Page 361 - NIXBOOK

Another class I went to once was a two-day Public Information Officer course, where a newscaster anchorman guy from some
big Midwest news TV station taught classrooms full of cops how to issue press releases and give on-camera interviews. Although
I had always wanted to be a PIO, the class was originally scheduled for my sergeant who had a schedule conflict at the last
minute so instead of forfeiting the course fee I was picked to go. On the last day of that training the class was divided into small
groups and given scenarios to discuss at a simulated press conference. The officers in my group were a bunch of fast thinkers
because when it came time to appoint a spokesman they all pointed at me and sent me up to the podium, where I had to explain
to the class how my imaginary police department was handing a case of a police officer who had chased a bank robber in a high
speed pursuit and wound up killing some innocent bystanders in a crash, and so of course the audience members, pretending
to be news reporters, had a deluge of criticism and a lot of hard questions.

Sometime after that I decided that I actually did not ever want to be a PIO; while it would have been exciting to sometimes be
on TV explaining some big police bust or something, I realized that department spokespersons also have to explain and defend
all the stupid policies that their bosses insist upon keeping. Over the years I saw more than a few PIO’s take a lot of heat publicly
for just being the messenger and the more I thought about it the less I liked it. It’s kind of like how they describe the White
House press secretary as the hardest job in Washington D.C. – it’s not fun being in a position to try to make bad things look
good on the orders of your boss when it’s obvious to everyone in the world that you’re blowing smoke.

Another time I got to attend a week long Dept. of Justice funded training in upstate New York about youth safety, with a large
group of officers from all over the country. I don’t have any stories about that one but I was close enough to drive to Niagara
falls once, which was pretty miserably foggy that day. And my rental car, a silver Chevy Malibu, had only 3 miles on the odometer
when I got it.
Other trainings included annual updates from the county prosecutors who would tell us about new state and federal case laws
that changed our standard operating procedures, and we had tactical first aid courses, and sometimes tactical maneuver
trainings involving paint marker gun rounds with mock scenarios involving bad guys on simulated traffic stops, taser update
courses, first aid and CPR, crime prevention, records management, standardized field sobriety test training, defensive tactics,
how to deal with mentally ill clients, state and national database access trainings, WSP breath alcohol machine updates, and
there was the occasional sexual harassment trainings for all city employees. Memorable for the one year when it was presented
by a woman from King County who used to be the county risk management supervisor who had to write the checks for all their
claims and payouts, so she knew what she was talking about. Unfortunately the message was kind of lost that year because she
was wearing a distractingly tight sweater that made sustained concentration for all the men in the audience virtually impossible.
And created discussion amongst ourselves during the breaks that would have greatly disappointed her, since we clearly were
applying nothing she had been trying to present to us.