Guest posts from Keith Bettinger and other street veterans. Also, miscellaneous but important things in the cop world–training, forensics, stress management, etc.
Around 1980-81 my partner and I are working a T-car (traffic) and looking for dui drivers. We are in Hollywood Division driving west on Santa Monica Boulevard west of Cahuenga Boulevard. A car ahead of us is weaving all over the road and makes a left turn into a parking lot cutting off opposing traffic. The parking lot belonged to a low class nudie bar which had the reputation of having some of the ugliest dancers to ever get up on stage. If this guy was going in there then he was probably already drunk.
I get him out of the car and my suspicions were correct. The guy reeks of booze, he can barely stand, his words are slurred, and he generally looks like something the cat drug in. As I am about to give him the F.S.T. (field sobriety test), I notice the passenger in the car trying to get out to talk to my partner on the right side of the car. My partner tells the passenger to stay in the car. The passenger replies very loudly, “You can’t tell me what the hell to do,” and proceeds to get out of the car. My partner and the passenger start snarling at each other and I know things are going to go south.
I quickly handcuff the driver so I can go help my partner in the fight that I know is coming. As I walk around the back side of the car I can see that the belligerent passenger can hardly stand up by himself. He is rocking back and forth shifting his feet constantly to maintain his balance. He looked like a fisherman standing on a deck in rough seas. As I get close the guy takes a swing at my partner who ducks and then grabs the guy by the front of his jacket. In a smooth motion my partner picks the guy up, turns him upside down and slams him to the pavement much like you would see a pro-wrestler do to his opponent………and breaks the guy’s back.
The guy is bent in the middle with his legs up and around both sides of his head. It appears that my partner has turned this guy into a paraplegic. The guy is screaming and my partner tells him to shut up and quit sniveling. As I watch this I thought of two things. First, that my partner was much stronger than I ever imagined and that secondly, we had to get our story straight. This is the kind of thing that today would probably get us sent to Federal Prison.
As the guy continues to scream I notice a pair of single pole crutches along side the front passenger seat. They were the kind that have a handle and a u-shaped support for around the back of the arm. We come to find out that all is not lost and that my partner was not as strong as it first appeared.
My partner had just body slammed a double amputee. He was missing both legs mid-thigh and his prosthetics (not the high-tech ones of today) loosened and popped off.
Later after getting another unit to transport the amputee home and us booking the driver in jail, I teased my partner about what had occurred. I said, “My my, body slamming a poor little double amputee,”
He calmly replied, “That guy will never mess with me again.”
Between the Thin Red Line, the Thin Blue Line and the Thin White Line lies the Thin Gold Line. This narrowest of lines represents those who are rarely seen but always heard and appreciated. The calm voice in the dark, the heroes behind the scenes, the Golden Link that holds it all together:
DISPATCHERS
By Thonie Hevron
The week of April 10-16, 2016 is National Public Safety Telecommunicators Appreciation week, also known as Dispatcher Appreciation Week. Dispatchers answer most of the incoming calls to public safety departments, assess and route the 911 calls, take appropriate action (some centers provide EMD-Emergency Medical Dispatch which means a dispatcher will direct the caller in first aid techniques to mitigate problems until the arrival of fire-fighters/paramedics) and relay important information to officers in the field. There is so much more they do: keep locations of patrol units in their heads as well as updated on the computer, provide confidential information when needed, recall bad guys’ dates of birth, listen for a tone in an officer’s voice to indicate trouble or need or whatever…
Telecommunicators Week began in California in 1981 and quickly grew to national recognition. Just ten years later, Congress designated the second full week of each April as a time to remember the critical role that dispatchers play in keeping us all safe.
Yesterday, the Sonoma County dispatchers celebrated twenty years of April Dispatcher Appreciation get-togethers. The venue was Sally Tomatoes in Rohnert Park and the event was well attended. My estimate was over one hundred dispatchers, retired and active-duty, as well as managers and department heads.
Here is a mug shot of the usual suspects: Kathleen, Daralyn, Kathrina, and Jan are seated. I’m standing next to Natalie and Carli. Here are the faces of the women who calmed the mother of the dead baby down enough to get an address (not all calls are on landlines), who woke the fire-fighters up for the inferno next door, and the dispatcher who stayed on the phone with a young caller who heard an intruder in her home.
I’ve been through a lot with these women. There’s a bond that transcends distance and time. All but three are retired now. During the luncheon, someone brought up Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD). Natalie asked the table, “How many of you have trouble sleeping?” To a person, we all raised a hand. It was a little humbling to realize that we all have scars from the job. But we live with them and temper the ghosts with fun memories of camaraderie, blowing off steam, and the knowledge of a job well done. The general public will never see these things and that’s just fine by us. We know we did what we were supposed to do—trained to do.
