Highly Fireable and Under Concerned Area

When I had my first interview to be a cop, the Captain over recruiting asked me a simple question:  You gonna wreck my cars?  Your driving record is terrible.

Vehicle shortages are a real concern as we all know.  Everywhere I've been, if you consistently crash cars that belong to the government, you'll be in the hot seat.

I hope you enjoy this short on how to not end up in a ditch or deep puddle, floating awkwardly.

-LEO

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Good morning, that Leo guy here. And today I'm going to aim for a change of pace from understanding and kind and trying to help people develop to a little bit angry and judgmental. Despite myself making these same mistakes after supervising at various places my frustration for driving poor decisions, which is pretty much always what it is, my patience got pretty bad. I'm not gonna lie. So, first off to start, I I would say I'm a good driver that has used significant bad judgment over the years. I've had some reckless driving tickets that got reduced. I used to ride sport bikes, and so you know what comes with that. So when I interviewed for my first police job on the road, the captain who was interviewing me overtly asked me, he said, I looked at your driving record and it's bad. Are you gonna wreck my police cars? And I was like, no, sir. Just easy to say. I still went out and drove poorly. I never had an atfault accident, but I took risks my first three years or so that were unnecessary and could have caused me to have at fault accidents and get disciplined and get fired and all that. So I want to get into that because it's those three to five year officers, it's when you've developed that confidence in your abilities and then, and some that are brand new, but especially once you've been on like a year to three years, you're like, I got this down. So I'm not talking about pursuit driving here, talking about, you know, driving regular or running code and how to not destroy your car, your body, and your career while doing that. I was lucky enough, one of my field trainers was very he was calm to the point, like he didn't have a pulse, like he was so chill. Uh, but he would also go up to a hundred thousand and flip out on people. So there was some stuff seething under the surface there, I think. I believe he ended up getting fired later for some kind of violent incident. I don't know. But 99% of the time, he was completely calm. So one time I was running code somewhere, I was brand new, like first couple weeks in a car in training status. I was driving, and I still remember the curve we were going around. We were going like you come off one main road and you go on like this one-way curving road that goes under and overpass and goes onto this smaller city street. And we were going code, uh knowing the neighborhoods, probably like a shooting or an armed robbery that had just occurred. So something, you know, in my young eyes, probably the first one I'd ridden or one of the first couple, something high impact, right? So I'm freaking rolling. I mean, tires are barely holding on. I'm thinking, I gotta get us there. Well, he goes, shut your lights off and pull over. And I'm like, what? He's like, pull the car over. So I pulled over, shut the lights off, pulled over. I'm like, I'm feeling like, what are we doing? Like, are we not serving the neighborhood? Like, we need to go. And he says, Man, I don't care if you mash out in the straightaways, but you got to ease up in these turns because you're definitely gonna kill us. He said, I had a partner on the next street up, the next main road up. He said, I had a partner up there that wrecked driving kind of like this, and he ended up going through the windshield, and then when I got there, his eyeball was hanging on by a string, and I'm not really trying to do that. So I need you to get us there, okay? I'm like, okay. It just felt really weird, but it made an impact on me that it showed what his value was. It was getting there, it was 100% the value over shaving a couple seconds off. So it was a really good lesson for me. Those lessons in the moment always hit me a little bit harder. So when you're driving in a police car, you are not above the law or the policy. You should know your driving policy. It's not sexy, fun stuff. But if you're not reading your ethics, use of force, including use of deadly force, driving, if you're not reading those policies, you're setting yourself up for failure because those are the ones that'll get you hemmed up. Okay. So just take the time and read that. Read how many at-fault accidents it takes for you to get disciplinary action. What's the normal? If you're just hitting poles all the time, you're going to get disciplined, even though you're not meaning to. When I say you're not above the law, you can't, if you're not in an emergency, you can't just go 20 over the speed limit. We've all been had our doors blown off by state troopers or city cops that are going way too