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In the days when hyenas of hate suckle the babes of men, and jackals of hypocrisy pimp their mothers’ broken hearts, may children not look to demons of ignorance for hope.
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Aberjhani (The River of Winged Dreams)
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Democracy is not simply a license to indulge individual whims and proclivities. It is also holding oneself accountable to some reasonable degree for the conditions of peace and chaos that impact the lives of those who inhabit one’s beloved extended community.
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Aberjhani (Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays)
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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream was a manifestation of hope that humanity might one day get out of its own way by finding the courage to realize that love and nonviolence are not indicators of weakness but gifts of significant strength.
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Aberjhani (Illuminated Corners: Collected Essays and Articles Volume I.)
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To be a jazz freedom fighter is to attempt to galvanize and energize world-weary people into forms of organization with accountable leadership that promote critical exchange and broad reflection. The interplay of individuality and unity is not one of uniformity and unanimity imposed from above but rather of conflict among diverse groupings that reach a dynamic consensus subject to questioning and criticism. As with a soloist in a jazz quartet, quintet or band, individuality is promoted in order to sustain and increase the creative tension with the group--a tension that yields higher levels of performance to achieve the aim of the collective project. This kind of critical and democratic sensibility flies in the face of any policing of borders and boundaries of "blackness", "maleness", "femaleness", or "whiteness".
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Cornel West (Race Matters)
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The fear of offense is a really small price to pay for freedom.
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Andrena Sawyer
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I realize that what happened in Bosnia could happen anywhere in the world, particularly in places that are diverse and have a history of conflict. It only takes bad leadership for a country to go up in flames, for people of different ethnicity, color, or religion to kill each other as if they had nothing in common whatsoever. Having a democratic constitution, laws that secure human rights, police that maintain order, a judicial system, and freedom of speech don't ultimately guarantee long lasting peace. If greedy or bloodthirsty leaders come to power, it can all go down. It happened to us. It can happen to you.
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Savo Heleta (Not My Turn to Die: Memoirs of a Broken Childhood in Bosnia)
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No country can police corruption in other countries when it itself is not free from corruption. You cannot clean a dirty wall with dirty hands.
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Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
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...the consequences of this shift of emphasis from the police to the military in the power game were of great consequence. It is true, ascendancy of the secret police over the military apparatus is the hallmark of many tyrannies, and not only the totalitarian; however, in the case of totalitarian government the preponderance of the police not merely answers the need for suppressing the population at home but fits the ideological claim to global rule. For it is evident that those who regard the whole earth as their future territory will stress the organ of domestic violence and will rule conquered territory with police methods and personnel rather than with the army. Thus, the Nazis used their SS troops, essentially a police force, for the rule and even the conquest of foreign territories, with the ultimate aim of an amalgamation of the army and the police under the leadership of the SS.
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Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism)
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The real value of democracy comes from unity, equal rights and ethical leadership. If we abide by this value, our community can progress without the rise of civil and economic inequality.
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Saaif Alam
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If cynicism and criticism is the way to worry about the country..
The country better start worrying about itself & it's social police...
Change is about Vision & Mission and not about social NEGATIVITY..
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Abha Maryada Banerjee (Nucleus - Power Women: Lead from the Core)
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In the middle to late 1970s, when Putin joined the KGB, the secret police, like all Soviet institutions, was undergoing a phase of extreme bloating. Its growing number of directorates and departments were producing mountains of information that had no clear purpose, application, or meaning. An entire army of men and a few women spent their lives compiling newspaper clippings, transcripts of tapped telephone conversations, reports of people followed and trivia learned, and all of this made its way to the top of the KGB pyramid, and then to the leadership of the Communist Party, largely unprocessed and virtually unanalyzed.
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Masha Gessen (The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin)
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f white Americans were to leave the country tomorrow, in ten years -America would be a ghetto. You can see the truth of this when you look at many of our major cities that are run by black mayors, black-dominated city councils, and black police chiefs. These cities are usually horrible places to live. Yet blacks who live in black-ruled cities can't see the truth: their own immorality is the cause of black poverty, crime, and family destruction!
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Jesse Lee Peterson (Scam: How the Black Leadership Exploits Black America)
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The toll from the two attacks: twenty-one pro-American leaders and their employees dead, twenty-six taken prisoner, and a few who could not be accounted for. Not one member of the Taliban or al-Qaeda was among the victims. Instead, in a single thirty-minute stretch the United States had managed to eradicate both of Khas Uruzgan’s potential governments, the core of any future anti-Taliban leadership—stalwarts who had outlasted the Russian invasion, the civil war, and the Taliban years but would not survive their own allies. People in Khas Uruzgan felt what Americans might if, in a single night, masked gunmen had wiped out the entire city council, mayor’s office, and police department of a small suburban town: shock, grief, and rage.
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Anand Gopal (No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes)
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No one wanted the job. What had seemed one of the least challenging tasks facing Franklin D. Roosevelt as newly elected president had, by June 1933, become one of the most intransigent. As ambas-sadorial posts went, Berlin should have been a plum—not London or Paris, surely, but still one of the great capitals of Europe, and at the center of a country going through revolutionary change under the leadership of its newly appointed chancellor, Adolf Hitler. Depending on one’s point of view, Germany was experiencing a great revival or a savage darkening. Upon Hitler’s ascent, the country had undergone a brutal spasm of state- condoned violence. Hitler’s brown- shirted paramilitary army, the Sturmabteilung, or SA—the Storm Troopers—had gone wild, arresting, beating, and in some cases murdering communists, socialists, and Jews. Storm Troopers established impromptu prisons and torture stations in basements, sheds, and other structures. Berlin alone had fi fty of these so- called bunkers. Tens of thousands of people were arrested and placed in “protective custody”— Schutzhaft—a risible euphemism. An esti-mated fi ve hundred to seven hundred prisoners died in custody; others endured “mock drownings and hangings,” according to a police affi davit. One prison near Tempelhof Airport became especially no-torious: Columbia House, not to be confused with a sleekly modern new building at the heart of Berlin called Columbus House. The up-heaval prompted one Jewish leader, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise of New York, to tell a friend, “the frontiers of civilization have been crossed.
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Erik Larson (In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin)
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Remember Martin L. King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference? When it staged marches in Alabama, that state’s governor, George Wallace, called the organization’s members “professional agitators with pro-Communist affiliations.” Sound familiar? How close to “outside agitators”! The phrase begs the question: outside of what? The state? America? This country is called the United States of America, founded upon a national Constitution. Do all citizens have the right to protest, or just some? Is what happened to Mike Brown a local matter, or is his unjustifiable killing actually a national issue? It’s not the job of media to police protests—deciding who are “good” demonstrators, who are “bad” ones. Their job is to report what is happening, period. Were it not for these protests, let us be frank, the mass media would’ve ignored the crimes police committed against Michael Brown, against his family, against his community, and against his fellow citizens—us. If media were doing their job, reporting on the vicious violence launched against young Blacks the nation over, perhaps Michael Brown would be alive today. Let us look at the cops, almost 98 percent of whom are outsiders to Ferguson. They work there, they kill there, but they don’t live there. They dwell in neighboring, whiter counties and towns. Who are the real outside agitators?
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Mumia Abu-Jamal (Have Black Lives Ever Mattered? (City Lights Open Media))
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We want people to share our commitment to purpose and mission, not to comply because they’re afraid not to. That’s exhausting and unsustainable for everyone. Leaders who work from compliance constantly feel disappointed and resentful, and their teams feel scrutinized. Compliance leadership also kills trust, and, ironically, it can increase people’s tendency to test what they can get away with. We want people to police themselves and to deliver above and beyond expectations. Painting done and using a TASC approach cultivates commitment and contribution, giving team members the space and the trust to stretch and learn and allowing joy and creativity to be found in even the small tasks.
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Brené Brown (Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts.)
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One reason I continue to oppose efforts to criminalize abortion is that I do not believe any government should have the power to dictate, through law or police action, a woman's most personal decisions."
"I consider that a slippery slope to state control of reproduction, and I'd witnessed the consequences of such control in China and Communist Romania.
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Hillary Rodham Clinton (Living History)
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For the US to be like Russia today,” he wrote, “it would be necessary to have massive corruption by the majority of members of Congress as well as by the Departments of Justice and Treasury, and agents of the FBI, CIA, DIA, IRS, Marshall Service, Border Patrol, state and local police officers, the Federal Reserve Bank, Supreme Court justices, US district court judges, support of the varied organized crime families, the leadership of the Fortune 500 companies, at least half of the banks in the US, and the New York Stock Exchange.
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Oliver Bullough (Moneyland: The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the World)
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They have seen the almost unbelievable idiocy of our political leadership—in the past political leaders, ranging from the mayors to governors to the White House, were regarded with respect and almost reverence; today they are viewed with contempt. This negativism now extends to all institutions, from the police and the courts to “the system” itself. We are living in a world of mass media which daily exposes society’s innate hypocrisy, its contradictions and the apparent failure of almost every facet of our social and political life.
