20th Annual IACP Training Conference on Drugs, Alcohol, & Impaired Driving Continued Professional Training July 30, 2014 Presenter: Gordon Graham DRE Operations 2014: Are you truly managing the real risks you face? Thanks so much for inviting me back again to Arizona to address you – the women and men of law enforcement who are out there every day trying to make the roadways safer through their activities as Drug Recognition Experts. I did your job for 20 years as a patrol officer and sergeant (33 years total with the CHP) and we share many of the same experiences. I have a 90-minute window of opportunity to talk to you about managing the real risks you face as a DRE. And I must tell you that never in my wildest dreams as a young motorcycle cop in the ‘70s did I ever think I would be standing in front of you here today. It is an honor to be here, and I really hope that some of the things I say today will allow you to go back to work and perhaps do things just a bit differently – with the goal of better protecting yourself, your team, your department, our public and our noble profession. And if you have been to any of my programs before, you know I am a huge fan of risk management, and how it applies to your job in law enforcement. Here is a definition for our brief time together: Risk management is any activity that involves the evaluation of or comparison of risks and the development, selection and implementation of control measures that change outcomes. Or, more simply stated, risk management gets down to RPM: Recognition, Prioritization and Mobilization. Real risk management is the process of looking into the future (5 seconds to 5 decades) and looking for things that can go wrong (risk assessment), and then doing something up front (prioritization and mobilization) to prevent it from going wrong. 1 From the simple stuff like wearing seatbelts, avoiding trip hazards (let me take a look at the overhead projector cord today) and properly fastening your motorcycle or bicycle helmet properly, to the complex stuff like handling a drunk diplomat from “Sumwhereistan” or investigating a bribery allegation, it is all about risk management. I am absolutely convinced that if more people at the federal, state and local level understood the real breadth and depth of this discipline, we would all be a lot better off. I have bored you with the details of this topic in the past, but for our limited purposes here today I will remind you that all risk management gets down to RPM. First, you must recognize the risks you face. How do people in your specific operations get hurt, get killed, get sued, get indicted, or get fired. Then you must prioritize these risks in terms of frequency, severity, impact and available time to think. Finally, you must mobilize – act – to do something up front to prevent these problems from occurring. We need things to get things done right on each and every task, incident and event in which we get involved. And today I want to focus on the risks involved in traffic operations – and while there are many ways to get in trouble as a traffic cop, I am pulling a page from the success of Mr. Letterman and giving you my top ten. Before we get going on this list however, here are three statements that have guided me through most of my adult life. First is a quotation, albeit paraphrased, from the great risk management guru of the ‘40s, Archand Zeller: “The human does not change. During the period of recorded history, there is little evidence to indicate that man has changed in any major respect. Because the man does not change, the kinds of errors he commits remain constant. The errors that he will make can be predicted from the errors he has made.” What does this mean? We have not figured out any new ways to screw things up. We are making the same mistakes over and over again. Refineries have not figured out any new ways to blow up. Restaurants have not figured out any new ways to kill people, which is why I will not be enjoying any sushi in Scottsdale tonight. Airplanes have not figured out any new ways to crash, and if you want to read something funny in this regard, check out the flight of the Vin Fizz and the pilot of that plane, Cal Rodgers. Fire departments and firefighters have not figured out any new ways to get in trouble. There are no new ways to get in trouble with traffic operations and more specifically, how we deal with impaired drivers. Please do not give me that nonsense that bad things just happen. I am sick of hearing that faulty “poor me” refrain. There are no new ways to get in trouble. To be sure, there are variations on a theme, but in reality it is the same stuff over and over again. Let me jump ahead in the lecture: 2 IDENTIFIABLE RISKS ARE MANAGEABLE RISKS And you as an active participant in this specific area of expertise (Traffic operations in general and DRE operations in particular) are in an excellent position in to do something about this right now. The second statement important in my life thus far came