland Clee served a major Florida police department as a Community Service Officer for more than 26 years. His career included uniformed patrol, training, media relations, intelligence, criminal investigations, and chief’s staff. He writes the American Peace Officer newsletter, speaks at public safety, recruiting and leadership conferences and helps local governments and public safety agencies through his business, CommandStaffConsulting.com.

His work is frequently featured on LawOfficer.com, the only law enforcement owned major media presence in the public safety realm.

For media interviews and podcast appearances, click here: http://bit.ly/40pT3NS

I want to publicly express tremendous gratitude to , author of For the Blue Substack and Legislative Director of the National Police Association, and Bert Eyler, President of the Police Officers’ Defense Coalition. Last year we locked arms with Hollywood Morris of Support Our Shields and police mental fitness advocate Cori Huston and accomplished something that had not been done before. This year we added a day and our impact was even more effective and profound.

References:

National Police Association

https://nationalpolice.org/

Police Officers’ Defense Coalition

https://policeofficersdefensecoalition.com/

Support Our Shields

https://www.supportourshields.com/

I’m honored to be invited back to Washington D.C. during National Police Week. I look forward to days of meeting with legislators and their staff to help move bills toward sponsorships and ultimately to floor votes.

Thank you to and Bert Eyler who joined forces between the National Police Association and the Police Officers’ Defense Coalition for making this whole thing possible. It wouldn’t have happened without them and I credit this effort to them. Discussing some issues with other national police organizations last year, they said that some of our key priorities weren’t really on their radar.

If my flights are on time and the D.C. Metro is clear, I’ll be in the Rayburn House Office Building tomorrow morning.

While preparing to travel, I saw a LinkedIn post from the Dallas Police Department noting that this year they are remembering 95 total fallen officers. I remember ten years ago where five Dallas Police Officers were murdered providing security for an anti-police march. My curiosity caused me me do a little more research finding that NYPD has lost 932 officers since 1849 and Chicago 571.

According to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, 111 law enforcement officers died in the line of duty in 2025. That number represents a 25 percent decrease from the 148 deaths recorded in 2024 and the lowest annual total since 1943. It is not a reason to celebrate but to share silent thankfulness.

As more than 100 names are carved into stone, they are preceded by 24,000 peace officers who gave their lives in the line of duty. Six already on that wall are friends and co-workers, of those four were murdered by criminals for doing their jobs well.

National Police Week is a time to stand still to honor the men and women of law enforcement who paid the ultimate price and to acknowledge what every officer carries the moment they pin on a badge and walk out the door. It is a week of folded flags, long silences, and names read aloud. Names that deserve to echo long after the ceremony ends.

While I look forward to doing my part by advocating for federal public safety legislation, please keep an eye out for me going live on Substack. I plan to do so at least twice a day and the first one should be sometime after 10 a.m. tomorrow just to document the beginning of the week. I’ll probably update via Substack Live on what we can expect to see in the coming days.

If you want to help, I ask that you do what my friends from Mission First Alliance are doing. While I was writing this note, I received a message from my friend Marcus saying that our mutual friend Jeremy “…let me know you are in DC this week for LEO Advocacy. Praying your time is very productive and our Almighty God will use you.” Thank you Marcus and Jeremy!

Perhaps the most profound moment last year was at a social gathering and the people I was standing with were the family who had lost a loved one in the line of duty. They don’t need lofty words and sentiments; they need and deserve our love and compassion.

Please keep all of our peace officers in your prayers, and this week especially, please keep the surviving families in your prayers also.

Not exactly master criminals

In most of these cases, the dollar amounts are tiny compared to the long-term financial penalty. Another striking revelation, none of these law enforcement officers are going to be joining Professor Moriarty, Lex Luthor or even Danny Ocean in the master criminal hall of fame. Are there stories where someone made a poor choice out of punishing hardship and the temptation was just too great? Not that we have seen so far.

The most profound observation is that these crimes are being committed for peanuts by cops who are prosperous by all standards. A New Orleans police sergeant has a base salary of $83,000 with an unmarked take home out-of-parish vehicle? An Orlando master police officer earning six figures? Of the cops that get themselves in trouble, none of the rewards are where you could set yourself up for life in a new country and live like royalty.

Also, the ignorance of everyone getting caught while committing this fraud annoys me. This type of crime has been going on in all careers forever but if you are a law enforcement officer, your arrest, trial and firing are going to be in the news.

In 2022, NBC reported on 54 California Highway Patrol officers being charged in an overtime fraud that took place between 2016 and March of 2018 with a grand total of $225,000 loss, which sounds like a lot until you find out the average would be about $4,200 and then knowing that in reality, many got more and many got less, those who got less than $4,200 were double cheated. However, the point being that officers are regularly getting caught ought to have some deterrence effect.