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Saul D. Alinsky (Rules for Radicals)
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The breadth of his hands-on experience at different levels of government, from the state legislature to the police department to the governor’s chair, had sensitized Roosevelt to the hidden dangers of the age: the rise of gigantic trusts that were rapidly swallowing up their competitors in one field after another, the invisible web of corruption linking political bosses to the business community, the increasing concentration of wealth and the growing gap between the rich and the poor, the squalid conditions in the immigrant slums, the mood of insurrection among the laboring classes.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin (Leadership: In Turbulent Times)
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first two days of Montgomery’s integrated bus service were without incident. Then, at 1:30 A.M. on Sunday morning, December 23, a shotgun blast ripped through the front door of King’s home. The floodlights were on, but no watchman was present. King, Coretta, and Yoki were asleep, and no one was injured. King chose not to call the police, but he did announce the incident to his Dexter congregation later that morning. “It may be that some of us may have to die,” he solemnly remarked. That evening, at a mass meeting, he declared that “I would like to tell whoever did it that it won’t do any good to kill me
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David J. Garrow (Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference)
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First, realize your fear is legitimate to you. What you feel is real, and you must deal with it constructively. When you are flooded with fear, chances are you aren’t thinking clearly. Panic and confusion, not to mention a rush of adrenalin, keep you from taking the necessary coping steps. Therefore, you must calm down, physically and emotionally. Calm brings the situation into perspective. Do what soldiers, firefighters, and police officers do when facing an alarming situation: breathe in for four seconds, hold for four, and release for four. Repeat. Next, it is important to remember that in everything we do, there is always a chance of failure. Facing that chance requires courage and
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Jill Morgenthaler (The Courage to Take Command: Leadership Lessons from a Military Trailblazer)
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Spontaneous order is self-contradictory. Spontaneity connotes the ebullition of surprises. It is highly entropic and disorderly. It is entrepreneurial and complex. Order connotes predictability and equilibrium. It is what is not spontaneous. It includes moral codes, constitutional restraints, personal disciplines, educational integrity, predictable laws, reliable courts, stable money, trustworthy finance, strong families, dependable defense, and police powers. Order requires political guidance, sovereignty, and leadership. It normally entails religious beliefs. The entire saga of the history of the West conveys the courage and sacrifice necessary to enforce and defend these values against their enemies.
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George Gilder (Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World)
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The former South African archbishop Desmond Tutu used to famously say, “We are prisoners of hope.” Such a statement might be taken as merely rhetorical or even eccentric if you hadn’t seen Bishop Tutu stare down the notorious South African Security Police when they broke into the Cathedral of St. George’s during his sermon at an ecumenical service. I was there and have preached about the dramatic story of his response more times than I can count. The incident taught me more about the power of hope than any other moment of my life. Desmond Tutu stopped preaching and just looked at the intruders as they lined the walls of his cathedral, wielding writing pads and tape recorders to record whatever he said and thereby threatening him with consequences for any bold prophetic utterances. They had already arrested Tutu and other church leaders just a few weeks before and kept them in jail for several days to make both a statement and a point: Religious leaders who take on leadership roles in the struggle against apartheid will be treated like any other opponents of the Pretoria regime. After meeting their eyes with his in a steely gaze, the church leader acknowledged their power (“You are powerful, very powerful”) but reminded them that he served a higher power greater than their political authority (“But I serve a God who cannot be mocked!”). Then, in the most extraordinary challenge to political tyranny I have ever witnessed, Archbishop Desmond Tutu told the representatives of South African apartheid, “Since you have already lost, I invite you today to come and join the winning side!” He said it with a smile on his face and enticing warmth in his invitation, but with a clarity and a boldness that took everyone’s breath away. The congregation’s response was electric. The crowd was literally transformed by the bishop’s challenge to power. From a cowering fear of the heavily armed security forces that surrounded the cathedral and greatly outnumbered the band of worshipers, we literally leaped to our feet, shouted the praises of God and began…dancing. (What is it about dancing that enacts and embodies the spirit of hope?) We danced out of the cathedral to meet the awaiting police and military forces of apartheid who hardly expected a confrontation with dancing worshipers. Not knowing what else to do, they backed up to provide the space for the people of faith to dance for freedom in the streets of South Africa.
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Jim Wallis (God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It)
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The enormous spotlight that focused on King, combined with the construction of Rosa Parks as a saintly symbol, hid the women's long struggle in the dimly lit background, obscuring the origins of the MIA and erasing women from the movement. For decades, the Montgomery bus boycott has been told as a story triggered by Rosa Park's spontaneous refusal to give up her seat followed by the triumphant leadership of men like Fred Gray, Martin Luther King, Jr., E. D. Nixon, and Ralph Abernathy. While these men had a major impact on the emerging protest movement, it was black women's decade-long struggle against mistreatment and abuse by white bus drivers and police officers that launched the boycott. Without an appreciation for the particular predicaments of black women in the Jim Crow South, it is nearly impossible to understand why thousands of working-class and hundreds of middle-class black women chose to walk rather than ride the bus for 381 days.
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Danielle L. McGuire (At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power)
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we have much to learn from the struggles in Alabama and Mississippi in the early 1960s. In the spring of 1963 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by Dr. King launched a “fill the jails” campaign to desegregate downtown department stores and schools in Birmingham. But few local blacks were coming forward. Black adults were afraid of losing their jobs, local black preachers were reluctant to accept the leadership of an “Outsider,” and city police commissioner Bull Connor had everyone intimidated. Facing a major defeat, King was persuaded by his aide, James Bevel, to allow any child old enough to belong to a church to march. So on D-day, May 2, before the eyes of the whole nation, thousands of schoolchildren, many of them first graders, joined the movement and were beaten, fire-hosed, attacked by police dogs, and herded off to jail in paddy wagons and school buses. The result was what has been called the “Children’s Miracle.” Inspired and shamed into action, thousands of adults rushed to join the movement. All over the country rallies were called to express outrage against Bull Connor’s brutality. Locally, the power structure was forced to desegregate lunch counters and dressing rooms in downtown stores, hire blacks to work downtown, and begin desegregating the schools. Nationally, the Kennedy administration, which had been trying not to alienate white Dixiecrat voters, was forced to begin drafting civil rights legislation as the only way to forestall more Birminghams. The next year as part of Mississippi Freedom Summer, activists created Freedom Schools because the existing school system (like ours today) had been organized to produce subjects, not citizens. People in the community, both children and adults, needed to be empowered to exercise their civil and voting rights. A mental revolution was needed. To bring it about, reading, writing, and speaking skills were taught through discussions of black history, the power structure, and building a movement. Everyone took this revolutionary civics course, then chose from more academic subjects such as algebra and chemistry. All over Mississippi, in church basements and parish halls, on shady lawns and in abandoned buildings, volunteer teachers empowered thousands of children and adults through this community curriculum. The Freedom Schools of 1964 demonstrated that when Education involves young people in making community changes that matter to them, when it gives meaning to their lives in the present instead of preparing them only to make a living in the future, young people begin to believe in themselves and to dream of the future.
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Grace Lee Boggs (The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century)
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FOCUS ON GENERATING REVENUE THE DOJ FOUND THAT virtually every branch and tributary of the city’s bureaucracy—the mayor, city council, city manager, finance director, municipal court judge, municipal court prosecutor, court clerk, assistant clerks, police chief—all were enmeshed in an unending race to raise revenue through municipal fines and fees: City officials routinely urge Chief [Tom] Jackson to generate more revenue through enforcement. In March 2010, for instance, the City Finance Director wrote to Chief Jackson that “unless ticket writing ramps up significantly before the end of the year, it will be hard to significantly raise collections next year. . . . Given that we are looking at a substantial sales tax shortfall, it’s not an insignificant issue.” Similarly, in March 2013, the Finance Director wrote to the City Manager: “Court fees are anticipated to rise about 7.5%. I did ask the Chief if he thought the PD [police department] could deliver 10% increase. He indicated they could try.” The importance of focusing on revenue generation is communicated to FPD officers. Ferguson police officers from all ranks told us that revenue generation is stressed heavily within the police department, and that the message comes from City leadership. The evidence we reviewed supports this perception.
