My name is Jim and I am a retired “Fed.” I spent 33 years on the job (following six years as an Army officer). My law enforcement career ran the spectrum from rookie agent to Presidential appointee. I worked in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Michigan, Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. I’ve been gone from carrying a badge for four years, and yet I miss it every day.
I miss the saints and scoundrels, the unique challenges and the thrill of getting it right. And sure, I miss the adventure and fulfillment, the big cases and big arrests. But I miss more the deep friendships and inter-dependencies formed in that closed world of responsibility, the commitment to the law and the power of enforcing it. There is no parallel profession where trust and confidence in each other is such a requirement, that I know of, other than perhaps in the military services.
During my time, I witnessed the revolutionary transition of American law enforcement from a fairly straight forward profession requiring a few key physical and mental skills, to its state today as a multi-faceted and complex array of professions, technologies, and organizations. Providing for the public safety and good order of today’s society requires a myriad of skills, strategies and resources, that didn’t exist nor even contemplated in the early days of my career.
It is well that this metamorphosis of law enforcing has occurred because as we all understand there are new threats to our safety that emerge with the speed of the new technologies that facilitate them. The old paradigms of patrolling, detection, investigation and prosecution while still important are not enough. The most effective law enforcement today comes in prevention processes because of the daunting capabilities to commit crimes that are targeted on our 21st Century world of electronic transactions, communications and prodigious data records.
So there you have it, I am excited by this new world of law enforcement and I will use this space to weigh in from time to time on subjects or issues that might stimulate your interest or opinions. I know how the bureaucracies that govern these functions work and make decisions and I would enjoy sharing my observations with you.
(Jim Huse is the CEO of IntegriGuard, LLC, a program integrity, payment accuracy company in Omaha, NE. You can learn more about him and his company at www.integriguard.org).
