MANCHESTER, NH – Police Chief Allen Aldenberg will be the featured guest Monday night on Supply The Why, a live Facebook webcast featuring conversations about difficult topics.
Discussion will center on how Aldenberg became head of a police department in one of the largest cities in New England, leadership styles and the ever-changing world of policing.
“My hope is that it is going to be a free-flowing discussion that will focus on a wide array of topics to include officer wellness, leadership, recruiting and retention, etc.,” Aldenberg said in an email.
Din Jenkins Sr., who will host the webcast, has been in law enforcement for 16 years, about three of them with the Manchester Police Department as a patrol officer.
Raised in Stoughton, Mass., he left Manchester in 2014 to return to his hometown and join its police department where today he holds the rank of sergeant.
Jenkins said he began Supply The Why last July focusing on leadership and cultural development by teaching people how to have difficult conversations based on facts and logic.
Topics covered include police use of force and race relations.
Jenkins, who is Black, said currently police face an era where it’s almost “you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”
He said, unfortunately, some police encounters require some unpleasantness.
“You have to match a subject’s unpleasantness with a tactic that seems unpleasant to keep everybody safe,” he said.
Jenkins said, as a crisis negotiator, he firmly believes in having a conversation with a subject to resolve a situation, but an officer still has to be prepared to take it to the next level which could mean the use of force. That, Jenkins said, is what makes it a difficult conversation, particularly now that people are so polarized.
“People really don’t want to have fact-based conversations right now,” he said.
He said the majority of time where he has worked, including Manchester, police are being “fair and impartial” in enforcing the law as it should be.
“The subject’s behavior determines the outcome,” he said. When an officer tells someone he can’t park there, or you can’t do 60 mph in a 30 mph zone and the individual owns his behavior, that is where it stays.
Everyone, he said, would like a police interaction to end with a conversation but “that isn’t even close to the case.”
Jenkins says he is passionate about diversity and fairness, said he has found “overwhelmingly” that an officer’s response to a situation, i.e. the use of force, has nothing to do with a person’s race. It is the individual’s behavior that is the determinant, he said.
At the Stoughton police department, Jenkins is in charge of training, accreditation, public records, defensive tactics and use of force, and the RAD women’s self-defense program.
He also is a member of the Metropolitan Law Enforcement Council (MetroLEC) Crisis Negotiations Team.
Jenkins earned a Master’s of Science degree in crisis and emergency management from Lasell University and is a member of the National Criminal Justice Honor Society, Alpha Phi Sigma.
His training sessions, webcasts and podcasts can be found on Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, Apple, iHeartRadio and Spotify via Supply The Why.
You can tune in to the show using this link, which airs Monday at 7 p.m. via Facebook live on the Supply the Why Facebook page.