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Norm Stamper (To Protect and Serve: How to Fix America's Police)
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Situation awareness means possessing an explorer mentality A general never knows anything with certainty, never sees his enemy clearly, and never knows positively where he is. When armies are face to face, the least accident in the ground, the smallest wood, may conceal part of the enemy army. The most experienced eye cannot be sure whether it sees the whole of the enemy’s army or only three-fourths. It is by the mind’s eye, by the integration of all reasoning, by a kind of inspiration that the general sees, knows, and judges. ~Napoleon 5 In order to effectively gather the appropriate information as it’s unfolding we must possess the explorer mentality. We must be able to recognize patterns of behavior. Then we must recognize that which is outside that normal pattern. Then, you take the initiative so we maintain control. Every call, every incident we respond to possesses novelty. Car stops, domestic violence calls, robberies, suspicious persons etc. These individual types of incidents show similar patterns in many ways. For example, a car stopped normally pulls over to the side of the road when signaled to do so. The officer when ready, approaches the operator, a conversation ensues, paperwork exchanges, and the pulled over car drives away. A domestic violence call has its own normal patterns; police arrive, separate involved parties, take statements and arrest aggressor and advise the victim of abuse prevention rights. We could go on like this for all the types of calls we handle as each type of incident on its own merits, does possess very similar patterns. Yet they always, and I mean always possess something different be it the location, the time of day, the person you are dealing with. Even if it’s the same person, location, time and day, the person you’re dealing who may now be in a different emotional state and his/her motives and intent may be very different. This breaks that normal expected pattern. Hence, there is a need to always be open-minded, alert and aware, exploring for the signs and signals of positive or negative change in conditions. In his Small Wars journal article “Thinking and Acting like an Early Explorer” Brigadier General Huba Wass de Czege (US Army Ret.) describes the explorer mentality: While tactical and strategic thinking are fundamentally different, both kinds of thinking must take place in the explorer’s brain, but in separate compartments. To appreciate this, think of the metaphor of an early American explorer trying to cross a large expanse of unknown terrain long before the days of the modern conveniences. The explorer knows that somewhere to the west lies an ocean he wants to reach. He has only a sketch-map of a narrow corridor drawn by a previously unsuccessful explorer. He also knows that highly variable weather and frequent geologic activity can block mountain passes, flood rivers, and dry up desert water sources. He also knows that some native tribes are hostile to all strangers, some are friendly and others are fickle, but that warring and peace-making among them makes estimating their whereabouts and attitudes difficult.6
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Fred Leland (Adaptive Leadership Handbook - Law Enforcement & Security)
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In the shock of the moment, I gave some thought to renting a convertible and driving the twenty-seven hundred miles back alone. But then I realized I was neither single nor crazy. The acting director decided that, given the FBI’s continuing responsibility for my safety, the best course was to take me back on the plane I came on, with a security detail and a flight crew who had to return to Washington anyway. We got in the vehicle to head for the airport. News helicopters tracked our journey from the L.A. FBI office to the airport. As we rolled slowly in L.A. traffic, I looked to my right. In the car next to us, a man was driving while watching an aerial news feed of us on his mobile device. He turned, smiled at me through his open window, and gave me a thumbs-up. I’m not sure how he was holding the wheel. As we always did, we pulled onto the airport tarmac with a police escort and stopped at the stairs of the FBI plane. My usual practice was to go thank the officers who had escorted us, but I was so numb and distracted that I almost forgot to do it. My special assistant, Josh Campbell, as he often did, saw what I couldn’t. He nudged me and told me to go thank the cops. I did, shaking each hand, and then bounded up the airplane stairs. I couldn’t look at the pilots or my security team for fear that I might get emotional. They were quiet. The helicopters then broadcast our plane’s taxi and takeoff. Those images were all over the news. President Trump, who apparently watches quite a bit of TV at the White House, saw those images of me thanking the cops and flying away. They infuriated him. Early the next morning, he called McCabe and told him he wanted an investigation into how I had been allowed to use the FBI plane to return from California. McCabe replied that he could look into how I had been allowed to fly back to Washington, but that he didn’t need to. He had authorized it, McCabe told the president. The plane had to come back, the security detail had to come back, and the FBI was obligated to return me safely. The president exploded. He ordered that I was not to be allowed back on FBI property again, ever. My former staff boxed up my belongings as if I had died and delivered them to my home. The order kept me from seeing and offering some measure of closure to the people of the FBI, with whom I had become very close. Trump had done a lot of yelling during the campaign about McCabe and his former candidate wife. He had been fixated on it ever since. Still in a fury at McCabe, Trump then asked him, “Your wife lost her election in Virginia, didn’t she?” “Yes, she did,” Andy replied. The president of the United States then said to the acting director of the FBI, “Ask her how it feels to be a loser” and hung up the phone.
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James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
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Well before the end of the 20th century however print had lost its former dominance. This resulted in, among other things, a different kind of person getting elected as leader. One who can present himself and his programs in a polished way, as Lee Quan Yu you observed in 2000, adding, “Satellite television has allowed me to follow the American presidential campaign. I am amazed at the way media professionals can give a candidate a new image and transform him, at least superficially, into a different personality. Winning an election becomes, in large measure, a contest in packaging and advertising. Just as the benefits of the printed era were inextricable from its costs, so it is with the visual age. With screens in every home entertainment is omnipresent and boredom a rarity. More substantively, injustice visualized is more visceral than injustice described. Television played a crucial role in the American Civil rights movement, yet the costs of television are substantial, privileging emotional display over self-command, changing the kinds of people and arguments that are taken seriously in public life. The shift from print to visual culture continues with the contemporary entrenchment of the Internet and social media, which bring with them four biases that make it more difficult for leaders to develop their capabilities than in the age of print. These are immediacy, intensity, polarity, and conformity. Although the Internet makes news and data more immediately accessible than ever, this surfeit of information has hardly made us individually more knowledgeable, let alone wiser, as the cost of accessing information becomes negligible, as with the Internet, the incentives to remember it seem to weaken. While forgetting anyone fact may not matter, the systematic failure to internalize information brings about a change in perception, and a weakening of analytical ability. Facts are rarely self-explanatory; their significance and interpretation depend on context and relevance. For information to be transmuted into something approaching wisdom it must be placed within a broader context of history and experience. As a general rule, images speak at a more emotional register of intensity than do words. Television and social media rely on images that inflamed the passions, threatening to overwhelm leadership with the combination of personal and mass emotion. Social media, in particular, have encouraged users to become image conscious spin doctors. All this engenders a more populist politics that celebrates utterances perceived to be authentic over the polished sound bites of the television era, not to mention the more analytical output of print. The architects of the Internet thought of their invention as an ingenious means of connecting the world. In reality, it has also yielded a new way to divide humanity into warring tribes. Polarity and conformity rely upon, and reinforce, each other. One is shunted into a group, and then the group polices once thinking. Small wonder that on many contemporary social media platforms, users are divided into followers and influencers. There are no leaders. What are the consequences for leadership? In our present circumstances, Lee's gloomy assessment of visual media's effects is relevant. From such a process, I doubt if a Churchill or Roosevelt or a de Gaulle can emerge. It is not that changes in communications technology have made inspired leadership and deep thinking about world order impossible, but that in an age dominated by television and the Internet, thoughtful leaders must struggle against the tide.
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Henry Kissinger (Leadership : Six Studies in World Strategy)
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In all these battles the Labour right has enormous reserves of political power. The Parliamentary Labour Party is overwhelmingly hostile to Jeremy Corbyn. Of the 232 Labour MPs no more than 20 can be relied on to back him. Back bench revolts, leaks, and public attacks by MPs opposed to the leadership are likely to be frequent.
Some Labour left wingers hope that the patronage that comes with the leader’s position will appeal to the careerism of the right and centre MPs to provide Jeremy with the support he lacks. No doubt this will have some effect, but it will be limited. For a start it’s a mistake to think that all right wingers are venal. Some are. But some believe in their ideas as sincerely as left wingers believe in theirs.
More importantly, the leading figures of the Labour right should not be seen as simply part of the Labour movement. They are also, and this is where their loyalty lies, embedded in the British political establishment. Commentators often talk as if the sociological dividing line in British politics lies between the establishment (the heads of corporations, military, police, civil service, the media, Tory and Liberal parties, etc, etc) on the one hand, and the Labour Party as a whole, the unions and the left on the other. But this is not the case. The dividing line actually runs through the middle of the Labour Party, between its right wing leaders and the left and the bulk of the working class members.
From Ramsey MacDonald (who started on the left of the party) splitting Labour and joining the Tory government in 1931, to the Labour ‘Gang of Four’ splitting the party to form the SDP in 1981, to Neil Kinnock’s refusal to support the 1984-85 Miners Strike, to Blair and Mandelson’s neo-conservative foreign policy and neoliberal economic policy, the main figures of the Labour right have always put their establishment loyalties first and their Labour Party membership second. They do not need Jeremy Corbyn to prefer Cabinet places on them because they will be rewarded with company directorships and places in the Lords by the establishment.
Corbyn is seen as a threat to the establishment and the Labour right will react, as they have always done, to eliminate this threat. And because the Labour right are part of the establishment they will not be acting alone. Even if they were a minority in the PLP, as the SDP founders were, their power would be enormously amplified by the rest of the establishment. In fact the Labour right today is much more powerful than the SDP, and so the amplified dissonance from the right will be even greater.
This is why the argument that a Corbyn leadership must compromise with the right in the name of unity is so mistaken. The Labour right are only interested in unity on their terms. If they can’t get it they will fight until they win. If they can’t win they would rather split the party than unite with the left on the left’s terms.
When Leon Trotsky analysed the defeat of the 1926 General Strike it was the operation of this kind of ‘unity’ which he saw as critical in giving the right the ability to disorganise the left. The collapse of the strike came, argued Trotsky, when the government put pressure on the right wing of the Labour movement, who put pressure on the left wing of the movement, who put pressure on the Minority Movement (an alliance of the Labour left and the Communist Party). And the Minority Movement put pressure on the CP…and thus the whole movement collapsed.
To this day this is the way in which the establishment transmits pressure through the labour movement. The only effective antidote is political and organisational independence on the far left so that it is capable of mobilising beyond the ranks of the Labour Party and trade union bureaucracy. This then provides a counter-power pushing in the opposite direction that can be more powerful than the pressure from the right.
