My Life in Law Enforcement: A True Life Story #9 Felony Stops

Source

Hey guys and welcome back! In my last chapter we left off talking about the pursuit block of instruction and how much fun and difficult that was. In this chapter we will be talking about my experience with the felony vehicle stop block of instruction. I was actually looking forward to this one as well because hey, who doesn't like driving the cars again and getting to draw your weapons and cool stuff like that? There's a lot of role playing in rookie school and this block is no exception.

As with many of the blocks of instruction, we were tested by a written exam as well as a practical exam. On this particular block, we were graded on calling in the felony stop via radio, positioning of the patrol cars and executing the arrest. We had the opportunity to play two roles, one as a primary officer and one as a back-up officer. This might not sound too bad but when you factor in nervousness and your suspect is off duty cops that are purposely going to give you a hard time, it was pretty challenging.

I had the radio traffic down, that was no problem because I worked hard on my own time trying to memorize everything. We couldn't really practice positioning the patrol cars because the suspect wasn't going to stop perfectly for us in a straight-a-way every time. I mean, we could visualize what our cars were supposed to look like in relation to the suspects car but it didn't always work out like that. The off duty cops were also very creative when role playing and enjoyed making things interesting, which was good experience for us because these things rarely go smoothly anyway. They would often resist arrest or refuse to do something we ordered them to do just to see how we would react. They might start resisting and then act like they had a medical condition, which is very likely to happen in the field.

This was the worst part of the damn thing. There was a beautiful female off duty cop there that we had to search when we arrested her and she was known to hide weapons on her body. She was famous for getting out of handcuffs and killing cadets because they failed to find the weapon on her. When searching females, we were allowed to touch/search everywhere on their body BUT we had to use the back of our hands when going over the breasts and genitalia. The director made it crystal clear that if she felt like any cadet was sexually groping her during this exercise that the cadet would be removed from the program and arrested... Okay, now with just being told all of that, how nervous do you think I was when searching her? Oh and she wasn't dressed very conservative either. She was wearing tight jeans with a very provocative top to boot! It was a bitter sweet moment let me tell ya.

Source

How did the Bandito do? I arrested her, searched her and placed her in the back of my car. She was giving me a hard time by trying to jerk away from me and stuff. I found a knife on her but no gun. While giving commands to the passenger in the suspect vehicle, I caught her trying to get the handcuffs in front of her body, she also had a .22 derringer pistol in the palm of her hand. While my partner was covering the other suspects, I dealt with the female. She almost got us. I failed to find the gun on her but she failed to shoot us with it like she has with previous cadets. I begged her to tell me where she hid that gun because I thought that I covered every inch of her body. But, when you use the back of your hand, you lose a lot of feeling. And if you're wearing leather search gloves, it's very plausible to miss contraband on someone, even if it's not a pro like her.

I've been dying to tell ya'll this story since I started this series so here goes! We had some people in our class that let's just say... didn't use the best judgement all the time and getting hired on somewhere would be a miracle in it'self. Well, two of these people decided to practice felony stops with each other after class at the male subjects house. Okay, the problem with this is that he lives in the city limits and these two idiots start doing felony vehicle stops in the middle of the street! Can you imagine what people were thinking when they saw a man pointing a gun at a woman, yelling at her to get on the ground in the middle of the road? Well, needless to say that the police department was called to the area and due to the number of calls and severity of the call, the police deployed their SWAT team...yeah. So numerous officers set up a perimeter around them and LUCKILY an officer that was there was also an instructor in rookie school and recognized the two special cadets and figured out what they were doing. Can you say WTF were you thinking?

The next day the entire class was in shock and was wondering if they would be kicked out or not. I was almost certain that they would be and the director even said that they probably would be. BUT, the officer that recognized him actually went to bat for the two cadets and suggested that they at least get to finish the program. Me personally, I would have sent them packing right then and there because they displayed extreme poor judgement and they're in the wrong profession to be lacking in that department. But the stars lined up for them and they were able to finish the course. Although to my knowledge, neither one of them ever got hired on anywhere, surprise, surprise. Things like that will follow you around everywhere you go for your entire career. And after graduation day, you have exactly one year to find an agency to swear you in and hold your certification for you or else you will have to go back through rookie school again. An agency can swear you in and hold your cert for you without actually hiring you...if they want to. Those guys were going to be hard pressed to find an agency to take on that liability.

This post is part of a series of posts that will cover a large portion of my life beginning just before starting my law enforcement career. The content and pictures posted in said articles belong to Hive account@bluelightbandit. If you haven't read the prior posts, I highly recommend that you check those out to catch up to speed, thanks!