Supervisor suffering from cognitive decline
To start this off, some context.
I work for a security team that travels to different locations to make apprehensions in co-operation with police. My supervisor is approximately 73 years old.
My supervisor is displaying signs of cognitive decline such as poor memory, spontaneous outbursts of anger and poor judgement amongst other symptoms.
Due to the nature of this job, it puts us at risk.
Example 1: My supervisor, two coworkers and a person we are training are in a room. The two coworkers are joking with each other. The supervisor is writing a report on the computer. One minute it’s fine, the next minute my supervisor is yelling at them saying “shut the fuck up and get out” and many variations of the same thing. He also threatened to go to his supervisor to report it.
(This doesn’t make sense because speaking to your coworkers in such a manner constitutes workplace violence and telling jokes is more of just a poor use of time.)
Example 2: We have a very limited use of force policy that basically only allows us to lightly guide suspects. So on this day the big wigs from head office are in our site and we’re training people. Two reasons to be extra careful about our activities. We are placing a suspect under arrest and they begin resisting. My supervisor gets into a tug of war over a bag full of merchandise, in front of one of the head office employees. He basically put us all at risk of being fired and had to come clean to his supervisor.
Example 3: We arrest a minor suspect. The law states that in any case of arrest by security or a civilian police are to be called immediately. My supervisor made up this tracking sheet to catalogue arrests. Despite it being a known fact by all of us, he wasted about 20 minutes looking through the same drawer over and over. The whole time we told him we will find the sheet and that he needs to call the police. He refuses to call the police until he has a made up tracking sheet that doesn’t supersede the law. He goes to print a new tracking sheet and I check the same drawer he was looking in and find the sheet almost immediately.
I am not sure how to confront this issue without creating a problem for myself and my employment. I cannot address this issue to my supervisor as he will just take it as an insult and try and retaliate against me by penalizing me and scheduling me at inopportune times and locations.
I am unsure of what would happen if I reached out to his supervisor. That is a Pandora’s box situation. Him and his supervisor have a (work appropriate) relationship that goes back over a decade. I am unsure of if she would take that claim as insubordination.
This leaves me wondering how I should address this so that there isn’t any blowback on me but the issue is confronted.
I can’t cite the previous 3 examples when addressing it if I go to his supervisor as we are required to report violations within 24 hours of them occurring.
If you’ve read this far, I want to thank you for sticking with it. I know this is a lot of shit to read from a stranger.
TLDR: How to address a supervisor who is experiencing cognitive decline where it is presenting a risk to my job security by me tolerating it?
Posted May 1, 2026, 3:52 AM UTC