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As I’ve noted here before, I attended the pilot class of the Philadelphia Civilian Police Academy as a reporter back in 1994.
The idea for the Civilian Police academy was a simple one. Run 40 citizens through a modified police academy course that all recruit police officers attend in order for the citizens to better understand law enforcement and to forge better community relations.
The pilot class included clergy and community leaders, town watch members, attorneys, political aides – and one newspaper reporter.
One of the instructors I met at the Police Academy back then was Lieutenant Martin O’Donnell. He was articulate, knowledgeable and thoroughly professional.
I
reached out to O’Donnell, now retired, and asked him about his career and
police training.
O’Donnell: I loved my assignment at the Police Academy for a number of different reasons. Primarily, I was afforded the opportunity to mold people of various backgrounds and life experiences to be police officers. I got to see men and women graduate from the Academy and for the most part embrace the life of a police officer and the Brotherhood that those before them fostered.
The Training Bureau gave me an opportunity to learn more about the needs of officers both in the Academy and in the street. The needs are completely different. It also gave me the opportunity to establish lifelong friendships with those that I trained across approximately 10 different departments.
What was the most difficult part of your job at the Academy?
O’Donnell: The hardest part of the Academy, in my opinion, was two- fold. Watching these, for the most part, young men and women hit the streets, knowing how it was going to change them and their families’ lives. The second part was attending officers’ funerals. I always took it personally when an officer like Danny Boyle, John Pawlowski, Gary Skerski, Patrick Mc Donald Laureth Vaird, Bobby Hayes, Charlie Knox, and other officers that I taught were murdered doing their job. I always lamented that I missed something when I was trying them or something else, I could have told them or warned them about. With all of the officers who were shot, stabbed, or seriously injured during the performance of their duty, whose lives would be forever changed, was it something that I neglected in my training?
What was the high point of your career?
O’Donnell: The high point of my career was becoming a Philadelphia Police Officer. Everything else was a bonus.
How does the training of police officers today differ from your day?
O’Donnell: It appears that the training today focuses a lot on social awareness. I’m old school, admittedly, and I believe that when you first encounter a police officer, their mere presence in their uniform and deportment should command respect. I feel that allowing sporadic compliance to an officer’s appearance is not helping officers today when they encounter the public.
Officers today have a much harder job with everyone video recording their actions, and the constant threat of being disciplined or even arrested for doing their job. It is easy to criticize or critique an officer’s actions or response sitting in an office looking at their response when they had, literally seconds, to react in a hostile, volatile situation. The only ones that are held accountable in these situations are the officers. People sitting in these offices aren’t experiencing the fear and adrenaline of the moment and therefore it’s impossible to judge the officers’ actions unless you look at the totality of the circumstances.
Why is police training so important?
O’Donnell: Training is important to the public so they can experience a minutia of what officers’ life is like. There is no way for the public to experience what it’s like to be in a heightened state of alert, or more precisely, anxiety/stress, for 8+ hours, 24 hours a day. I know officers are only at work 8-12 hours, but they are constantly in a state of awareness and readiness.
What do you remember about teaching at the Civilian Police Academy?
O’Donnell: I had many different professions come through, from lawyers to doctors, to reporters, nurses, to homemakers. I would comfortably say having 300+ people come through is their impression of what an officer does changed dramatically, and they were more empathetic to an officer’s daily encounters.
I would also say, from an outside perspective, that today’s police officers are being taught to be a kinder, gentler police officer. The theory of this is great, but in a world where it is much more violent than it was 20 years ago, it allows for more injuries to police and a reduction in the pool of applicants. Police today are faced with a number of challenges that we never faced 20 years ago. They face a judicial body that supports the criminal element and doesn’t support the officer on the street. They face a legal system that promotes their personal agenda and has discard justice being “blind.” Justice now wears a robe of anti-law enforcement and embraces personal agendas.
Have cell phone recordings of police officers changed policing?
O’Donnell: Initially, I thought the cell phone would adversely impact police work, but I think it has actually helped support the police as it relates to the actions that they took were reasonable and prudent. The downside of the cell phone phenomenon is that it has emboldened the criminal’s interaction with police. The “bad guy” now provokes, assaults and intimidates officers, using their cell phones as a shield against an officer’s response. I believe in the “Pendulum Theory” and I believe that the public will tire of this total disrespect for police officers and the lack of the prosecutorial responsibility of the office that charges criminals.
When I attended the Civilian Police Academy, we were told that car stops were the most dangerous police action. Has that changed?
O’Donnell: When I taught car stops at the Academy, along with Sgt Charles Ebner and the DT Staff, I based our scenarios on actual statistics where officers were shot or shot and killed. I kept a 3” binder of FBI reports and newspaper articles all relating to these incidents. Vehicle investigations will always be inherently dangerous, because of the mobility of the vehicle and the fact that the occupant/s can commit an armed felony or shooting in one part of the city and be in another part of the city in minutes, before flash information has been put out. This continues to make vehicle stops critical. Additionally, because of the current public opinion of officers, they tend to be more lenient in what they allow the occupants to do.
“I think that “domestics” or “domestic disputes” are slowly eclipsing vehicle stops. Officers approaching homes or businesses or other encounters seem to be gaining more deadly results.”
Martin O’Donnell did an excellent job of preparing scores of police officers, as well as this reporter, for life on the mean streets of Philadelphia.
Paul Davis’s On Crime column appears here each week. He is also a contributor to Broad + Liberty and Counterterrorism magazine. He can be reached via pauldavisoncrime.com.
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