from my mentor, professor and friend Chaytor Mason. He was a risk management guru in the ‘70s. Here is a capsulized version of his response when I accused him of being the smartest person who ever lived: “The smartest person in the world is the woman or man who finds the 15th way to hold two pieces of paper together.” My instant response when I first heard this was confusion, but then I figured it out. While there are no new ways to screw things up (Zeller) there are always new ways to fine tune and revisit our existing systems. We must be looking for new and improved ways of doing this most complex job, and you are the ones who can do that. Status quo (we have always done it that way – we have never done it that way) does not work. There is a better way of doing business, the 15th way, and we must constantly be looking for it. Maybe I will be able to give you some better ways in our brief time together. My third belief in life is a summary of the above two thoughts: Predictable is Preventable Thanks for your patience. I have been using this line since 1980 (and I have built an entire company around these three words) and I appreciate your patience. Take a look at the top story in the news today. It is July 30 and we will read stories about kids dying in hot cars, and people drowning in pools or in a body of water without wearing a PFD. On the police side of things we will be reading about cops in trouble because they forgot that there is this thing called a cell phone camera and everyone in the world has one of these devices. If you have nothing to do tonight (meaning there are no reruns of the greatest TV show in the history of the world – CHiPs) take a look at this website – www.policemisconduct.net. It is the same stuff over and over and over again. So, what do we need to do in DRE operations? It all starts with a solid risk assessment. This is the R of RPM. Where are the problems going to occur? You can get this information for your agency by using your own internal records. You can further your assessment of risk by studying other similarly situated agencies near your department and looking at their nasty consequences. You can study national and statewide trends. 3 Below is a chart for your consideration: Regardless of how you approach the risk assessment, you will get the same results. Things go wrong for two reasons and only two reasons. Some of our problems come from intentional misconduct, where someone does something bad on purpose. And some of our problems come from negligence – where someone made a mistake. Sometimes this intentional misconduct comes from outside our organization (bad conduct directed at one of our people or facilities) where a bad person with a bad heart does something bad on purpose knowing full well what they are doing was bad when they did it. Every year we lose 55-60 cops who are murdered. Murdering a cop on a traffic stop is a form of external misconduct. And terrorism is a form of external intentional misconduct, is a huge threat, and every traffic cop in America has a huge opportunity to nail some of these punks prior to them perpetrating their terrorist acts. It is very difficult to prevent this type of behavior, but I am convinced we can help thwart it by being vigilant (like we were on September 12 nearly thirteen years ago). Please keep your eyes and ears open when contacting people and if something is not adding up – do something about it. If you are not familiar with the work of your local Fusion Center – you need to be. Another way we get in trouble is in the area of external negligence. The most common mistake that good citizens make is in the area of vehicle operations. Please drive defensively, be well rested, stay off the darn cell phone and computer while driving, watch out for the other guy and wear your darn seatbelt. And always be aware of the risks of roadway incursions. Please take a look at www.respondersafety.com and take their strategies seriously. While the external issues are difficult, the internal behaviors cause us even more problems. Some of our problems come from internally generated misconduct, where our own people do something bad on purpose. I am absolutely convinced that we can eliminate the internal intentional misconduct by doing a better job of screening out losers up front. Law enforcement is not an evil cauldron that takes good people and turns them into bad people. 