Law officers reflect on changes to field during National Police Week

The field of law enforcement has been through continuous changes in recent years, according to local officers.

May 14-20 is recognized as National Police Week to recognize police officers across the nation for their efforts in public safety.

And according to Portales Police Department Detective Charlie Smart, something that has undergone frequent changes in his 28 years in law enforcement is the public’s view of police.

“For three or four years, we’re looked at as kind of the good guys, and then something may happen in the nation that changes the view to where we’re now the bad guys,” he said. “To me, in my experience, I think that’s just human nature. It’s the old adage of ‘one bad apple spoils the bushel,’ but it doesn’t, really. There’s bad and good in any profession. We, as law enforcement officers, are just more in focus, and so we should be. We should be held to a higher standard.”

Eastern New Mexico University Police Officer Jim Lara has worked in law enforcement for 21 years, and in that time, he has also witnessed dramatic shifts in public opinion toward police.

“Public perception’s changed quite a bit. You get one or two (police officers) that make some bad decisions, and everybody’s kind of labeled to be the same. Nobody wants to talk to you or have anything to do with you until they need you,” he said.

Much of the public perception of police is shaped by popular media, according to ENMU Police Department Chief Bradley Mauldin, who referenced the “CSI effect” (referring to the popular television series).

“You can turn on your television and watch a television program and watch them process fingerprints and photographs and DNA evidence in an hour, and the reality of those circumstances is it’s an extended period of time before that is actually turned out to those law enforcement agencies to continue processing that investigation,” he said.

Smart has also seen crime make a shift into the digital realm in the last decade.

“Now, we work way more white collar crimes, as far as credit card theft, identity theft, things of that nature. That has really, over the past 10 years, increased enormously,” he said. “We still have burglaries, and with the age of computers and technology, the white collar crimes are extremely difficult to investigate, because they have ways of pushing things through different computers all over the world until it’s untraceable.”

The process of investigating a crime may have become more complex in terms of search warrants and testimonies for financial records, but Smart has noticed a new, educated generation of officers that he believes is capable of facing crime in its new environment.

“A lot of rookie officers are coming in with bachelor’s degrees, even some of them still going to college, which is certainly a benefit for us, nationwide,” he said. “When it comes to the job, the benefits are they’re already pretty much computer savvy. They can work the different programs within the computer, so we don’t have to take time to teach them so much on that.”

Another new aspect of policing that Smart has noticed is a push for “community policing to interact more with the community, more outreach programs to educate the community, to be more proactive as opposed to reactive, don’t wait for it to happen and try to head it off before it does happen.”

Mauldin will touch on the many changes his field has gone through over the years Thursday at Cannon Air Force Base’s Police Officer Week event.

“While things have changed over the course of our profession, some things should have remained the same,” Mauldin said as the basis of his presentation.