A Few Good Supervisors

Being a sergeant is one of the hardest jobs to get and keep, that is if you do it right. Doing it right does not necessarily mean pleasing the sheriff. Doing it right means what it says. In this politically correct world, it means doing the right thing all the time, not just the politically expedient right thing.

An old retired guy once was told that "your job is to keep the sheriff out of trouble" when he made sergeant. This ORG took that as meaning that he needed to be sure that things were done legally and in the right manner every time, no exceptions.

Does that mean when someone has been a sergeant for some time that they have been doing the job right? Not necessarily, because the lack of leadership at the higher levels at the sheriff's office have, over time,  led to an erosion at the sergeant's level. When you have a sergeant that used on duty time (not personal time) to watch his child play soccer (leaving the shift short), when you have sergeants that were politically promoted (and in at least one case circumventing the written promotion process), when you have sergeants that spend more time playing politics in the office instead of spending the time supervising on the street, now you have a systematic failure that starts at longshanks' desk and works its way down through the captain, lieutenant, and sergeant levels to the street. When these shortcomings were brought to the administration's attention, they were promptly ignored as you cannot have the chosen ones getting in trouble, can you longshanks?

A professional sergeant is not concerned with the atta boys and the like. He knows that his job is to make the hard decisions at the first line supervisory level that need to be made when they need to be made. This is not done over coffee the next morning. He may not be popular by doing the job right, but he has the personal knowledge and satisfaction that he has done the job right, accolades be damned.

Look at the street supervision at the sheriff's office and you will see how few of the professional supervisors there really are.