Rehiring LMPD Officers

Not all the officers who have retired will make a good officer for the training unit. Each would need to be used where they could best be an asset. It takes more than just experience to be a good teacher and handle the young pups. Show me one of the retired officers who will be running with the recruits or getting in the pit for hand to hand with them.

I think as a Employer you have to put some qualifications in the process to get the right kind of person. As an Officer, I am glad that qualifications are a requirement. I have worked with both ends of the qualification spectrum. Ones that had only a highscool diploma and others that had military experience or college experience or both. Hands down, except for a few rare cases, Officers that had college and military were the Officers I had the best results with. With college and military experience, Officers are use to showing up for work on time as in the military, taking orders as in the military, they are educated as in both the military and college and the list goes on. When I looked at becoming a Police Officer I was 20 years old. I decided at that time that I was going to do whatever it took to become one. I looked at the qualifications and I looked at what they perferred. So on that information I went to college and joined the military. One to serve my country and the other to get the experience I needed to become an Officer. When I got out of the military, where incidently I took two years of college classes and received my associates degree while in the military, I started applying for departments. Shortly after I was hired as a Police Officer. My point is you can't sit around the house and then one day decide "I want to be a cop today" and then expect that your life experience will be more than enough to get you the job. You need to put in something to get something out. There are men and women who after working many years with other employers are coming on the department at the age of 42 and so on. Get busy trying or get get busy doing something else. Yes you do learn many values from college and the military.

Alot of departments around our country have gone to these requirments. It is nothing new, in fact LMPD is way behind for its size not to have these in place. If you want to become a Police Officer and don't quilify for LMPD go somewhere else and apply but by all means stop crying about it. IF you wanted a job in the private sector and didn't get it because the requirments were too much you would either go back to school and get what you needed or go somewhere else to get the job.

As for laterals, I don't think they are the answer to our problem. There are people who didn't qualify for an initial hire but they went to some small city, got a job on a 2 or 3 man dept and now they are great for LMPD and whatever problem they had is gone. We need to look at the lateral applicants very close to find out why they are leaving their department and what baggage they are bringing here. That will take more than just making phone calls to the deparment where the officer is at. IT will take going to that department and looking at the files on the officer, asking other officers what they feel about them and doing a complete backround check on them.