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The Second Question

by David Brown | November 7, 2026 | Leadership and Culture | 0 Comments

After a hard call, “you good?” gets “yeah, I’m good” every time. One small change gets you a real answer.

Clear the Desk

by David Brown | November 3, 2026 | Leadership and Culture | 0 Comments

It's a Tuesday, and the request has been sitting in your box since the first of the month. Four days in March. His daughter turns ten, his wife found a cabin down in Hocking Hills, and his in-laws want to fly in from Arizona if it's actually happening. You've looked...

Write It Down

by David Brown | October 27, 2026 | Fatherhood | 0 Comments

I was driving home from work when a retired general on The Art of Manliness podcast described a briefing he sat through in 1991. Mark Hertling was an Army major in Germany with two boys at home, ten and seven, and he was told his cavalry squadron could take casualties...

Side by Side

by David Brown | October 20, 2026 | The Road and Outdoors | 0 Comments

We were sitting at a fire, and nobody was talking. We both knew there was hardship there, and neither of us was saying anything about it. Then, with tears streaming down his face, all the weight he had been carrying opened up and came out. Nobody had asked him how he...

Skating Isn’t Hockey – Jumping from Officer to Sergeant

by David Brown | October 13, 2026 | Leadership and Culture | 0 Comments

There is a particular kind of embarrassment in having a wide open net in front of you and not being able to score. I know it well. I started playing hockey at 43. I never played growing up. I rollerbladed in the nineties, but never hockey, so when I finally stepped on...

Staffing Came Back. Experience Didn’t.

by David Brown | August 18, 2026 | Leadership and Culture | 0 Comments

Everyone bracing for a young department to fail is watching the wrong place. They are watching the street, and the street is fine. The failure, when it comes, shows up in a case file somebody else opens about nine days later. Chuck Wexler sent PERF's members their...

Silence is Not Agreement

by David Brown | August 11, 2026 | Leadership and Culture | 0 Comments

Watch the room the next time you roll out a decision. If every head is nodding, you have a problem. People who believe in an idea do not nod at it. They speak up, they add to it, they start solving for it before you finish the sentence. Nodding is what a room does...

The Staffing Crisis Is Quietly Promoting People Who Aren’t Ready

by David Brown | August 4, 2026 | Leadership and Culture | 0 Comments

The number everyone quotes is one in ten. American policing is running at about 91 percent of authorized staffing, and almost every conversation about that number turns into a recruiting conversation. The conversation nobody schedules is about what the shortage is...

Overtime Is a Bridge. We Made It a Foundation.

by David Brown | July 28, 2026 | Leadership and Culture | 0 Comments

In most departments, the worst news in policing is not delivered by the chief. It is delivered by a shift sergeant walking toward an officer who has already worked a full tour, to tell them they are not going home. Ask front line supervisors to name the hardest part...

Who Actually Runs the Police Department? What Does the Charter Say?

by David Brown | July 21, 2026 | Leadership and Culture | 0 Comments

In the early months of the pandemic, law enforcement officers around this country were told, in everything but writing, to stop being cops. The order did not come from their chiefs. It came from the politics above their chiefs, and the crime rates that followed told...

Checkpoint Me

by David Brown | Jul 29, 2025 | The Inner Game

Leadership isn’t about being everywhere. It’s about knowing when to show up. There was a time when I thought being CC’d on everything was good leadership. I wanted visibility. I wanted to stay in the loop. I wanted to make sure nothing slipped through the cracks. But...

What Motorcycling Taught Me About Command

by David Brown | Jun 17, 2025 | The Road and Outdoors

Everyone talks about “command presence.” But what does it actually look like in the real world—outside of a classroom or crisis? You don’t need to ride a motorcycle to understand this. The road just happens to be where I learned one of my most valuable lessons in...

You Don’t Have to Lose it to Love It.

by David Brown | Jun 10, 2025 | The Inner Game

We talk a lot about burnout. We don’t talk enough about what we still have. You’re in the middle of something meaningful. But I’ve seen enough people walk away from the job—some by choice, others not—and almost all of them wish they’d appreciated it sooner. Not the...

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Burnout