A friend of mine sent this powerful video by Tamara Lowe to me and I just had to share it with you. It’s about eternal truths and the influence of pop culture…

Chaplain Grant Wolf of the Chattanooga, TN Police Department is still working on his anthology of “stories of faith and courage” from law enforcement. He needs 45 more stories to complete the project and has asked for my help in getting the word out to readers of this blog. When it is finished, the book will feature 365 stories – one for each day of the year – about how God intervened in the life of a law enforcement official.

Stories received to date run the gamut from light-hearted (a rookie who passed out while helping deliver a baby) to not-for-the-faint of heart (a bank shooting and a fatal auto accident). They represent every phase of law enforcement work and demonstrate that something happened which simply cannot be explained other than by God’s hand.

If you have a suitable story, please download this link for a brochure explaining the law enforcement faith and courage project.

Most progressive disciplinary models used by law enforcement agencies use behavior-based standards. However, most of our problems stem from ethical failures. Discipline is not always negative. By definition, discipline is training designed to perfect moral character, not necessarily punish behavior.

In this video last video in the Polish the Tarnished Badge series, I use the Path of Destruction from the Dynamic of Restoration to illustrate a powerful principle. To incorporate a character-based dynamic into a progressive discipline model, let the nature of the offense determine the range of internal disciplinary options and let the character of the individual dictate which option is chosen.

This points us back to the leadership principle of knowing the condition of your flock. Without the foundation of internal trust-based relationships, this disciplinary model will not work…

The Character First Curriculum provides some excellent tools for promoting and encouraging character within any police organization. The Police Dynamics Institute has partnered with the Character Training Institute to provide a truly outstanding character-based leadership program for law enforcement.

The basic principle is that you should hire a police officer for character and then train them for skills. But in law enforcement management, we tend to hire for skills and fire for character because so many officers fail the character test!

The key to impacting a culture is to impact its vocabulary. In this video, Franklin Smith shows you how to make the character connection on a day to day basis as well as how to pass the character tests that we all tend to face.

The Dynamic of Authority is the essential teaching to understanding the Police Dynamics training series and principles of character-based leadership. Here, I use it as a teaching paradigm to communicate how to model a standard of good character. If the leadership of an organization is not modeling good character as well as encouraging it, the whole process breaks down.

Understanding what the badge actually represents and the proper relationship between a police officer and his or her authorities is perhaps the most important teaching for law enforcement personnel and their leaders to grasp.

A critical leadership principle is the ability to articulate vision and standards. Part 3 of the Polish the Tarnished Badge series deals with communicating the standard of good character. A failure to clearly articulate a standard is a leadership failure. So law enforcement leaders must be particularly careful to communicate standards and expectations clearly and unambiguously.

Franklin Smith, President of Character Focus and former Director of Administration for the Dorchester County Sheriff’s Office, explores the concepts of using a Police Standards Manual and Character First Bulletins to help communicate the character standards of a police organization in this video from the National Sheriff’s Association Annual Conference.