Patrol Lessons Learned

The police academy will give you the barebones to be a cop:  Law, tactics criminal procedure.

Field training will indoctrinate you into the culture of the agency you chose.

This episode will provide realistic, day-to-day best practices that I adopted over years of patrolling and supervising a patrol shift.  These practices will lead you to success and great fortune!

-LEO

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Good morning. It's Leo and welcome back. This one may sound like it'll be a little bit boring, basics of patrol, but there's a lot of stuff that you're taught in the academy that doesn't really translate to being a quality patrol officer. So if you're new, there's a very good chance that uh some of the stuff you've either been taught, but the culture of the shift you join, they don't really do it. And so it's very quick that, you know, you show up and you have field training and your field trainer's like, yeah, we don't do it like that. That's academy shit. We that's not real life. So here are some things that uh you may not even realize you're in a toxic or a problematic culture that could end up, you know, either creating you a situation professionally or just limiting your mobility. You know, you're on one shift and all the other shifts may be doing things better, but you may have a bunch of freaking boneheads on your shift that, you know, when you're new, you become what you see oftentimes. It's really hard to go against the grain. And here are some things that, in my experience over the last 20-ish years, will help you to be a quality patrol officer, to, you know, get good reviews if you guys have those, and to move on and to get noticed as being quality, and to just not be kind of hated on your shift. Uh I'll start with a very basic one that I've seen quite a few cops neglect, and that is checking your backseat, your whole car, but especially your backseat before and after shift. Before your shift, check for damage. People will run cars into stuff and not tell you. And if you're just picking up a pool car, it's not a take home, uh, which is what we're referring to. And at the end of shift, the next officer checks and finds damage, that's you're a little bit stuck because you should have checked it. Most places it's a policy, people kind of neglect it. Check the lights, check the siren, all the little crap, see if it's working, stuff you might need. And check the backseat. I have, if you've been on five plus years, you have probably found either drugs or a gun in the backseat because the shift before you didn't check it. You don't want to be the one that gets stuck with somebody else's drugs or gun, or you know, you put somebody in the backseat and you didn't check, and now there's a bag of crack on the floor and they're saying it isn't mine. And you have to be honest and be like, I didn't check. I don't really know if it was here or not. So check your car like you're supposed to. After your arrest, check your car. Once you put them in the jail, check that backseat real good. Make sure there's not a pistol stuff down. I know we have those big hard plastic things where you can't really hide stuff, but get down in there and check and make sure, or even one crack rock, you need to find that. And you need to be able to honestly say that was not there before. I just put that guy in jail. When I came back and checked my backseat, there was a crack rock back there that wasn't there. And then, of course, at the end of your shift, check it just to double check. That whole process takes like two minutes and it can make a big difference. Back up everyone, even your shitty, abrasive, annoying drama-starting partners. Back up everyone. If they're crossing some boundary in some way with you, you know, deal with that, but do not fail to back them up. Both because it's pretty unethical, you know, they can get really hurt. And if they do get really hurt or killed and you weren't backing them up because you were on lunch break and you were only two minutes away, but you didn't feel like it because you were having a meatball sub, or you just don't like them and you think they're a jerk, or you're just kind of lazy and you were like, Oh, I ain't trying to do all that. Just get in the habit of backing up everyone, no matter personality conflicts. Just be there for your shift. Because the one time in your career that it goes to absolute hell in a handbasket for that partner of yours, not chosen partner, but partner nonetheless, and you didn't show up, you're gonna be reliving that. You know, you're not gonna be like, oh to hell with him. I didn't like him anyway. No, you're gonna, you know, be at the funeral and be thinking, you know, this didn't need to happen if I'd just been there. So back them up. Uh, knowing who to call when you have questions. There are people that when you call them, don't know shit, but claim to know everything and will give you bad advice. There are people that know a lot, but are generally pretty quiet. If they're willing to share it, some of those people are just not going to really talk to you. They're gonna give you really short answers when they have more in their head. Find the right person. It might not be the sergeant. My first sergeant was crusty as hell, did not want phone calls. Here's how he answered the phone. People that know him will know immediately. Hello. He wanted nothing to do with a phone call from a rookie. And that's okay. I wasn't going to change that. He'd been on like 30 years. But my go-to guy was a guy that had been on about 15 years. He was still an officer. He was kind of disgruntled, but he knew the job very