Apologies for the silence the past two days. I have been busy assisting the police with their inquiries.
More seriously, FotB RoadRich and I (and a small group of other folks) had the opportunity to do some volunteer work with the University of Texas Police Department at their training academy.
UTPD is actually the third largest statewide law enforcement agency in Texas (numerically), which I did not realize but makes sense when you think about it. The UT system has a large number of campuses, as well as the health sciences centers and other university facilities, so you can easily see how this is a big organization. (I wonder what it’s like patrolling out at the McDonald Observatory. But I digress.)
In addition to training UTPD candidates, the academy also does training for other local law enforcement agencies. The class we were working with had two cadets from the Lakeway PD, at least one from the Hays County Sheriff’s Office, and a few more from other jurisdictions.
The civilian volunteers were role-players in various scenarios that the trainers ran the cadets through. I don’t want to go into great detail about those scenarios, because I don’t want to ruin them for the next class. I will say that they were typical things the cadets could expect to encounter: traffic stops, alarm responses, bickering roommates, and even someone peeing where they shouldn’t have been peeing.
(No Tasers, no Simunitons, no grappling. Apologies to all my readers who would have enjoyed a photo of your humble blogger being Tased. Maybe next time.)
It was a lot of fun, believe it or not. Myself and the other civilians I was with got to stretch our improv skills, and got to have a little fun with the cadets. Not that we were trying to mess with them and get them flunked, but the instructors did encourage us to throw them an occasional curve ball…
Thanks to the cadets and the instructors at the UTPD Police Academy. I’m looking forward to doing this again sometime. (Though not with you cadets, since you’ll be graduating soon and doing real police work.)
I attended the Michigan State Police Academy between my junior and senior years of high school. I spent a week doing the same things that actual troopers would do.
I learned that a spare tire from the trunk of your car will, when thrown into the water, support as many people as can get their hand on it. It was in their Olympic size swimming pool where much training occurs, due to Michigan having a body of water, be it a creek, river, or lake/pond, within 6 miles of any point in the state.
One of the girls in the class lost a contact lens in the pool. That afternoon they brought it to her, a state police diver having found it.
They also taught how to shoot the .38 special revolvers that were used at the time, as well as how to disarm an attacker, who held a gun on you. Along with a lot of other types of physical skills.
I seem to remember them telling us that they had a training cadet go in with the real class of troopers, and told the 2 or 3 pretend officers to try and take him into custody. They instructed the guy not to use any types of “moves” or fancy stuff, just resist like someone on the street might do.
They said it opened a lot of eyes of those trying to restrain the guy, with huge difficulty.
We had a coed class, of about 120 students. The males were on the 2nd floor and the females on the 3rd floor. We could not use the elevators, so we had to go up the stair every time we had to return to our rooms. The girls were on the top floor so that the males did not go past their floor on the way to their bunks.
I was 17 then, so the rule was a good one. I don’t think they ever found any male above our floor. It was a very impressive week, and I got a big gain of respect for State Police Officers.