It’s not easy to lose a police pension, but in many states, committing financial fraud against your police employer is a great way to get rid of it. First responders and their families likely know the generosity of some extra duty details. I know construction contractors and movie production companies do. Many have a minimum time if you show up, so if you are working traffic for a 5K run and there is a tornado warning, the officer still gets paid the three or four hours minimum in the agreement.

Some agencies have venues that necessitate a coordinator who schedules regular coverage for a private employer. Depending on the assignments, these can be prone to abuse. Perhaps a shopping district, that requests additional extra-duty patrol, in an area that already has a visible police presence, may not notice that the officer and vehicle, that they are paying for, is not there at all. The officer, her or his vehicle, and GPS enabled radio and body camera, are sitting at home, while the money rolls in. This was a real case in Orlando where the officer remained at his residence outside the county. The list of charges was limited by data retention so while nobody knows how long this abuse existed, it was for longer than what he was arrested and charged with.

Most media reports follow a pattern. Most law enforcement agencies do it right. Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office Florida detected fraud and arrested three cops including a former officer, and two were fired. Nassau County Florida fired and arrested a deputy for fraudulently claiming hours she didn’t work over two years amounting to $4,478.63. Again and again, these sums just don’t add up.

The Big Easy’s big problem

Reporters in New Orleans have been following overtime abuses with the New Orleans Police Department for several years and what makes this story unique is that it seems it is the same cast of characters year after year. Sergeant Henry Burke’s payroll records reflect that he worked 4529 hours, more than 12 hours per day on every single one of the 365 days of the year, bumping his base salary of $87,254 to $282,200. Burke was arrested on February 4, 2026 and charged with ten felony counts. Here’s the other dimension to the story: the ADP Payroll company account for Sergeant Alfred Russell added multiple in or out punches days after the shifts occurred. Investigation has revealed chronic password sharing of payroll authorization accounts.

Senior Police Officer Brandon Coleman, documented as being on the clock and on the job assignment while being photographed at home, had over 1700 payroll reviews and edits, with every edit linked to the user ID of Sgt. Kevin Thompson, and Thompson had 1385 payroll edits done by Coleman’s user ID. This illustrates that Coleman has administrative rights over Thompson’s payroll timecard and vice versa.

The abuse continues with Sergeant Bianca Boone whose base $83,024 salary swelled to $239,045 while reportedly working 4200 hours of scheduled shifts, overtime and details.

She is being investigated, as is Sergeant Rene Benjamin for working 602 shifts over 363 days. NOPD payroll records show Benjamin working 444 days and 14 months without a day off in the recent past. There was an FBI investigation with an unknown resolution. In 2020, Benjamin is documented as having worked 360 days.

In April 2026, the investigative reporter, who has been working on this for years, spoke with NOPD Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick. He asks her about Benjamin who has worked 363 calendar days, and she treats it like an ambush.

“That is something I would say, I don’t know how healthy you are going to be trying to do that – I don’t know anything about that, I appreciate that you are trying to get to the truth of the matter and ‘you’re also doing the gotcha’ so I don’t know anything about this situation.”

In that, Chief Kirkpatrick fails to address what a police chief ought to know in a department of less than 1,000 officers where 50 are earning more than $200,000 as overtime has doubled since 2022 from $13.1M to $26.8M in 2025.

The chief who covered it up

Mount Dora is situated in Florida between Orlando to the southeast and The Villages to the northwest. It is an ideal place to raise children with high performing schools and a reputation as a center of culture. Why, in the beautiful area of chains of lakes and rolling hills would one of the most egregious abuses of authority take place? For years, the law enforcement profession has faced both fair and unfair accusations of abuse of power and corruption. The Mount Dora Police Department is an agency of less than 80 employees and less than 50 sworn staff.

In August of 2025, I wrote

“…in October 2023 where Mount Dora Lieutenant Barry Strykowski was accused of stealing time by falsifying records and misuse of his city issued vehicle. This included claiming to be in service on extra duty jobs, and invoicing for that time worked, while they planted a GPS on his vehicle which revealed not only that he wasn’t at work but at times beyond geographic range the agency vehicle uses policy permits. Sometimes he was working but double dipping, claiming to fulfill two obligations. But these accusations were not just policy violations, some of the actions, where they developed probable cause, were serious felonies.”

