The results of traffic stop data collection projects can sometimes have very adverse effects on the reputation and morale of law enforcement agencies. This is especially true when the study was done using biased or invalid research methods that suggested widespread racial profiling when none actually existed.

This webinar involves a brief review of the best practices in traffic stop data collection and analysis. Drawing on two decades of traffic stop data analysis research, this webinar will reveal the most fair an impartial methods in use today to examine for racial profiling. Specifically, it will address material that ensures your officers, and the community, receive a fair and impartial examination for evidence of racial profiling. Topics covered in this webinar include, the proper writing tone, ensuring data validity, benchmarking techniques, disaggregating your analysis, and determining capacity to perform these evaluations.

This webinar is appropriate for command personnel, analysts, accreditation managers, and any other personnel involved in their agency’s traffic stop data collection process.

Course Summary:
According to American Police Beat “somewhere between 2-6 times more officers kill themselves each year than are killed by the bad guys.” Thousands of officers are currently in crisis—experiencing trauma, family and financial distress, behavioral health challenges, substance abuse and other health issues. Employee wellness programs shouldn’t wait for crisis to occur, but should begin during the hiring process and continue through retirement. Both preventative programs and crisis intervention should be utilized to influence the professional and personal lives of employees and their families. When organizations identify healthy applicants and partner with health professionals to maintain employee health, these organizations have the potential to improve morale and productivity while reducing complaints and liability.

Officer and Agency Wellness—Hiring and Retiring Healthy© will introduce attendees to the innovative Indianapolis employee wellness program that US Attorney General Loretta Lynch has called “the model for law enforcement wellness.” Ground-breaking research and proven strategies to address officer distress from the Indianapolis Model© will be introduced in this course. These strategies are intended to aid agencies in reversing the trends of organizational paralysis that result in a failure to intervene as employees face personal and career crisis. Upon completion of this course, participants will have gained insight into strategies for designing an agency infrastructure that supports and maintains healthier employees.

Course Objectives:

• Understand the importance of education and early intervention before officers are in crisis.
• Identify health and resiliency traits during the recruiting and probationary process while there is still time to address long-term risk.
• Understand how promoting employee wellness reduces distress (both on and off-duty) which results in reduced liability for the organization.
• Identify, recognize and assess indicators of crisis and how to use the Indianapolis Model© to effectively intervene.
• Understand how implementing organizational strategies for developing and maintaining healthy employees benefits the officer, the organization, the union, the community and the officer’s family.
• Understand the importance of timelines, accountability and binding agreements in ensuring agency commitment and employee compliance.
• Address the myth of “retraining” as a cure-all for employee issues.
• Utilize financial literacy training and other retirement planning education at the start of officers’ careers.
• Recognize how emotional intelligence could positively impact officer behavior and interaction with the public.
• Utilize separation agreements and other non-adversarial methods when intervention strategies prove unsuccessful.

It has never been easier for a public employee to express their personal views on a range of issues to the community and to the world—particularly through social media.  With increasing regularity, employees are openly sharing their views on local and national politics, internal agency operations, the competence of their agency leaders and many other issues.  This presents a difficult challenge to public agency leaders as they seek to hold employees accountable for statements that harm agency operations while still respecting their First Amendment rights.  This balance is made all the more challenging due to the lack of clear and concise court guidance on these issues.

In this webinar training, Attorney Matt Dolan will discuss: 

• Public employees’ freedom of speech rights in the age of social media
• Politics and social media
• Conduct unbecoming standards—do they apply to social media?
• The millennial generation—saving them from themselves through preventative training

Today’s increased service demands and the scrutiny placed upon public safety professionals have resulted in a growing need to master verbal conflict management skills. When negative verbal encounters escalate to the point where physical intervention is used, criticism often results when it is later discovered that there is little evidence of verbal de-escalation techniques employed by officers. This is particularly true when incident video and audio reviews are utilized. In some cases, it has become clear that the verbal actions of the public safety responders served to escalate the situation. Administrators are now asking, “Is this an area in which the training tape has run out? Have we adequately trained our personnel to successfully manage and respond to verbal confrontations in a professional manner?”.

