April 9, 2009
From TheKCGuy
This post is the sixth in my series on the Prairie Village Citizen Police Academy.
We had three classes at the Citizen Academy this week. Two focused on the way that the Prairie Village police department interacts with the local schools, and one was on vehicle operations.
Corporal McCullough taught us the class on vehicle operations, which covered things such as the defensive driving methods that they use in everyday driving conditions, the procedures for emergency response, and their persuit policy. The cops aren't dumb, though, and they know that the fun stuff for us in the class is the dangerous stuff. We got to see a few videos of persuits in our town. It was interesting for two reasons. First, it was like an episode of cops on streets we were familiar with. It looks a lot more dangerous to see a car speeding through an intersection when it's the intersection right by the park where you play with your family. The other interesting part was hearing a commentary from someone who knows a few things about high speed persuits. He pointed out aspects of the chases that I would have not noticed or considered if I had been watching it on my own. Again, I continue to be surprised by the dangerous situations that these officers are placed in.
I was glad to have the two classes dealing with officers in the area schools, too. It's been a while since I was in school, and it sounds like things have changed a bit. Prairie Village has a DARE officer who splits his time between Prairie, Briarwood, Belender, and St. Ann's. Officer Steck teaches classes to Kindergarten through 6th grades mainly about avoiding drug use, alcohol, and smoking. But, he apparently teaches much more than that, from safety in public and at home to respect for classmates. Prairie Village has two Student Resource Officers who spend their time at the local schools. Not only do they provide some law enforcement services there, but they also are counselors, teachers, and more for many of the students. I'll bet this program does tons to help kids who are having trouble at home and don't really have a role model or authority figure they can trust. It sounds like a pretty tough but rewarding special assignment for the officers, and one that goes a long way to help out the community.
Next week we have classes in records and dispatch. Since I'm a bit of a police scanner junkie, I'm looking forward to the class about how dispatch works. Stay tuned for an article about that. In the meantime, if you've enjoyed this one, take a look at last week's class on firearms or some of the other articles from my series on the Citizen Police Academy.