If you don’t notice when you’re on the phone with us, that’s fine with us.
Police officers have to have many skills to be effective – including how to play hopscotch.
Just watch this video from the Huntington Beach, California, Police Department, posted on Facebook on Wednesday, which shows one of their officers teaching a homeless girl how to play hopscotch.
The sweet moment has a serious lining, according to the department: Officers Wednesday morning were investigating a "suspicious occupied vehicle" when they learned that a mother and her 11-year-old daughter were living out of their car.
While officers worked to arrange housing for the family, one of the officers "began displaying his expertise in hopscotch to the daughter," according to the department.
Video of 'Officer Friendly' playing hopscotch with a homeless girl in the affluent California community of Huntington Beach is all the rage on mainstream media channels, but few noticed the original reason why the cop was there.
Turns out, anonymous neighbors tried to ‘shop’ the girl and her mother to police. They rang the authorities to complain about a “suspicious occupied vehicle” Wednesday, rather than doing the neighborly thing by going out to offer assistance.
Officers Zach Pricer and Scott March were dispatched to “investigate”.
Fortunately, they decided not to criminalize them, which is often the reaction by authorities, but instead March contacted the Homeless Task Force while Pricer started teaching the girl how to hopscotch.
The video, which was filmed by March, has been viewed more than 750,000 times.
Comments below the Facebook post reveal a number of people in the area know the mother and daughter. One commenter recognized them from church and said they had been attending services for years.
“They have lived in their van for a while. Very nice and respectful mom and daughter,” another commenter said.
While most of the comments were gushing with joy at the sight of a police officer playing hopscotch, as opposed to shooting unarmed civilians, another commenter got real.
“Wait. People know this mother/daughter living situation AND they attend a local church AND they've been homeless for years? Why hasn't anyone offered employment or a place to stay for a while, while they save a little money and get back on their feet?” read the Facebook comment.
Huntington Beach is in Orange County, which has one of the most expensive housing markets in the US with values increasing by almost seven percent last year. The median house price in Huntington Beach is $735,500 and the median rent is $3,000 per month.
The oceanside city has a largely hidden community of homeless people who live in tents and cars, or on the streets. The county’s homeless population grew by 5 percent between 2013-2015, according to the Orange County Homeless Count & Survey Report, due to rising rents and a lack of affordable housing.
In Orange County, a person must earn $65,760 to afford a two-bedroom apartment, according to the California Housing Partnership Corp. With California’s minimum wage at $10 per hour, this leaves low-income employees at a shortfall.
Nearly 4,500 homeless people were counted in the survey, which is carried out every two years and reflects a single day in January 2015, half of them sleeping outside of a shelter, a 31 percent increase in two years. 450 of them are military veterans.
Huntington Beach passed a no camping rule in 2012 in reaction to complaints from residents about the shelters created by homeless people on beaches and in parks.
It was the late seventies. I was working Hollywood morning watch. My partner had just finished writing a ticket at the intersection of Santa Monica and Western. We were in a parking lot across the street from a local dive bar and since it was close to closing time we decided to sit and wait and snag a DUI driver leaving the bar.
We did not have to wait long and saw our future arrest come staggering out of the bar and start walking to his car parked at the curb. As he walked to his car we noticed that he was placing his hands on other vehicles for support as he walked. He gets in a late fifties Cadillac, starts the engine, cranks the wheel, and punches the accelerator. The car makes a sharp U-turn from the curb, tires are screeching with rubber burning and it goes blasting east on Santa Monica to the entrance to the Hollywood Freeway.
The guy has a lead on us and my partner does some driving to catch up. We are south bound on the freeway about three miles or so before we get the guy stopped and pulled over on an off ramp. We get him out of the car and one thing is readily apparent.
He is old. His driver’s license says he is 89.
One other thing becomes apparent. He is not under the influence. No booze on his breath, no nystagmus in his eyes, and his speech was clear and distinct. We asked him if he had been drinking and he said he had not had a drink in fifty years. We asked him what the hell was he doing in a bar then. He replied that he lived in an apartment down the street from the bar and went there because he was lonely and he could talk to people. We asked what the hell was up with his driving.
He replied, “I was sitting there in the bar when someone come in and says that there is a black and white parked across the street. Someone else asks, ‘Hey, Pops you want to earn some money?’”
“They pass the hat, everybody kicks in a few bucks—I think twenty to twenty-five. They say, ‘Take this money and go take the cops on a wild goose chase’……so I did.”
