Common Sense Tips For Police Officers
By Wyatt Earp | July 23, 2009
Why is it that when the weather is completely and utterly miserable the morons come out in force? Is it the humidity? Is it the dropping barometric pressure? Or is it just that the idiots love to anger me when I’m in a particularly sour mood? Either way, Tuesday was that day. It rained cats and dogs the entire time I was in the office, and the cops saw that as an excuse to tap dance on the landmine. The landmine, of course, being me.
So, as a public service to all police officers in my division, and any out there reading this blog, I will offer some helpful, common sense tips for dealing with detectives. (JumpOut posts about these tips all the time.) You can thank me later.
Common Sense Tip #1 – Don’t Be A Dink. If you come to a division and approach a detective who is busily typing away at a keyboard, it is considered polite to wait a second until the detective is finished. Simple, huh? Not in my division. Some knucklehead officer came up the other day, saw that I was busy typing, and put his paperwork down in front of my keyboard, obstructing my view. Normally, an action like that will result in one of the following results:
1. The officer’s paperwork would summarily be “lost” in the circular file.
2. The officer’s name would be placed on the “Idiot List.”
3. The officer would receive a boot to the head.
Anyway, I stopped typing and he immediately began relating his tale of woe. As my urge to kill started to rise, I interrupted this brain surgeon’s story with, “Oh, I’m sorry. I’ll stop what I’m doing, because, you know, I’m not busy or anything.”
The officer stopped, gave me a dirty look, and continued on. No apology, no remorse. Since there were bosses in the office, this particular officer received option #2.
The rest of the story is below the fold:
Common Sense Tip #2 – Know Your Role. If you are a police officer, your role is to answer radio calls and make decisions based upon them. You are a sworn law enforcement officer, and amazingly enough, you are given arrest powers. If someone needs to be pinched, lock them up. If not, well, not.
What you don’t do is call the division and ask the detectives to make the decision for you. This is a stupid thing to do for a few reasons:
1. It makes the officer look like an idiot.
2. It is what uniformed supervisors are for.
3. Detectives get paid to investigate crimes, not to babysit police officers.
For cripes’ sake people, this is not the most difficult job in the world. To be successful, just use some common sense, and all the power of your brain. Those who do not, well, they’ll be appointed police commissioner some day.
Here endeth the lesson.
Topics: The Job | 14 Comments »
July 23rd, 2009 at 9:22 pm
Gotta know; was it the same guy?
July 23rd, 2009 at 9:40 pm
Doghouse – Sadly, it was not, That would have been a better story, though.
July 23rd, 2009 at 11:01 pm
I love when I’m eating lunch at my desk and someone comes to my door and starts whining. I’ll usually help them, but I’ll make sure to leave big greasy finger prints on their keyboard.
July 23rd, 2009 at 11:09 pm
Are you sure you don’t work for the CPD? Sad to say common sense is dead.
July 24th, 2009 at 12:52 am
I think some secret Affirmative Action for Idiots in the workplace legislation passed at some point recently. It appears from my own experience that it guarantees at least 20% of all employees be complete morons. May tomorrow be a better day Wyatt.
July 24th, 2009 at 1:47 am
Stupidity seems to be the most common attribute of most people.
Back when I was allowed to work, part of my job was doing computer support for graduate students (those going for a Masters or PhD). The degree was in computational biology (or some variant). Note the word ‘computational’… implies they know something about computers… at the very least basic knowledge. These boneheads couldn’t print yet would get degrees for writing crap code? Umm… wtf? I quit caring after I shortened a bit of their code’s run time from 5 minutes to about 2 seconds, and no one cared… and the original code is still used.
Those who have brains are rare… cherish their friendship… ‘cuse everyone else is cannon fodder.
July 24th, 2009 at 9:18 am
Makes you wonder what happened to common courtesy.
I guess that is why it is called the job. Anywhere else you could tell them to pound sand.
July 24th, 2009 at 9:57 am
Boot to the Head!
http://www.webguys.com/pdavis/karate/tikwanleep.html
http://www.webguys.com/pdavis/karate/audio/16_Ti_Kwan_Leep_32kbs.mp3
July 24th, 2009 at 10:49 am
If you take the average group of people and give them three bowling balls you will find these results after one week.
1 of the bowling balls will get broken. Another will get pregnant, and the third will go missing.
I deal on an almost constant basis with people who like to pretend that they are “switched on” when in reality they are consistently falling short of the half way point to mediocrity.
This comes from a societal mandate that we abandon the reward system for those who produce in favor of a system that uniformly applies minimal reward to everyone in the name of fairness.
I laugh every morning when I drive by a construction site on 611 just north of the Turnpike. The union guys are protesting some non-union company who looks to be making great/swift progress with their project.
Affirmative actions isn’t limited to race. It has expanded well into intellectual capacity and ambition.
I offer this:
Motivation
July 24th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
Common Sense is a total misnomer and is virtually extinct.
Common Curtesey can fill the gap somewhat but seems to be just as rare.
Pity, ain’t it!
July 25th, 2009 at 1:05 pm
Guess we know two people who won’t be making detective any time soon if ever.
July 25th, 2009 at 2:53 pm
CM – It’s the least you can do!
LDIV – No, but I work for one of its former flunkies. Ramsey.
Snigs – Only 20%? We’re well ahead of the curve!
Dano – There are idiot detectives in my squad. We try and ignore them and let them stew in their own idiocy.
Admiral – No, we have to take their jackassery with smiles,, because otherwise, they will rat us out to their sergeants.
Ryan – Exactly!!!
Jason – That’s an awesome poster! I look at it like this. I am really good at what I do. On the other hand, I know next to nothing about computers, save for some blogger HTML code. So, I am aware of my ignorance, and when an issue comes up, I ask someone with smarts for help – usually Code Monkey.
What I don’t do is fake it, or pretend I know something about which I know nothing. Some cops in my division do that, and their stories are usually printed here.
Alan B – You can say that again!
MeToo – Thank God for that. I’d probably have to train them!
July 25th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
Re: #12 “Pity, ain’t it!”
July 27th, 2009 at 12:04 am
I’ll bet there’s market for this pithy advice as sampler given to new academy graduates.