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John Rees
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awkward televised hug from the new president of the United States. My curtain call worked. Until it didn’t. Still speaking in his usual stream-of-consciousness and free-association cadence, the president moved his eyes again, sweeping from left to right, toward me and my protective curtain. This time, I was not so lucky. The small eyes with the white shadows stopped on me. “Jim!” Trump exclaimed. The president called me forward. “He’s more famous than me.” Awesome. My wife Patrice has known me since I was nineteen. In the endless TV coverage of what felt to me like a thousand-yard walk across the Blue Room, back at our home she was watching TV and pointing at the screen: “That’s Jim’s ‘oh shit’ face.” Yes, it was. My inner voice was screaming: “How could he think this is a good idea? Isn’t he supposed to be the master of television? This is a complete disaster. And there is no fricking way I’m going to hug him.” The FBI and its director are not on anyone’s political team. The entire nightmare of the Clinton email investigation had been about protecting the integrity and independence of the FBI and the Department of Justice, about safeguarding the reservoir of trust and credibility. That Trump would appear to publicly thank me on his second day in office was a threat to the reservoir. Near the end of my thousand-yard walk, I extended my right hand to President Trump. This was going to be a handshake, nothing more. The president gripped my hand. Then he pulled it forward and down. There it was. He was going for the hug on national TV. I tightened the right side of my body, calling on years of side planks and dumbbell rows. He was not going to get a hug without being a whole lot stronger than he looked. He wasn’t. I thwarted the hug, but I got something worse in exchange. The president leaned in and put his mouth near my right ear. “I’m really looking forward to working with you,” he said. Unfortunately, because of the vantage point of the TV cameras, what many in the world, including my children, thought they saw was a kiss. The whole world “saw” Donald Trump kiss the man who some believed got him elected. Surely this couldn’t get any worse. President Trump made a motion as if to invite me to stand with him and the vice president and Joe Clancy. Backing away, I waved it off with a smile. “I’m not worthy,” my expression tried to say. “I’m not suicidal,” my inner voice said. Defeated and depressed, I retreated back to the far side of the room. The press was excused, and the police chiefs and directors started lining up for pictures with the president. They were very quiet. I made like I was getting in the back of the line and slipped out the side door, through the Green Room, into the hall, and down the stairs. On the way, I heard someone say the score from the Packers-Falcons game. Perfect. It is possible that I was reading too much into the usual Trump theatrics, but the episode left me worried. It was no surprise that President Trump behaved in a manner that was completely different from his predecessors—I couldn’t imagine Barack Obama or George W. Bush asking someone to come onstage like a contestant on The Price Is Right. What was distressing was what Trump symbolically seemed to be asking leaders of the law enforcement and national security agencies to do—to come forward and kiss the great man’s ring. To show their deference and loyalty. It was tremendously important that these leaders not do that—or be seen to even look like they were doing that. Trump either didn’t know that or didn’t care, though I’d spend the next several weeks quite memorably, and disastrously, trying to make this point to him and his staff.
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James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
“
First, I said, we in law enforcement need to acknowledge the truth that we have long been the enforcers of a status quo in America that abused black people; we need to acknowledge our history because the people we serve and protect cannot forget it. Second, we all need to acknowledge that we carry implicit biases inside us, and if we aren’t careful, they can lead to assumptions and injustice. Third, something can happen to people in law enforcement who must respond to incidents resulting in the arrest of so many young men of color; it can warp perspectives and lead to cynicism. Finally, I said, we all must acknowledge that the police are not the root cause of the most challenging problems in our country’s worst neighborhoods, but that the actual causes and solutions are so hard that it is easier to talk only about the police. I then ordered all fifty-six FBI offices around the country to convene meetings between law enforcement and communities to talk about what is true and how to build the trust needed to bend those lines back toward each other. It is hard to hate up close, and the FBI could bring people up close.
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James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
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City officials exerted constant pressure on police executives to generate more revenue through enforcement, and the pressure was transmitted all the way down through the ranks: The importance of focusing on revenue generation is communicated to FPD officers. Ferguson police officers from all ranks told us [federal investigators] that revenue generation is stressed heavily within the police department, and that the message comes from City leadership. . . . Officer evaluations and promotions depend to an inordinate degree on “productivity,” meaning the number of citations issued.
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Malcolm K. Sparrow (Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform)
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seventy-six-year-old Professor Liviu Librescu, but he was from a different generation. He sacrificed himself by holding the door while ordering his students to escape through the windows. He understood the responsibilities of leadership — the leader, like the captain of a ship, saves himself last.
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Chris Bird (Surviving a Mass Killer Rampage: When Seconds Count, Police Are Still Minutes Away)
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This citizenship was quite literal and conveyed enormous privileges. The universities of Germany were, and I use the past tense with sorrow, powerful institutions in their own right who owed no obedience to the laws governing other civil organizations. They made and enforced their own rules. Police or even government officials were forbidden to so much as enter the university grounds except upon the invitation of the rector. To be a student in a university was to belong to a group which exercised a great formative power upon the life of the nation. Social trends were formed there and political doctrines originated. It is difficult to compare these institutions with the American colleges because our contact with the life of the nation was so close and we exerted a strong political leadership. The German universities are the greatest professional schools and all their entrants are already college graduates.
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Kathrine Kressmann Taylor (Day of No Return)
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Until the outbreak of the war, Jedwabne was a quiet town, and Jewish lives there differed little from those of their fellows anywhere else in Poland. If anything, they may have been better. The Jewish community was not affected by significant rifts or protracted conflicts. There were a few Chasids in Jedwabne, but spiritual leadership of the community was recognized by all in the person of a pious and respected rabbi, Avigdor Bialostocki. A few years before the war the town saw the appointment of a new parish priest, Marian Szumowski, whose sympathies were with the nationalist party, but until then Rabbi Bialostocki and Jedwabne's Catholic priest had been on very good terms with each other. In addition, by a lucky coincidence, the local police commander was a decent and straightforward fellow who kept order in the town and went after troublemakers, irrespective of their political beliefs or ethnic background. And then the war came.
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Jan Tomasz Gross (Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland)
“
Here is the story, which I have abridged (with acknowledgement to Sergey Parkhomenko, journalist and broadcaster, who reported it): The River Ob makes a turn at Kolpashevo, and every year it eats away a few feet of a sand cliff there. On April 30, 1979, the Ob's waters eroded another six-foot section of bank. Hanging from the newly exposed wall were the arms, legs and heads of people who had been buried there. A cemetery at least several yards wide had been exposed. The bodies had been packed in and layered tightly. Some of the skulls from the uppermost layer rolled out from the sandbank, and little boys picked them up and began playing with them. News of the burial spread quickly and people started gathering at the sandbank. The police and neighbourhood watch volunteers quickly cordoned off the whole thing. Shortly afterwards, they built a thick fence around the crumbling sandbank, warning people away. The next day, the Communist Party called meeting in the town, explaining that those buried were traitors and deserters from the war. But the explanation wasn't entirely convincing. If this were so, why was everyone dressed in civilian clothes? Why had women and children been executed as well? And from where, for that matter, did so many deserters come in a town of just 20,000 people? Meanwhile, the river continued to eat away at the bank and it became clear that the burial site was enormous; thousands were buried there. People could remember that there used to be a prison on these grounds in the late 1930s. It was general knowledge that there were executions there, but nobody could imagine just how many people were shot. The perimeter fence and barbed wire had long ago been dismantled, and the prison itself was closed down. But what the town's people didn't know was that Kolpashevo's prison operated a fully-fledged assembly line of death. There was a special wooden trough, down which a person would descend to the edge of a ditch. There, he'd be killed by rifle fire, the shooter sitting in a special booth. If necessary, he'd be finished off with a second shot from a pistol, before being added to the next layer of bodies, laid head-to-toe with the last corpse. Then they'd sprinkle him lightly with lime. When the pit was full, they filled in the hole with sand and moved the trough over a few feet to the side, and began again. But now the crimes of the past were being revealed as bodies fell into the water and drifted past the town while people watched from the shore. In Tomsk, the authorities decided to get rid of the burial site and remove the bodies. The task, it turned out, wasn't so easy. Using heavy equipment so near a collapsing sandbank wasn't wise and there was no time to dig up all the bodies by hand. The Soviet leadership was in a hurry. Then from Tomsk came new orders: two powerful tugboats were sent up the Ob, right up to the riverbank, where they were tied with ropes to the shore, facing away from the bank. Then they set their engines on full throttle. The wash from the ships' propellers quickly eroded the soft riverbank and bodies started falling into the water, where most of them were cut to pieces by the propellers. But some of the bodies escaped and floated away downstream. So motorboats were stationed there where men hooked the bodies as they floated by. A barge loaded with scrap metal from a nearby factory was moored near the boats and the men were told to tie pieces of scrap metal to the bodies with wire and sink them in the deepest part of the river. The last team, also composed of local men from the town, worked a bit further downstream where they collected any bodies that had got past the boats and buried them on shore in unmarked graves or sank them by tying the bodies to stones. This cleanup lasted almost until the end of the summer.