The accusations against Strykowski are settled facts. He claimed to be working, and was getting paid for working, while he and his vehicle were in Orange or Duval counties. In at least one case, he was getting paid twice for the same time worked. He cheated the city and contractors that hired cops for extra duty.

Following an investigation that produced a 22-page report outlining only the known theft by fraud committed by Strykowski, he had applied to another police agency and was in the final stages of the hiring process.

Officers who change jobs prior to discipline are a stain on the profession called gypsy cops. Their illegal behavior is recognized by one agency, only for them to lily pad to another agency. While it is a well-documented problem in law enforcement, there are safeguards that work if police executives follow the rules. That failed to happen in this case.

Mount Dora Police Chief Michael Gibson explained to the ABC affiliate WFTV in Orlando that upon the conclusion of the internal investigation, he used his discretion to negotiate a voluntary resignation from Strykowski with a whitewashed record. Initially the Florida Department of Law Enforcement separation form reflected that, truthfully, Strykowski ‘resigned while under investigation and pending discipline.’ Then that form was changed stating it was a ‘voluntary separation not involving misconduct.’ That record manipulation is the mechanism that creates gypsy cops.

A Mount Dora captain received a call from the agency doing the background on Strykowski to hire him, which being out of the loop on the lieutenant’s investigation, stated under oath that he checked with Chief Gibson:

“I saw the Chief. I said Chief Oakland is calling. They want to find out if there’s any discipline on Barry Strykowski. He said, no discipline, just like that. No discipline and no pending inquiries. That’s what he said. I said, can I write that down? He said, yeah. And then he made those other comments. What’s the connection? Or what? You know, what there? That’s it. Can I send him that? He said yes.”

Captain Victor Uvalle replied via e-mail to the phone query with the response from Chief Gibson. A nine-word e-mail. “No open cases and no discipline on Lt. Barry Strykowski.”

Life went on for months until a whistleblower let the news know that Strykowski was getting promoted to sergeant, while still under new-hire probation at his new agency. Gibson, confronted by facts, stated that his resignation was his discipline. He argues to the news that since the City of Mount Dora was the victim, that he had the discretion to forward or not-forward the crime to rightful prosecution. Gibson suspends Uvalle with pay for months, and then fires him for four sustained counts of truthfulness related to the nine-word e-mail that Gibson had Uvalle send to the hiring agency.

Leadership is the answer

My father told me, locks keep honest people honest. A co-worker in my earliest work experience told another co-worker as he put his wallet in his pocket, it’s not that I don’t trust you, I just want to keep on trusting you.

We can’t blame leadership for all the criminal mistakes of sworn officers. No one can do any public safety profession, dispatch, corrections, rescue, fire, and law enforcement without an above average risk tolerance. Bill Bratton had it right when, to paraphrase, that we must hire from the human race. But leadership must respond and decisively when we see the obvious gaps.

Superintendent Kirkpatrick doesn’t understand that intangibles like public trust will never be achieved without acknowledging that detecting obvious abuses like nearly 50 cops making over $200,000 via overtime is a primary function of her role.

Chief Gibson is unlikely to ‘use his discretion’ to let a shoplifter go who stole $5,000 from a local art storefront, so why would the theft to the city, where often the instrumentality was a city unmarked police vehicle, be any different? Without a whistleblower, Gibson’s backdoor agreement and FDLE separation form manipulation would have gone unnoticed. Records show Gibson has done it again as recently as March of this year where another FDLE separation form needed to be changed from ‘failure to perform tasks satisfactorily’ to ‘administrative separation not involving misconduct.’

This is the call for the true leaders to stand up. They will be easy to spot. They’ll listen, they’ll show caring, and they’ll show all the fake losers the road. The true leaders will do the right thing regardless of the cost. They have the clarity and vision that will call people to follow them.

I’d like to know from you what you think is worse: the massive fraud in New Orleans or the leadership decisions in Mount Dora. Let me know in the comments.

Please keep all peace officers in your prayers.

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Roland Clee served a major Florida police department as a Community Service Officer for more than 26 years. His career included uniformed patrol, training, media relations, intelligence, criminal investigations, and chief’s staff. He writes the American Peace Officer newsletter, speaks at public safety, recruiting and leadership conferences and helps local governments and public safety agencies through his business, CommandStaffConsulting.com.

His work is frequently featured on LawOfficer.com, the only law enforcement owned major media presence in the public safety realm.

