This is an excellent article written by Sgt. Jeff Baker of the Omaha Police Department.  Weigh in.  What role does your faith (Judeo-Christian or otherwise) play in your service?

Faith-Based Policing

A former agnostic weighs in

• Jeff Baker
• 2008 Jun 18

Noted conservative commentator and former Republican representative from Oklahoma, J.C. Watts, issued a rousing response to then-President Bill Clinton’s State of the Union address in 1997. A provocative quote from that transcendent speech was, “Character is doing the right thing, even when nobody is looking.”

Ponder that.

Opportunities to slip toward or into malfeasance in our profession abound, so how do we as individual officers behave when nobody’s looking? Are we acting righteously and honorably away from the eye of the mobile video system? When we prepare our reports? When we testify? Are we being as honest and forthright as we should be given our stated oath? Are we, as the congressman’s definition demands, doing the right thing when nobody’s looking?

Or could it be someone  is looking when by all worldly indications we’re alone with the smelly indigent who lay crumpled in a public park?  Is someone looking when the comely female motorist expresses a willingness to do anything to avoid being arrested for DUI? Or maybe on a more common but no less insidious level,  is someone looking when we supervisors set a poor example by running down the chief or turning a blind eye to unpopular policy?

Faith didn’t come to me overnight, nor did its interface with my work. The product of an areligious upbringing, I spent much of my adult life as an unbaptized agnostic, only entertaining cursory thoughts of a creator just in case one existed.

After an intense, year-long personal investigation into the matter of faith as an adult, I believe in the God of the Hebrew Old Testament. I believe God is a Trinity of persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Therefore, I’m Christian, specifically, a Roman Catholic Christian.

While I remain imperfect, my faith is the cornerstone of my life, my marriage, and ethical decisions I make at home and at work. I find it easier to be a good ambassador for the law enforcement community as a believer. I fellowship with friends and family from other expressions of the faith, so ecumenism is an aspect of my Christian growth and maturation.

I convey these thoughts to the reader in order to lay a foundation for what I’d like to broach in this article: the connectivity between God and cop as seen through the eyes of a brother paladin who himself struggles with bouts of pride, self absorption, and sin.

Before and after
I was recently asked what work was like  before faith, a time when I viewed mankind through secular glasses and a correspondingly suspicious gaze. The honest answer? I wasn’t as patient, polite or professional a police officer then. Yes, I’m still a “Type A,” inasmuch as I don’t shy away from a challenge or wanton disregard for the law, but I’m a  kinder cop today; more often than not, I’m able to see past the bad behavior and accept that somewhere underneath lies a person, another member of God’s creation.

Not always easy to do, I realize. The various dregs of society we deal with may have been born in goodness, yet there could be myriad genetic predispositions, environmental conditions, substance abuse problems, and issues relative to socioeconomics and upbringing which can poison people who -different time and place- might well have been productive members of society.

Thus, a “God’s children” ideology in dealing with the public only goes so far; violence is the exclusive language of a small percentage of our clientele, so you must stand ready to communicate on that level as well. It’s a bit primal at times, but the truth is we deal with evil, not evil as a metaphor for man’s internal struggle to do the right thing, but  evil as a manifest reality . So I make no bones about it. I believe in God, therefore I believe in the devil. It’s plain to see both are at work in our world.

Faith’s intangibility makes it a decision. A gift, yes, but also a  decision which can, at times, leave one in a state of spiritual flux. For instance, in December 2007, I was among the first responders to the worst mass shooting at a mall in U.S. history. The call provoked me to reflect on my mortality, priorities, commitment to training, and my conduct as a sergeant responsible for a crew of officers. The event also caused me to dwell on the Lord and why He might let something like this happen in my hometown (fodder for an article in and of itself).

My wife, who inspired me to take the first step on my faith walk, is unaware of the most intimate details of my Von Maur experience, what it felt like to step inside anticipating a meeting with my God or the devil. She didn’t take in the graphic imagery that still bounces around my head at times. What my wife  could see in the days after the call was a somewhat withdrawn, brooding husband. She was Christ to me anyway, renewing my hope, and I am truly blessed and grateful for that.

Obviously then, our faith and communal hope was pivotal in my getting through one of life’s dark valleys. Together we hope and pray for the eight murder victims. We hope and pray for something beyond a wrenchingly violent and bloody end to their earthly lives that day. We hope and pray for their families, friends, neighbors, and co-workers.

That’s the new pivot point for me, hope. It’s Christianity’s essence, for us to decide through free will and of our own volition to be steadfast in hope for and in Him despite the sadness, sickness, death and despair which pockmark our passage through time.

I began my law enforcement career in 1988. Most days, I still thoroughly enjoy being a police officer, particularly a  Christian police officer who has at least a dim intimation of the eternal implications of his actions and decisions.

In the final analysis, the role of peacemaker is more than zero tolerance enforcement, fire teams, vehicle pursuits, and kicking ass, so I challenge you to search within yourself to identify those opportunities to be more than a rigid, protocol-driven uniform in your dealings with the public. Please pray for our vocation, and that all law enforcement professionals throughout the world be emboldened to know, love and honor God.

When we think of ethics, we think of them in relation to morals.  What are morals and what are ethics?  One way we can look at the two is to consider morals as behavior according to custom and we can look at ethics as behavior according to reason or reflection.

