Community for Cops
Dan Pasquale is an officer with the Tracy (Calif.) Police Department. He spends his spare time writing for PoliceMag.com
Here you are being thrust into the middle of a situation that took years to deteriorate. Now you are expected to solve it in five minutes or less because you are, in fact, the police department, right?
"We cops have the best job in the world!" How many times has each of us said this to someone during our careers? However, when was the last time you stopped to consider all the other "forgotten" benefits of this job?
Picture this: the pursuit ends with the suspect bailing out and running. You and your fellow officers set your perimeter and give chase. The bad guy gets away, and you and your buddies return to the cars to swap excuses about how you could have caught this guy "back in the day." Sound familiar?
While I can't do anything to help you pass the time during the waiting process, I can give you some tips on how to maximize your testing experience.
We all know the feeling. You catch the bad guy, book all of your evidence, and put together a great case. Now you're in court, sitting on the stand answering the district attorney's questions when he or she finally says, "no further questions."
Auto burglary and auto theft make up a huge portion of an officer's report writing time. Anyone who has ever worked dayshift knows how many of these calls come in as soon as people wake up and check on their vehicles (or where their vehicle was the night before). While taking these reports, we get to hear the "obvious" ways victims made their car look like a glowing beacon at night to burglars.
Informants can provide a wealth of information. However, that information can come at a price if you’re not careful how you deal with them. Too many officers fall into a few common traps with informants, leading to bad cases, blown operations or personal complaints against them.
We'll look into some of the best (and most common) places criminals like to hide things inside a vehicle.
Vehicle Identification Numbers (VINs) are a very useful tool in the hands of an officer with a little knowledge.
Simply put, the more information you have in a case, the better your chances of solving it. While this is common knowledge to most officers, we tend to forget that using field contacts is one of the easiest ways of gaining intelligence in our own cities.