For media interviews and podcast appearances, click here: http://bit.ly/40pT3NS

References

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/54-california-highway-patrol-officers-charged-overtime-fraud-scheme-rcna16821

https://www.boston.com/news/crime/2020/09/02/boston-police-arrested-overtime-fraud/

https://www.police1.com/arrests-sentencing/3-fla-officers-arrested-in-33-000-overtime-fraud-investigation

https://www.fox8live.com/2026/04/29/nopd-overtime-investigation-finds-more-sergeants-home-while-clock/

https://www.fox8live.com/2026/02/19/nopd-overtime-investigation-reveals-thousands-timesheet-edits/

https://www.wftv.com/news/local/central-florida-police-officer-suspended-hours-after-9-investigates-questions-why-he-was-hired/SFGQJUELZFCRZI2NGL3M3ABT4U/

https://www.wftv.com/news/local/ch-9-obtains-records-raising-questions-about-whether-local-officer-lied-during-hiring-process/XNVVJBE62VBBZM6D2XDWXPZFKU/

https://www.wftv.com/news/local/orlando-officer-arrested-clocking-couch/GGBBHEVWSRHG3EZ6NB6QW22III/

I spent nearly three decades in law enforcement encountering marijuana and working with officers who recognized what they were dealing with when they smelled weed. In one case, a traffic crash, I moved a damaged car out of a travel lane only to find a two-gallon Ziplock bag of weed under my foot on the ground that had been flung into the grassy area. The moving van traveling north clearly had more than household goods on its bill of lading. I put the bag of weed on the hood of my patrol car so they would know not to come back looking for it.

Working weed was fun. Think of Sean Penn playing Jeff Spicoli as a stoner. Bloodshot eyes, the giggles, munchies, maybe a cooperative walk back to the patrol car. It was predictable. It was manageable. Little or no psychosis.

That drug is completely gone. It does not exist today. The young cannabis user of today has never been exposed to the mellow drug of yesteryear.

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Modern Cannabis

The substance has been bio-engineered to a degree that it bears uncharacteristically high chemical levels in THC [tetrahydrocannabinol] and little resemblance to the low risk weed that made alcohol look dangerous in the late 1980s. The cannabis available today may bear the same name as the drug that myself and hundreds of thousands of law enforcement officers encountered on the street 30 years ago, but it is a substance of the same name with an incredibly different potency and effect.

Many, including me, were the ripple effect hires of the 1994 crime bill and remember being on the frontlines during the last chapter of our nation’s crack epidemic. We witnessed the survival of the bodies but the terrible cost for families. The drug users punished themselves by their own abuses far beyond what any justice system could impose. Families disintegrated under the pressure and children were scattered to families, foster care, and adoption. Today’s generation euphemize crack cocaine in terms that equate to an overpriced coffee drink.

Today’s drug stories are very different. A friend recently lost his son to a cocaine overdose. Another police veteran friend lost his troubled son to drugs tainted by Fentanyl. They are two loving parents who I worked with closely. Thirty years ago, there was trouble and complication, today there is the sudden and stark absence.

In 2013, I read the significant event sheets that I printed out every morning for chief’s staff. Officers stopped a car and search incident to arrest, they found several grams of heroin in the vehicle. I thought to myself, ‘Wow, I haven’t heard about heroin in a few years. Funny how they stopped them a couple of blocks away from the closed down methadone clinic.’

The tide has turned recently

In 2014, the New York Times published a series by the editorial board early in the legalization push of cannabis with the main headline being ‘Repeal Prohibition Again’ creating a legitimacy of debate on a topic that has been bounced about for decades.

Today the new members of the NYT editorial board have a different take. With the perspective of a dozen years of recent history, they traverse their own minefield of issues precious to them, including any economic, racial, or ethnic group being criminally charged for offenses in deviation to the mean of the majority.

To their credit, they completely rethink the attitudes, policies, and laws that have gone into past endeavors. They have not switched sides but have recognized the realities of cannabis liberalization in different states. Cannabis remains illegal under federal code.

David Leonhardt, an editorial director in New York Times Opinion, with Emily Bazelon and German Lopez weighed in online, in print and via podcast. Here are a few excerpts of their published discussion.

Bazelon: Also the strains of weed have become so much stronger. As someone who rarely actually uses or smokes it, I feel like with edibles I have to be really careful and start with a really small amount and just assume that it’s going to be way too strong. Or else I’ll wake up in the morning and still be in some kind of fog.

Influential Ohio based NYT editorial voice German Lopez had a lot to offer:

‘But then over time, we saw more and more problems pop up with marijuana legalization. We’ve seen a sharp increase in daily users. More people now use pot daily in the U.S. than use alcohol daily. And that is a dramatic shift. We’ve seen increases in addiction. We’ve seen increases in people going to E.R.s and reporting what’s called “cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome,” which we’ll just say C.H.S., but it’s like really violent nausea. It’s not at all pleasant.’

