The end
I probably had four main reasons for attending the Rosemount Police Department's Citizens' Academy.
As someone who covers the police department, I wanted to know more about what officers do on a day-to-day basis. I feel like I had a decent big-picture idea of a cop's workday life before the first day of class seven weeks ago, but I was amazed at all the small details I knew nothing about. It might not seem like a lot, but I was fascinated by small details like the fact a police officer making a traffic stop will park his car farther into traffic than the car he's stopping as protection from traffic. Or that he checks to make sure the trunk is closed every time he approaches, just in case there's some kind of ambush. In Rosemount.
I also wanted the police department to know me a little better. Ruben Rosario, the Pioneer Press columnist who has spent a couple of decades covering police issues, said at last night's graduation that, like him or hate him, he wants the police departments he writes about to respect his work. I don't need everybody in the RPD to be my good friend, but if I ever have to write a negative story about the department I want them to know who I am and where I'm coming from and that I've taken the time to get to know at least a little bit what being a cop is all about.
Maybe most important, though, I thought the whole thing would be fun. One of my co-workers went through a recent citizens' academy put on by the Farmington Police Department and had a great time. That's a big part of the reason I signed up. And I had a great time, too. The little details of a police officer's day were interesting, but so was just getting to know the officers better and seeing the enthusiasm they have for their jobs.
Finally, I thought I could write a good story. I wasn't sure when I started exactly what form that story would take, although I had some ideas. The idea for this blog came up pretty early on, and I've had a lot of fun with it. It's been a good way to ease into my day on Friday mornings and the feedback I've gotten -- both from other class members who have checked it or from the numbers of page views I've gotten -- has been rewarding. Hopefully it all made sense. In the true spirit of writing a blog, I spent little to no time in the editing process.
The title of this post isn't entirely accurate. I'm not completely done with this blog. Part of this class is a ride-along with a police officer, and I plan to take advantage of that and I expect to have one or two good stories to tell when I'm done, likely about how terrifying it is when a police officer decides he needs to get somewhere fast.
Until then, thanks for reading.
Oh, and one final not about this blog: You can have one too, if you want. The system I'm using is owned by our parent company, Forum Communications, and it's there for all of our readers to set up blogs. It also gives us the ability to feature local blogs on our web page at www.rosemounttownpages.com. So start one if you've got something to say. It's not hard. And if you do, let us know. We'll make you an online star. You know, assuming 20 or 30 views a day is enough to make someone a star.
Posted by: nathanhansen on 10/27/2006 at 8:22 AM | Comments (4) | Permalink
To my classmates
I've had a lot of fun sharing my experiences in the Citizens' Police Academy, but now I'd like to share some of yours. I'd like to put a story in our printed paper Nov. 2 and I'd like to talk to some of you about what you think of the whole experience. I'll try to talk to some of you at graduation next week but I also invite you to call me when you have a chance. You can reach me at 651-460-6606. Or, if you'd rather not actually talk to me, you can leave comments here or e-mail me at editor@rosemounttownpages.com.
Posted by: nathanhansen on 10/20/2006 at 9:30 AM | Comments (0) | Permalink
Control (No, not the Janet Jackson song)
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."
It's Weatherford's job, at least in part, to get
officers ready for just about anything. Most situations officers can
deal with, especially in a city like Rosemount, don't require anything
more than a commanding voice. 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.
Posted by: nathanhansen on 10/20/2006 at 8:53 AM | Comments (0) | Permalink
Command center
The dispatch center at the Eagan Police Department looks a little bit
like a cross between the command center from War Games and the comic
strip Dilbert. Dispatchers -- there are as many as four on duty at any
one time -- sit in the kind of cubicles that are familiar to just about
anyone who has ever worked in an office, but each work station is
decked out with four flat screen computer monitors and the software
dispatchers need to keep track of every Rosemount and Eagan police
officer who is on duty and to get those officers the information they
need to respond to calls for help.
On top of each cube there is a small cylinder with three lights. The
light shows red if one of the dispatchers are is on the radio, blue if
she is on the phone and amber if an officer is calling in.