In other words, morals are those things we know innately, through modeling and experience in community.  Morals can stretch over different venues and customs and morally speaking, it can be difficult to figure out just how we should act or just exactly, “what we are all about.”  This is where ethics come in.  Without some process of thought, discussion and discernment, we can become confused.  Ethics are the process through which we examine and discuss our morals.

We can consider morality as having to do with human behavior and ethics as reflecting on and engaging in constructive conversation about that behavior.  The reason we practice ethics at all is to define how we actually make moral decisions.

Considering the prominence of reason and discussion for ethics, it pays to have some ground rules established for this conversation because when we deal with matters of morals and ethics, we are dealing in the affective realm of thought.  We are passionate about our values and moral beliefs.  Passion digs deep and triggers all kinds of emotions.

First and foremost in discussing ethics, agreement is not the objective.  We do not necessarily have to agree with everything that is put forth in an ethical conversation, in fact, there should be some disagreement just on the basis of values, context and cultural background.  Although we acknowledge there will be lack of agreement on content, we absolutely must agree that an ethical conversation requires respect and trust.

I offer the following considerations for constructive ethics conversations:

Listen.  We each hear things differently, if we spend our time truly listening to the person talking rather than planning our next statement or strategy, our responses will make the conversation richer in perspective and more respectful.

One at a Time.  A conversation where more than one person talks at a time is an argument.  Let the person speaking finish.  If you are the person speaking, be respectful and do not filibuster.

Be Authentic.  In the course of an ethical conversation, we are talking about core values and how they shape our decisions.  Our participation should not be to please any person or espouse a certain viewpoint.  We need to share our perspective honestly and frankly, using tact.  Any comments should be from our own perspective.

Be Prepared to Answer, “Why?”  Socrates said, “An unexamined life is a life not worth living.”  The gist of this is that when we examine our morals and discuss them, we are trying in a sense to figure out where we are morally.

If we are about to explain a value or choice apologetically, it makes sense that we should be able to explain why we hold the value.  We should be able to reasonably explain our beliefs and values when the question “why?” is asked.  Ethical conversation goes much deeper than parroting a thought we heard or read somewhere and thought was interesting.

Everyone has a perspective worth hearing.  No matter what our background, we all tend to have a narrow view when it comes to ethics and values.  The view is shaped by experiences, upbringing, awareness and community.  As we expand these areas by having healthy ethical conversations outside of our usual circle of influence, we grow as people and are able to better reason through decisions.

We do not have to agree with everyone, but we do need to respectfully listen and to test our values and morals.  Expanding perspective furthers growth and allows us to measure where we are at in our eternal existence.

In social dealings, being older is being wiser, study shows

Skill greater at handling disagreements

By Randolph E. Schmid, Associated Press

WASHINGTON — It turns out grandma was right: Listen to your elders. New research indicates they are indeed wise — in knowing how to deal with conflicts and accepting life’s uncertainties and change.

It isn’t a question of how many facts someone knows, or being able to operate a TV remote, but rather how to handle disagreements — social wisdom.

And researchers led by Richard Nisbett of the University of Michigan found that older people were more likely than younger or middle-aged ones to recognize that values differ, to acknowledge uncertainties, to accept that things change over time and to acknowledge others’ points of view.

“Age effects on wisdom hold at every level of social class, education, and IQ,” they report in today’s edition of Proceedings of the National Acade­my of Sciences.

In modern America, older people generally don’t have greater knowl­edge about computers and other technology, Nisbett acknowledged, “but our results do indicate that the elderly have some advantages for analysis of social problems.”

“I hope our results will encourage people to assume that older people may have something to contribute for thinking about social problems,” Nis­bett said.

In one part of the study the researchers recruited 247 people in Michigan, divided into groups aged 25 to 40, 41 to 59 and 60 and older.

Participants were given fictitious reports about conflict between groups in a foreign country and asked what they thought the outcome would be.

For example, one of the reports said that because of the economic growth of Tajikistan, many people from Kyr­gyzstan moved to that country. While Kyrgyz people tried to preserve their customs, Tajiks wanted them to assimilate fully and abandon their customs.

The responses were then rated by researchers who did not know which individual or age group a response came from. Ratings were based on things like searching for compromise, flexibility, taking others’ perspective and searching for conflict resolution.

About 200 of the participants joined in a second session, and a third sec­tion was conducted using 141 schol­ars, psychotherapists, clergy and con­sulting professionals. The study concluded that economic status, education and IQ also were significantly related to increased wis­dom, but they found that “academics were no wiser than nonacademics” with similar education levels.

While the researchers expected wisdom to increase with age they were surprised at how strong the results were for disputes in society, Nisbett said.

“There is a very large advantage for older people over younger people for those.”

Lynn Hasher, a psychology profes­sor at the University of Toronto, called the study “the single best demonstration of a long-held view that wisdom increases with age.”

“What I think is most important about the paper is that it shows a major benefit that accrues with aging — rather than the mostly loss-based findings reported in psychology. As such, it provides a richer base of understanding of aging processes. It also suggests the critical importance of workplaces’ maintaining the opportunity for older employees to continue to contribute,” said Hasher, who was not part of the research team.

Lead author Nisbett, co-director of the University of Michigan’s Culture and Cognition Program, is 68 and his team of co-authors ranged in age from mid-20s to mid-50s.

The research was supported by the Russell Sage Foundation, National Institute on Aging and the National Science Foundation Grant.