By Deputy Chief (ret.) Andrew C. Senzer
One of the most important responsibilities of any police chief is the overall morale of their agency. Healthy morale is the intangible force multiplier that can help counterbalance and overcome obstacles, including deficiencies in staffing, compensation, vehicles and the societal challenges faced by officers.
I experienced this myself as a zone commander in Atlanta in 2020 and 2021, when the effects of the COVID pandemic merged with widespread civil unrest. Amid a fierce wave of anti-police sentiments, we had to navigate expectations to pull back proactive policing yet fulfill our mission to protect and serve — all while facing a mass exodus of officers, which left the remaining ones overworked, burned out and frustrated.
While any of these negative circumstances can and do impact the psyche of the rank and file, they can coexist with healthy morale. But healthy morale — especially in times of crisis — cannot exist absent the implementation of one critical concept: S.A.C. – Standards, Accountability and Consistency.
Standards, accountability and consistency
S.A.C. represents three intrinsically linked ideals that need to be embraced at all levels of leadership throughout an organization. Every team within an agency must have explicit standards of performance, and these standards must be reinforced through mechanisms of accountability.
Without accountability, standards become mere suggestions that may or may not be followed. When those who meet or exceed the standards observe that others are being allowed to fall short of the bar without being remediated and challenged, team dynamics will quickly break down, and morale will disintegrate. This will happen regardless of the amount and quality of resources at hand.
The smaller the team and the higher the standards (think of SWAT, homicide and other specialized units), the more quickly and dramatically the fall will be. Thus, we are not just upholding standards to get the deficient people up to par. We are upholding the standards to remind everyone — including the people we think we don’t need to worry about — that we have them.
Consistency comes into play during the process of holding our people accountable. To positively change an undesired culture or maintain a culture of excellence, leaders must be consistent and methodical with holding their people accountable for standards of performance.
Accountability must take place every day, indefinitely. Deviations from the standard must be addressed as soon as they are discovered and with a sense of urgency and immediacy. Any delay will convey a diminished importance of the standards, and rest assured, your people are always watching you.
We all know a good police officer when we see one, but what is it about their performance that makes them successful and admired day in and day out?
The challenge of defining standards
Law enforcement agencies have no shortage of standards outlined in written policy. Physical fitness, uniforms and firearms marksmanship are the obvious ones with clear pass/fails and dos and don’ts. But when it comes to performance in the field, specifically with officers assigned to field operations, it can get complicated.
We all know a good police officer when we see one, but what is it about their performance that makes them successful and admired day in and day out? It’s certainly a combination of one’s ability to bring to bear the right technical skills, sound tactics, physical ability and mindset to myriad types of calls to mitigate each unique problem and bring each one to an acceptable resolution. And I would add, doing so while preserving the trust of the citizenry and legitimacy of the agency.
We all know what that guy or gal looks like. They know everyone on their beat. They have an inherent ability to recognize what is normal and what is an anomaly that deserves further attention. They know how to talk to people — the law-abiders and the law-breakers alike. They are adept at managing their responses to 911-dispatched calls and their ability to be proactive as crime fighters.
The big question is, how do we articulate that in a way that translates to objective evaluation metrics to allow us to state, “This is the standard that must be met by all?” Do we measure community engagement by tallying up the number of “drop-ins” conducted and community meetings attended? Do we measure a good day’s work by the number of arrests made? How do we measure proactive policing and our ability to thwart criminal behavior and activities? Do we look at time spent on calls?
I’m not here to tell you how to create your performance metrics (although I certainly have implemented my own favorite methods that have worked for me and my teams). I also don’t believe that certain characteristics of what makes an officer “good” are quantifiable.
What I am doing here is acknowledging that as simple as creating standards sounds to the uninitiated, those of us who have done this for a while know that measuring performance in law enforcement can be difficult. Despite this, law enforcement leaders must develop, adopt and enforce standards of performance to uphold morale and strengthen team dynamics.
Implementing S.A.C. in Zone 2
During the early part of 2019, I was a newly appointed Major assigned to the Atlanta Police Department’s Zone 3 Precinct, which services the Southeast section of the city. Zone 3 is a rough-and-tumble zone with no shortage of violent crime and problems to solve. I loved this assignment, and I loved the type of officers who were proud to stand at roll call and take on the challenges of policing in this part of the city.
I had been my predecessor’s captain and assistant Zone Commander here in Zone 3, so I was well on my way to implementing S.A.C. principles. I was at peace with the perspective that this might be my forever home as I was within five years of my retirement date, and I could touch my promotional ceiling with my hand.
But, as fate would have it (and we all know that as soon as you’re comfortable, change will certainly happen), I was asked to take command of the Atlanta Police Department’s Zone 2 Precinct. In stark contrast to Zone 3, this precinct services the most northern section of the city, which encompasses the very affluent Buckhead community.
Little did I know that within a year, I would have to navigate the confluence of the COVID pandemic, widespread civil unrest (including rioting and looting), and Buckhead’s movement to secede from Atlanta and form its own city. Any one of these alone would have been challenging to manage, but the synergy of these events had a devastating effect on our department’s ability to fight crime and do it in a safe manner.
It was a daunting endeavor for a commander new to the Zone and even more unsettling for the troops. Once the dust settled, one of the persistent residual effects of this awful trifecta of events was the pullback of proactive enforcement and street-level community engagement. This was completely understandable in the wake of officer indictments, firings and anti-police sentiment, which permeated the news outlets and caused a mass exodus of officers from agencies across the country, including ours.
