This New Year's message is in lieu of our Weekly Update Newsletter.
Greetings to All OACP Members,
I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and were able to celebrate with family, friends, or even your staff. For those of you who had to work on the holiday, thank you for your service; and thank your families for giving you up to help keep our communities safe. For many of us in law enforcement, Christmas and other Holidays are not spent on the actual day but at other times when we can be off work. If they are spent on the day, oftentimes it is a brief "pop-in" while in uniform for a meal and a little celebration, at least until the next radio call. Most people don't understand the sacrifices, challenges, and things that we do as public safety professionals, or they take for granted the normalcy they have that we don't. Again, my sincere thanks to all of you and your staff!
Well, 2021 is almost done. I remember so well all the sentiment at the end of 2020 saying that "2021 will most certainly be better - it has to be by comparison." I, for one, can say 2021 was better(ish) than 2020, but definitely had some of the same challenges and some new ones as well. I think we all can say that public safety and, in particular, law enforcement is, or has, entered a new era. For those of you like me with 30+ years in the business, we have seen many changes since we started. In my opinion, over the last couple of years the changes and swings in support have been the most drastic. It has never been so difficult to find, hire, and retain officers and staff than it is now. I wish I could identify one reason for this but there are many and several are out of our control. And yet we endeavor to make our profession the best it can be and keep our lines of succession full of good people who are ready to take our places, especially through our efforts at the OACP.
In preparing this message, the staff at the Victory Group provided me with the following information from 2021:
• New Active members: 23 Active Members (Jan: 8, May: 4, July: 6 and Sept: 5)
• New Associate members: 24 Assoc. Members (Jan: 12, May: 2, July: 1 and Sept.: 9)
• Retired members from past year: 17
• Number of those serving on committees: 64
• Money raised with all Job Postings from past year: $5,900
• Total registrations for all virtual training: 421 (ELTS: 224, Annual Conf: 149, Fall Conf: 48)
• Total (approximate) messages sent out this past year: 310
These numbers will undoubtedly continue to grow as I know of several people who are either retiring in 2022, thinking about it, or retiring in the next five years. Of course, some of those will come out of retirement for a short time and some will announce their third retirement (congrats Geoff Spalding, we'll see if this is the last one