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Lawrence Bransby (Two Fingers On The Jugular)
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1.4.2 Action item: Law enforcement agency leadership should examine opportunities to incorporate procedural justice into the internal discipline process, placing additional importance on values adherence rather than adherence to rules. Union leadership should be partners in this process.
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U.S. Government (Final Report of The President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing May 2015)
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Danielle Oliveira, boasting nine years of dedicated law enforcement experience, currently holds the position of Lieutenant within the New Jersey Division of Criminal Justice. Commencing her journey as a seasonal police officer in 2012, she swiftly ascended to the rank of Sergeant, showcasing remarkable commitment and leadership qualities.
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Danielle Oliveira New Jersey
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Every time we decide to use our power to influence others, particularly if we`re gleeful and hasty, we damage the relationship. We move from enjoying a healthy partnership based on trust and mutual respect to establishing a police state that requires constant monitoring.
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Kerry Patterson (Crucial Confrontations: Tools for Talking About Broken Promises, Violated Expectations, and Bad Behavior)
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If you’re reading this book and chapter, you are probably in what we call the 10%er mindset or those in law enforcement that are continually improving them both physically and mentally. This chapter is preaching to the choir, but as members of this proverbial choir your voices need to be heard. You need to sing out loudly to those who are not so concerned about improving themselves as they are jeopardizing your life, the lives in the communities you serve, and the tranquility in a free society that is being torn apart by those that would destroy us. Police officers are the fine blue line between chaos and order. You are our first line of defense. Today’s law enforcement officer can no longer be what has been referred to as a “ROD”. That is “Retired on Duty.” Those who look at law enforcement as just a paycheck and a career leading to a secure retirement need to be not only shaken, but steered either out of their departments or quickly change their attitude about what it means to be a cop.
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Fred Leland (Adaptive Leadership Handbook - Law Enforcement & Security)
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Focus on Generating Revenue The City budgets for sizeable increases in municipal fines and fees each year, exhorts police and court staff to deliver those revenue increases, and closely monitors whether those increases are achieved. City officials routinely urge Chief Jackson to generate more revenue through enforcement. In March 2010, for instance, the City Finance Director wrote to Chief Jackson that “unless ticket writing ramps up significantly before the end of the year, it will be hard to significantly raise collections next year. . . . Given that we are looking at a substantial sales tax shortfall, it’s not an insignificant issue.” Similarly, in March 2013, the Finance Director wrote to the City Manager: “Court fees are anticipated to rise about 7.5%. I did ask the Chief if he thought the PD could deliver 10% increase. He indicated they could try.” The importance of focusing on revenue generation is communicated to FPD officers. Ferguson police officers from all ranks told us that revenue generation is stressed heavily within the police department, and that the message comes from City leadership. The evidence we reviewed supports this perception.
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U.S. Department of Justice (The Ferguson Report: Department of Justice Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department)
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Efficiency is an important aspect to policing. We must ensure things that need to be done such as information and evidence gathering, dissemination and documentation in reports, etc., is indeed getting done. However it is important for leaders not to get lost in the efficiency of processes as it breeds a zero defects environment that creates a frontline that waits to be told what to think and slowing down considerably the effectiveness of timely decision making and tactical problem solving.
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Fred Leland (Adaptive Leadership Handbook - Law Enforcement & Security)
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Police departments by their very nature are learning organizations and eventful or not, every shift yields fruit in the form of lessons learned. Hence, some effort needs to be made to “harvest” knowledge that can be used in bettering future shifts. While methods may vary, they usually take the form of a debriefing. A debriefing is a facilitated discussion focused on gaining understanding and insight regarding specific actions, taken on shift and involving those people who were personally involved.
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Fred Leland (Adaptive Leadership Handbook - Law Enforcement & Security)
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Along the way after introductions to putting Boyd’s, Sun Tzu and Clausewitz (two other brilliant military (human conflict) thinkers) as well as other’s thoughts to practice, we begin introductions to actually implementing these ideas in the classroom along with examples of how they translated to the street. Over the course of the book, these real-world examples compile to actually form a real world Program of Instruction (POI) for a course that was implemented successful in a large police force just a couple of years ago.
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Fred Leland (Adaptive Leadership Handbook - Law Enforcement & Security)
“
Around the world, the perception and reality of corruption and bad governance in public places remains very high. But it isn’t just in governments that these are found; they can permeate through society, where they are rampant in private enterprises and even religious institutions. We need to deal with the causes, not just consequences. You will need to play your role, both as a good example as well as part of the social police force. Cultures and beliefs must change at a personal level as well as at institutional levels.
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Archibald Marwizi (Making Success Deliberate)
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The law enforcement profession is a thinking profession. Every cop is expected to be a student of the art and science of conflict, crime and justice. Leaders are expected to have a solid foundation in police theory and, knowledge of law enforcement history and the timeless lessons to be gained from it.
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Fred Leland (Adaptive Leadership Handbook - Law Enforcement & Security)
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This culture within FPD influences officer activities in all areas of policing, beyond just ticketing. Officers expect and demand compliance even when they lack legal authority. They are inclined to interpret the exercise of free-speech rights as unlawful disobedience, innocent movements as physical threats, indications of mental or physical illness as belligerence. Police supervisors and leadership do too little to ensure that officers act in accordance with law and policy, and rarely respond meaningfully to civilian complaints of officer misconduct.
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U.S. Department of Justice (The Ferguson Report: Department of Justice Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department)
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Because lessons learned by police personnel play such important role, it is necessary that a system be in place to insure that such lessons are properly and correctly recorded. Experience is a powerful teacher, but experience by itself is not the most efficient way to learn. The process can often be painful and time-consuming. To learn as quickly as possible, we must be more deliberate, more disciplined, and more thorough in our approach in order to squeeze as much as possible from each experience. As with everything else about better execution there is no magic here.
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Fred Leland (Adaptive Leadership Handbook - Law Enforcement & Security)
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On the job training and experience is often stated as “the way” to learn the job of policing. What does this mean to us cops? Does it mean with time on the job we’ll get better at what we do, automatically, or magically from working shift after shift and handling call after call? Every time we race to the scene and charge towards the sounds of danger and come out safe with suspect in custody, mean that we have somehow gotten better just by being there and participating in the dangerous encounter? Or is there something more to this concept of “on the job training” we should be doing to leverage every experience no matter how small or big to improve our performance? When I think of on the job training I do not envision an environment where you show up for work and fly by the seat of your pants and hope things work out as you think they should. No, what I envision by on the job training is that you learn from every experience and focus on leveraging the lessons learned to make you better at the job. Law enforcement officers are members of a profession that does not routinely practice its tactical skills. Only constant violent conflict and violent crime, a condition to objectionable, to even contemplate, would allow such practice. Thus the honing and developing of law enforcement peacekeeping skills must be achieved in other ways.
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Fred Leland (Adaptive Leadership Handbook - Law Enforcement & Security)
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It’s Not Easy
Let’s be honest. Ethics is not for wimps. It’s not easy being a good person.
It’s not easy: to be honest when it might be costly. To keep inconvenient promises or to put
principles above comfort.
It’s not easy: to stand up for your beliefs and still respect differing viewpoints.
It’s not easy: to be on time. To control anger. To be accountable for attitudes and actions. To refrain
from gossip and hurtful words. To tackle unpleasant tasks. Or to sacrifice the now for later.
It’s not easy: to bear criticism and learn from it without getting angry. To take advice. Or to
admit error.
It’s not easy: to really feel sorry and apologize sincerely. To accept an apology graciously. Or to
forgive and let go.
It’s not easy: to not complain. To stop feeling like a victim. To avoid disheartening cynicism. To
make the best of every situation. Or to be cheerful for the sake of others.
It’s not easy: to share. To be consistently kind. To think of others first. To judge generously. To
give the benefit of the doubt. To give without concern for gratitude. Or to be grateful.
It’s not easy: to fail and still keep trying. To learn from failure. To risk failing again. To start over.
To lose with grace. Or to be glad for the success of another.
It’s not easy: to avoid excuses. To resist temptations. Or to listen to our better angels.
No, being a person of character is not easy. That’s why it’s such a lofty goal and an admirable
achievement.
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Paul M. Whisenand (Supervising Police Personnel: Strengths-Based Leadership)
“
A Change in Culture, Top down and Bottom up! There can be no true problem solving without decentralization of control and individual initiative. To change from a culture of “tell me what to do to one that breeds and nurtures creativity, innovation, adaptation and time critical decision making,” we must move, really move from centralized control to a decentralized form of leadership. We have been talking about decentralized control in policing for years now, since the onset of “community policing” initiatives. True! But that's the problem we have been “talking about it, and that is all.” We need to be practicing it. Get beyond the talk and walking the talk if we truly want to see results that meet the challenges we face in policing. Yes there have been some organizations in law enforcement who have taken this approach seriously and the results show the value of frontline decision making. It takes constant practice to master these cultures! The action taken by leadership needs to be more than written mission statements and words. It takes action, action over time through learning, education, and training. Not just in the formal sense but in the real world sense of learning from everything we do at all levels of the organization and throughout the community on a daily bases.