Proactive policing and community trust
Our officers were self-relegated to being merely call-takers and report writers. Officer-initiated contacts with citizens dropped off the charts. Yet, at the same time, the residents of Buckhead were prosecuting their case to become their own city by decrying the unchecked criminal activity and their perception of lawlessness. The leader of the Buckhead City movement compared the level of violence in Buckhead to Baghdad.
Of course, despite the histrionics and hyperbole that were being thrown around and amplified on national news, the crime stats showed the situation to not be quite as bleak as reported. This wasn’t the first time that reality of crime and perception did not align, and I knew that people’s perception of safety — what they observed and felt when they walked out of their houses and went about their daily routines — was more important than crime stats.
We had a problem. We had to get back to being proactive instead of reactive. We had to let the community know that we still cared about their safety and that we were trying our best, despite the challenges at hand, to meet their expectations and hold up our responsibilities as a component of the criminal justice system by deterring criminal behavior and catching the individuals perpetrating crimes.
This meant setting the standards for self-initiated and proactive performance, introducing it to Zone personnel, and ultimately getting their buy-in.
We had a problem. We had to get back to being proactive instead of reactive.
Communicating the why
The first order of business was getting all of my watch commanders on the same page with me, including how to message the advantages and benefits of specific proactive tactics, and the overarching reason why we were getting back to the business of real police work.
Telling any group of officers to do something without explaining why you want it done, and then expecting to get good results in return, is a losing proposition most of the time. Asking officers to conduct self-initiated traffic stops in a 2020 environment was just flat-out lunacy, but that’s exactly what I wanted my officers to do. The messaging was critical, and it had to come directly from me — many times and on all watches — until we were back in the saddle.
I explained that every time we turned on the blue lights to conduct a traffic stop, we were accomplishing three things. First, the citizens would observe us actively engaging in enforcement activities, reinforcing their perception that we are visible and vigilant. Secondly, the same message would be sent to those individuals who are endeavoring to commit crimes, forcing them to take their nefarious activities elsewhere, thus achieving displacement and disruption. Finally, each traffic stop creates an opportunity to engage in a unique police-citizen encounter.
These encounters were opportunities to reinforce the Department’s standards of professionalism by introducing officers and the agency to the public. Each encounter provided officers with a chance to hone their skills, including verbal communication, identifying deceptive responses, reading body language and furtive behavior, maintaining situational awareness while multi-tasking, and recognizing when to expand the scope of their investigation beyond the original probable cause for the stop.
Every police-citizen encounter became an opportunity to expand experiential knowledge and master the craft. Gradually, Zone 2 officers began to reengage. The community started to compliment the number of officers they saw in their neighborhoods. By the end of the first month, Zone 2 was leading all six zones in proactive policing, which also coincided with a decrease in crime.
Every police-citizen encounter became an opportunity to expand experiential knowledge and master the craft.
Transparency, accountability and recognition
A report was generated that broke down proactive efforts by each individual officer, each watch and the zone collectively, which was then tracked and compared to the previous week’s efforts. This report was available to everyone within the Zone, creating transparency and healthy competition. Top performers were acknowledged for their efforts and praised during roll calls and community meetings.
I also expected my watch commanders to immediately engage with poor performers and to understand the urgency of mitigating violations of standards. As the late great Sid Heal states in his comprehensive book “Field Command,” “Every crisis involving the fluid dynamics of a human adversary becomes time-competitive.” Although he was referencing a criminal adversary, the leadership lesson is still applicable.
The faster you can identify a problem and implement a course of action to positively influence the situation, the faster you will gain control of it. Avoiding accountability because you are afraid of conflict and the potential negative impact on relationships with the troops will only allow problems to fester and ultimately become much more challenging.
Root causes and tough conversations
Additionally, these timely and tough conversations were not just meant to be constructive and remediative in nature. They were also opportunities to look beyond the often-symptomatic nature of poor performance, uncovering and revealing root causes of more serious issues that might otherwise remain hidden and unaddressed. These could include domestic-related issues, substance abuse, or mental health challenges.
While it is important to go into these conversations with an unwavering position on conformance to standards, it is equally important to check your ego at the door and go in with a willingness to listen. You can be a staunch defender of standards while also being humble, empathetic and helpful.
At a time when fewer officers are expected to hold the line between good and evil, with less opportunity to recuperate from the constant drip of experienced trauma, these conversations become even more crucial.
The lasting impact of S.A.C.
You will earn the respect of your team by being honest, direct, fair and decisive. Conversely, allowing one’s inherent desire to be liked to drive their responses to substandard behavior will lead to contempt, distrust, and dysfunction.
Zone 2’s adoption of S.A.C. would be a driving force for operational success in the years to come. By the end of 2021, Zone 2 earned APD’s Crime Reduction Award, which it successfully repeated in 2022. And yes, the Buckhead City movement was also put on ice.
Think of building team dynamics and morale as working on a relationship. As everyone knows, relationships aren’t easy. It takes time and effort to make them work. It’s a perpetual process in which you should never sacrifice your principles.
S.A.C. principles are easily scalable and should be implemented at every level of an agency, from the Office of the Chief through the divisions, sections and units. By adopting the principles of S.A.C., you will set the tone for operational excellence and long-term success.
About the author
Andrew Senzer is a retired deputy chief with the City of Atlanta Police Department where he served honorably for over 28 years. He has extensive experience in the special operations community, having served on SWAT as a bomb technician, counter-sniper supervisor and team leader. His experiential knowledge in this realm drove him to conceptualize, develop and implement a training program that bridged the gap between patrol and SWAT, giving field operations personnel enhanced training and equipment to quickly mitigate emerging critical incidents. For this legacy program, which has trained over 300 law enforcement personnel including members of seven neighboring agencies, he was bestowed the Atlanta Police Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement award.
