Common Sense

A recent article in PERF Daily News grabbed my attention this morning.

Why? Lo and behold, it’s about what I call “common sense” in policing and common sense is what my sergeant told me I needed to remember. I was a young 21 year-old police recruit right out of the Marines. “Just use common sense, Couper,” he told me.

And here it is again — the lasting power of “common sense” as revealed in Sir Robert Peel’s “Nine Principles of Policing.”

Read them — it’s “common sense!”

And as the new chief said in the following article he follows these Principles — it’s “police doing right.”

For me, that’s “common sense.” What about you?

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MetroWest Daily News (MA): Westborough didn’t have to look too far to identify its next police chief

Prior to a Select Board vote Tuesday on a motion to promote him to police chief, Todd Minardi made a 30-minute presentation, describing his career and goals going forward, should he be selected.

Minardi told the board his “guiding principal” was a quote by Sir Robert Peel, who founded what is considered the first modern police force, the London Metropolitan Police in 1829: “The police are the people, and the people are police.”

“I have a view of community policing that may be radical,” Minardi told the Daily News in an interview on Thursday. “I just call it ‘police doing right.’ It’s getting back to doing police the way it should be done. We are part of the community. We’re not supposed to be viewed as being separate from them.”

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(BTW: I have been a member of the Police Executive Research Forum [PERF] from its beginning days in the 1970s.)