Remember a few weeks ago when I said people make police officers nervous? This week we learned how police handle that. Basically, the answer boils down to control. Police officers want to control everything they can about a situation, from how close they stand to someone to who's talking when. The tools they use to maintain that control range from a stern voice to a loaded gun.
"People think sometimes we're rude, we're mean, we use excessive force, but there's a reason we do a lot of things we do," said Bryan Weatherford, an 18-year veteran of the RPD and the department's use of force training officer. "We need to basically be ready and prepared and know what's happening."
But even in Rosemount things can escalate. In those situations police have options ranging from batons to pepper spray to Tazers to guns, and they have strict instructions on when they should use what option. There's a chart and everything. Basically, though, the idea is to stay one step ahead of the bad guy. If they have a stick, you have a Tazer. If they have a knife, you have a gun. It sounds a little bit like Sean Connery's speech from the Untouchables (If they send one of yours to the hospital, you send one of theirs to the morgue) but fortunately nobody gets clubbed with a baseball bat.
Just about everything police are trained to do is designed to get control of people without causing permanent damage. Even when they're clubbing someone with their baton, their first option is to go for the calf, the thigh, the forearm and the upper arm, areas that have large nerve clusters but where permanent damage isn't likely. Police officers know where to find all kinds of nerve clusters and pressure points to make people do what they want. In other words, you don't want to get into a wrestling match with a cop.
Of course, if those spots don't work, Weatherford said, they're swinging for the joints.
The tool most police officers are excited about is the Tazer. It's a lot easier to carry all day than the baton, and officers can use it from as far away as 25 feet. And, as I've mentioned before in this blog, it hurts like a sumbitch without doing permanent damage. The Tazers keep track of every time the trigger is pulled, and when one of the cartridges is fired it sprays confetti-sized disks called aphids onto the ground. Those aphids can be tracked to the department or individual who bought the cartridge, so there is a record whenever police Taze someone.
Rosemount police haven't used their Tazers on a person in the year they've been carrying them -- there might have been a use on an out-of-control dog, but that wasn't entirely clear -- but most are happy to have the option.
Even when the situation seems to be under control -- when it's time to handcuff a bad guy -- things can get out of hand. John Sommers, another force training officer, said handcuffing is about the most dangerous thing police officers do on a regular basis.
"If they're going to fight, it's going to happen when you put that first cuff on," Sommers said. "They might cooperate up until, 'click-click.'"
Then, not only is someone fighting but they have a fairly heavy piece of metal swinging from their wrist.
Rosemount police don't use their guns often. When they do, it's usually just to euthanize a deer that's been hit by a car.
Rosemount police have only shot and killed one person in the city's history. That was on a domestic violence call a few years ago, when the suspect charged police with a baseball bat.
It's hard to make too many jokes about drunk driving. Rosemount police take the subject pretty seriously. If you're out on the road around closing time and police see a reason to stop you -- from weaving to speeding to a burned-out headlight -- you're probably going to get stopped. According to RPD sergeant Jim O'Leary, statistics suggest one in seven drivers on the road after midnight has a blood alcohol level over .08. O'Leary hasn't seen the evidence of that himself, but he and others figure it's better to send someone on his way with a warning than to leave a drunk driver on the road.
"The only way you get drunk drivers is to stop everything that moves," O'Leary said. "We get 'em at 10 in the morning. We get them at 2 in the afternoon. People who drink a lot, they can be over (.08) on the way to work."
Rosemount police are always on the lookout for signs of a drunk driver, and it's not always the weaving people tend to associate with drunk driving.
"It might be not dimming his headlights. Stopping before the intersection. The guys who look for them get more."
Officer David Addleman is one of the officers who look for them. He leads the department with 27 DUI arrests this year.
"Typically it's not the guy shoulder-to-shoulder hitting curbs," Addleman said. "Typically it's the little violations."
When Addleman stops someone for one of those little violations -- whether it's the intersection thing O'Leary mentioned or a broken taillight -- he is immediately on the lookout for signs someone has been drinking. He looks for glossy or bloodshot eyes. And he uses his nose.
"I'm waiting for that smell to hit me," he said. "Most of the time it won't, but on a good, still night it comes out of the car like somebody's smoking in the car."
The department has the right to seize the car of anyone convicted of a first degree DUI, but they usually won't if the person owes too much on it or if it's not worth the extra expense.
High tension
Here's the thing about being a cop: ordinary people scare the bejeebers out of you, like, all the time.
Seriously, even on what police refer to as a routine traffic stop there are about 16,000 things that can go wrong. Someone could have drugs. Someone could have a gun. Someone could try to make a run for it. And while most traffic stops actually are routine, a police officer has to be ready for all of that. So, what's a police officer to do? The answer seems to lie in the advice of Dalton, Patrick Swayze's inexplicably famous bouncer character from the classic American movie Road House: "You be nice until it's time not to be nice." In other words, be civil to everybody you stop but know in the back of your head that they could be about to pull a gun on you. So, there's a word of advice: Never do anything to make a police officer think you might be about to pull a gun on him.
"You don't want to make the police nervous," officer Jeremiah Simonson said at Thursday's Academy session.
Consider all the things a police officer goes through every time he stops a car: Even before you've pulled over, he's checking your license plates, making sure you're not a dangerous criminal. When he walks up to your car, he checks the trunk to make sure it's not open. Basically, he wants to be certain nobody's going to pop out and ambush him. And he does this EVERY TIME. Of course, if you get stopped at night you don't see that because there is a really bright spotlight shining at you. That's so you can't see where the cop is coming from. Police officers like to use their lights to make sure they can see you better than you can see them.
Even the way a police officer parks when he stops you is deliberate -- a little farther into the traffic lane than your car, so there is room to walk without worrying so much about getting hit by a car and with the wheels turned to the outside of the road so if a car does hit the squad car the squad gets pushed into the ditch, not into the officer and the car he has stopped. And just about every cop can tell you a story about nearly getting hit during a traffic stop.
"I want to be safe. I want to go home every night. That's my goal," Simonson said. "I could car less how many tickets I write.
"There's nothing routine about this job. Especially traffic stops."
It's a lot to keep track of. Trust me. I tried my hand at a simulated traffic stop Thursday and I'm pretty sure that, if it had been real, I would have died about six times. First, the driver and passenger, played all night by a pair of RPD reserve officers, got out of the car. By the time they had responded to my frantic shouts for them to stop, I had somehow stepped into traffic. Then, after being reminded to check the trunk AND to look into the car, I spotted a marijuana pipe sticking out from under the driver's seat but not the gun on the passenger side. I was completely disoriented. And I even KNEW nobody was going to come after me.
So, that's routine stops. Speeding. Broken headlights. Things like that. The kind of stop any cop makes 10 times a day. That's when it's time for cops to at least start out being nice.
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