Ten televisions hang on the wall. Eight are showing feeds from security
cameras around Eagan's city hall. One of the other two, both of which
have the sound muted, is tuned to the Fox News channel's O'Reilly
factor, the other to My Name is Earl.
If you're a Rosemount resident and you call police after hours this is
where your call comes, although it won't for more than about another
year. Sometime next year something called the Dakota Communications
Center will open and dispatchers from all over the county will go to
work there. You can see the building going up now near the corner of
Highway 3 and 160th Street.
With the software dispatchers have at their fingertips it doesn't much
matter where the dispatchers are sitting when the calls come in. On one
screen they can open a map of Rosemount to pinpoint addresses. On
another they can type instructions and information that is sent
directly to computers in police officers' cars. Others track the status
of officers. As Academy students stand in the dispatch center on a
Thursday night we can hear as frustrated Rosemount officers try to
chase down a horse that has gotten loose near the city's northern
border. If you call 911 on your cell phone the dispatcher's screen
shows not just your name and phone number but your current latitude and
longitude.
There is a generator to keep things running in case the power goes out,
and there's a backup generator in case the first one goes down.
Apparently they believe in preparing for the worst.
Things can get a little hectic, too. Maybe not
turn-on-the-generator-and-cower-in-the-corner bad, but busy. A few days
ago a dispatcher here talked a woman through childbirth. So, yes, that
actually happens.
Like I said, though, all of this is changing. Where Eagan currently has
space for four dispatchers, the new Dakota Communications Center, which
will dispatch officers and county sheriff's deputies all over Dakota
County, will have space for 19. Presumably, things will get even higher
tech. I'm guessing it will look like a cross between the command center
in Jurassic Park and The Office.
Posted by: nathanhansen on 10/20/2006 at 8:32 AM | Comments (0) | Permalink
Hello ossifer
You know that test they do on cop movies and TV shows to find out if someone's been drinking? Apparently, real cops don't actually do that. Apparently, they think it's too mean, and there are other, better ways to find out if someone's had a few too many.
Apparently, in other words, I've wasted a whole lot of time practicing my backwards alphabet.
ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA.
That actually took me a whole lot longer than it should have.
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."
There are three main tests Addleman or any other officer will do on someone he suspects has been drinking. The first, and typically the most reliable, is something called the eye gaze nystagmus. It involves the suspected drunk driver following the officer's finger or the tip of a pen with his eyes. A sober person will typically follow the pen smoothly without moving his head. A drunk's eyes, because they don't focus well, will jump and skip. Held at the periphery, a drunk's eyes will twitch and shake like Michael J. Fox in a windstorm.
According to O'Leary, studies have shown that if someone makes at least four mistakes on the eye gaze test there is a 77 percent chance their blood alcohol content is at least .08. If someone is really experienced at the test, O'Leary said, they can make a pretty accurate estimate of blood alcohol content from this test alone.
For lack of a more colorful name, we'll call the second test the one-legged stand. Like the name suggests, it involves standing on one leg and kicking the other out in front, holding it about six inches off the ground, then counting aloud to 30. Kind of like a particularly lazy Rockette.
Some people will fail this test before they really start, lifting their foot while the officer is demonstrating even though they've been told to wait.
"Not following instructions is one of our clues," O'Leary said.
Assuming they make it to the leg-lifting part, a drunk won't make it far. They'll lose their balance or lose their place in their counting. 
For the sake of comparison, one of the Academy students who demonstrated this particular test is a retiree who recently had cancer surgery. So, it can be done.
After the leg lift is another balance test probaly familiar to cop show regulars. It involves walking nine heel-to-toe steps, pivoting and walking back. If someone's been drinking he'll likely miss his toe with his heel, get off his line or just forget what he's doing.
"Sometimes they just keep walking," Addleman said. "I've had a guy go 28 steps. I just let them keep going."
There are more tests, and if a suspect is being cooperative the officer might keep doing them. They don't do the backwards alphabet thing, but officers will use the alphabet, asking subjects to recite starting at a letter other than A and ending at a letter other than Z. If a person is drunk he will probably lose his place or forget to stop. He might also start singing, which is typically a pretty good clue for police.
Police might also ask suspects to count backwards, stopping somewhere other than zero.
