Has not a clue where he is going

Things have been rather uneventful at work lately. A few traffic stops and a few reports, none of them very memorable. JS is on his final day of evaluation. He is doing well and is going to pass. He does a great job with safety, traffic stops, driving, reports, and just about every other aspect of the job. However, he is having difficulty with Key mapping. To put it bluntly, he can't find his behind with both hands. To his credit, he has only lived in Houston since January of this year and he has spent the majority of his training time north of the bayou. The first four days of evaluation, I really did not notice the severity of the issue. I am not sure if all of our calls were on major streets or if I was just a little too helpful. Sometimes it is difficult for me to sit in the passenger seat and let the driver turn the wrong direction.

I did start noticing early on that he had some difficulty finding the regular places. What I mean by regular places are those location that we go to every shift. I typically eat at the same restaurant, get a drink at the same convenience store, write reports in the same parking lot, run traffic at the same intersection every single shift. I do not expect the rookie to be able to find those locations without help on the first day. By day two and then day three, they should have some idea. By day five, I should not have to tell you where to turn to find a place that we have been to each of the last 4 days. I noticed on day three that I still had to tell him where to turn to find my convenience store and report writing location.

So, today at the beginning of the shift I told him that it was sink or swim time. I was not going to help him find any of our locations. He found the convenience store and we got a drink and then we were dispatched to a loud noise that was about a mile away from the store. He looked at the Key map for 10 minutes and then turned west out of the parking lot. Our destination was to the east. Amazingly enough, I did not correct him. We drove west looking for a street that was behind us. He drove about three miles and decided to stop and look at the map again. We turned around and then slowed at every street so that he could read the street sign. After we made it back to the starting place, I told him to pull into a parking lot. It was teaching time.

In the call slip which comes up on the MDT (the computer in our patrol vehicle), three streets are named for every destination. The actual location of the call, and then the two cross streets and their block numbers that the actual location sits in between. JS knew the information was there, but was not sure how to use it. Our call was in the 200 block of a street and the cross streets had the block number of 3700. I asked him what was the block number of our current location, 1000. I then asked what was the block number of our closest cross street. He looked and discovered it was 3800. I asked which direction our current street ran, and he replied correctly, east and west. I told him that the block numbers get smaller as you go east and north in our area, for the most part. With that information, I then asked him if our target street was an east west street or a north south street? He said east west. Correct. I asked which way did we need to go to reach the cross streets? He correctly replied east and we were on our way. Armed with his new found understanding of block numbers in our area and how to use them, JS vastly improved his ability to find location throughout the rest of the shift. I also gave him a few other pointers to help him find his way around the area. It will take him a little time, but at least now he will not drive miles in the wrong direction.

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