fast. You may be going to a call, but read your freaking policy because I'm telling you, as a supervisor, all those cars have some kind of black box in them. They have something that's tracking your speed. And I'm telling you right now, when you blow the doors off people, some people call that in and they say, hey, I'm looking at car 0413. It just passed me going at least 90. I'm going 70 and they blew my doors off. Are we, are y'all supposed to be doing that? And if that complaint gets formalized and you were going 20 over and you weren't using your lights and sirens, I'm telling you right now, yes, it's gonna be out of policy. So I know you want to get there, but you got, if you want a long career, you gotta put your career before what you really want. And you got to put your law, your policy in the law first. When you run code, you are exempt from some laws. Can you speed? Yes. Are you also held to a reasonableness standard? Yes. If you're going, I don't know, 100 miles an hour in a school zone because you're going to three people shot. Yeah, you need to get there. But most investigations are going to show that that was unreasonable. If it's a school zone, that you're going 100 or even probably 80, you might have to ease it way back. And that's the extreme example. But man, I I remember an at fault accident where they found him at fault. He was running code on an open highway at night, nobody on the road. And the little black box showed he was going 120 miles an hour. And I don't remember what happened if there was a deer or he just lost control, but he wrecked that thing. So now he's dealing with injuries, but he was also found at fault. They said the city said it is not reasonable to go 120 on that parkway. We don't care that it's empty. You know, in police work, they say money, sex, and lying will get you fired. I'm going to add driving to that list. If you keep wrecking cars, they don't need you, or you're going to end up on a desk sitting at, you know, the front of the building taking walk-in reports, and you're probably going to hate your life. I've seen exactly that. Somebody that wrecks so many cars because they're so motivated, they so want to do the right thing, but their judgment sucks and they're running into stuff. When you're not running code, unless you're like pacing somebody to get their speed, you got to follow the law. So the moment you start thinking you don't have to, man, come on. You do. So deal with it. Some things to avoid. Here's one, man. I used to say this every roll call. When our area just would flood, man. Like there'd be intersections underwater when it rained. Those puddles, and what I would always say is, don't sink my police cars. Please don't put my police cars underwater. I'm gonna be pissed. You want to see me pissed off? Call me and say, hey, Sarge, I drove into a puddle and now the car's floating and I had to walk out. I'm gonna call you an idiot and I'm gonna find you at fault. Period. You're that's your fault for driving into that puddle. Oh, I thought it was shallow. Guess what? It wasn't. It can be deceptive. I'm telling you not to drive into that puddle. Nobody on my shift ever sunk it because every time it rained, I would literally say that at the beginning. Like, I don't support you if you drive into a puddle and say, oh, I thought it was three inches deep. It ended up being a foot and a half. And if your city's anything like mine, you're short on police cars already. So now we're down another car. Now people are doubling up even more. And that's your fault. Like I said, the angry guy, angry and judgy. Avoid curbs, cars, poles, people. You can hit all that stuff. I've seen quite a few officers hit poles. Again, it's an emergency situation. Your partner's in a foot chase. It doesn't really matter. You make it so much worse if you get in an accident because now we have another scene. As a supervisor, I'm going to both those scenes. If that officer gets in a foot chase, I expect there to be the use of force at the end. There usually is. And now I got to go deal with your accident. So I'm the only supervisor, what now? You're out of pocket, you screwed everything up. So it pisses your supervisor off when you crash cars at fault. You just got to be really careful. And it screws up the insurance and all that. The difference in just stop trying to justify the bad decisions. A lot of people make the decisions. I've done it, and you're like, I can justify it because I was going to a shooting. That's why I was going 80 around that bend in the road under the overpass. But it's not really a justification. It's still stupid. It's a dumb choice. So the sooner you can learn that, you know, when I started, I looked at the older guys more like, oh, this is just an old guy that's not motivated. They always got an excuse. Some of them were. So, you know, some of them didn't want to work. They're always talking about liability. I ain't doing nothing because, you know, I'm just going to get in trouble these days. I'm not with