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Fred Leland (Adaptive Leadership Handbook - Law Enforcement & Security)
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For fourteen years Wiliam Walker alias Brown alias Shields alias Swallow alias Waldon alias Todd alias Watson had been a major irritant to British authorities on both sides of the world. To the London police he was an accomplished thief. To the colonial government in Van Diemen's Land, he was a clever and determined escaper; he had stolen one of its vessels and caused much embarrassment by making it back to England not once but twice, one of only a handful of runaways to do so. To these skills of theft and evasion must be added outstanding seamanship, a glib tongue, extraordinary resourcefulness and a capacity for leadership. Among his more admirable attributes his loyalty to his family should also not be forgotten. To the convicts of Macquarie Harbour and Port Arthur he was a living legend, tangible proof that escape from the island prison was possible. By any standards, he was a remarkable man...
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Warwick Hirst (The Man Who Stole the Cyprus: A True Story of Escape)
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At OBSS An unexpected occurrence did come of this escapade, even though I didn’t care for the program. Andy, you may or may not be aware that Outward Bound teaches interpersonal and leadership skills, not to mention wilderness survival. The first two skillsets were not unlike our education at the Enlightened Royal Oracle Society (E.R.O.S.) or the Dale Carnegie course in which I had participated before leaving Malaya for school in England. It was the wilderness survival program I abhorred. Since I wasn’t rugged by nature (and remain that way to this day), this arduous experience was made worse by your absence. In 1970, OBSS was under the management of Singapore Ministry of Defence, and used primarily as a facility to prepare young men for compulsory ’National Service,’ commonly known as NS. All young and able 18+ Singaporean male citizens and second-generation permanent residents had to register for National Service compulsorily. They would serve either a two-year or twenty-two-month period as Full Time National Servicemen after completing the Outward Bound course. Pending on their individual physical and medical fitness, these young men would enter the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF), Singapore Police Force (SPF), or the Singapore Civil Defense Force (SCDF). Father, through his extensive contacts, enrolled me into the twenty-one-day Outward Bound summer course. There were twenty boys in my class. We were divided into small units under the guidance of an instructor. During the first few days at the base camp, we trained for outdoor recreation activities such as adventure racing, backpacking, cycling, camping, canoeing, canyoning, fishing, hiking, kayaking, mountaineering, horseback riding, photography, rock climbing, running, sailing, skiing, swimming, and a variety of sporting activities.
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Young (Turpitude (A Harem Boy's Saga Book 4))
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Growing up with well-educated parents and an older sister with her Master’s Degree in English Language and Literature, I was left with little wiggle room as a child to use poor grammar. When I would inadvertently slip, I would be corrected in a matter of moments—excuse me, seconds! While it may have been irritating for a 10-year-old, I am eternally grateful as an adult that the grammar police kept me in line.
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Susan C. Young (The Art of Communication: 8 Ways to Confirm Clarity & Understanding for Positive Impact(The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #5))
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And as with many corporate chief executives, there is a high
turnover rate among police chiefs; average tenure of chiefs is three years. Why
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P.J. Ortmeier (Police Administration: A Leadership Approach)
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Without that
courage, an officer is just another person in the crowd of badges. Demonstrating
courage takes practice. Many police professionals have the knowledge and ability
to lead. Yet, they may choose not to exercise their leadership skills—not to do the
right thing—because they fear losing the rewards that conformity provides (such
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P.J. Ortmeier (Police Administration: A Leadership Approach)
“
The metaphor of the early American explorer fits policing and the complex problems we face on the street daily. As we search for peaceful outcomes to the situations we encounter numerous unknowns despite the similarities, in the types of incidents and crises we observe day to day. Standard operating procedures, policy and procedure practices are all very useful when we have standard problem and things go as we plan but what happens when things deviate from the standard and go outside the normal patterns? Here is where we must rely on resilience and adaptation, our ability and knowhow. Experienced people using their insights, imagination and initiative to solve complex problems as our ancestors, the early American explores did. As we interact with people in dynamic encounters, the explorer mentality keeps us in the game; it keeps us alert and aware. The explorer mentality has us continually learning as we accord with a potential adversary and seek to understand his intent to the best of our ability. An officer who possesses the explorer mentality understands that an adversary has his own thoughts objectives and plans, many which he cannot hear, such as: “I will do what I am asked,” “I will not do what I am asked,” “I will escape,” “I will fight,” “I will assault,” “I will kill,” “I will play dumb until...,” “I will stab,” “I will shoot,” “he looks prepared I will comply,” “he looks complacent I will not comply, etc.” The explorer never stops learning and is ever mindful of both obvious and subtle clues of danger and or cooperation.
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Fred Leland (Adaptive Leadership Handbook - Law Enforcement & Security)
“
For executives, simulator-style training is occasionally available in crisis leadership courses, where trainees are invited to take their turn at the helm in a crisis response exercise. But absent a crisis, most executive teams operate without any special training to help them interpret the myriad signals available or recognize important conditions quickly and pick the best response to different scenarios. In the absence of such training, many executive teams muddle through, having learned most of what they know through their own experience on the way up through the managerial ranks rather than through formal training. As one chief noted, the closest equivalent to executive-level simulator training is when one department has the opportunity to learn from the misery of another. A collegial network of police executives, ready to share both their successes and failures, is a valuable asset to the profession (see box 2-1).
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Malcolm K. Sparrow (Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform)
“
The United States policing style of dealing with conflict and crisis requires intelligent leaders with a penchant for boldness and initiative down to the lowest levels. Boldness is an essential moral trait in a leader for it generates power beyond the physical means at hand. Initiative, the willingness to act on one’s own judgment, is a prerequisite for boldness. These traits carried to excess can lead to rashness, but we must realize that errors by frontline street cops stemming from over boldness are a necessary part of learning. We should deal with such errors leniently; there must be no “zero defects” mentality. Abolishing “zero defects” means that we do not stifle boldness or initiative through the threat of punishment. It does not mean that leaders do not council subordinates on mistakes; constructive criticism is an important element of learning. Nor does it give subordinates free license to act stupidly or recklessly. Not only must we not stifle boldness or initiative, but we must continue to encourage both traits in spite of mistakes. On the other hand, we should deal severely with errors of inaction or timidity. We will not accept lack of orders as justification for inaction; it is each police officers duty to take initiative as the situation demands. We must not tolerate the avoidance of responsibility or necessary risk.
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Fred Leland (Adaptive Leadership Handbook - Law Enforcement & Security)
“
The reason some people do not experience God in their life is the same reason that we do not notice that something is going wrong with our marriage untill we arrive in a divorce court or that something is wrong with our child until we got a phone call from the police station . Simply put....Because we do not pay attention
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Patience Johnson (Why Does an Orderly God Allow Disorder)
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On August 12, 1933, President Machado fled Cuba with ABC terrorists shooting at his laden airplane as it prepared to take off from the long hot runway. He left Cuba without any continuity of leadership and a smooth transfer of authority to the next administration became impossible in Havana.
American envoy, Sumner Welles stepped into the vacuum and encouraged Carlos Manuel de Céspedes y Quesada to accept the office of Provisional President of Cuba. Céspedes was a Cuban writer and politician, born in New York City, son of Carlos Manual de Céspedes del Castillo who was a hero of the Cuban War of Independence. Wearing a spotlessly clean, crisp white suit, Céspedes was installed as the Provisional President of Cuba, on what was his 62nd birthday.
This expedient political move failed to prevent the violence that broke out in the streets. Mobs looted and behaved with viciousness that lasted for six long hours and created a mayhem not witnessed since Cuba’s Independence from Spain. Students from the university ransacked the previously pro-Machado newspaper “Heraldo de Cuba.” The Presidential Palace was stormed and severely damaged, with the culprits leaving a “For Rent” sign hanging on the front gate. The temperament of the mob that rallied against the Machado supporters, including the hated Porristas who had been left behind, was ferocious. They wounded over 200 hapless souls and cost 21 people their lives. Five members of the Porristas as well as Colonel Antonio Jimenez, the head of Machado’s secret police, were summarily shot to death and trampled upon. The rioters then tied the mutilated body of Jimenez to the top of a car and paraded his bullet-riddled carcass through the streets of Havana, showing it off as a trophy. When the howling throng of incensed people finally dumped him in front of the hospital, it was determined that he had been shot 40 times.
Students hammered away at an imposing bronze statue of Machado, until piece by piece it was totally destroyed. Shops owned by the dictator’s friends were looted and smashed, as were the homes of Cabinet members living in the affluent suburbs.
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Hank Bracker
“
When someone is attacked, we call it assault. As horrible as that is, what is even worse is torment. Torment is when you’re assaulted and you cannot escape, like prisoners of war and those who are held captive in slavery. For some women, their version of slavery and captivity in torment is called marriage. Tragically, some women settle for this kind of life. Or perhaps even worse, they tell their church leadership, only to be told that when Paul said our bodies belongs to our spouses, it means the wife is basically a piece of property. Some tragic studies report that an assaulted wife who goes to her church instead of the police or a licensed counselor will be less likely to get ongoing emotional help and legal protection, but rather will return to the abuse in the name of submission—as if the abuse is what God had in mind for her. Anytime a husband or church leader demands the wife obey the Bible without doing the same for the husband, he is sanctioning abuse. Any professing Christian man who assaults his wife is a heretic preaching a false gospel with his life. A man is to love his wife as Christ loves the church. Jesus’ relationship with the church is not one of rape, violence, abuse, and degradation. There is no place for any assault—including sexual assault—in any marriage.
