NJSACOP Continues to Reach Out for Global Perspective in Police Leadership
2025 Senior Leader Course conducted in cooperation with the Scottish Police College and Police Scotland
The NJSACOP has a well-earned reputation for offering our members and other stakeholders cutting-edge professional development opportunities and fresh perspectives on contemporary issues. One of our Association’ s key strategies in delivering such opportunities is looking beyond the traditional topics, presenters, venues, and methods of law enforcement professional development and education. While of course we have an enormous wealth of talent, knowledge and experience right here in our own backyard, we naturally do not have a monopoly on these assets. Accordingly, we continually seek out the best that can be found from across our borders— whether those borders are local, state, national— or even international.
Professional and personal growth benefits from looking beyond the routine, the comfortable, the local; in short, from being open to new experiences, information and perspectives. The 15 police executives that attended the 2025 NJSACOP Senior Leadership Seminar did just that, and much more. The program, conducted in conjunction with the Greater Manchester Police was held July 06-13, 2025 in Tulliallan and Edinburgh, Scotland.
In putting together the agenda for the program, we were able to take advantage of the close links we’ ve forged over the past several years with our international colleagues. The result was an agenda that included a rich mix of exceptional practitioners and police educators, as well as the opportunity to make several site visits of great interest to our group of law enforcement professionals.
The limited registration for this seminar served to maximize the interactive nature of the learning experience. The agenda was broken down into multiple units, with a special emphasis on Leadership, Public Trust, Recruitment and Retention, Multi-Agency Approach to Counter-Terrorism, De-escalation, and Use of Force Management. This focus was not chose at random; on the one hand, New Jersey’ s law enforcement leaders have been confronted with these challenges in ways not readily imaginable just a few short years ago, while public safety professionals in Scotland have been dealing with these issues for decades. They have drawn many lessons from these experiences and are more than eager to share these lessons. The specific information provided on plans, tactics, strategies, mistakes, successes, and the like were interesting and useful, even more importantly was the chance for our attendees to look at these topics from another perspective and to challenge their own thoughts and assumptions.
While this seminar stands on its own, it also fits into the overall NJSACOP professional development portfolio. Participants receive units that can be used towards qualification for the Accredited Chief / Command Executive certification designation, a statewide, voluntary professional credentialing program instituted and administered by the NJSACOP.
The New Jersey Police Chief Magazine | Summer 2025
Planning is underway for the 2026 Senior Leaders Seminar in conjunction with the Police Service of Northern Ireland.
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