Team-Building
A lot of building a team is teaching a mystique for that team, and separating them out to the admiration of others. I do it myself when building teams for commercial pursuits. So it�s not unexpected when a blog I follow about Tactical Teams talks about the difference between SWAT and everybody Other. I found this article enormously interesting. It does echo many of the comments I read on police blogs, where one kind of cop is dissed by another (�hair-gels�, �On the Soft�, old-timer v. new timer, affirmative action, clout, et cetera). So I appreciated his attempt at laying it out.
You must get first that civilians are sheep, crooks are wolves, and cops are sheepdogs. They keep the wolf away. This paradigm runs through law-enforcement literature. It is useful but limited.
The premise of the article is that the alpha males of the law enforcement community go into SWAT. They are the true sheepdogs. The rest of law enforcement is
a. young and trying to get into SWAT, or should be recruited for SWAT,
b. bitching moaning middle-aged beta males on the beat
c. old gagers who are just hanging in and doing time for retirement post-SWAT,
d. old gagers who made rank and are miffed they didn�t have the cojones for SWAT, or know they couldn�t make SWAT, or tried to SWAT and failed;
e. educated jerks who understand book learning but don�t understand the street. There are two subsets:
i. those there because they are manipulate-able and clueless, or
ii. the product of a bent hiring process (nepotism or clout, for instance).
f. the occasional hybrid cop, who could have been SWAT but wasn�t. I guess we need to round those sixteen hybrids up and find out where they came from. I guess these are the sixteen warriors of the traffic stop. Nobody else non-SWAT does shit. Apparently any non-SWAT cops reading his article are supposed to buy into the token hybrid label, and be comforted.
I�m going to list what�s wrong with this article: I could go all day, but I�ll stick to the high points.
Reciprocity
Under this rubric, the author explains why nobody likes SWAT except SWAT. That�s why group d. (the cojones-less) is cutting funding for tac teams all over the nation. I don�t doubt, if all of SWAT is showing this kind of snobbery to the non-SWAT, that the dislike is mutual.
Strategy
If these are alphas, how did they let it get so bad that the betas can cut them off at the knees? (Because the world is just not made up of alphas. Only SWAT teams are, and they are outnumbered.) If nothing else, this view shows that the alpha SWATS are deficient in strategy. They�ve sidelined themselves from the decision-making cadres of their agencies. Oops.
Tactical Sets and Subsets
On another reading, I don�t know why we have beat cops at all, or why some of us sheep arm ourselves, or try to pay attention to prevailing conditions in our neighborhood, schools, or living rooms. We apparently need to wait until things get bad enough for SWAT. Aren�t prevention and early response also important? Wouldn't a tac team understand that there are infinite tactics, some of which they aren�t built for?
Training
Maybe you can't turn a beta into an alpha. But if education is such a beta indicator, then why do you train all the time? Why would a college degree make someone automatically beta? This post makes alpha sound somehow stupid, or that educated people can't be educated. But really two kinds of characteristics are conflated here.
Group sets and subsets
Even on alpha teams, there�s rank and pecking order. There will be a group dynamic within a tac team too. It�s a team, not a set of psychopaths.
Since I�m obviously educated, un-SWAT, and a sheep, this disqualifies my opinion from the get. That won't stop me from saying, in my alpha-scholar way, that this blog writer is full of shit. By priming his team to disrespect non-SWAT colleagues, non-SWAT tactics, the people they serve, and those that procure the funding, he�s just popped himself off the human map.
Bud, if your team can�t work with my team, then I don�t think you know team.
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