4 The reality is that we occasionally hire losers (too often at the advice or direction of our lawyers for whom the future is Friday) who once in our noble profession continue to perpetrate their bad behaviors. We can and must do something about this now. This issue needs your instant and ongoing attention. Our public has the right to expect that all of your personnel possess integrity, and not just a point of hire. The majority of our nasty consequences, however, do not have come from outside your department. Nor do the majority of your problems come from internal intentional misconduct. A critical study off the data will show you that most of our problems today (and this could change rapidly if terrorists are successful) come from internal negligence. Synonyms for negligence include errors, omissions, lapses and mistakes. Call them anything you want, but they are overrepresented in nasty consequences. The good news is that it is relatively easy to manage this risk. A renowned expert in risk management, Dr. James Reason (he is out of the U.K. and you can pickup any book he has written over the years) talks about Kb, Rb, and Sb errors (knowledge based, risk based, skills based). Or you can read any work by Dr. Tony Kern, Dr. Dietrich Dorner, Dr. Gary Klein, Dr. Todd Conklin or Dr. Laurence Gonzales. Each of these smart people has studied tragedies and why things go wrong. Where do the errors occur? Let me show you something that you may not yet be familiar with. Trust me, by EOW today you will know this inside out. This requires your referencing the chart below. For those of you who have been to my programs before, I promise to go through this quickly. NDT HR HR LF DT HF R I DT S K LR LR LF HF FREQUENCY 5 Most of the things you and your people do in your job in your organization are High Frequency, and your past experience will show you how to do it right the first time. This brings up the topic of RPDM, or Recognition Primed Decision-Making. The principals of RPDM are as follows. Consider your mind as a hard drive, or for those of you over 50, a slide tray. Your daily experiences help load this drive and create a ton of memory markers and behavioral scripts. Everything you do and experience is loaded into your hard drive. When you get involved in any task or incident, your magnificent brain quickly scans your hard drive and looks for a close match. When a good cop gets involved in a high-frequency event there is a very high probability the involved event will go right. There are exceptions to this including high-frequency events involving complacency, distractions, hubris, fatigue and risk homeostasis. These can cause you a ton of grief, but again there are things that we can do to obviate these issues. When people get involved in a low-risk event, I do not get overly concerned because even if it goes bad, the consequences are relatively small. However, when you or your people get involved in a low-frequency event (particularly one HR in nature) I get very worried. This is where good people most often make mistakes. Please recognize that this top left box has been divided into two areas. Some tasks need to be done immediately with Non-Discretionary Time (NDT), and some give us time to think with Discretionary Time (DT). The top left portion of the top left box scares me a lot, as these tasks truly give you no time to think. Included here are shoot don’t shoot, pursue don’t pursue, fighting, terrorist strikes, CPR, car fires, tail rotor failure on a helicopter, workplace violence, bomb threat calls and the like. The good news here is that in an average career of 30 years, less than one shift is really spent on this type of task. The bad news here is that in an average career of 30 years, less than one shift is really spent on this type of task. But because of the high level of risk involved in the task, these need to be covered regularly to make sure people know what to do if they ever get involved in the HR/LF/NDT family of tasks. More on this later, I promise, but this is the foundation of the Lexipol DTB system. The excellent news is that most of the tasks in the top left box are not NDT, but rather DT meaning that you have time to think before you act. Traffic operations can be very complex. However, most of the incidents we get involved in are ones that we have done a lot (HF) or ones that give us total discretionary time. You have to remember the thoughts of Dr. Zeller including “there are no new ways to get in trouble.” There are plenty of people in our profession who have done the involved task before, and they know how to do it correctly. Individually, you know a lot about your job. Collectively, this group present today knows a lot more than any one individual. Slow down and think before you act. 6 Anyone can do the high-frequency tasks. Low-risk tasks do not cause us problems. Dr. Zeller told us the kinds of errors man will make can be predicted from the kinds of errors already made. Watch out for the HR/LF tasks. These hold the highest potential for ending up in grief. Your role as in DRE operations in your department is making sure that you and all of your people in each and every job description are adequately trained for the NDTs (the tasks that give us no time to think), and that you (and they) understand the value of thinking things through when they are involved in a Discretionary Time task. So, with this in mind, it is time to get to the top ten list of things that we need to pay attention to – and get our people thinking about them. And here is my list. Fatigue – If you are not getting seven hours of sleep every night, you