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A police veteran on being a cop today

Police across the country are under increased scrutiny with complaints of racial profiling and excessive force creating tensions in a number of cities, including New York, Los Angeles, California, Seattle, Washington, and Cincinnati, Ohio.

Now, some departments that have changed their tactics in response to those complaints are being criticized for not doing enough to protect their communities.

Gary Hankins is a retired 22-year veteran of the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department and former president of its Fraternal Order of Police union. He talked with CNN.com about the dilemma for police today.

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CNN: Are police officers being put in a no-win situation where they are criticized for being to aggressive and are criticized for not doing enough?

HANKINS: Undoubtedly. To put this in perspective, the names of 13,000 police officers who have died in the line of duty are inscribed on a memorial here in the District of Columbia, the National Police Memorial. Scores and scores of police officers are killed every year, hundreds are injured, many hundreds who, thank God for modern medicine and God's blessing, we don't all die.

It is a violent place out there for law enforcement, especially in urban settings. The officers who are killed and injured are, by overwhelming majorities, surprised when they are assaulted and they are killed. So, the officers really have to be on guard.

The traditional attitude of good police officers was to be active and aggressive, given what is going on. And it's happened in Cincinnati, and here [in] the District of Columbia, where the chief of police for the Metropolitan Police Department, in a completely unprecedented move with the U.S. Department of Justice, voluntarily signed a memorandum of agreement that will have the U.S. Department of Justice supervising the Metropolitan Police Department, even though there were no civil rights violations here, there were no actions against the department.

This memorandum of agreement is a model that's unfortunately been applied in a lot of other places, where an officers' every move is documented.

If I'm out on the street -- and I was, here, for 22 years and I worked drug details in some of the worst neighborhoods -- if I responded to the sound of gunfire -- and in some parts of Washington at that time that was every night --you should be damned certain that I am going to draw my weapon at the sound of the gunfire in the darkness. If I got there and nothing was found -- which unfortunately more often than not was the case because the people had fled by the time you get there -- the gun is holstered and you go back to your beat.

Under this new proposal, every time a police officer unholsters his or her weapon, they would have to file a report and that will be counted as a use of force. It will be documented, investigated by a "use of force" team, and kept in your jacket for at least 10 years.

Any complaints against the officer, even when they are unfounded or you are proven innocent, will remain in your jacket for at least 10 years. So, an officer who is active on the street -- is trying hard to get to scenes and is responding to violent or potentially violent situations and pulls his or her weapon -- is going to have a jacket full of notations that he or she pulls his or her weapon. The performance management system is going to look at these things as markers of the officer's performance that are going to affect his or her career.

If he or she becomes the subject of a complaint -- because it's a very real fact of life that what police officers do often upsets people -- when you arrest somebody and deprive them of their liberty, they're upset. When you are investigating a crime and you tell people to step away from the crime scene, [or are] issuing traffic tickets or parking tickets, you upset people. That is the nature of law enforcement, unfortunately, one part of it.

Now, under the new system [the Justice Department] wants to put in place here and the FOP here is fighting, officers would have all of this documented, and if a person complained and said, "He wrote me a ticket for no reason," and didn't even give his name, that anonymous complaint would remain in my file for 10 years.

When it comes time for promotion, the active officer, who is the one who is the most effective at protecting the community, is going to be the least likely to be promoted. When he or she goes to court [to testify], under recent court decisions defense attorneys have the opportunity to go into my personnel file and say, "Did you know Officer Hankins drew his weapon 300 times in the last five years?" and paint a picture of an out-of-control officer, which is not the case at all.

So what is going on in Cincinnati, and what the Justice Department is trying to put in place here in the District of Columbia, is essentially a wonderful theoretical model by a bunch of attorneys inside their Justice Department offices, people who have never been on the streets, people who never faced what police officers face, and people who in my mind clearly do not have an inkling of what law enforcement and police work is like out there.

They are putting in place a philosophy of management that is going to encourage police officers to become passive, and the last thing any community wants is a bunch of passive police officers. You want officers to be professionally, responsibly aggressive in order to keep your streets safe.