Gordon Graham remembers when checking a license plate took eight to 10 minutes.
An officer radioed the number. A dispatcher wrote it down and worked through a process involving punched paper before a response came back. An out-of-state registration could take much longer.
Now, Graham watches officers get impatient when information takes a few seconds. “We get so spoiled with dependability,” he said.
At IACP, the Lexipol co-founder and retired California Highway Patrol veteran asked police leaders to consider what happens when that dependable system stops working.
“What would you do if this system went down?”
During the “Mission Ready: Leadership for What Comes Next” session, Graham examined how agencies choose technology and prepare employees to work through failures. He pointed to T-Mobile’s T-Priority while discussing officers’ need to get and share information quickly, particularly when their safety depends on it.
He connected those decisions to his “10 Fs”: faith, family, friends, food, fun, funds, fitness, function, freedom and fulfillment. The framework covers life beyond the badge, including maintaining close relationships and planning for retirement. Graham concentrated this discussion on function and fulfillment: chiefs’ responsibilities to their people and the meaning they find in carrying them out.
Graham’s interest in preparing officers began with a gap in his own knowledge.
In 1977, after a fatal Los Angeles police shooting brought attention to PCP, he watched experts discuss the drug on television. He was a motorcycle officer who knew little about it and worried about what would happen if he encountered someone under its influence. He wrote down the experts’ names, found their offices and showed up without appointments. They agreed to speak with him.
Graham turned his notes into a pocket-size officer survival guide and made 40 copies for fellow motorcycle officers. His captain wanted it distributed throughout the office, along with briefings. Presentations at other offices followed, then an assignment to narrate a training video.
He had identified something officers needed to know and found a way to get the information to them.
Decades later, Graham challenged the chiefs in the room to examine the gaps in their own agencies. Here are five takeaways from his presentation and the audience discussion.
1. Test whether your backup plan works
Agencies have more connectivity options than ever. The challenge is knowing whether those resources will work together when something fails.
“Having a backup is not the same as being resilient,” Graham said.
A backup connection needs to work where officers need it. Personnel also need to know how to use it.
Graham encouraged leaders to ask employees how they would respond to an outage, then keep asking what they would do next. Those conversations should be supported by testing inside buildings and in rural areas, where service may differ from what officers experience elsewhere.
Major incidents and disasters also need to be part of that preparation.
Graham tied that to T-Priority.
“I want people getting information quick, not just the coverage, but also the capacity to give that information back and forth very, very quick,” he said.
Graham said the risks are visible before they hit.
“There are zero black swans out there, folks,” Graham said. “All of our problems are gray rhinos. They’re coming right at us. You can see them coming. You can do something about it.”
2. Train for the failures that leave no time to think
In motorcycle school, Graham’s instructors repeatedly drilled riders on how to respond to a front-tire failure.
A rider might rarely encounter that emergency. If it happened, there would be little time to work through the options.
Graham described those situations as “core critical tasks”: events that are “very risky, done very rarely, with no time to think.”
“These are the ones that need the constant ongoing training,” Graham said.
He also recalled lessons about helicopter tail rotor failures and fires aboard submarines. The people confronting those emergencies need to respond immediately, even if they have never experienced one outside training.
Graham recommended identifying those tasks within each assignment and regularly asking personnel “what would you do if” questions.
Technology failures belong in that training. Officers who seldom work without a dependable system may have little experience using the alternative.
3. Get qualified advice before buying
Graham questioned whether agencies have a qualified chief technology officer or simply someone who knows more about technology than everyone else in the room.
“Just because someone knows more about tech than you do does not mean they’re a chief technology officer,” Graham said.
He recommended consulting subject matter experts before committing money and asking how a purchase will fit the agency’s needs over time.
“What’s the lifespan on this? Is it compatible with everything else we’ve got?” Graham asked.
Graham pointed to agencies with a million dollars’ worth of software sitting on a shelf and questioned support arrangements that leave police sharing IT personnel with other municipal departments. His example: A printer goes down at the jail in the middle of the night, and the IT person is also covering libraries, parks and recreation and the fire service.
Cost doesn’t have to be the barrier, Graham pointed out.
“You don’t have to invest a lot of money to get some good solid technology,” he said, adding that grants are available.
Training expert and veteran law enforcement officer Dale Stockton cautioned against letting uncertainty keep agencies from using technology they can afford.
