With a new head of the department in place, the Michigan State Police is looking to modernize.
Colonel Joe Gasper was on WKAR’s Off the Record. He says they’re looking to take some components of a traditional paramilitary agency – like discipline and chain of command – and combine those with empowering troopers to make more decisions.
“As we’re looking at how we’re going to conduct training in the future, we need to look at what the current generations and future generations are going to want because they are our future.”
Gasper says he wants to decentralize decision making within the department. That means local outlets would make their own decisions about what’s best for their community instead of everything going through central command. He calls it a leader-leader philosophy instead of a leader-follower philosophy.