His personal experience with cannabis was also less than pleasant:

‘I remember making fun of Maureen Dowd’s experience with an edible, then going to Colorado and having basically the exact same experience where I’m sitting in a bed just in a state of panic and completely shocked that this was so much stronger than anything I had been used to. I just was not expecting it at all.’

I’ve previously cited the Breakfast Club appearance of SNL alumnus Pete Davidson where he mentioned his desistance to anything with THC. The co-hosts agreed, that today you need to ‘break off’ a cannabis product to avoid a negative outcome on a single use product. In the same conversation, Davidson spoke about how all of the people he was in rehab with were youth and they were there because of weed.

Some perspective

In 1977, the average THC concentration in seized cannabis was roughly 1 percent. By 1997 it had climbed to 5 percent. By 2022 the DEA was measuring an average of 16 percent in confiscated flower, a sixteen-fold increase in 45 years. Concentrates, oils, and vaping products routinely test between 60 and 90 percent THC. Dabs, a vaping product is regularly tested at 90% THC.

Now the DEA’s 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment has added something new. Chinese transnational criminal organizations are producing cannabis averaging 25 to 30 percent THC. According to the DEA, this is the strongest marijuana ever seen in drug trafficking history.

Chinese transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) dominate the domestic cultivation and distribution of marijuana, with most grow sites located in states where the cannabis industry is “legal.” These Chinese TCOs are producing the most potent form of marijuana in the history of drug trafficking, with a THC content averaging 25-30%.

Earlier research from The Lancet Psychiatry had already established that daily users of high-potency cannabis were significantly more likely to develop psychotic disorders. A meta-analysis in Schizophrenia Bulletin found that the heaviest users were nearly four times more likely to experience psychotic outcomes compared with non-users.

This year, in 2026, JAMA published a retrospective cohort study following 463,396 adolescents between the ages of 13 and 17. Past-year cannabis use was associated with significantly increased risk of clinician-diagnosed psychotic and bipolar disorders through age 25. The association was strongest for psychotic disorders.

When Psychosis Meets a Patrol Officer

Psychosis is not a medical abstraction. It is paranoia that feels like certain knowledge. It is hallucinations that cannot be distinguished from reality. It is a person who is genuinely terrified of something that does not exist, standing in front of an officer who has no idea why. A review published in Frontiers in Psychiatry found that cannabis use was a risk factor for violent behavior in patients with psychosis.

A separate meta-analysis of youth populations found that cannabis users were more than twice as likely to engage in physical violence compared to non-users. In California, Bryn Spejcher stabbed her boyfriend more than 100 times after consuming high-potency marijuana. Her defense successfully argued that cannabis-induced psychosis caused her to lose touch with reality entirely. Again, this was a ruling in California, a state with a legalization of recreational cannabis.

More courts are now wrestling with cannabis-induced psychosis as a criminal defense, and some jurisdictions are accepting it. In Connecticut, prosecutors argued that cannabis-induced psychosis contributed to a double homicide in Bridgeport.

California emergency rooms reported a 53 percent increase in cannabis-related visits in the three years following legalization. In 2014, people with cannabis use disorder accounted for 11 percent of all psychosis cases arriving at emergency rooms, totaling 90,000 cases and 250 per day, triple the number from 2006. That was before today’s concentrates became widely available.

The drug being legalized in state after state is not the drug those policy debates were built around. When Colorado voters approved Amendment 64 in 2012, average THC was about 12 percent. Today’s legal dispensary shelves carry flower testing at 25 to 30 percent and concentrate products (dabs) that reach 90 percent.

How can law enforcement succeed?

Law enforcement has been slow to make the connection, in large part because the opioid crisis consumed so much attention and resources. But cannabis-induced psychosis is showing up in use-of-force incidents, in emergency rooms, and in courtrooms. Officers who are not trained on what high-potency intoxication looks like are going to make decisions without the information they need.

Standard police training needs to reflect the current threat. A recruit who learned about marijuana intoxication from a 2010 curriculum learned about a different drug.

Departments must update their training on drug recognition, mental health crisis response, and de-escalation to account for what high-potency cannabis intoxication actually looks like. We need to recognize that the product changed faster than the policy conversation did. This drug has changed. The risks have changed. The encounters are changing. Pretending otherwise helps no one except the people profiting from the sale of increasingly dangerous products.

Please keep all peace officers in your prayers.

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Roland Clee served a major Florida police department as a Community Service Officer for more than 26 years. His career included uniformed patrol, training, media relations, intelligence, criminal investigations, and chief’s staff. He writes the American Peace Officer newsletter, speaks at public safety, recruiting, and leadership conferences, and helps local governments and public safety agencies through his business, CommandStaffConsulting.com.

