A Major in the Philosophy of Life: Police Earn Their Ph.D.s on the Job

Recently, while presenting before the academic and administrative staff of a smaller liberal arts college, I had an interesting encounter. We were training on the run-hide-fight concepts to faculty members. It is interesting to note that sometimes faculty members of universities and police officers do not have a chance to intermingle and exchange views, but this experience was eye-opening.

This article appeared in the September/October issue of OFFICER Magazine. Click Here to subscribe to OFFICER Magazine.

While discussing the concepts of hiding and barricading your hiding place, the question asked was once the door is closed, and you are barricaded, when do you open it up? For instance, you may hear the voice of a colleague of yours asking for admittance. The strategic question was—would you let them in? This moved the discussion toward—would you give up your safe advantage? Do you unsecure your area and open it up to what may be an attacker outside? Could the attacker have a colleague or student held as a human shield or prisoner, using them as a ruse? There are no easy questions, and certainly, no pat answers either. The decision of saving yourself and others versus that of the life of another individual is a tough or maybe a team decision. Leaving others to be at their own peril was brought up and was one of the hardest decisions of this class discussion.

In this group was a young doctor of philosophy; she started to question me about how one makes such a decision. During our conversation, she made an astonishing comment to me regarding law enforcement in general. Her comment was, “So, I never thought that a police officer could teach others about ethical decision making.” Well, this took me back a little bit, and we continued to clarify the questions of the class at hand. Later, we had a one-on-one conversation. I told her that basically, police officers make ethical decisions a multitude of times every day. It is what we do. Of course, she recounted that police officers do not have that level of academic education and formal internship experience for this type of decision-making. She agreed that we are “masters of a trade.” So how can police make the right ethical decisions without a classic formal education in this topic? I first reminded her that this class was training her colleagues and staff, not a debate on police decision training and our ethos. We, the police, are the ones going toward the gunfire and not running or hiding. I finally flippantly told her most officers have a doctor’s degree in life. We focus on protecting and caring for others first—it’s what we do, it’s in our DNA. We are here to stop the killing and stop the dying, nothing else; it is not a social visit. She finally smiled and agreed with a “I think I get it now.”

In all my years of presenting to academics, there is a constant. Most have never been in the military, nor been in law enforcement. They have lived in the world of academe. Most will never understand what a law enforcement officer’s days are like on their best day. It is easy to sit on the sidelines and throw stones at those in the arena. For some, they have developed a one-dimensional view from their hoity-toity viewpoint of life. Granted, they have never had to enter a crime scene on a steamy summer day, where the stench of death permeates your clothes and singes your nose hairs. Their sterile view of life without seeing the inhumanities of life does not allow them to develop the cop’s view. This “trade,” as she referred to law enforcement, can be a dirty, grimy job; one that the weight of that day does not go away when you clock out on that day’s shift. Some events you carry with you into the night, for weeks or years... or a lifetime for that matter. Some of us may relive our worst day in dreams, where we still scream in the night many years after retirement.

When any of us have an opportunity to enlighten the other side, we need to do so. Often, we believe that they will not comprehend our lives. But occasionally, a little sliver of understanding may creep into their thinking. Change them, probably not, but little differences add up.

We, as a vocation, need to return to our outreaches, formal and individual, to all our service populations or customer base. We have done this in the past with community policing, the citizens police academies and presentations to civic and/or professional organizations. There have been time gaps from our past outreaches, adding the COVID-era, placed us away from our service communities once again. Sadly, we may have totally missed some opportunities altogether. Granted most of the universities and colleges will probably be like this one, a self-described bastion of thinkers will never ask for this presentation. There will be some liberal, if not woke, thinking waters we will be wading into, but the thing of it is, we should at least try to connect with them—after all, they are our citizens as well.

What can we do as officers to educate those in the academic community who are truly unaware of our realities? I know some of them will probably want to counter everything that we say. Seize the opportunities when they avail themselves to us and not debates. Law enforcement must make a perceptive decision to do so for the multiplier effect. They are educating the masses. If we make positive inroads with them, it goes forward to future students.

One would hope that this lady, who was my student that day, may take her newfound understanding forward to her students. Now, us cops that do not have Ph.D.s in philosophy or neoclassical trainings will continue to make a difference in the lives of our citizens. Often, life and death decisions are made instantaneously. There is no time to read a white paper, take a class or read a book on the matter. Lives are saved by the seconds by members of a "trade" who give their all every day.