If the field sobriety tests suggest someone's been drinking police will give a preliminary breath test. The PBT results aren't admissible in court, but they'll give police a pretty accurate indication of whether someone's over the legal limit. Fail it and you'll almost certainly be arrested and taken to to police station for an Intoxilyzer test.
The Intoxilyzer is the legally-admissible test. The box sits on the counter in the RPD's intake area but the department can't do much more than turn it on and ask someone to blow into it. The machine checks itself regularly, and if there are problems and if any show up it's the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension that takes care of them. There are ways to throw the machine off -- mouthwash has an effect, as does not wrapping your lips tightly around the mouthpiece. Police know about those, though, and they watch for them. Suggestions that putting a penny in your mouth will throw off the machine, though, are pure urban myth.
Fail an intoxilyzer test and you're really in trouble. That's when you get the DUI. That's when you pay hefty fines and lose your license and, if you're especially persistent with your drinking and driving, your car. Getting a DUI will cost you a lot of money, but it won't typically do much for the RPD's bottom line. The department usually gets about one third of the money paid for drunk driving fines, but thanks to paperwork and other issues very little of it makes it into the department's budget.
"We're not into it to make money," O'Leary said. "If we break even we're doing good."
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.
I've seen all of these tests. Two RPD reserves and one of the department's community service officers volunteered for one of the cushiest jobs the department can offer. They spent three hours Thursday drinking gin and vodka at the department's expense. Nobody got falling-down drunk. Most got to the stage of drunkenness where EVERYTHING was funny. Even at .04, though, they had trouble with the tests. Nobody quite made it to .08, but none felt comfortable driving, either.
DUI facts
According to O'Leary, 43 percent of traffic fatalities in Minnesota are alcohol-related. Nationwide, alcohol-related accidents cost about $114.3 billion.
Police departments in Dakota County recently won a national award for a program in which officers from every department in the county cooperate twice a month to focus enforcement on a particular problem area in the county. In its first year the program has resulted in more than 200 arrests.
Posted by: nathanhansen on 10/13/2006 at 9:28 AM | Comments (1) | Permalink
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.
Felony stops, though? Those are a different story.
On felony stops -- when police stop a stolen car, or when the driver tries to get away -- police know from the beginning they're going to arrest everybody in the car. There's no time to be nice then.
Felony stops involve a lot of yelling by police officers and, hopefully, a lot of people in the stopped car doing exactly what they are told. It also involves a shotgun, which, if I were in the stopped car, would make me want to do what I was told.Felony stops also appear to involve a fair amount of discomfort for the people being arrested. Lots of kneeling on the pavement and getting handcuffed. But then, it's a lot easier to apologize for a little rough behavior than it is to deal with someone coming after you.
And you think traffic stops sound fun? How about searching an empty building for someone who may or may not be hiding there and who may or may not want to hurt you?
Rosemount police respond to security alarms or reports of open doors just about every day. When they do, its up to the officers to search the building and make sure there's nobody there who's not supposed to be.
Sometimes, particularly when the alarm comes from a home, the search is relatively uneventful. Other times -- say, in the middle of the night with no lights on -- things get a little tense. You know those scenes in movies where a SWAT team is searching a building with their flashlights and their guns? It's a lot like that but with, at least in Rosemount, a much lower chance of a serial killer being involved.
Even in Rosemount, though, tensions can get a little high. More than one officer, during a building search at Dakota County Technical College, has been startled by one of the fashion department's fully-clothed mannequins. And officer Tim Murphy, who helped lead Thursday's building search session, admitted to once almost putting a bullet through a cardboard cutout at the city's movie theater.
Even Thursday, when I knew the person hiding was a reserve officer and not likely to try and take me out, I was a little on edge. Searching through the parks and recreation office with an unloaded handgun was like the most intense game of hide and seek ever.
Posted by: nathanhansen on 10/05/2006 at 9:50 PM | Comments (3) | Permalink
CSI: Rosemount. Or maybe not.
So, you know that fancy stuff they do on CBS's 30 or so Crime Scene Investigations shows? Stuff like, as a recent episode synopsis explains, using a victim's actual blood as part of a to-scale recreation of a crime scene and regularly doing the forensics equivalent of finding a needle in a needlestack? Yeah, that doesn't happen so much in Rosemount.