We kick the old guy loose. I am laughing, my partner is fuming. We race back to the bar and of course find it locked up tight.
Tim Dees, retired cop and criminal justice professor, Reno Police Department, and Reno Municipal Court, is considered a “Top Writer” in the field of Law Enforcement, Police Procedures, and Criminal Justice. He’s been read in Time, Newsweek and many more professional magazines as well as on Quora.
This post was taken (with Tim’s permission) from Quora, an online Q & A forum on many subjects. Tim is a Quora “Most Viewed Writer” in Interacting with Police.
First, detectives are cops. They simply have a different assignment than the uniformed guys in patrol.
Television has convinced many people they know everything they need to know to be detectives. TV makes it look easy. You want to question someone, and they are both immediately available to you and willing to talk. You only work one case at a time, and if it goes to trial, the trial is later that week. If someone clams up and demands their lawyer, all you have to do is act mean and they’ll come apart in a heartbeat. Confessions are obtained in minutes.
Police work is very seldom like what you see on TV. No two calls are exactly the same, and you have to be able to apply broad legal and procedural principles to ambiguous situations, often when the immediate world is coming apart. While you think you can keep it together at these moments, I can guarantee you will have experiences where you have no idea what you are supposed to do next. Those experiences happen less often as you grow in the job, but they still come around now and again for everyone.
In order to do long, complex interviews, you first have to learn to do short ones. Those happen on traffic stops, on field interviews, when you’re talking to a domestic violence or burglary victim. You have to know about search and seizure, which is a field that changes constantly. When can you stop someone? When can you search them? Is there a difference between a search for weapons and a search for evidence of a crime (hint: yes, there is). If you have a search warrant for someone’s house, can you also search their garage?
You also have to learn about people very different from you. You have to be aware of the body language of native Asians and Hispanics, which can be very different from that of Americans. You have to know your community at a level people who live there all their lives never get into.
These things are all learned while you’re a patrol cop. Some people learn faster than others. Hardly anyone gets it before they’ve been doing it five years. A few people circumvent the usual career path and get promoted before that, but they nearly always become substandard cops, people who could have been much better in their jobs if they were left on a vine a little longer.
Policing is something almost no one understands until they have done it. There is no way to acquire the necessary experience in a classroom or from a book. You have to live it.
By Thonie Hevron Too many law enforcement officers have been killed in the line of duty in 2013. One is too many but thirteen is unfathomable. And we’re only in mid-March. Patrolman David Ort…
Too many law enforcement officers have been killed in the line of duty in 2013. One is too many but thirteen is unfathomable. And we’re only in mid-March.
Patrolman David Ortiz of the El Paso, Tx Police Department End of Watch March 14, 2016
Peace Officers Down Memorial Page offers statistic that are difficult to believe. Taken from FBI statistics drawn from every police agency in the US, they are a sobering reminder of the inherent peril in this work. Few men and women can do this job with the alertness and cognition it requires–twenty-four hours a day. Cops are never off duty. Badges and guns may be put away but a warrior mindset must always be present. It’s like a sneaker wave at the beach–nine times out of ten, it’s okay to turn your back, but the tenth wave can kill you.
The effects of a career last a lifetime–PTSD is almost a cliche but honestly, we live with it day in and day out. Every cop, every emergency worker (I know because my husband is a retired fire fighter) has ghosts that will forever haunt us. There is no laying them to rest, closure is an illusion. Turning away has been my coping mechanism–remembering the camaraderie, the sense of accomplishment when an incident went right ( I’ll never forget a hug from an officer and close friend when only he and I–in dispatch–were on duty. He had a particularly dangerous pursuit that ended safely with a solid arrest due to the fact that we both did our jobs well–that hug was a highlight of my career), acknowledging the adrenaline spurt and excitement is satisfying enough.
Standing in the rain directing traffic around flooded streets during two El Nino events, smelling the airborn toxins as I drove up to a burning house, being nervous as hell doing CPR on an old man who fell off a ladder are memories that make me who I am. All of us have these memories and worse–I was a civilian Community Services Officer for seven years before I traded the uniform for the climate controlled chaos of dispatch. I saw but a small slice of the life on the streets.
Those of you who wear or have worn the badge, get it. Those of you who don’t, count your blessings that there are those people out there who love this job. It can’t be done well if they don’t.
All know this could be their last day, but do it anyway.
Welcome to the first blog of the communication center for the Santa Rosa Police Department, aka dispatch. We hope to give you a little insight into the way our dispatch center operates and would love to answer any questions you might have about what we do.