that, but I am with the with when it comes to driving, slow it down a little bit. If you're going 120, you're probably wrong if you're not pursuing something crazy. But just trying to hurry to a scene at 120 miles an hour is generally you just can't react in that time. It's all going to come down to are you reasonable? You're going to go through stoplights, stop signs. The videos are always going to be there these days. They're everywhere. And if your little black box shows that you were going 90 through an intersection, you cannot safely check an intersection going 90. And if you get in a wreck, think about it this way. What if you hit a car and there's a pregnant girl inside and somebody dies? Are you, first off, are you personally going to be okay with yourself in five years when you look back and go, you know what? I really shouldn't have been driving like that. If you're driving reasonable, you won't hit that car. You'll slow down to 10 miles an hour, whatever you need, and clear that intersection. But you're still responsible for everybody's safety when you're driving. So saying, oh, I had my blue lights and siren on, yeah, well, she was listening to music and didn't expect you and had a green light, and you plowed her. So yeah, that's your fault. And that's harsh, but that's how I feel. It is our responsibility when running code or not code to be safe. We gotta expect them to make mistakes and be unaware. Sheep, cheap dog, all that stuff. I'm not saying to never show up. I'm saying you should always show up. So if you go 100 instead of 70, you're probably shaving seconds, probably under a minute off of your response time. And if you flip your car or hit somebody, your response time is it's gone. You're hurt, somebody else is hurt, whatever. So it's it's this cle it's this weird little kind of cliche statement of like, well, you you know, better to show up late than not show up at all. And my thought was always, yeah, you know, that's for people that can't drive. I'm gonna get there. Like I can drive. But then Murphy and Murphy's Law steps in and suddenly you don't make it. You hurt somebody real bad. I don't want that to be my fault. So there's there's high impact situations you'll get dispatched to. That's your job as a cop. You might get an officer down call. Officer needs assistance now, a foot chase, a bank robbery, a shooting. The most high impact one being officer down. If you slide through an intersection and go through a pole on the way there or take out a stroller, you didn't help anything. So I'm just saying don't let your emotions destroy your vehicle, your body, and your career because you're like, I gotta be there five minutes ago. You can only be there when you be there. Once you start feeling brake fade, once your brakes aren't working anymore, your tires are squealing every corner, you might need to ease up a bit. Those brakes are gonna stop working so well. I already mentioned the black box, the cameras. Most cars, the cameras come on automatically. Your body comes on automatically when you hit the blue light. So it's gonna be on video. I've seen officers be dishonest about how fast they were going or say, I don't, I have no idea how fast I was going. Probably like 60. And then you look at the body cam as 95 on a city street. It's like, okay, that's not even really close to what you said. And nothing's gonna frustrate the supervisor more than you lying to cover up a policy violation like that. But you won't have to if you make that good choice on the front end. And again, for the under five-year officers, some of you are you've entered into police cultures where people do stuff like this. It's all about trying to get over on the supervisor and how do I do this job without them getting in my way? And sometimes the supervision teams have created that atmosphere where they're out to get people all the time, and it breeds this environment of, well, how do I get by? Because I want to do cop stuff. I want to catch people, but everything I do, my sergeant's just saying, You're you're liable for that, or saying, or trying to write me up. So it's this balancing act. But what you don't want to do is be trying to get over and then come out that you objectively lied about your speed, about how you were driving, about if you ran the red light, if you were going too fast without your head, without your blue lights and siren on and all that. Most places, in order to violate the law, you have to have that stuff going. So your statement's gonna matter. So just don't lose your mind when there's something high impact that comes out. That's when you need your mind even more. The bottom line is: were you in policy and the law? If you were, you're good. Generally, that they're gonna find that you were reasonable. Were you in policy and did you follow the law? Some things to expect following your accident, be it at fault or not at fault. This is most plays have some policy similar to this. And again, this is why you want to have read the policy when you