Rosemount police have some of the same tools those fictional characters use. They can take fingerprints and make molds of footprints or knife slashes. They know how to look at blood spatters and read the story they tell. It's just they usually don't.
According to investigator Henry Cho, Rosemount police usually don't take a fingerprint unless a felony has been committed. And even when they do it's not like on TV where they feed the prints into a desktop-sized supercomputer and get the bad guy's address spit out on their screen.
For Rosemount police, investigations mostly include conducting interviews. Interviews with victims. Interviews with witnesses. Interviews with suspects. Cho said shows like CSI have bumped people's expectations for what local police are able to do at a crime scene to unrealistic levels.
Posted by: nathanhansen on 10/02/2006 at 10:00 AM | Comments (0) | Permalink
Where do they get all those wonderful toys?
Honestly, I expected to feel a whole lot tougher all got up in SWAT gear.
This seems logical, at least on the surface. Put a guy in a heavy-duty
bulletproof vest and give him a military-grade firearm and he should
feel ready to kick some butt, shouldn't he.
Only, I didn't. Mostly I felt awkward and out of place.
I'm not sure why this was. I suppose it might have been because the
vest I was wearing was a size or so too small for me. I don't know that
a lot of members of Dakota County's Mutual Aid Assistance Group -- the
local equivalent of a SWAT team that's been around in one form or
another since 1974 -- are 6' 6". It also might have been the helmet
with the night-vision monocle. Or the fact I was carrying not just an
M-16 but something called a Sage gun. Officers define it as a revolver,
but it looks like the kind of hopped-up revolver Yosemite Sam might
carry if he were 16 feet tall and patrolling the Mexican border with
the Minutemen.
So, it could have been one of those things. Or, it could have been the
fact I was wearing/carrying all this stuff in the garage of a police
department while a bunch of people I still don't know all that well
encouraged me to recite quotes from Dirty Harry and a Rosemount Police
Officer took my picture.
Whatever the reason, I didn't feel super tough. It was maybe the second
most uncomfortable I've ever been in a police station (for the story of
my most uncomfortable moment, see the archive for last December).
None of that is really important, though. What's important is this:
remember last week when I said police officers had lots of really cool
tools? Apparently, I didn't know the half of it. In order to get the
really cool stuff, you have to join the MAAG.
When the MAAG started in '74 it consisted of nine local police
departments. The group joined with the Dakota County Sheriff's
Department in 2004. Now the only Dakota County cities with their own
SWAT teams are Eagan and Burnsville. Currently, 34 officers serve in
the Dakota County MAAG, broken into Alpha and Bravo teams. They're the
ones responsible for high-risk warrant executions, situations where
someone has barricaded himself into a building, hostage rescues and
other high-risk situations. They also did dignitary protection duty
when Vice President Dick Cheney was in Rosemount during the last
election.
They have all kinds of fancy gear to do their jobs. They have cameras
on nine-foot poles that they can use to look around corners or into
attics. They've got an infra-red camera to see in the dark. They've got
a thermal imager that lets them detect a .33-degree change in
temperature. Hold your hand on a cabinet door for a few seconds and the
imager can pick it up from across the room. Point it at a room full of
police academy students and it makes them all look like glowing white
skeleton-creatures.
Then there are the weapons. Most MAAG officers carry M-16s. The
aforementioned Sage gun, while I swear it looks like something Arnold
Schwarzenneger carried in The Terminator, actually fires gas canisters
and less-lethal rounds. The MAAG team has a 35-pound battering ram to
knock down doors, and if that's not enough they have a "breaching
shotgun" designed specifically to take out hinges and locks. Basically,
if they want to come in they're coming in.
"We can pretty much take over a house in about 12 seconds," Rosemount police officer Brian Burkhalter said.
So they're coming in. And when they come, they're probably bringing
grenades. Boy, are they bringing grenades. They're bringing gas
grenades. They're bringing smoke grenades. They might even bring
grenades that pop open and spray hundreds of little rubber pellets
around the room at high velocity.
