Search Result: Officer Safety

While we're a far cry from replacing man with machine, technological innovations have vastly improved the safety, speed, and accuracy with which today's patrol officers do their jobs.

Foot pursuits by their very nature are emotionally charged and dangerous events that occur frequently in police work. Law enforcement officers must balance their obligation to enforce laws and arrest perpetrators with their personal safety.

Most threats against police officers are verbal threats used to control, harass, and intimidate the officer. But situations involving threats at the next level—where violence is a grave possibility—are different.

Enforcing the law is inherently dangerous. Therefore, developing bad officer safety habits is like playing Russian roulette: You can only beat the odds for so long-then you take a bullet.

Officer safety remains a paramount concern even if some choose to ignore it. We are losing our basic skills by relying too much on modern toys to do our jobs for us. In today's world, one of the biggest unrecognized threats to officer safety and survival is technology.

Cops are cursed by a tragic mix of impatience, skewed priorities, and self-preservation instincts that sometimes fail to rise to those of a drunken frat boy. As a result, traffic collisions have for decades been one of the top two causes of officer fatalities.

When called to suicide scenes, emergency personnel don't always know what they're up against. With some 90 percent of chemical suicides posting warnings on the windows of the cars and rooms in which they kill themselves, one would hope that officers and firefighters would think twice before opening doors and breaching windows.

We search people in a variety of field situations and legal circumstances. As far as officer safety skills are concerned, I believe pat search techniques to be one of the most critical skills given too little emphasis in training, and therefore worthy of analysis.

Caught between diminishing tax revenues and citizen demand for greater police protection, law enforcement leveraged the challenge onto the backs of its patrol personnel. By splitting two-officer units into separate cars, police agencies were able to effectively double the area of patrol coverage.

Searching people in a standing position is something deputies and officers do every day. As such, officer safety is a primary concern. View this photo gallery for a step-by-step approach to help you safely conduct a pat-down or Terry search for weapons. Read the full article, "Safe Searching: The Standing Basic Search." Photos courtesy of Sgt. James Harbison.