The Professional Law Enforcement Assistants' Association

FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin,The, July, 2004 by Debra S. Beebe, Joy Rikala

Law enforcement agencies throughout the world recognize the importance of professionalism and have worked diligently to have the public view their departments, as well as their officers, as professionals. Many have included the core value of professionalism--which not only applies to sworn officers but extends to those employees who provide support services--either in their mission or vision statements.

While they endorse the concept, many departments struggle with how to meet training mandates for their sworn personnel, as well as how to keep officers abreast of changing trends. Along with these challenges, however, agencies also must make training opportunities available for their support staffs. Although law enforcement officers have the visible day-to-day contact with community members, support personnel prepare reports, answer phones, handle payrolls, and coordinate meetings--important jobs that hold agencies together. Professional development can help support employees better understand how their positions fit into the policing service delivery system and provides an opportunity for them to become refreshed and inspired. After all, the need to enhance their occupational skills and develop professionally proves equally important for law enforcement administrative personnel as for officers.

William James, a 20th century scholar, said, "Mankind does nothing save through initiatives on the part of inventors, great or small, and imitation by the rest of us--these are the sole factors active in human progress. Individuals of genius show the way, and set the patterns, which common people then adopt and follow. The rivalry of the patterns is the history of the world." (1) A small group of administrative support personnel from several Minnesota law enforcement agencies have taken that giant leap of faith and shown their agencies, chief executives, and officers that they have the initiative to be inventors.

The Beginning

In 1998, the FBI's Minneapolis office sponsored a 2-day seminar on professionalism. Although originally intended for FBI professional support employees, the coordinators decided to invite administrative support personnel from other law enforcement agencies in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area as well.

Several law enforcement administrative assistants realized that this seminar was the first time they and their peers had received relevant law enforcement training from someone who actually had performed comparable tasks (the instructor previously had served as a secretary in the FBI). Further, the instructor understood the uniqueness and importance of the duties that professional support employees perform. One participant advised, "[The instructor] was able to understand our questions in the context of law enforcement, she taught the class using law enforcement language, and she knew how to apply what she was teaching to our positions in the various police agencies."

During the first day of training, several participants agreed to get together for additional training in the future. Many had spoken to each other on the phone, coordinating meetings for the police administrators they worked with, but they never had met in person. The networking that began during breaks created the impetus to form an association. As a final learning activity during the seminar, participants wrote a letter to themselves stating what they learned during the 2 days and what steps they planned to take upon returning to their workplaces. The instructor then collected the letters and, 6 months later, mailed them back to the participants as a "self-check-in." One of the attendees had written in the letter to herself to start an organization of law enforcement professional support personnel throughout Minnesota.

In early 1999, eight of the original seminar participants began Minnesota's first association for law enforcement support personnel. They started by drafting a mission statement to 1) encourage and promote a high degree of skill and efficiency for the members, 2) provide relevant law enforcement training, 3) establish cumulative relationships through a strong networking system, 4) ensure more uniformity in their services, and 5) enable members to provide enhanced professional assistance to chief law enforcement officers and member departments, which, ultimately, would benefit communities they serve. Participants established a mailing list, began a letter campaign to gauge interest in the association, and decided to meet once a month to chart the course of their venture.

Next, the group agreed that their association needed a name. Members agreed that they wanted the word assistants in the title to be more inclusive of the varied positions and job titles held at their agencies and that the word professional was extremely important to them; they wanted to set the tone for their new organization. Subsequently, the Professional Law Enforcement Assistants' Association (PLEAA) was born.

Ideologies

PLEAA members identified professionalism as an important behavioral expectation and sought a way to define it as it pertained to their positions and what they hoped to accomplish through their organization. They determined that professionalism is an individual quality; employees who perform assigned tasks with great skill and pride, maintain high ethical standards, and exhibit a courteous, conscientious, and businesslike manner in the workplace typically define professionals. These attributes, skills, and even a sense of pride reflect positively on their departments. PLEAA members concluded that professionalism comes from within a person; no amount of money can buy it.