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Mark Driscoll (Real Marriage: The Truth About Sex, Friendship, and Life Together)
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Within the New Jersey Division of Criminal Justice, Lieutenant Danielle Oliveira is renowned for her adept leadership in guiding Conviction Review Investigations. Starting as a seasonal police officer, she rapidly climbed the ranks to become a Sergeant within just five years. Despite her demanding professional commitments, Danielle remains deeply committed to her family, demonstrating a remarkable ability to harmonize her personal and professional spheres with finesse and dedication.
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Danielle Oliveira New Jersey
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We had lost the most critically thing as a country. Not sure if it was looted during unrest, stolen by illegal foreigners . If It was vandalized with infrastructure by the tenderpreneurs or It was colonized . We had lost RESPECT as a country or nation. Respect for the law or authority. Respect for the police or government. Respect for the country or principles. Respect for the culture , tradition or religion. Respect for the elders, parents, chiefs, kings or presidents. Respect for humanity or nature. Respect for other people privacy or rights. Respect for others and respect for ourselves. We are wicked, dishonest, malicious, deceitful, arrogant, rude, vile, mean, disrespectful and shameless. That is why we are suffering like this. Respect builds you, but we don’t have it so we are broken people or society with our Phd, degrees, certificates , qualifications and jobs. We don’t respect each other.
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D.J. Kyos
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They rather watch us die so they can make money than to save us. Our sufferings and death it is a profitable business to them.
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D.J. Kyos
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Need Teachers Not Cops (The Sonnet)
The world needs less cops and more teachers,
While cops enforce law, teachers instill accountability.
Thus law enforcement only produces an illusion of order,
It's the teachers who can create a crime-free society.
If students are the future, teachers are future maker,
So be civilized and focus on lifting teachers and students.
Government of baboons invests in police 'n defense contracts,
While a truly civilized government invests in education.
Arm the teachers with books and students with sustenance,
Then watch them accomplish the impossible future,
A future of true lasting order, reform and harmony,
Which a billion police cannot achieve in a billion years.
Society that empowers teachers empowers peace.
Society that empowers police empowers malice.
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Abhijit Naskar (Himalayan Sonneteer: 100 Sonnets of Unsubmission)
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As the separatist elements got emboldened by the leadership in the state, police officers became frustrated. ‘I would arrest a stone pelter, only to watch him be set free after ten days. Sometimes we got so frustrated that we would ask the judge to at least book him on charges of eve-teasing so that he stayed in jail for slightly longer,’ said an officer.
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Rahul Pandita (The Lover Boy of Bahawalpur : How the Pulwama Case was Cracked)
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Beyond Politics (The Sonnet)
Changing leadership, changing party,
These ain’t change, but same old tribalism.
Changing the shape and name of tribalism,
Is not end of tribalism, but recurring tribalism.
If you really want to bring actual change,
Aim for a non-tribal society, one of nonsectarianism.
Replacing one sect with another may feel like change,
But it's just another form of unchanging divisionism.
Real change is when civic duty turns common sanity,
When there's no community service, only life and living.
The supreme policy is that of individual accountability,
True order comes through collectivity, not policing.
Stop relying on politicians for every little trouble.
And the world will be a place without political turmoil.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Gentalist: There's No Social Work, Only Family Work)
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Dusk had fallen on December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks, a tailor’s assistant, finished her long day’s work in a large department store in Montgomery, the capital of Alabama and the first capital of the Confederacy. While heading for the bus stop across Court Square, which had once been a center of slave auctions, she observed the dangling Christmas lights and a bright banner reading “Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men.” After paying her bus fare she settled down in a row between the “whites only” section and the rear seats, according to the custom that blacks could sit in the middle section if the back was filled. When a white man boarded the bus, the driver ordered Rosa Parks and three other black passengers to the rear so that the man could sit. The three other blacks stood up; Parks did not budge. Then the threats, the summoning of the police, the arrest, the quick conviction, incarceration. Through it all Rosa Parks felt little fear. She had had enough. “The time had just come when I had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed,” she said later. “I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen.” Besides, her feet hurt. The time had come … Rosa Parks’s was a heroic act of defiance, an individual act of leadership. But it was not wholly spontaneous, nor did she act alone. Long active in the civil rights effort, she had taken part in an integration workshop in Tennessee at the Highlander Folk School, an important training center for southern community activists and labor organizers. There Parks “found out for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society.” There she had gained strength “to persevere in my work for freedom.” Later she had served for years as a leader in the Montgomery and Alabama NAACP. Her bus arrest was by no means her first brush with authority; indeed, a decade earlier this same driver had ejected her for refusing to enter through the back door. Rosa Parks’s support group quickly mobilized. E. D. Nixon, long a militant leader of the local NAACP and the regional Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, rushed to the jail to bail her out. Nixon had been waiting for just such a test case to challenge the constitutionality of the bus segregation law. Three Montgomery women had been arrested for similar “crimes” in the past year, but the city, in order to avoid just such a challenge, had not pursued the charge. With Rosa Parks the city blundered, and from Nixon’s point of view, she was the ideal victim—no one commanded more respect in the black community.
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James MacGregor Burns (The American Experiment: The Vineyard of Liberty, The Workshop of Democracy, and The Crosswinds of Freedom)
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As America suffered from the Depression, Kansas City soared, thanks to the Ten-Year Plan. “In Kansas City,” said Conrad Mann, the president of the chamber of commerce, “we are building the greatest inland city the world has ever seen.” New skyscrapers sprouted from the ground every year, and jazz clubs rollicked into the morning, at a time when, as one agent put it, the rest of the country “couldn’t afford three dollars a night for a musician.” Pendergast liked to think generosity was at the core of his power. When a British parliamentarian named Marjorie Graves visited his Main Street office in 1933, he told her he helped “the poor through our organizations.” It was true that Tom’s Town was built on undervalued workers—immigrants, Black labor, the poor. “The Boss” hosted a fancy dinner for the needy every Christmas and kept quarters in his pockets for the homeless. By the early 1930s, with police brutality against the Black community on the rise, Pendergast seized control of the Kansas City Police Department, taking it back from the state of Missouri, which had assumed leadership in the Civil War era. Pendergast assigned staffing oversight to “Brother John” Lazia, the leader of the Fifth Democratic Ward and a charismatic crime boss, and when dozens more loyal Pendergast supporters were appointed to the force, The Kansas City Call reported that police brutality had declined. But Pendergast’s Ten-Year Plan funds rarely made it to Black communities, and the occasional gifts from his patronage system masked the need for lasting racial reforms.
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Mark Dent (Kingdom Quarterback: Patrick Mahomes, the Kansas City Chiefs, and How a Once Swingin' Cow Town Chasedthe Ultimate Comeback)
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Some released beneficiaries did rejoin al-Qaeda. Official reports cite recidivism rates of between 10 and 20 percent depending on the period examined and the set of prisoners involved.22 However, it was not the course content or recidivism rates that most concerned the Ministry of the Interior; what really mattered was the program’s dramatic public relations impact. In the Saudi leadership’s view, it did not matter if some of the rehabilitated terrorists returned to al-Qaeda. They could be recaptured and might not be given a second chance to surrender. What mattered was that the Saudi public saw how the police had trusted these young men and tried to help them, only to be repaid with lies and more criminal behavior. No one would feel sorry for them the second time they were arrested for terrorism. For Mohammed bin Naif, losing a few dozen prisoners was less important than keeping millions of Saudi citizens on his side.
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David Rundell (Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads)
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The connection between the changing role of the police in American society and efforts to control culturally subversive groups is illustrated in the backgrounds of some of the most well-known of the “occult cops.” Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedecker’s examination of these usually low-ranking detectives found that many of them “had spied on groups opposing racism or the Vietnam War in the late 1960s.” Before morphing into “occult experts” they traveled the “small town lecture circuit” warning mainly white, middle-class audiences about the danger of “Moonies” and other alternative religious movements. The role of the police in the satanic panic of the 1980s appears to be symptomatic of a much larger problem. Rather than asking its police to prevent and prosecute crimes against person and property, white America asked it to crusade against evil, to slay monsters and demons. In an urban America prostrated by the growing economic inequality of the 1980s and the consequent deadly mix of entrepreneurialism and despair that constituted the crack epidemic, politicians gravitated to the “tough on crime” rhetoric that became such an important part of the successful campaigns of Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. Meanwhile, the leadership of the evangelical and Charismatic worlds adopted a very similar rhetoric in which their followers were asked to engage in an unrelenting war on the forces of darkness threatening their homes, children, churches, and communities.
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W. Scott Poole (Satan in America: The Devil We Know)
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front door in the dark and debated going after the gunman. A police car pulled up in front of my house. We blinked the front lights and the car came to a stop. We ripped open the front door and ran straight at the officer, me barefoot and holding a large butcher knife. The officer quickly stepped from his car and his hand went to his weapon. I shouted, “No, no!” and pointed toward the Murrays’ house. “There he goes. He has a gun!” The gunman burst out from the Murrays’ front door and took off running toward the nearby woods. As police cars from many jurisdictions
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James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
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If your leaders want you to talk to them, consider them.