well. And he had done the job. And he'd been in narcotics, he'd done some stuff, and you know, he was back on patrol for whatever his reasons were. But he had knowledge and he was willing to share with me if I asked. If I didn't ask, he would just quietly go about his night. There are supervisors and officers that will make it worse, that will talk about you, that will try to micromanage you when you say, hey, here's my situation. What do I handcuff a 12-year-old on a stolen bike? I don't really know what I'm doing here because I've worked here six weeks. I caught three 12-year-olds in a stolen car. What the hell do I do with this? You're just confused and kind of lost. I got a domestic where they had a love triangle gone wrong, and I think they all punched each other. What do I do here? You know, you're in one of these weird situations. You need the right person that's going to make it easier for you, not worse. Uh, know your job. That includes your policies. I mean, I've covered this several times. You need to know your pursuit policy and understand it. You need to know your use of force policy and your ethics policy. If you haven't read those three, take those two hours and knock that out. If you have questions, let's figure it out now. Not after the pursuit, not after the fight. Here's a big one for you to be a quality patrol officer. Shut the hell up. I've done several episodes covering this same stuff. One's called Don't Get Fired or Indicted. One's called Rumors, Rumors, Rumors, Avoid. It's so easy to get sucked up into a group text, dragging a supervisor behind his or her back, and it gets back to them. Just being generally negative, complaining, and just all that crap. It just does nothing for you. And I'll tell you, as somebody that has supervised various units, the last thing we want is somebody that's going to come in and run their mouth. I don't want somebody that's going to run their mouth about me, about their coworkers, about the department and how screwed up it is. Just shut up. If you got something negative to say, don't say anything at all, or whatever that saying is. Go ahead and develop yourself while you're on patrol. It is an awesome universal training ground. You deal with pretty much everything from property crimes to dope. You have opportunities to do interviews, you can help detectives work towards search warrants. There are just countless avenues available that you can learn what you want to do and how to do it. If your whole view of patrol is ride 911 calls and occasionally stop a car and write them a ticket, you're missing out on a lot of growth and development that you can have as an officer. So that when you want to go to homicide, you can say, Yeah, I've done, I used to interview all my shoplifters. I'd read a Miranda and practice my interviews, try to get them to confess to stealing some shirts, whatever it may be. I helped these developed, uh, these uh detectives develop probable cause for a search warrant. Just use it as a bit of a training ground. If you never want to leave, that's cool. But if you do, go ahead and have some stuff in your pocket. Yeah, I make a couple felony dope arrests a month. You know, yeah, I've I've had this gun case go federal. I've testified in federal court based on a traffic stop I did on patrol. I'm a big proponent of this next one. Don't be a 10-year rookie. I've seen 20-year rookies. They were too cool to be humble and be learning within a year or two in. They already knew everything. There was nothing else left out there. I've seen these guys in narcotics, I've seen them everywhere. Homicide. You don't know what a historical cell site warrant is. I've met homicide detectives that have never done a historical cell site, never pulled CDRs. And that's wild. You should be developing yourself so that you're not a 10, 15, 20 year rookie, so you're not a sergeant in 20 years that doesn't know anything about a certain subject. If there's somebody that knows more, go on and pick their brain, humble yourself, and be able to say, hey, I see you get a gun and crack every other day. I haven't gotten any of that. Can you teach me what you're looking for? What's catching your eye? How you're getting in the car, what court's like? Just be humble, man, and you can learn a lot and you can climb. Again, it's finding the right people. Some people are going to smirk at you if you say that. Oh, well, the hell with them. That's not really your problem. Find somebody that's not going to be like that. But most of the people that are getting into real stuff consistently, the shit magnets, as we call them, they love talking about their exploits, telling a story, and then you might have to push them for that story to have a point. Cool, you got three stolen guns off this guy. Tell me about it. How'd you get consent? What did you ask him? How did you ask for consent on that car? You had three guys in the car at midnight. How'd you do that safely? Can you teach me a little bit? And they want other people to become like them. So just pick their brains and obviously go to training. Beat integrity. Most of you, probably all of you, have heard this term having beat integrity. It means whatever your area you're assigned that you're responsible for, you ride the majority or all of the calls during that shift in that area. Something sleazy I used to do when I was new on patrol is I would on my MDT, my little computer, mobile data terminal, I would have 33 punched in, which is the code for meal break. And I hated riding accidents, not accidents with injuries. I wasn't dodging those, but just a non-injury accident. I hated just the mundaness of moving the cars out of the