Dispatchers are the link between the community and police officers. As dispatchers, we understand the importance of taking care of our community and officers at a moment’s notice. We are always available to our citizens 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
During a normal 24-hour period, dispatchers enter approximately 375 calls for service. Calls for service include reports of criminal or suspicious activity, traffic accidents, stolen property, parking violations, request for an officer’s assistance, or other quality of life issues. When you call the Santa Rosa Police Department you will be greeted with “911 what’s your emergency” or “Santa Rosa Police Department”, depending on if you call 911 or the non-emergency number. At any given time there are anywhere from three to seven of us working on the phones and radio, helping out the community and our officers.
Each of our 18 dispatchers answer an average of 12,000 calls per year. That’s over 200,000 calls every year to our department in the dispatch center alone. The calls come in on 911 lines, non-emergency lines and inter department lines. Each line has its own special ring so we don’t even have to look at the phone screen to know what line is ringing. Some of us have been working for Santa Rosa for 27 years others just 3 months. We all have gone through or are going through a year of on the job training as well as keeping our skillset up with mandatory state trainings. One thing we all have in common is, we love helping others.
Our workstations include 6 different computer screens, 3 different keyboards, phone keypad, and 4 different mice. It might sound like a lot, but while we are talking to you we could be using almost every piece of that equipment to get you the help you need.
As we develop our blog, we hope you will feel more involved with what is going on with your local law enforcement dispatch center. We are excited to share with you some information about who we are and what we do. We look forward answering all your questions and hope you enjoy the ride.
Piner High School freshman Leena Keo hugs Santa Rosa Police Officer Amanda Cincera, during the lunch break, in Santa Rosa, on Thursday, October 29, 2015. Officer Cincera is the school resource officer at Piner.
(Christopher Chung/ The Press Democrat)
By Press Democrat
Santa Rosa Police Officer Amanda Cincera jokes with junior Brian Villanueva at Piner High School, in Santa Rosa, on Thursday, October 29, 2015. Officer Cincera is the school resource officer at Piner.(Christopher Chung/ The Press Democrat)
Staff Writer Julie Johnson
Piner High School students streamed by Santa Rosa Police Officer Amanda Cincera on Thursday while the uniformed school resource officer stood in a central open air courtyard during lunch as music pumped from a stereo.
A girl walked by and waved — “Hi, Officer Cincera!” They exchanged a few laughs as the student continued on to class.
The moment passed and would be unremarkable, apart from the fact that Cincera had arrested the teen three times for fights and hanging out with gang members, in violation of probation rules that prohibit her from doing so. The series of events brought Cincera, 41, and the teen closer together.
“Those are the kids I think we can help,” Cincera said, noting that she’s seen the girl make positive progress after her arrests. “She tried out for the volleyball team; isn’t that amazing?”
Cincera’s dealings on Piner’s campus Thursday were a study in contrast to a video of a classroom arrest in South Carolina that has gone viral, sparking a national conversation about police presence at schools.
The video depicts a white sheriff’s deputy flipping a black female student at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, S.C., out of her classroom desk, then dragging and throwing her across the floor.
A fellow student took video of the incident on a cellphone. The footage has spread widely and called into question the role of police in noncriminal school disciplinary matters.
The deputy had been called to the room by school staff because the girl apparently refused to stop using her phone. The deputy, Ben Fields, was fired after county officials determined his actions were improper.
Santa Rosa Police Officer Amanda Cincera, right, works with assistant principal Andrea Correia in following up on a welfare check on Jasmine Phillips at Piner High School, in Santa Rosa, on Thursday, October 29, 2015. Officer Cincera is the school resource officer at Piner.(Christopher Chung/ The Press Democrat)
All Piner High School students asked about the video on campus Thursday said they had seen it on TV or Facebook.
“It was crazy,” said 16-year-old junior Daisha Moeai, who was sitting outside on a bench, waiting to retake an Algebra II test during a free period.
Moeai said she’s had few interactions with police but has a positive view of having an officer on campus.
“To me, I think it was racist and over there they have that,” she said, referring to the South’s long history of racial strife.
Around the corner behind a set of lockers, a 15-year-old named John stood with a group of fellow juniors.
“It’s f-ed up,” he said of the video.
John said that because he’s been arrested at school for marijuana possession, he does not like police and would prefer that an officer were not at school. The Press Democrat is withholding John’s last name because he has a juvenile criminal record.
“But some cops are cool,” he said.
While waiting for a ride home, Miguel Gonzalez, a 16-year-old sophomore, said he believes Cincera’s presence on campus prevents fights and other problems and he makes a point to say hello to her. Gonzalez said he’s never seen an encounter between police and a student like the one portrayed in the video.