References

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/10/opinion/legalized-marijuana-laws-regulation.html

DEA 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment

Euronews Health: Highly potent cannabis products tied to risk of psychosis, schizophrenia, and addiction (August 2025)

ScienceDaily: The hidden mental health danger in today’s high-THC cannabis (2025)

Axios: Cannabis THC levels keep getting higher, DEA data shows (April 2025)

The Lancet Psychiatry: Cannabis and psychotic disorder (EU-GEI study)

PMC/NIH: Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence

NIDA: Cannabis Potency Data

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083929/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_in_0_q_fast%20t

The Flat Tire

Three years ago, I saw a social media post by a law enforcement agency showing an officer changing a tire for a stranded motorist. The officer in the photo is a friend of mine for more than two decades, and knowing him well, I was not the least surprised by his kindness or initiative. But there were details in the post that made me think. The officer was on his lunch break at a training class in another county when he encountered the motorist with the flat tire in a parking lot. The parking lot was the police department he was visiting. Yet somehow the moment was photographed, sent to the public affairs office, packaged for social media, and distributed across multiple platforms.

After giving this perhaps too much thought, I was left with the same question: What does this have to do with law enforcement, and what does it do to enhance the image of the agency or the profession? My friend in the picture would have changed that tire whether anyone was watching or not. He would have done it in uniform, off duty, or wearing a fishing shirt on a Saturday morning. That is who he is. The act itself was genuine. The presentation of it felt less so.

Supporters of policing will praise these moments because they tend to celebrate almost everything officers do. Critics will dismiss them as public relations theater. Unfortunately, when a good deed is carefully staged for public consumption, it risks confirming the cynics more than persuading them. That is where the problem begins.

When Policing Becomes Performance

Around 2017 and 2018 many agencies began emphasizing a directive often described as “humanizing the badge.” The goal was understandable: show the public that police officers are not distant authority figures but fellow citizens who care about their communities.

Soon social media filled with photos of officers cooking breakfast during wellness checks, mowing lawns for elderly residents, washing dishes in family kitchens, and participating in various acts of goodwill. None of these actions are inherently wrong. In fact, nearly all officers have always done these things quietly for decades.

What changed was the need to document them.

The moment an officer pushes a lawn mower while another officer photographs the scene for social media, something subtle but important shifts. What was once a private act of kindness becomes public messaging. It becomes insincere and even exploitative.

At one point in my career, I was assigned to follow command staff to a homeless shelter to take photos of them reading to children. The activity itself was commendable. But the experience left me wondering whether the moment was about service, or about optics. Policing has never been a profession short on genuine compassion. I consider it a real danger comes when compassion begins to look scripted.

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Coffee With a Cop

One of my last assignments involved organized community engagement in 2019 while working in the media relations office. One morning we held a “Coffee with a Cop” event at a small coffee shop. Before leaving headquarters, more than a dozen officers gathered for a briefing that ended with the commander’s enthusiastic directive: “Let’s go engage the community.” The irony was difficult to ignore.

Each of us arrived in our own unmarked city car, filling most of the nationally known coffee shop’s notoriously tiny parking lot. Inside, the limited seating was quickly occupied by uniformed officers. Citizens who had simply stopped in for coffee suddenly found themselves surrounded by police officers conducting an outreach event they had not planned to attend. We tried to make the best of it, talking with customers and posting photos to social media. The interaction often felt forced, and the smiles we captured for the camera did not always reflect genuine connection.

Programs like Coffee with a Cop were created with good intentions, and in some places they work well. But the lesson I took from that morning was simple: trust cannot be manufactured through scheduled engagement alone. When I dug into the roots of its origins, all the way back to Hawthorne, California, I found that most of the national sponsors were not pro-police, but painted the police as the problem.

That does not mean community engagement is meaningless. It grows through daily encounters that are neither staged nor scripted.

The Professional Presence

Decades earlier I witnessed a moment that demonstrated this principle far better than any outreach program. I had located a hit-and-run driver and called for backup. The officer who responded was one of the most respected in our department. His uniform was immaculate, his tactics were flawless, and his demeanor reflected quiet confidence. When the driver began giving me attitude, the officer calmly walked over and said, “I don’t know what you think is funny here, but this isn’t a joke.” He never raised his voice. He never mentioned arrest or jail. The driver’s entire posture changed.

Professionalism alone commanded respect. Citizens recognize authenticity quickly. So do criminals. Moments like that build trust in ways that no social media campaign ever could.