are suffering from fatigue. Fatigue impacts decision-making. Fatigue impacts critical thinking skills. Fatigue impacts judgment. Fatigue impacts disposition. I worry about 12 hour shifts. I worry about long commute times. I worry about number of consecutive days worked. I worry about tired cops. So, here is a control measure for you to consider. Exactly what is wrong with work/rest periods – paying our people to take a nap during the workday? Here are some thoughts for you in this regard. Distractions – When the CHP starting putting computers in our cars – I went way, way out on a limb and predicted that CHP cars would be involved in more traffic collisions if we were going to encourage our people to type and drive at the same time. And the collision numbers went up and people looked at me as if I were a genius. It was an obvious distraction and it was very apparent what was going to happen. We need to put some control measures into place regarding computer usage. And we need to seriously address the cell-phone and computer issue – internally and externally. Complacency – I don’t care how many times you do a high-risk task – the next time you do it, the task is as risky as the first time you did it. The level of risk does not change – but your acclimation to the risk does change. Regularly talk to your people about the dangers of being complacent on traffic stops and related activities. Hubris – I love confident cops – and I worry about cocky cops. Cocky cops are en route to nothing but trouble. Get cocky on a traffic stop and sooner or later something bad is going to happen. Get cocky in court and sooner or later you will be getting in trouble. Get cocky in an airplane or motorcycle and you are going to die. Be confident – but don’t get cocky. 7 Risk Homeostasis – A pet peeve of mine. Sometimes we do things to make people more safe – and if fact our efforts make them less save. Backup cameras (soon to be mandated by the federal government) are a classic example. Does that tool make us more safe or less safe? Right side approaches – If you do not get anything else out of our time together – do something about this. And lets make an effort to get the VIN on the right side of the vehicle – or both sides of the vehicle. What the heck are we thinking about? Digital Recorders – If you are not carrying a recording device (if legal to do so in your state) while acting as a traffic cop, I recommend you leave your gun at home and don’t wear a protective vest either. Cops without recording devices are en route to nothing but trouble. And please remember that everyone has a cell phone and many are recording your activities. Please be thinking about this all the time! And if you have an in-car camera system, remember that all of that information is public record – so again – be thinking. Report Writing – Take the time to do it right and recognize that the second you turn that document in – you are locked into that version of events for the rest of your career. Did you check the in car video prior to writing that report? Did you check the dispatch tapes prior to writing that report? I guarantee you that IA, FBI, and aggressive plaintiff lawyers are going to be making this comparison, so please manage that risk. Roadway Incursions – Increase your visual conspicuity! Why do local cops wear dark blue uniforms and state police where a lighter color? What about that yellow stripe down the leg of the CHP pants? Why do LAPD cops not have patches on their uniform – except for the traffic cops who have got the white patch on their shirts? Wear your bright color vests when tactically proper. And check out the website I referenced earlier. Seatbelts – Don’t even get me started on this issue – and if I was in charge (and I am not – yet) there would be dramatic consequences for cops who don’t wear their seatbelts. Every time I read about a cop being ejected from a vehicle – EVERY TIME – I get sick. Wear your seatbelt! And when I see foolish cops on TV reality shows not belted in – their chief or sheriff gets a letter from me and you should be doing the same. I long for the day when a cop sees another cop not belted in and has that candid conversation right then. For more information on this, take a look at www.Below100.com 8 Anyhow, that wraps it up for our brief time together. Most of our nasty problems will come from internal mistakes. We have to recognize that these internal mistakes are easy to prevent if we know where and how they occur. And if you understand the risk-frequency matrix you can better predict where mistakes are going to occur and put together control measures up front to prevent bad things from happening. Be aware of the top ten – and if you have any further thoughts in this regard – I welcome your comments. I thank you for your attention and I wish you continued success in protecting the citizens and visitors in your specific state. Take care and stay safe. Gordon Graham www.Lexipol.com [email protected] or my personal office at: 714.374.9326 9