Editor’s note: In this article, Mark Dillard draws on more than three decades of underwriting law enforcement agencies to explain why first-line supervision is the biggest lever leaders have in reducing risk and improving agency operations. For more on building agency readiness, join Lexipol’s Readiness Week, September 21–25, for a free week of live sessions and resources for public safety leaders.
By Mark Dillard
Every law enforcement agency experiences critical incidents. What separates the strongest organizations isn’t whether they avoid every complaint, use-of-force event or lawsuit. It’s how leaders respond afterward.
The agencies that consistently improve are the ones that ask difficult questions, learn from what happened, and have the discipline to turn lessons into better leadership, training and supervision.
After more than three decades working with police departments, sheriffs’ offices and detention facilities across the country, I’ve discovered that insurance claims rarely stem from a single officer or a single isolated incident. They’re windows into how an agency leads, supervises, trains and holds people accountable.
From an underwriting standpoint, I don’t spend much time asking whether an agency has ever been sued. Almost every agency has. I’m interested in understanding what happened in the aftermath:
- Did leadership learn from it?
- Were policies updated?
- Was additional training provided?
- Were supervisors held accountable or did everyone simply move on until the next claim happens?
That’s why a loss run, which summarizes past insurance claims, never tells the full story. A spreadsheet might summarize losses and settlements, but it can’t give me context. It can’t tell me whether an agency has strong leadership, whether first-line supervisors are engaged, or whether command staff have created a culture that encourages accountability instead of complacency.
Those factors often predict future performance far better than historical claims data alone.
When I have the opportunity, I want to meet the people leading the organization. I want to understand how they think, how they approach difficult problems and whether they’re genuinely committed to continuous improvement. In my experience, the overwhelming majority of law enforcement professionals are dedicated public servants working under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. The agencies that stand out are those that give those professionals the leadership, training and supervision they need to succeed.
With this in mind, I’ve identified three best practices that, when followed, consistently separate the agencies that improve their risk profile from the ones that continue to struggle.
1. Develop your first-line supervisors
If I could mandate only one risk management practice for every law enforcement agency in the U.S., this would be it. The single greatest predictor of organizational performance is the quality of first-line supervision.
Policies don’t supervise officers; training manuals don’t make decisions on chaotic scenes. Police chiefs don’t respond to every call. Sergeants and front-line supervisors do.
They’re the leaders who reinforce professionalism during every shift briefing, coach officers after difficult encounters, identify small problems before they become major liabilities and establish what acceptable conduct actually looks like on the street or inside a detention facility.
Many agencies invest heavily in leadership development at the executive level while assuming newly promoted supervisors will naturally succeed because they were excellent officers.
The problem is that outstanding officers don’t automatically become outstanding supervisors. They need leadership training, mentoring and enough time in their day to actually supervise rather than simply carrying another workload.
What chiefs, sheriffs and command can do now:
- Stop treating promotion as the finish line. Build a formal first-line supervisor development program that begins before promotion and continues through the first year.
- Require supervisors to spend scheduled time coaching officers, not simply responding to calls or completing paperwork.
- Conduct quarterly reviews that evaluate supervisors not only on operational performance, but on mentoring, documentation quality, policy compliance and developing younger officers.
- Pair newly promoted sergeants with experienced supervisors who have demonstrated strong leadership skills.
- After every significant use-of-force event or citizen complaint, ask: “Where was our supervision? What coaching occurred before this incident?”
2. Make sure your supervisors have the capacity to supervise
Every sergeant understands today’s hiring challenges. Recruiting is difficult. Budgets remain tight. Overtime continues climbing, while burnout is becoming increasingly common.
When supervisors spend most of their shift answering calls, filling staff shortages or performing patrol functions, they’re no longer supervising. Coaching disappears. Documentation suffers. Performance issues go unnoticed until they become disciplinary issues, or worse, litigation.
A comprehensive staffing analysis isn’t simply an administrative exercise. It’s a leadership tool. It helps agencies determine whether supervisors have realistic control, whether specialized assignments are adequately staffed, and whether personnel resources truly support the organization’s expectations for accountability.
What chiefs, sheriffs and command can do now:
- Conduct an annual staffing analysis that measures supervisory span of control, not just officer vacancies.
- Identify positions where sergeants routinely spend more time handling calls than supervising personnel.
- Review overtime data alongside complaints, use-of-force reports and preventable accidents. Burnout often shows up in operational data before it appears in morale surveys.
- Protect supervisory time whenever possible by limiting administrative distractions and unnecessary collateral duties.
- When requesting additional staffing from elected officials, frame the request in terms of liability reduction and public safety, not just workload.
3. Identify personnel problems before plaintiffs’ attorneys do
Regardless of the agency, I find that one practice is consistently critical: early detection and intervention for officers who consistently use excessive force disproportionate to their peers.
Officer benchmarking and early intervention systems are a huge help in this process. If one officer consistently generates significantly more use-of-force incidents than peers performing similar assignments, that’s worth understanding. It doesn’t automatically indicate misconduct, but it absolutely deserves attention.
Every organization has performance data. The question is whether leaders use it.
When an officer’s activity consistently differs from peers performing similar work, leaders should ask why. The answer may be additional training, better supervision, operational assignments or other legitimate factors. The goal isn’t to jump to conclusions. It’s to identify patterns early enough to provide support before a situation escalates into a serious incident.
That said, early intervention isn’t about punishing officers. It’s about supporting them. Sometimes the answer is additional training; sometimes it’s mentoring from an experienced field training officer. Sometimes it’s closer supervision. Occasionally, it may require disciplinary action or determining that an individual simply isn’t suited for the role.
The point is to identify concerning patterns while they’re still manageable, not after they’ve produced catastrophic outcomes that will cost your agency millions.
The agencies making the greatest progress aren’t waiting for lawsuits to reveal these trends. They’re finding them first.
What chiefs, sheriffs and command can do now:
- Track and monitor officer activity beyond use-of-force incidents alone. Include pursuits, citizen complaints, preventable vehicle crashes, injuries, sick leave patterns and other indicators.
- Use research-validated risk indicators to surface officers for supportive supervisory engagement before more critical issues emerge.
- Provide coaching and follow-up training before problems escalate.
- Use benchmarking to identify and reinforce high performers. Agencies can learn as much from officers who consistently resolve difficult encounters successfully as they can from those struggling.
- Treat early intervention as a leadership tool, not a punishment system.
For law enforcement agencies, effective risk management is not about avoiding every lawsuit. It’s about building an organization that learns faster than its problems grow and one that daily demonstrates a commitment to learning, accountability and continuous improvement.
About the author
Mark Dillard is the President of Public Risk Underwriters of Texas, Inc. (PRU), an Arrowhead Programs business and part of the Public Entity practice group. PRU is a Managing General Agent specializing in professional liability for public entities. This includes law enforcement liability, public officials liability and educators legal liability. The views and opinions expressed herein are those of Mark Dillard and may not be representative of the views of PRU or Arrowhead Programs.
