The biggest challenge facing law enforcers
A journalist asks: What is the biggest challenge facing law enforcement management?
I don’t mean to seem flippant, but how about alcoholism within their own ranks as the biggest challenge? July’s top story starring L.A. City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo and his wife Michelle, the Review of the Month on the movie “Breach” (FBI agent Robert Hanssen, who sold secrets to the Soviets for 20 years) and the Antic-of-the-Month, another FBI agent doing idiotic things while at a .30 BAL, are just a few examples of why alcoholism is an enormous problem among law enforcers.
In researching my first book (Drunks, Drugs & Debits), every Drug Recognition Officer I spoke with admitted that the rate of active alcoholism on police forces ranges from 20% to 50%. Prison guards are even worse. And the “pressures of the job” do not cause addiction; addiction precedes the job, evidence for which includes the fact that recovering addicts tell us they triggered their alcoholism during their first drinking episode–average age, 13.
We cannot reduce the rate of recidivism in a system in which addicts are arrested by addicts, judged by addicts and then guarded by addicts.