Also by Dan Pasquale

Be prepared for things to go south on every contact you make. You never know when you’ll need to take chase or pull your gun at a moment’s notice.

Like any other common task, accident investigations can become a bit routine for most patrol officers. Important details can be inadvertently missed as we try to finish up to get to the next call.

There is a saying in law enforcement, "We deal with 10 percent of the population 90 percent of the time." And whoever said it first had to be a patrol officer.

One of the most ignored aspects of our work is report writing. But it shouldn’t be. Whether we are patrol officers or investigators, we write reports each and every day. And these reports stay with us from the day we write them all the way through the court process and beyond.

Officers can become too reliant on the new technology to do their job, and can easily forget that an officer’s job is still 90 percent common sense and know-how.

While the old standby techniques certainly have their place in today’s police work, technology and new improvements have created some exciting new ways to track criminals and solve crime.

By remembering and practicing a few little techniques, we can keep crime scenes as clean as a rookie’s uniform.

So, the next time that radio buzzes with an officer asking for help, resist the urge to pick it up and answer. Just head that way and get there.

Car stops are a daily occurrence for most patrol officers. Whether in a big city or out in the country, a traffic stop is at the very root of what we do. And like most activities that we consider “routine,” we can get a little complacent on traffic stops and put ourselves on “auto pilot” without even realizing it. That’s a bad move on our part.