Page 360 - NIXBOOK

POLICE TRAINING

Lets go way back to 1993: Just a few days after signing the paperwork to become a full-time city employee and Police Officer, I
had to start thinking in earnest about what was coming my way. I had some mild fears and concerns, like would I be able to read
license plates at a distance? In the dark? How long will it take me to learn how to decipher what the hell the dispatchers were
saying on the radio? Will be it hard to learn where all the streets and roads are? What will it be like to wade into a rowdy crowd
of drunks and break up a bar fight? Would the police training be too difficult? Fortunately, eventually all of those became non-
issues for me.

My official police training started at the state academy in Burien, WA near the SeaTac
airport. Officially, the place was called the Washington State Criminal Justice Training
Commission, otherwise known as the WSCJTC. My Basic Law Enforcement Academy class
in the spring of 1993 was formed up as class #403. (When I retired 27 years later the BLEA
classes were in the 800’s!) The classes were five days a week with weekends off. During the
week the student officers stayed in dorm-type rooms. The instructors were mostly cops on
loan from different agencies; some of them were great, some mediocre. We learned about
patrol tactics and procedures, firearms, federal and state laws, etc. The total course was only
12 weeks long and did not include a lot of important topics that were added in the years to
follow; the last time I checked the course now was up to about 19 weeks long, which sounds
about right. Change is constant there; new courses are added, better training is
implemented, and depending on who is in charge of the whole place at one any one given
time, the new recruits are either trained as police officer ”Guardians” or “Warriors”. To the
relief or consternation of police chiefs and sheriffs across the state who send their new
officers there.
After my initial training at the CJTC I went to a lot more courses and classes over the years; some were just an hour or two, some
were a day long, and some were a week long. Some were at the academy but most were at other police departments hosting the
trainings, and some were at hotel conference rooms or other civic or government buildings in other counties or states.
Every single training course I ever attended always had one thing in common; none of the police officers attending ever wanted
to sit in the front of the class. The seats would fill in from the back first, and unless the class was totally full the first couple rows
of seats would always remain empty. Every instructor and officer expected it and the instructors would always make jokes about
it. Only a few ever insisted that everybody move up to the front.

It was also not uncommon for most police instructors to half-apologize in advance for swearing during their presentations or
give a disclaimer or warning: “Oh I should warn you all that I tend to swear a lot when I’m doing police work, and that includes
classroom instruction. So, if you have a problem with me swearing,” (short pause here for dramatic effect) “then you are in the
wrong fucking line of work and most definitely in the wrong fucking classroom. So fucking deal with it, because I’m going to be
doing some swearing.” These types of announcements were always met with general laughter and I never heard or saw anybody
wrinkle their nose and complain at any point about the instructor’s profanity. We were all cops, after all. Needless to say, some
of the presentations sometimes included graphically violent and horrible pictures or videos of crime scenes and victims, too.
In the first half of my career I went to a fair number of training conferences and classes. One of my first ones was a two week
DARE Instructor course where about 20 officers from across the state were selected to be DARE Officers. The very first exercise,
at the start of the first day, was each officer had to go to the front of the class and deliver an engaging energetic monologue
about a certain subject for five minutes. The subject topics were written on cards and each officer got their card when they stood
there in front of the class. So of course there was absolutely no chance to prepare, it was all improvisational. The subjects were
very vague like “Big Toe” or “Sky” or “Front Door.” Officers talking had to stay on topic and no questions from the audience was
allowed. The idea was to see which officers could be comfortable with extemporaneous speaking in front of people in
uncomfortable situations. I did okay. Not everybody passed. A few guys did really well and impressed the instructions. (The
DARE course was also a bit entertaining because we had several Canadian police officer students in attendance. They lived up
to their reputation of being hilarious because every single night at dinner in different restaurants one of them secretly told the
waiters and waitresses that one of them was having a birthday. They pointed out this one same guy every time. So every night
he had the wait staff surprise him with a happy birthday moment that usually included surrounding him singing and clapping
and presenting him with a candle-lit desert.)