“That’s, like, him abusing his power. He could have been calmer,” Gonzalez said. “I think that was a unique situation.”
Santa Rosa Police Officer Amanda Cincera looks at where freshman Fatima Contreras was recently injured during a physical education class, at Piner High School in Santa Rosa, on Thursday, October 29, 2015. Officer Cincera is the school resource officer at Piner.(Christopher Chung/ The Press Democrat)
Somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 law enforcement officers work in schools across the country, according to the National Association of School Resource Officers. The Alabama-based group has about 4,200 members and provides training for police heading into schools.
Santa Rosa police officers have been stationed at high school campuses off and on for at least two decades, with school liaison officers rotating through campuses or assigned to one depending on budgets and staffing. For at least six years, the Police Department has assigned one officer to each of the city’s five high school campuses.
Lt. Ron Nelson, who supervises the city’s school resource officers, said the job of an officer is the same on the street or at a school: Build relationships and enforce the law.
“It’s all one and the same. The policy doesn’t change; the concept of escalation and de-escalation remains the same,” Nelson said. “The overriding philosophy is that you’re only supposed to use force necessary to overcome resistance to effect an arrest.”
Santa Rosa officers attend a weeklong training held by the resource officers association before working in schools, Nelson said. He said he also took the training to learn about the work his officers do.
Although the principles of policing are the same, officers are taught to incorporate what they know about a person’s state of mind. For teenagers, that involves a still-developing brain.
“They spent a good deal of time on the physiology of the teen brain and how it’s not fully mature until age 21,” Nelson said. “Cognitive reasoning just isn’t there, and that’s why teens sometimes do goofy stuff.”
School resource officers start each day at the station with an early morning briefing before they fan out to their respective campuses. It’s a special assignment that gives the officers wide berth to craft the day as it evolves, depending on what issues surface.
Cincera had just barely sat down in her small, windowless office at Piner High on Thursday morning when she saw a student walk past and waved her inside.
Cincera shut the door and spent more than a half-hour talking with the teen. The student, a junior, talked through her difficult home situation, at times in tears, and tough decisions she’s facing about whether to seek emancipation from her parents.
“I know you; I know when you set your mind to do something you will do it,” Cincera said. “I just think you need to come up with a plan.”
By the end of the conversation, the girl was smiling and had a list of things to consider and do in her mind as she walked out the door.
Pinned to the wall of Cincera’s office is a panoramic image of Piner’s Class of 1992 — Cincera’s graduating class. Cincera said she became a police officer because of interactions she had with a school resource officer in the late 1990s when she worked in juvenile probation, and working in schools was her goal.
Cincera then was called across the hall into the office of Assistant Principal Amanda Correia, who was speaking with a father of a student who was missing.
“I last saw him yesterday at 7 o’clock in the morning, before school,” the man said. “I just want to know he’s OK.”
They pulled up the student’s Facebook page, looking for clues, and Cincera and Correia discussed tracking down the boy’s friends to find out what they knew about his whereabouts.
By noon, Cincera had consoled and consulted on a variety of issues, from missing students to marijuana possession.
She talked with Assistant Principal Ryan Thompson about a male student who was reportedly harassing a girl, who had asked school staff for help curbing his advances. Cincera recommended they write up a behavior contract with the student to set clear expectations for him and give him the opportunity to stop.
Back in the courtyard, Cincera took note of a group of boys.
“That’s a lot of blue,” she said under her breath, referring to the color associated with sureño gangs.
Cincera was standing at that very spot last school year when a girl came up to her and confided that she had been molested. Cincera said that over the four years she’s worked at Piner, six girls have made similar disclosures. Some have led to investigations, and in one case, the suspected perpetrator was arrested and currently is facing trial.
“Our title is school resource officer, and that’s genuinely what I want to be: a resource,” she said. “There are many days I don’t arrest anyone. I’m just counseling them, talking to them.”
![CropperCapture[148]](https://i0.wp.com/thoniehevron.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/croppercapture148.jpg?resize=463%2C163&ssl=1)
Here is a mug shot of the usual suspects: Kathleen, Daralyn, Kathrina, and Jan are seated. I’m standing next to Natalie and Carli. Here are the faces of the women who calmed the mother of the dead baby down enough to get an address (not all calls are on landlines), who woke the fire-fighters up for the inferno next door, and the dispatcher who stayed on the phone with a young caller who heard an intruder in her home.
Tim Dees, retired cop and criminal justice professor, Reno Police Department, and Reno Municipal Court, is considered a “Top Writer” in the field of Law Enforcement, Police Procedures, and Criminal Justice. He’s been read in Time, Newsweek and many more professional magazines as well as on Quora.