way, directing traffic, drawing the diagram, talking to the people that are lying about it. Just yawn. I hated it. So I would hold out on a meal break if I saw one pop up in my beat. That was shit police work. I probably wouldn't do that again. I probably really pissed some people off. But just having beat integrity, you know, if you're on a traffic stop and you see something come out in your beat, it's okay to just clear that stop. Be like, hey man, that is your lucky day. I'm cutting you loose. I got work to do. They may have already dispatched it. You can come over and go, hey, disregard that unit. I got it. But people, your shift partners not having to pick up your Slack all the time will go a long way. Sick leave abuse gets noticed. Like I said, I've I've supervised, I've been part of interviews for different units. And it's it is allowed to look at someone's sick leave use. And it's very obvious the sick leave abusers versus the people that tend to catch a cold when it comes around. If you, if your days off are Sunday, Monday and you're always sick on Friday, Saturday, you're sick, you're abusing the sick leave. You if you have zero hours of sick leave. If I'm running a unit, if you want to go to narcotics, I have to expect you to abuse your sick leave if you've done it consistently until now. And most places there's a policy that says they can look at it, they will look at it, and supervisors can discipline you for it. So just think twice before, you know, there's a lot of people that probably don't want to come into work on that Friday or Saturday night. But as someone that has created that schedule, it freaking sucks to have four people call in sick on Saturday night. And you got seven beats to cover, seven areas of responsibility, and you got five cops and you're like, damn it, man, busiest night of the week, and I'm short. I'm kind of screwed. Do I hold people over? Does somebody else get screwed because you're calling in sick? Could be. Some places I've even heard about like supervisors riding by people's houses and people flip out about it. They're like, why are they coming to check on me? Why are they coming to my door? Have I ever been involved in something like that? No. If you're calling in every Friday night, do you maybe deserve that? Maybe. Yeah. Stop calling in all the freaking time. They're probably not doing that the first time you call in sick, but you want to have a tantrum because you called in three out of the last four Fridays, and now you're getting checked up on. They're saying, hey, I want to see you. Send me the COVID test. You know? So just don't abuse your sick leave. It's the absolute worst when your supervisor's plan gets its legs chopped off for the evening. It's supposed to be a nice, pleasant, warm Saturday night, and now the sergeant's riding calls. Pack your food and drinks, or expect to be fat and broke. That's pretty straightforward. I don't think that needs explanation. Man, people talk about having the windows down, smelling the city, being part of the city. It really does matter. A lot of the cops that are, you know, finding success consistently, seeing the crimes that are going on, effectively protecting their community, they're either out walking the area or their windows are down. They're picking up on smells, on sounds. They're hearing the gunfire. They're hearing the lady screaming, crying, yelling, get off me, get off me. So just get out, go for a walk in your high crime area. If it's high enough crime, bring a buddy with you. Might not be a bad idea, but just uh shit, walk the low crime areas. It doesn't matter. People usually like seeing the cops out walking their area. The criminals don't like it, but I'm telling you, if you got some rough projects in your area and you get out and the, you know, the real citizens in there see you walking through, climbing stairwells, asking them if everything's okay. Hey, how's the neighborhood? What's been going on? When uh uh, you know, they may say, man, there's gunfire every night. All right, what time of night? Who's shooting? Can you tell me who's shooting? Where are they shooting at? You go over and pick up some shell casings. Maybe it's tied to a crime scene. And you can pull video and connect something. All kinds of stuff happens when your windows are down or you're out of your car. When you're sealed up in your little box, you're kind of disconnected. There's a weird disconnection that comes from that piece of glass between you and the world. Here's a simple one that I was taught early. The boss ain't always right, but the boss is always the boss. So if you don't like your sergeant or lieutenant, you don't agree with how they run things, uh, whatever they're doing that aggravates you, they're still in charge. So you just got to figure that out. That's kind of a you problem, whether you're having a conversation with them or changing shifts. But if you're constantly working around the boss, we've all seen this, then you're gonna find yourself getting hemmed up because they're gonna figure it out. They're a human too. They've probably been on 20 years, maybe 30, and they're gonna see the bullshit you're on and that you're trying to pull. They may not speak to you about it, but they may go, okay, Leo's always trying to get over. You know, he's always in a quote pursuit. He's always following somebody and they're crashing. I need to really keep an eye on when this happens and pull his body cam or pull local cameras and see if he's being honest about if he was chasing this car or not, or whatever it is that you know you guys aren't agreeing about. Just know once you once you start disobeying or talking