Specialized Units: Legal Liability and Best Practices

Specialized units can play an essential role in addressing public safety challenges when those units are properly composed, effectively supervised, and the officers assigned to them are given very clear mission statements.  On the other hand, when these units have become too special to be effectively supervised, they have resulted in some of the most damaging scandals in American policing over the last few decades.

The misconduct within specialized units like the SCORPION Unit in Memphis, the Gun Trace Task Force in Baltimore, the Rampart CRASH Unit in Los Angeles, and others have done tremendous damage to their departments in the court of law and the court of public opinion.  These scandals, at their most fundamental level, tended to result from poor selection, supervision, and accountability for members of specialized units.

For any law enforcement professionals who believe that specialized units have and can continue to serve a crucial role in fighting crime in their communities, it is imperative to make sure that these units are formed and run the right way. 

In this two-hour webinar, Attorney Matt Dolan will provide attendees with practical guidelines to consider in order to minimize legal liability and loss of public trust in conducting specialized unit operations while maximizing their effectiveness in improving public safety.  

This webinar training will include guidance on:

• Properly articulating unit goals, guidelines and rules of engagement before deployment
• Ensuring personnel selection practices that assign the right officers to specialized units
• Coordinating with prosecutors to ensure that there is cooperation and buy in for the unit’s stated objectives and planned operations