The “Piggy Bank” Theory of Trust

Several years ago I discussed these issues with chiefs, academy directors, and senior law enforcement leaders. They described community trust as an investment—coins deposited into a piggy bank over time. One day, they explained, an officer might face a tragic encounter involving deadly force. When that moment comes, the accumulated trust will allow the department to make a withdrawal from the bank of public goodwill. It is an appealing theory.

But the events of recent years, and even in 2026, tested that theory in ways few expected. Across the country, officers found themselves facing hostile crowds, violent protests, and an intense national debate about policing. In some cities, officers were struck with rocks, frozen water bottles, and broken pavement. Leaders struggled to balance political pressure with the morale of the officers standing the line. The lesson is sobering.

Public trust can never be stored away like savings in an account. It is not a deposit that grows in value like accumulated interest.

We need to answer calls again

The same public that you are engaging in community events, bringing out your field kitchen, or following you on your social channels are getting the message that law enforcement has the time for cookouts or ice cream trucks, but then they are directed to a clunky failing online reporting system when something vitally important to them is disregarded by cops as inconsequential. What do you think that taxpayer thinks of your officer or deputy’s Tahoe or F150?

A question for the ‘old school’ officers who responded to stolen toaster or lawn mower calls: did you get a ton of field intelligence about the neighborhood from nosy neighbors?

The best thing that the police can do for community engagement is policing professionally.

Please keep all peace officers in your prayers.

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Roland Clee served a major Florida police department as a Community Service Officer for more than 26 years. His career included uniformed patrol, training, media relations, intelligence, criminal investigations, and chief’s staff. He writes the American Peace Officer newsletter, speaks at public safety, recruiting and leadership conferences and helps local governments and public safety agencies through his business, CommandStaffConsulting.com.

His work is frequently featured on LawOfficer.com, the only law enforcement owned major media presence in the public safety realm.

For media interviews and podcast appearances, click here: http://bit.ly/40pT3NS

The Law Enforcement “Family”

A desirable feature of joining law enforcement, corrections, or a fire-rescue agency is the idea that you are now grafted into a great big loving and competitive family. It is one of the attractions that used to draw people to law enforcement, to be able to say that we are all family and that we are all connected to one another in this pond of sacrifice, sweat, and blood.

To those, excluding military service members, who have not been through actual academy training, and to family members who think that you have vicariously experienced it, you may have experienced a good taste, but nothing compares to the actual complete experience. There are significant goals in academy training that are exclusively based on trust between first responders, trust within the unit, and trust in the organization you work for.

The Moment an Officer Gets Injured

In patrol, I had many sworn officers as light-duty ride-alongs. It was important that they reached pensionable hours per pay period as they navigated the workman’s comp regime. When I was transferred to investigations, I received a larger cubicle with room for a second officer and an intern. During that season, I spent significant time with many sworn officers who had experienced both physical and moral injury. Many of my readers know the pain firsthand of deadly force exerted on you and responding with deadly force to end the threat. You were there and you understand the complicated nature of dealing with both sides of it.

“My squad members don’t reach out to me anymore,” shared one injured officer who was spending 40 hours in the headquarters building absent doctors or PT appointments. I spent decades with them. Too many of their careers ended prematurely.

The Athlete Recovery Model

That’s why I am honored to share the innovative program Ready Rebound. What if we took the best practices and attitudes of high-performance sports medicine and rehabilitation to first responder injuries? The real newsmaker is that we haven’t had an innovation like this sooner.

While civil servants in fiscal management or neighborhood relations face physical risks, their daily hazards differ fundamentally from those of rescuers, corrections officers, and law enforcement. We currently operate within a system that treats carpal tunnel syndrome as administratively equivalent to the ‘on-the-job’ traumas of the front line: a gunshot wound in policing, musculoskeletal damage from a firefighter pulling down a burning ceiling, or facial trauma from an assault in a correctional facility.

The sports model is radically different: When a professional athlete is injured, the world stops. Trainers rush onto the field, a team physician conducts an immediate assessment, and within hours the athlete may have imaging, treatment plans, and rehabilitation specialists assigned. Every step is designed to restore strength, mobility, and confidence so the athlete can return to peak performance.

A fireman’s surgery may be weeks away. The decision to send a corrections officer to physical therapy may take more than a month. The law enforcement officer may be waiting for treatment while the cloud of an internal affairs investigation hovers over her or his family.

One of the hardest duties of any police chief is to tell an officer that because they haven’t been able to return to full duty within a policy time limit, they will be terminated. No one has offered a fix to that until recently, when I heard my friend Todd’s presentation to the police chiefs association meeting.

