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