have some downtime so that you know what to expect, so that you're not surprised. Most places will have an alcohol and drug screen, including prescriptions. Do you have a back injury from your time in the Army Rangers and you take muscle relaxers? And do you need to have told your agency about that? I'll give you a hint. When you have a drug screen, they're going to say, What prescriptions are you taking? If they do a test for opiates and you're on painkillers from an injury, is that going to affect how they look at your case? So you need to, in my opinion, let your agency know if you're on a prescription that says things like, don't operate heavy machinery or automobiles. Like you need to balance that alcohol screen. If you had some drinks last night until late, is that still gonna be in your blood? And are you gonna blow a positive read on that breathalyzer? I mean, God forbid it's high enough that your DUI, but they're gonna ask, when was the last time you had a drink? And if you're blowing a 0.04 at eight in the morning, it was probably pretty recent. What's the policy on how long do you need to wait between having a drink and coming to work? They're probably gonna ask, how much sleep did you get? That's that was something in ours. Hey, how much did you sleep last night? When did you go to bed? When did you get up? And if I were you, I would want to know how many at fault wrecks before discipline, whether it's policy or whether it's the norm. Usually the first one, you might get a reprimand. The second, third one, I mean, you might start getting in some real trouble. And then that leads to the decisions I just talked about to hide things. Hey, I've had three at fault accidents. Maybe I can just climb up under this car, pop this bumper back out and not mention it, and drive away. I don't see anybody. And then guess what? Some joker calls in and says, Hey, I just saw a cop hit a pole, pop it out, and drive away over here on Westwood and Levi Street. And you know, the sergeant looks on the little GPS that all the cars have and goes, Oh, Johnny was over there. Let me see. And sure enough, Johnny hit something and you and didn't tell you. And there's definitely a policy on when you need to report that accident. Usually it's immediately. So wasn't as angry and judgy as I had hoped to be. I'll do better next time. I'll do some real, I'll find some condescension in my voice. But this is such an avoidable mistake that can and will hurt your career. So if you can take away from this, slow your ass down a little bit. If you can hear your tires screaming, if your brakes are fading, you're probably doing a little too much. If you have multiple incidents a month of because you slid through traffic and almost hit somebody, I'll tell you another one. I'll end this with a little story. And you'll probably be like, man, that guy was a real jerk of a supervisor. But I don't care. Because my job is to supervise. And if I see the officers doing something stupid and risky, I feel like it's my job to say it. So officer was in a foot chase and uh calling out on the radio direction, running, running into some apartments chasing a guy. And so I start going there. I'm running code, going down like probably a 40 mile per hour zone, two-lane road, one lane going each way. There's like three police cars in front of me, and like two of them are driving insane. I mean, they're going into oncoming traffic. Lights and siren are on, but are they being reasonable? Man, not even close. They're being unreal, like so close to causing a wreck. So I got on the radio, I said, units responding to foot pursuit, shut off your blue lights and siren. And that's not a good feeling. That officer is calling out directions and expecting help. Those guys were coming inches from hitting cars head on. And uh the other thing is if you get a reputation of driving responsibly, your supervisors will let you do things like chase cars. They won't break off the pursuits as much. They'll trust you more. All the stuff that comes from having the trust of your boss, you will get, you will have earned. But you burn it when you don't realize he's behind you and you're going 90 down a two-lane road, sliding around cars, sliding into the emergency lane that isn't even really an emergency lane and it's right on the edge of the grass. We all know if you touch grass going 90, you're probably going sideways. So that was just that's just something that I remember is looking at them and being like, wait, this is really how they drive when I'm not around. Like, this is some childish stuff, man. This is like some action junkie stuff. That's not good enough. So don't be that. You never know who's watching. And more than that, you you just don't want to live with having hurt or killed somebody that has nothing to do with anything because you were young and wild and had blue lights on or didn't. All right. I hope this is helpful. I hope this keeps somebody from running into somebody, and I hope you guys have a great day. Bye bye.