Todd Herb and I worked together for 23 years. He came from a smaller agency and hit the streets running in the most target rich environments in patrol, to the jump-out uniformed drug unit, to apprehension K-9, and finally solving the most intellectually challenging complex cases in our financial crimes unit. Even in our highly charged and competitive environment, I can’t recall a single negative comment shared about him and all his peers gave him a five-star rating. Today, after several years of representing valuable tools of the trade, he brings Ready Rebound to the forefront.

Getting Officers Back on the Street Safely

It is a 180-degree course correction for everyone with a high-risk pension, like police, corrections and fire. This solves the problem of every city, state, or county that doesn’t want to terminate the law enforcement or fire service professional based on arbitrary time limits on injury, repair and healing.

Recent data confirms what everyone in uniform already knows. According to the FBI’s Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted report, assaults on officers have reached a ten-year high, with more than 85,000 officers attacked in a single year. The rate of assaults has climbed for three consecutive years, even while other categories of violent crime have declined nationally.

In practical terms, that means the risk to the officer answering the radio call is increasing, not decreasing. In early 2024 reporting, unprovoked attacks on officers rose dramatically, underscoring a troubling shift toward targeted violence against those who wear the badge.

Those numbers are not just statistics. Every assault on an officer carries the potential for a life-altering injury, both physical and psychological. A broken wrist during a struggle, a rolled ankle during a foot pursuit, or the long rehabilitation after being beaten in the line of duty is not an abstract policy matter. I’ve been in the hospital rooms with officers who nearly lost their life, and but for backup showing up in time, they would be engraved on the memorial wall. If you’ve ever been there, you know how off-putting, impactful and necessary that can be. We hope we never have to do it again. To be blunt, officers like that don’t need six weeks or six months to endlessly ruminate on what nearly happened. Sometimes we lose those officers to other careers and other times we lose them tragically.

Too often the systems responsible for protecting these professionals treat recovery as a bureaucratic timeline rather than a mission.

The Leadership Decision Agencies Must Make

I’ll admit that chiefs and sheriffs are easy targets. It is tempting to feel sympathy for them, caught between political pressure from above and expectations from the rank and file below. But on this issue, that excuse does not hold. Not here. This is precisely where leadership is teste and where too many fail.

Every chief and sheriff who rose through the ranks remembers what it felt like to stand in that space between pressure from the top and pressure from the street. Some of them reminded us at every rank stratum, that wherever they were, sergeant, lieutenant, captain, that they were the one bearing the tension for the whole organization.

Today, on an issue as fundamental as how we care for injured first responders, we are hearing too many supposed leaders retreat behind the language of scarcity, blaming and lamenting budget uncertainty and citing possible tax reductions that have not even been proposed, let alone enacted.

When the people who run toward danger for their communities are the ones left navigating a bureaucratic maze after being injured in the line of duty, silence from leadership is not neutrality, it is failure.

When assaults are increasing and the risks of the profession are rising, leadership must ask a fundamental question: are we building systems designed to return our people to service, or systems that quietly push them out when the healing takes longer than a policy manual allows? Generation Z, and the now rising Gen Alpha, as their social norm will not tolerate any sense of disloyalty to them, even as their loyalty is blatantly conditional. Broadly, their perception is that every agency, business, or organization, exists for them, to give them a means of earning an income, to keep their promise of care, and if there is a generous wellness, healthcare, and disability program, the rising generation treats any failure as a systemic betrayal. This must be a consideration in retaining the generation that we will be handing the keys over to shortly. This hastens the need to fix this now.

I have no financial relationship with Ready Rebound today. I’m not opposed to it in the future, but it must be noted that this is not paid or sponsored by Ready Rebound. I saw my friend Todd Herb doing the right thing for the right reasons. If you’ve read previous articles, you likely know that the only promise I shared with victim’s families was ‘to figure out the right thing to do is, and whatever it is, do it.’ I encourage you to do the same!

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Please keep all first responders in your prayers!

Roland Clee served a major Florida police department as a Community Service Officer for more than 26 years. His career included uniformed patrol, training, media relations, intelligence, criminal investigations, and chief’s staff. He writes the American Peace Officer newsletter, speaks at public safety, recruiting and leadership conferences and helps local governments and public safety agencies through his business, CommandStaffConsulting.com.

His work is frequently featured on LawOfficer.com, the only law enforcement owned major media presence in the public safety realm.

For media interviews and podcast appearances, click here: http://bit.ly/40pT3NS

Reach out to Todd Herb via email at therb@readyrebound.com