Retired Captain Gaylon Grippin •
Law Enforcement • Templates
When you look at a law enforcement officer, they have a lot of equipment. And over 10, 20, 30 years, they get a lot more– just more and more continually being assigned to them. If somebody is not keeping track of that, which happens regularly, at some point you end up having to go to each of the officers and say, please tell me what you have.
How many of these do you have? Where? What do you have in your hands? And factually speaking, I had so much equipment that I didn't have it all with me. Some of it was sitting in a closet, some of it was sitting in my office. I mean, there are pieces everywhere. So there's no way that you as a supervisor or chief or somebody else can legitimately go and find all of your employees' equipment without rummaging through their personal effects in their home.
At some point you really have to come to your people and say, please tell me what you have and you hope that when you do that, they are being honest with you. And of course, 99.9% of the officers are, but you'll find occasionally somebody will, you know, pocket one item or as it happens, they may retire and hand it off to somebody else. That happened to me several times. So sometimes it's stuff that gets forgotten. Sometimes it's stuff that is hidden.
So without something better in place, you're really relying on your people and potentially exposing your agency to unwanted risk and liability like loss, theft or abuse.
It's like anything else: if you want to start organizing your information, you have to have a system of some kind. And it may be something simple. Obviously, we've seen agencies develop their own. We see it all the time. But at its very base, you have to start gathering information.
You have to start speaking to your people and determine the ground truth? We start from here. From this point forward, we know that we will maintain this information and keep an accurate record. So you can start with something as simple as a template and we have those ready for people to use. You download a template, send it out to all of your staff, have them fill it out, you accumulate that. And you can stop there if you want. You've now got a written record. That is the most basic system. Or if you choose, you can take that and build it into a bigger system, much like ours, and a much easier, much more foolproof method of management that will set your agency up for long term success.
At the end of the day, you have to start somewhere.
Standard Equipment Assignment Record (SEAR) Template