If your leaders want you to debate them,
regard them.
If your leaders want you to oppose them,
love them.
If your leaders want you to police them,
revere them.
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Matshona Dhliwayo
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If your leaders want you to talk to them, consider them. If your leaders want you to debate them, regard them. If your leaders want you to oppose them, love them. If your leaders want you to police them, revere them.
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Matshona Dhliwayo
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Kamala Harris is the female representation that we've all been waiting for. She is a good example in showing that women, black women, can lead key countries too.
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Mitta Xinindlu
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growing greater by the day, David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann, and delegates from Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia arrived in London to meet with the British leadership. They had been summoned by British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, in order to explain the empire’s new policy toward Palestine. Jewish immigration would end. The Jews would live under Arab rule in an independent state. Ben-Gurion erupted: “Jews cannot be prevented from immigrating into the country except by force of British bayonets, British police, and the British navy. And, of course, Palestine cannot be converted into an Arab state over Jewish opposition without the constant help of British bayonets!
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Eric Gartman (Return to Zion: The History of Modern Israel)
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Meanwhile, in the Katyn Forest in Russia, the Soviet secret police, in an operation approved by Stalin, murdered more than twenty thousand Polish citizens, including eight thousand army officers taken prisoner in the 1939 invasion. It was a preemptive attack, organized by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, and its utterly ruthless leader, Lavrenty Beria, aimed at eliminating any independent Polish leadership for the foreseeable future. The Soviets pinned blame for this signal and unforgivable atrocity on the Germans, an audacious lie that was believed around the world for decades.
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Richard Bernstein (China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice)
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Of course, morality matters in law enforcement, no matter what popular opinion may be about the subject at any given moment. And it tends to matter even more as an officer rises through the ranks and assumes greater responsibility in police supervision and leadership. The public expects more from high-ranking leaders, and often expects nothing less than impeccable moral character and judgment.
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Travis Yates (The Courageous Police Leader: A Survival Guide for Combating Cowards, Chaos, and Lies)
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Nonetheless, conflict is something that leaders must do. And truly courageous leaders often excel at predicting and preventing conflict long before there’s even a chance of it. In contrast, when cowardly leaders avoid conflict, they create all kinds of unnecessary problems, and even more conflicts. Their avoidance creates a void in leadership that allows the “Ferguson effect,”[34] or the “nobody’s got my back” phenomenon to creep in and take over—which has become an increasingly significant problem throughout the law enforcement profession.
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Travis Yates (The Courageous Police Leader: A Survival Guide for Combating Cowards, Chaos, and Lies)
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Michelle, the girls, and I visited a sprawling favela on the western end of Rio, where we dropped in at a youth center to watch a capoeira troupe perform and I kicked a soccer ball around with a handful of local kids. By the time we were leaving, hundreds of people had massed outside the center, and although my Secret Service detail nixed the idea of me taking a stroll through the neighborhood, I persuaded them to let me step through the gate and greet the crowd. Standing in the middle of the narrow street, I waved at the Black and brown and copper-toned faces; residents, many of them children, clustered on rooftops and small balconies and pressed against the police barricades. Valerie, who was traveling with us and witnessed the whole scene, smiled as I walked back inside, saying, “I’ll bet that wave changed the lives of some of those kids forever.”
I wondered if that was true. It’s what I had told myself at the start of my political journey, part of my justification to Michelle for running for president—that the election and leadership of a Black president stood to change the way children and young people everywhere saw themselves and their world. And yet I knew that whatever impact my fleeting presence might have had on those children of the favelas and however much it might cause some to stand straighter and dream bigger, it couldn’t compensate for the grinding poverty they encountered every day: the bad schools, polluted air, poisoned water, and sheer disorder that many of them had to wade through just to survive. By my own estimation, my impact on the lives of poor children and their families so far had been negligible—even in my own country. My time had been absorbed by just trying to keep the circumstances of the poor, both at home and abroad, from worsening: making sure a global recession didn’t drastically drive up their ranks or eliminate whatever slippery foothold they might have in the labor market; trying to head off a change in climate that might lead to a deadly flood or storm; or, in the case of Libya, trying to prevent a madman’s army from gunning people down in the streets. That wasn’t nothing, I thought—as long as I didn’t start fooling myself into thinking it was anywhere close to enough.
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Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
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The San Francisco police force was deeply implicated in the murders of Moscone and Milk. Dan White was not carrying out SFPD orders that morning in city hall, but he was carrying out the department’s will. He was no longer on the force, but he was one of them: their star ballplayer, their political representative, their brother. He knew all about the cops’ murderous feelings toward the city’s liberal leadership. He felt the same way. They had the will, he had the willpower.
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David Talbot (Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love)
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Months earlier, he had begun to dream about the postwar world, and if he kept Churchill at arm’s length it was partly because his vision did not include the restoration of colonial empires. Surely he had spoken from the heart in telling the prime minister, “It is fun to be in the same decade with you.” Yet there was also cold conviction in Roosevelt’s observation to his son Elliott: “Britain is on the decline.” America was ascendant, and Roosevelt had reason to hope that his countrymen possessed the stamina to remake a better world: a forthcoming Roper opinion poll, secretly slipped to the White House on Thursday, revealed that more than three-quarters of those surveyed agreed that the United States should play a larger global role after the war. Nearly as many believed that the country should “plan to help other nations get on their feet,” and more than half concurred that Americans should “take an active part in some sort of an international organization with a court and police force strong enough to enforce its decisions.” The president found it equally heartening that 70 percent approved of his war leadership and two-thirds favored him for reelection in 1944 if the world was still at war.
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Rick Atkinson (The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy Book 2))
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The church was the political headquarters our communities turned to long before we had 'elected' officials advocating for us. (Reclaiming the Black Church: A Call to Restore Leadership, Unity, and Purpose – blog)
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Carlos Wallace
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If you reach a point where you have to kill the people opposing you, just know you've failed as a leader. True leadership inspires change, not fear. If you must kill to silence dissent, you've already lost the moral ground.
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Carson Anekeya
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Lawyers, contrasted with diplomats: "The lawyer, like the diplomat, deals in debate and compromise. A knowledge of law is essential to the diplomat, an ability to negotiate is essential to the lawyer, and a knowledge of human nature is essential to both. But when the lawyer turns to international problems these similarities lead him to the false conclusion that diplomacy is a form of law. His whole training has accustomed him to presuppose a court where right is distinguished from wrong, legal from illegal, and where there are police and jails to enforce decisions. Moral as well as legal concepts govern his thinking ... He seeks to regulate affairs by hard and fast formulas within a completely ordered system. None of these concepts applies to international affairs. Even international law, which covers only a tiny part of the field of diplomacy, has few sanctions."
— Charles W. Thayer, 1959
Leadership: "Only he is capable of exercising leadership over others who is capable of some real degree of matery over himself."
— George F. Kennan, 1954
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Chas W. Freeman Jr. (The Diplomat's Dictionary)
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Hardly anyone has weakened democracy from within as much as the 45th president of the United States, Donald Trump. But it would be uninteresting, predictable, and unjust to write about his failings without even briefly illuminating the other side of the coin. The polarization of American society is certainly not only or even primarily his work. Left-wing politics has contributed its share too, by being increasingly disconnected from the priorities and needs of large parts of the population and full of self-righteousness. Also, if one disregards Trump’s narcissistic self-dramatization and an erratic political style that shows little respect for democratic institutions, one sees an administration that made three important course corrections: the economic decoupling from dictatorships, especially China; the growing pressure on Europe to fund and strengthen NATO; and a critical stance against the abusive market-dominating practices of Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and, most importantly, Chinese surveillance tools and platforms. These policies have all been continued in Joe Biden’s presidency. In style and language, their differences are vast; in substance, strikingly few. Underplaying Trump’s leadership on these fronts does no favors to a substantive critique of his democracy-damaging legacy. From the beginning of his presidential bid, Donald Trump used aggressive and incendiary language, presented simplistic worldviews, and pointedly depicted his opponents as the enemy (US, the good guys, versus THEM, the bad guys). This is the emotional fuel of polarization. His rapid rise was based in part on relativizing racism, and throughout his term, Trump downplayed any cases of police violence against blacks, including the murder of George Floyd in 2020, as isolated incidents. He called protests against racism “un-American.” Deeply associated with Donald Trump’s administration are the terms “fake news” and “alternative facts.” And it is here that lie the most dangerous, democracy-damaging legacies of his time in office. Fake news has been around as long as news has been around. For thousands of years, it spread as rumors in the marketplaces and gossip behind closed doors. Today, it spreads globally within seconds on social media. So fake news is not new. It’s just become more dangerous. And it becomes a problem for democracy when social groups, political parties, or NGOs accuse the other side of falsifying facts and label facts that do not serve their own agenda as fake. Trump not only reinforced this tendency, he elevated it in his political communications and campaigns.
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Mathias Döpfner (Dealings with Dictators: A CEO's Guide to Defending Democracy)