Sunday, February 28, 2010

Evaluating a hug

I was asked to put my training of Ze on hold so that I could evaluate S. He has already completed one week of evaluation so he will be done with the training program after our week together. Ze will ride with other officers for a week while I evaluate S.

S is from Ohio. He spent a couple of years working for Atlanta PD. He left there because APD started lowering pay and benefits for the officers.

Our first call on Friday night was to check by with an evening shift unit on an accident on the freeway. The evening shift unit arrived on the scene at 10 PM. He decided that he did not have enough time to finish the accident report before 11 PM, the end of his shift. Well, he had an hour so you would think that he would have time to do something, anything. Nope. He did nothing except to wait for us to arrive. Pathetic.

We arrived and found a one car accident involving a Nissan 300Z. The driver stated that he was north bound on the freeway when another vehicle swerved into his lane. In an attempt to avoid that car, he jerked the steering wheel to the right and lost control of his vehicle. He went across 4 lanes of the freeway, over a curb, a median, another curb, an exit ramp, a curb, a median, another curb, two lanes of the frontage road, and finally one more curb before stopping. Amazingly he did not hit another vehicle. He said that the airbags deployed when he hit the first curb and he could not see anything after that so he just "rode it out." Hitting the brakes would have been a good idea. You don't need to see to do that.

After getting the driver's and passenger's information, S ran them on the patrol vehicle's computer. The female passenger came back with a class C warrant. S asked me what to do and I told him it was his choice. He decided to inform the passeger that she had a warrant and to advise her to take care of it. When he told her that she was not going to jail, she was very happy as you would expect. As a way of saying thanks, she decided to hug S. As she was hugging him, she asked why he was not hugging her back. S told her that we generally do not hug people on police scenes. So she backed up a little and then she felt his chest and asked if he was wearing a vest. He was and told her so. At this point, S was praying that I was not observing this exchange, since he is on evaluation. I of course, witnessed the entire interaction. He looked over at me and we both started laughing. After S gave the case number to the driver, the passenger came over and hugged me. I guess she did not want me to feel left out.

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