“I think the biggest risk today is doing nothing,” Stockton said.
He described a small sheriff’s office operating on a six-figure budget that couldn’t afford rugged laptops. Instead, the agency used smartphones to handle work officers would typically perform across several devices.
The phones served as body-worn and in-car cameras, translation tools and report dictation devices. They also functioned as the deputies’ in-car and office computers, and as access credentials for the courthouse.
The agency had built much of its daily workflow around a device deputies could carry with them, without the cost of equipping every patrol vehicle with a rugged laptop.
4. Make sure officers understand what they sign
An audience question about AI-assisted police reports brought Graham back to the judgment of the person using the technology.
“I want people to use artificial intelligence, but I also want them to understand how to think,” he said.
He questioned whether officers producing polished reports with AI were reviewing the contents before signing them.
“They can’t put a sentence together personally, and they’re turning out these dynamite reports,” Graham said.
Stockton discussed AI’s potential to search years of investigative information for a distinctive case detail. He compared it to asking how many books in a library have the word “alligator” on the fourth page. His warning concerned relying on its output without verification, including in grant compliance reports.
“Somebody needs to be reviewing those reports,” Stockton said, because agencies are responsible for those federal dollars.
Graham compared the report-writing problem to one that existed before AI. Officers copied a previous report, changed some details and left information from the earlier incident in the new narrative.
The officer signing the report still needed to understand its contents and confirm that it accurately described what happened.
5. Give people room to identify problems
Graham expected employees to acknowledge mistakes honestly so the agency could address them. He also distinguished mistakes from misconduct.
He asked whether a cop can “do incredibly stupid things and keep your job so long as you tell the truth.” As a CHP sergeant, Graham said he handled two incidents on the same day. In one, an officer’s gun went off unintentionally during a freeway traffic stop, and the round ricocheted off the pavement and killed a man. The officer told Graham the whole truth and kept his job. In the other, an officer backing out of a parking lot broke a taillight on another car and lied about it. He was fired.
His message to employees: He expects mistakes, expects them to own up and tell him directly what happened, and the agency will deal with it.
Graham knew the reception that could await someone returning from a conference with an idea.
“Let me tell you exactly what’s gonna happen on Monday,” Graham said. “This won’t work. This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. Who do you think you are?”
Then comes the institutional defense.
“Are you aware our organization has existed for over 100 years without your advice?”
Graham encountered that resistance during his own career, writing memo after memo as he tried to put what he was learning into practice.
He called attendees “5 percenters,” describing people who want to improve their organizations. In any room of cops, firefighters or paramedics, he said, 80 or 85% will do what they’re told and 5%, maybe 10, “want to change the world.” As chiefs, they had the authority to consider changes that employees elsewhere in the organization might struggle to get heard.
“You are the women and men who can do something when you get back to work,” Graham said.
What will your dash represent?
Graham told attendees he had delivered five eulogies the previous year. He builds them around Linda Ellison’s poem “The Dash.” When preparing them, he thinks about the dash between the birth and death dates on a headstone.
“So what’s your dash gonna be?” he asked.
He asked the chiefs whether every day on the job offers a chance to change someone’s life and called that “a big deal.” He pointed to accomplishments people in the room might never be able to discuss publicly. Someone may have helped stop a terrorist attack. Someone may have arrested a serial rapist. A dispatcher may have helped a parent save a choking child. “If that’s all you do, have you done something good?” he asked.
Graham described himself as “just a motorcycle cop.” Then he recalled a traffic stop that became a childbirth emergency.
A driver had been speeding through Los Angeles. When Graham approached the car, the man kept pointing toward the back seat. A woman was giving birth.
Graham called for help. He could see a foot and remembered enough from academy training to recognize a breech birth, a serious complication. As he waited for paramedics, he feared the mother and baby might die.
Then he heard the sirens.
Paramedics arrived and delivered the baby. Afterward, one of the paramedics told Graham the mother wanted his name. She wanted to name her son after him.
Decades later, Graham still wondered about that child. He imagined the mother passing the intersection with her son and explaining why she had named him Gordon.
“Maybe that’ll be my dash,” Graham said.
Then he turned back to the chiefs.
“You’ve got an obligation to do this stuff,” Graham said. “This is your function.”