Verbal De-escalation training provides public safety professionals with time-tested communication skills proven to help de-escalate volatile situations, safeguard fellow officers’ emotional and professional well-being, and significantly enhance the agency’s professional image. The course also provides opportunities for the participants to participate in practical skill building so that when they complete the two-day training they are well on their way to becoming more effective professionals in communication.

Webinar Objectives:

• Improve public safety professionals’ verbal communication skills
• How to apply Rhetoric- Aristotle’s Art of Persuasion (The art of using speech to persuade) when deflecting & redirecting verbal abuse
• Develop an understanding of Chief Dolan’s “Guardians of the Peace” concept “Language of the Street Fallacy”, “TUI Pattern” (texting, typing or talking under the influence)
• Diffuse potentially volatile verbal encounters
• Avoid the “Rope-A-Dope Syndrome”
• Understand the importance of managing “Hyper vigilance”
• Raise organizational morale and grasp the concept of “Police Legitimacy”
• Significantly enhance the agency’s image throughout the community
• Practice “Verbal Contact & Cover” principles
• Apply the FAA’s “Sterile Cockpit Rule” on duty
• Understand the importance of “Chief Dolan’s 24 Hour Rule” as a key component of communication success

According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, the violent crime in the U.S. has been on the rise since 2014, and the property crime rate has bottomed out after three decades of steady decline. Furthermore, while many law enforcement agencies have adopted intelligence-led policing strategies, quickly identifying active crime locations within their jurisdictions, many field commanders lack a toolkit of proven strategies to address these crime locations.

This webinar seeks to provide field supervisors and officers with a toolkit of policing strategies that have been proven to curb or eliminate specific types of crime, or crime at specific locations. These evidence-based strategies are based on research findings from numerous studies that have evaluated “what works” in policing to reduce crime. Specifically, this webinar will address offense-focused directed patrols, geographic-focused directed patrols, crime prevention by environmental design, and focused deterrence strategies targeting criminal individuals and groups.

Police-community relations is, by all accounts, the most critical issue facing law enforcement in
America today. This training seminar presents law enforcement leaders with solutions, based on empirical research and actual practice, for improving citizen satisfaction, citizen confidence,
and citizen support for law enforcement officers.

This webinar will review the fundamentals of Community Policing & Problem Solving as well as utilizing the findings from social scientific research to identify what factors influence citizen satisfaction with the police, then provides real-life case study examples to illustrate each of the solutions identified by the research.

This webinar is designed to provide public safety professionals with an overview of the existing DCG Community Policing & Problem Solving: Winning Back Your Community curriculum including a pdf student workbook. The webinar is suited for law enforcement leaders of any rank who engage in directing agency operations and assist in forming departmental policies.

Webinar Objectives:

• Policing Strategies Throughout The Decades
• Problem Solving with SARA
• Relationship Between Social Disorder and Community Engagement
• Pareto 80/20 Rule and Community Quality Of Life
• What has experience and empirical research evidence revealed about what police can do to improve citizen satisfaction?
• What steps can law enforcement agencies take to improve citizen satisfaction?
• Factors found to influence general citizen satisfaction with the police
• Bringing Everything into Congruence
• The Future of Policing & Leadership Thoughts
• Closing Comments

The proliferation of recording devices has resulted in a new reality for police officers: encountering civilians who are recording them as they do their job. While the Supreme Court has yet to give law enforcement officers a clear definition of the constitutional right to record (subject to reasonable time, place and manner restrictions), the writing is on the wall. The overwhelming majority of courts that have taken up the question have concluded that the First Amendment prohibits officers from infringing upon a civilian’s right to record them in public while performing their official duties. This is particularly true when there is no question as to whether or not the civilian was lawfully present—meaning that the civilian was not ducking below police tape or otherwise placing themselves into a position where they are putting officer safety and/or investigations into jeopardy. Arrests motivated by the fact that a recording was taking place where a civilian was lawfully present have been tossed out by local prosecutors and have resulted in a multitude of lawsuits and settlements. Yet the YouTube® footage going viral often shows officers angrily asserting the act of recording is illegal.