But the granddaddy of them all is the flash bang. That's the one they
use if they really want to disorient you. Basically, it's the coolest
firecracker ever, bright enough to make you lose your night vision and
with a concussion loud enough to break out windows and knock down
ceilings and, I can now say from personal experience, make your knees
buckle. Set one off in Central Park on a Thursday night, and dispatch
is going to get a few calls. Three, to be exact.
Posted by: nathanhansen on 9/28/2006 at 10:31 PM | Comments (1) | Permalink
High times at city hall
Last night I pretty much equaled my liftime exposure to illicit drugs. That's weird in itself. What's even weirder: it was a Rosemount police officer standing in front of me with a lighter and a bud of marijuana.
It's hard to know how to react in a situation like that. The officer wanted everybody to know what marijuan smelled like so we could call police if we ever smelled it. It wasn't enough that anyone actually felt an effect. So I figured I should look interested. Just not too interested.
Mostly I was worried about what I'd say if I got pulled over on the way home and the officer wanted to know why I smelled like Willie Nelson's tour bus.
Sgt. Tim Murphy has spent 13 years working with drugs. He represents the RPD on the Dakota County Drug Task force and gives training sessions on drugs to Rosemount teachers. And does Murphy think there's a drug problem in Rosemount? "Oh, hell yeah.
"I can get you mushrooms, cocaine, meth. I can get you all the weed you want (in Rosemount)," he said.
Murphy said Rosemount police stop cars almost daily with drugs in them. Police have busted elaborate marijuana growing operations in Rosemount townhomes and police make 3-4 arrests a year for crack.
A week or so ago Drug Task Force officers arrested someone in Eagan with 600 tabs of ecstacy.
There's an old quote from comedian Denis Leary, something like, "Marijuana doesn't lead to hard drugs. Marijuana leads to carpentry."
Sgt. Murphy might disagree with the first part of that comment -- he says he's never arrested someone with hard drugs who didn't start out with marijuana -- but it's hard to argue the second part. Murphy has confiscated marijuana pipes made out of everything from toilet paper tubes to plumbing supplies to beakers stolen from school science classes. He's also taken handmade glass pipes that the maker was selling for as much as $1,500. That person could have made a pretty good, pretty legal living, he said, if he hadn't sold marijuana along with the pipes.
Murphy said he is seeing hard drug use among teens, too. He said cocaine is catching on among teens and he has found meth pipes near Rosemount High School.
"The kids right now, they don't understand what they're doing to their liver or their kidney or their brain," Murphy said.
In 2001, Rosemount had more meth lab busts than any other city in Dakota County.
Posted by: nathanhansen on 9/22/2006 at 10:17 AM | Comments (2) | Permalink
Gear factor
You get to use all kinds of really cool equipment when you're a police officer. There's the gun, sure, but there's also handcuffs and pepper spray and a taser and a hopped-up modern version of a nightstick called and Asp that telscopes out of its handle with a pretty intimidating snap and feels like it could do some serious damage.
Thing is, though, you have to carry that with you everywhere you go, and with all of that stuff sticking out it can't be comfortable when you drive. The average Rosemount Police Officer's belt, which includes everything mentioned above plus a little more, weighs something like 35 pounds.
Take that, Batman.
Police officers have to train with all of that gear, too. Police officers qualify three times a year with their handguns. Officers are also required to carry two forms of non-lethal weapons. For the RPD its the Asp, which looks like it could be lethal if used with enough force, and the Taser, which might not be lethal but which I can tell you from experience hurts like heck.
For the record, the gear on a Rosemount police officer's belt looks like this:
ﾕ Gun - Officers used to get to provide their own but in the interest of being able to share ammunition in emergency situations they are now issued weapons by the department.
ﾕ Radio
ﾕ Keys
ﾕ Rubbber gloves - I assume these are for first aid situations. I didn't ask, because if they're not, I don't want to know.
ﾕ Asp - Seriously, this thing frightens me.
ﾕ Pepper spray
ﾕ LED flashlight - It's like your household flashlight on steriods. It's the Barry Bonds of flashlights.
ﾕ Handcuffs - With or without the chain between the cuffs. Variety is the spice of life.
Posted by: nathanhansen on 9/22/2006 at 9:31 AM | Comments (0) | Permalink
