Throughout my 23 years as a federal law enforcement officer, I spent roughly ten years as a field training officer. What follows are books that I found helpful in my career. I must admit I did not pass all these down to all the recruit trainees I mentored—some of the books I didn’t know about soon enough, and some were not written yet—but I wish I had.
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
This book by Stephen Covey is the first ‘self-help’ book I ever read. I came to it through the Middle Leader training program (@Mike Wood) in the Forest Service. I had always assumed it was a business book. Fortunately, it’s not about that at all.
Covey’s main point is that you must learn to lead and manage yourself through principles before you can lead others. (If you want the business stuff, see Covey’s book Principle-Centered Leadership.) I wrote a series of articles on my website that discuss similar ideas. I borrowed liberally from Covey.
As Jim Collins writes in the forward, “Covey set out to write a book, not on building great organizations, but on achieving great personal effectiveness. Still, organizations are composed of people, and the more effective those people, the stronger the organization.”
“The 7 Habits are not a set of piecemeal psych-up formulas. In harmony with the natural laws of growth, they provide an incremental, sequential, highly integrated approach to the development of personal and interpersonal effectiveness. They move us progressively on a ‘Maturity Continuum’ from dependence to independence to interdependence.”
Jim Collins, Introduction to The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People
Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual
A law enforcement professional is a leader regardless of title or rank. In all-risk incidents, they are often the initial incident commander, tasked to bring calm to VUCA situations.
Retired Navy SEAL Commander Jocko Willink distills the lessons learned from his twenty-year career. It’s an easy read using real ‘war stories’—you might forget you are learning something.
“While garnering an understanding of the concepts is fairly simple, sometimes it takes more. A leader must understand the strategies and tactics needed to actually implement these principles—how to pragmatically put the principles to work. He or she must understand the strategic foundations on which the principles are built and the core tenets that comprise those principles. Then the leader must understand the tactical skills, strategic maneuvers, and communication techniques used to employ the principles of leadership. That is what this book is about.”
Jocko Willink, Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual
It all starts with how to be a good team member and follower. From there, Willink shows us how to succeed as a new leader. I find it to be a better starting point for new officers than Willink’s first book, Extreme Ownership.
Emotional Survival for Law Enforcement: A Guide for Officers and Their Families
My analogy for law enforcement stress is an ice cream cone—the cone is ‘life’ and all the normal stressors that anyone can experience, with three scoops of special law enforcement flavors:
- Personal
- Operational
- Organizational
The academy and field training should help you learn and practice how to deal with operational and critical incident stress (at least in the moment). Whether and how well they do this is a longer discussion for another time. Doctor Gilmartin wrote this book to help you with the emotional impact of the whole dessert every day for twenty-plus years.
“This book is designed to help law enforcement professionals overcome the internal assaults they experience both personally and organizationally over the course of their careers. These assaults can transform idealistic and committed officers into angry cynical individuals, leading to significant problems in both their personal and professional lives. Officers and their families can experience a law enforcement career as emotional survivors instead of falling by the wayside as victims of predictable and preventable challenges.”
Kevin M. Gilmartin, Ph.D., Back Cover
When it comes to law enforcement psychology, author Kevin Gilmartin is the GOAT. He spent 20 years as a law enforcement professional before becoming a clinical psychologist. In less than 150 pages, this book reads like a conversation or small, informal seminar with the author. Gilmartin is plain-spoken; he doesn’t mince words. This is not new agey, pop psychology. Nor does it need a psychology degree to understand.
One caveat: Gilmartin’s primary solutions, or as he puts it, “How to become an emotional survivor,” are presented in the last 30 or so pages. First, as is mentioned throughout the book, is knowledge of the problem. Go back and read the first 110 pages if you didn’t catch on the first time. Second, when leaving work, you need to “turn on something different.” That is to re-engage in hobbies, friends, and family as you did before you became a police officer, so that your identity is not one-dimensional. Lastly, “Survivors practice aggressive [proactive] personal time management and goal setting.” Another solution hinted at but not thoroughly discussed is “for officers early in their careers to be trained in what it takes to maintain a sense of control in their personal lives.”
These solutions may seem shallow at first glance. These are important solutions, but not enough. The primary thing missing is how to develop a practical philosophy and then a strategy for which each of these solutions is one of several tactics.
Mindful Responder, The First Responder’s Field Guide to Improved Resilience, Fulfillment, Presence, and Fitness—On and Off the Job
Speaking of tactics for emotional survival…
Even though I have practiced informal mindfulness for 9-10 years, and formal meditation for eight, I find it hard to explain the benefits to recruit trainees. It took me a long time to go all in (and a big thanks to my coach Michelle for constantly needling me to try). I can only say I wish I had started sooner.
“To truly succeed in life’s crucible moments, to flourish throughout the inevitable peaks and valleys we all face—this requires that we acquaint ourselves and grow comfortable with stillness, silence, and non-action. I began to see that action and non-action aren’t opposites, but are in fact complimentary.”
Greg Amundson, Introduction to Mindful Responder
In less than 160 pages, Crawford Coates packs in information about:
- Practical mindfulness
- Positive psychology
- Resilience
- OODA loop
- Polyvagal theory
There are practical exercises throughout, and a “schema for progressive practice” in the appendix. Bonus: the author quotes Melville—
“Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare’s? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of Herschel’s great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of hearing? Not at all. Why then do you try to ‘enlarge’ your mind? Subtilize it.”
Herman Melville, Moby Dick (emphasis mine)
It’s a good primer for the practical aspects of mindfulness without the hippy-dippy-trippy naval-gazing. If all you get out of it is some parasympathetic-dominant downtime, it would be well worth it. It is the perfect accompaniment to Gilmartin’s book.
The Elements of Style, 4th Edition
Writing anything ‘well’ is hard. Writing law enforcement reports can be doubly so. Ten years as an FTO, and 14 years of reviewing probable cause statements and incident reports of non-commissioned officers* has taught me that. In law enforcement and investigation reports, you will need to present the fact pattern and evidence in such a way as to convince others that your actions were the best course.
Done well you use all three modes of persuasion:
- Ethos – credibility, trust
- Logos – logic, reason, proof
- Pathos – values, emotions
The trick is to tap into the pathos of the reader, without stating your emotions or applying value judgements. How? “Properly composed, concise, concrete, vigorous writing that admits no doubt.” And unless things have changed, this is not taught at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center.
But there’s help. In about one hundred pages first written in 1919, by William Strunk, Jr. and updated by E.B. White in 1979, you learn how. The fourth edition was published in 2000.
“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”
William Strunk,Jr.
Elements of Style includes:
- Rules of usage
- Principles of composition
- A list of commonly misused words and expressions,
- A “few matters of form”
Do yourself a favor. Take this small book to Staples, OfficeMax, of some similar outfit and pay to have the binding changed to spiral or coil bound. You will find yourself returning to this book as a reference. My copy’s binding started falling apart on the second read.
*Non-commissioned officers writing probable cause statements and incident reports? Yes. It’s a Forest Service thing. They are called “Forest Protection Officers.” With only 40 hours of training, any Forest Service Employee can take enforcement action for petty violations on Forest Service Lands, including issuing citations. And, no, they do not have defensive gear, so yes, it can be dangerous. Nor do they have arrest authority (despite the fact that “promise to appear” and “issued in lieu of arrest” and they detain suspects long enough to run their license and registration and issue the citation).
There you have it. Five books that I promise will help you in your career as a professional law enforcement officer. Have a book you think should be on this list? Comment below.