about them, you kind of put a target on your back and they're in charge and they have the ability to reprimand you. You can have fit if you want, you can appeal it all the way up to God Himself. But at the end of the day, they have the actual authority. All bosses are different, so know who you're dealing with when you're on patrol. Like I said, I had the one that he didn't want any questions. He didn't want to deal with me. I had a lieutenant that was totally fine. I mean, did my sergeants want me usurping the chain of command? No. But he would have been fine if I bumped into him and asked him. And then I also had the other officer on my shift that I would generally call, who had no actual authority, but he was there to help me. So just know what you're what you're dealing with and kind of accept that you are a subordinate and you are a follower. You're not the leader of that shift. Your gear, your paperwork, your car, it needs to be working for both functionality and comfort. If you've always got hip pain because of how your gear is sitting, because you have one of these vests that is, you know, has all your crap on it and it's pushing into your belt and you can't even ride around in a car for an hour without being uncomfortable, you need to fix it. You know, the seat bags with the little accordion folders with all your paperwork in it. Have that stuff squared away before your shift for both comfort and functionality. You know, if your seat bag's so big that it's always knocking your lunchbox off because you don't want to be fat and broke, so you got a lunchbox. Just get that stuff reorganized. Your gear, I always have carried a second pair of handcuffs in my left pocket, my weak side front pocket, so that if I have two people fighting, I can handcuff both, I'm not hung out to dry. That didn't bother me. But if it bothers you and you want to have two pairs of handcuffs, go ahead and, as the kids on Fortnite would say, organize your loot. Get your loot in order so that you can use it comfortably and functionally. Keep in mind that your normal day, your normal call is likely the worst day of their life. People don't call the cops as a first resort. It's usually a last resort. A lot of time they're like, I'm sorry, I didn't even know if I should be calling you. They might be a total emotional wreck. So if you're on patrol, you're gonna deal with people that just if your mindset is like, God, these people are so stupid, they're always crying, they're just blabbering. Like, yeah, that's because they just called 911 for help. So keep that in mind and have a little bit of empathy for the people you serve. They're probably gonna be blabbering, they're probably not gonna be focused. You know, we've all been to a thousand domestics where they want to tell you about their whole life story, and you just don't want to hear it. You don't want to hear about the infidelity, the fighting when they got punched two years ago by their spouse. It's all irrelevant for the most part. We're we're here. Why'd you call 911? What are we doing here? But don't get snappy, just professionally work through the problem. I mean, you think about whoever your kind of at-risk loved one is, whether it's your mom or your wife or your child, if they called 911, would they want you to show up? Would you be professional and fair and know your job well enough to help them? So hopefully this helps some of you. I know there's, you know, we have the police academy where you learn traffic stops and you learn how to shoot and you get somewhat fit by doing running or whatever, you know, all the stuff they teach you, constitutional law, criminal procedure, all this stuff. But a lot of the little things, the intangibles that aren't black and white, you learn from your field trainer and from your sergeant. And some of those people are going to be wrong. So I'm not saying question everything they say, but I am saying it's your career and you need to critically think about is this the best way of doing it? When you have a partner that's saying, that guy always escalates things. Talking about another cop, he always escalates things. I try not to back him up. I try not to be over there with him. They wouldn't say I try not to back him up because that rings wrong, but I try not to go out with him because he's always escalating things. Well, how about you talk to that guy or talk to the sergeant if you can't talk to him, if he's always mad? Hey, Sarge, Dave is like, he just screams at everybody. Nobody wants to back him up. I don't want him left out to dry. I want to back him up, but I don't want to get in fights over stupid stuff because he's always disrespected people. And in this area, if you disrespect people, where they say talk shit, get hit. You might get tested a little bit. So I want to back him up. I don't want to fight all the time. Help me out. Or hopefully you can just talk to that officer directly or one of his friends. Like, hey man, can you talk to your boy? Like he's always dragging me into some drama. I'm always, my knuckles are always scratched after shift because I'm rolling around on the ground with people because he runs his freaking mouth. I'm not really into that. I want to back him up. I'm there for him. I'm gonna back him up, but I don't want to fight because he's got some anger issues or whatever. So I hope this helps some of y'all either in the academy, fresh out of the academy, or veterans who have built bad habits and want to change those habits. It's okay to go, you know what, I've developed a shit habit here. I want to be a better cop. I hope this helps some of y'all again, repetitive, and have a wonderful day. Goodbye.