Page 374 - NIXBOOK

RESERVE OFFICER COORDINATOR & FIELD TRAINING OFFICER

Because I guess I was a motivated go-getter, I also took on the duty of being the department’s Reserve Officer Program
Coordinator for a few years, which is what you call the guy who manages and oversees the volunteer (unpaid) officers. During
that time I recruited and hired a dozen new volunteer police officers and I helped them through our multi-jurisdictional county
reserve schooling course. Later I also fired about half of them for various offenses, because, well..reasons. I liked being their
supervisor but I was always a little nervous one of them would do something bad and cause a huge lawsuit against the city and
drag me into it for failing to train them on some particular aspect of something. So I kept them all well trained about everything
and I enjoyed being their leader and teaching them things. I wrote a new training manual and qualifications guide for them all,
and they rode with me and the other officers a lot. Some eventually qualified and progressed to solo patrol, meaning they could
go out and inflict law and order on the general public all by themselves.

I remember one night we had a training on how to do building searches, specifically how to methodically and safely clear rooms
at gunpoint while looking for bad guys hiding. I had managed to talk a local interior design store business owner into letting me
use his new place, which had a lot of interesting display rooms connected by strange passageways. I sent the new reserve officers
into the dark building in pairs and watched while they practiced their techniques. I also surreptitiously called their cell phones
in the middle of the searches to see which ones had paid
attention to my prior warning to turn the volume down on
their phones before starting what was supposed to be a
tactically quiet building search.

Most of our reserve officers were enlisted sailors from the
submarine base. One of them was the chief of the boat, which
is the highest rank an enlisted guy on a submarine can have;
those guys are so knowledgeable that the sub captains usually
just defers a lot of personnel related matters to the COB
directly. Another of our reserves was a retired air force pilot.
Ah hell, I’ll just make a list of the more interesting ones that I
can remember. Let’s see, we had more than one Navy
Corpsman, a Navy Diver, a whole bunch of other Navy guys I
can’t remember what they did exactly, a Washington State
Ferries system safety officer, a commercial laundry delivery
company driver, a tribal casino gaming agent, a Microsoft
Patent Attorney, a golf club pro, a corrections officer, a grocery store clerk, an IT guy, a Seattle Fire Department Lieutenant, and
a civil lawyer specializing in land use regulations. Those are the just the ones I remember; I’d say I altogether probably worked
with 60 reserve officers over the years, but most only lasted a year or two. Especially the navy guys who got transferred away
from the submarine base.

Back in the ‘90’s when we had a couple dozen reserve officers, every Friday and Saturday night at least a few would come out to
play with us. We had them classified/ranked as “First Class” “Second Class” and “Third Class.” First Class guys could solo patrol
all by themselves. It took a couple years of OJT for them to get that level of efficiency, of course. Third Class guys were the new
and inexperienced ones, good for riding in the passenger seat and running after fleeing felons on foot. Second Class RO’s could
drive police cars with the regular officers in the passenger seat supervising them. We’d also use Second Class RO’s to drive
prisoners to the jail for us, which was helpful for us and didn’t require any real police action on their part; they were essentially
armed transport chauffeurs then.

We screened our reserve officer applicants before we hired them; the ones we accepted went to a Reserve Academy course that
was usually hosted at the community college in Bremerton on weeknights. The total course lasted 3 or 4 months, and also
included full Saturdays of instruction. It was basically just a shortened version of the real police academy class, and in addition
to the classroom instruction there were defensive tactics classes, practical exercises in handcuffing and driving police cars and
practicing felony stops, etc.

Eventually we had to screen the applicants better to include a psychiatric exam and a polygraph/lie detector test. Each test cost
$300 and the PD paid for them. So we had to start getting really discriminating about who we hired and spent $600 dollars on,
because if they failed either test we were out a bit of money.