In response to this clear momentum, law enforcement agencies across the country are publicly acknowledging that recording officers is not an arrestable offense in and of itself, absent exigent circumstances. Many of these agencies are also instructing their personnel to respect the First Amendment right of civilians to record. But how many of these agencies are actually training their people to recognize that a civilian’s right to record in many instances is not an affirmative defense to charges independent of the act of recording? It is crucial that officers have a keen understanding of the difference between arresting someone for recording them in public versus arresting someone while they happen to be recording them in public. This distinction is a crucial one.

Situations in which officers approach a suspect and are confronted with a camera are now commonplace. If officers “over-correct” in their interactions with the public and refrain from taking actions they would otherwise deem appropriate due to a misunderstanding of the limits of the First Amendment right to record, police operations and public safety could suffer.

When applied properly and consistently, coaching serves to minimize the need for formal counseling and disciplinary action. Understanding why leaders fail to coach & counsel before matters get out of hand is vital to organizational success.

All employees want and deserve honest candid feedback regarding their achievements, growing potential and areas where improvement is needed. Holding back either negative or positive feedback significantly diminishes personal and organizational goal attainment.

Feedback sessions are not ordinarily disciplinary in nature. They are used to provide team members, peers and superiors with opportunities to recognize performance excellence and identify areas for growth and improvement.

“You’ve got to have great athletes to win, I don’t care who the coach is. You can’t win without good athletes, but you can lose with them. This is where coaching makes the difference.”
– Lou Holtz

This webinar is designed to provide public safety professionals with an overview of the existing DCG Performance Coaching and Counseling curriculum including a pdf student workbook.

Webinar Objectives:

• Essentials of Supportive and Corrective Feedback
• Implement Key Strategies Proven to Improve Productivity and Morale
• Fundamentals of Conducting Meaningful Coaching Sessions
• Effectively Confront Negative Performance Issues Free from Emotional Stumbling Blocks,
• Effectively Identify and Confront Problem Employee and Supervisory Behaviors

This webinar is designed to provide public safety professionals with an overview of the existing leadership development training offered by DCG throughout the country. We will discuss the process of influencing individuals by providing purpose, direction, and motivation while achieving the goals of the organization. In addition, we will review the concepts of developing the right mindset, performance theory, management, supervision, leadership, and principles of motivation. Lastly, it will reveal what effective leaders do to improve morale and organizational effectiveness

Webinar Outline

• Discovering What Effective Leaders do to Improve Morale & Organizational Effectiveness
• Performance Theory
• Developing the Right “Mindset”
• What Employees Say They Admire Most in Managers & Supervisors
• Chief Dolan’s Motivation Keys:
  • Raise Expectations, tell them why, and involve team members in decision making, particularly in those areas impacting their work environment.
  • PRIME PEOPLE FOR SUCCESS!
  • Show them what right looks like (Military Phrase)
  • Demonstrate enthusiasm whenever and wherever possible.
  • Keep Your Sense of Humor!
  • Put talent where it wants and needs to be.
  • If you don’t know what motivates a person, ask.
  • Constantly recognize individual and team successes; it’s critical to moving the organization forward.
  • It’s OK to SPAR respectfully at meetings; it avoids Group Think and the Abilene Paradox.
  • “Keep it fundamental” Simplicity   
  • Trust, Delegate and “Inspect What You Expect.”
• “Chief Dolan’s Proximity Conundrum” & “Knock it Off” Principle
  • “Why do supervisors and managers find it so difficult to hold subordinates accountable and track performance?”
  • “An increase in the frequency of ‘Knock it Off Meetings’ directly corresponds with a decrease in Disciplinary Actions.”
• Review Webinar Take-A-Ways & Closing Comments