You may not know these terms, but you know the behavior and so do cops. Because we’ve all seen it, heard about it, or done a little of it ourselves. I’ll go first. “Contempt of Cop” is slang for perceived disrespect toward an officer’s authority. It’s not a crime, but it can trigger emotional responses that lead to escalation, unnecessary conflict, or questionable decisions. It shows up when an officer feels challenged or disrespected and reacts from that place rather than fr

I didn’t learn that lesson overnight. It took years and a very specific moment before it finally landed for me. A few years ago, I sat at the most senior leadership table in my organization and presented a staffing issue that I knew was coming. I didn’t show up with opinions or hunches. I showed up with researched data, operational projections, workload impacts, and solutions that aligned with both present and future needs. My intent was simple: to raise an issue early enough

We rarely say those words out loud. Instead, we find a thousand different ways to communicate the same thing, just without the honesty of the sentence itself. When I was writing Tightrope , I originally kept in a few stories about people in policing that I genuinely didn’t like. After 27 years there were only a handful, which isn’t bad for a career lived in close quarters. But those stories were eventually edited out, not because they weren’t true, but because they weren’t th

This is often a difficult topic for police officers and police leaders to talk about honestly. That’s because police corruption is not limited to the obvious acts people usually imagine: taking a bribe, misusing police intelligence for personal gain, planting or manipulating evidence, or stealing it outright. By definition, police corruption also includes organizational gain —actions that benefit the police organization itself through unethical means, including the suppressio