March 23, 2009
From TheKCGuy
Last week, I attended another Citizen Police Academy class at the Prairie Village police department. That evening consisted of three classes about traffic: DUI enforcement, traffic accidents, and radar enforcement. It was a pretty fun evening, and I learned quite a bit.
The class about DUI enforcement was entertaining enough, but focuses mainly on aspects that would be applicable in almost any local law enforcement department in the country. For instance, we learned about how officers spot a possibly impaired driver, post-stop signs that a driver may be impaired, and how the field sobriety test works. I would rather have heard more statistics and anecdotes about enforcement in Prairie Village in particular. For instance, where are most caught, whether they are typically residents or just passing through our city, and how Prairie Village compares with other municipalities in Johnson County.
I was pretty interested in the traffic accident class, too. I've always wondered how officers could possibly piece together what happened in an accident based only on what they find on scene without any eye witnesses. Measuring skid mark distances, road surface conditions, and mapping out pieces of debris seems like it can only give you so much information. Then, once you throw in two or more conflicting stories by witnesses and the involved parties the odds of getting anything close to the truth seems pretty slim to me. But, the officers in the traffic division all attend rather advanced classes on using these pieces of information to figure out what's going on. They also occasionally rely on help from some of the surrounding agencies. For instance, I guess Shawnee has a pretty advanced computer system for mapping accident scenes. They and other agencies often lend a hand, which is great in this area where we have a ton of small municipal police departments.
Surprisingly enough, the hit of the night was the radar class. We learned a bit about the equipment that the department has on hand, like their hand-held and vehicle mounted radar guns and their laser gun. But then we got to head out to try out the radar guns. We stood by Mission road for about 20 minutes and shot radar on passing cars. Most of the class got quite a kick out of watching some of the faster cars quickly slow down when they realized that several of the people standing on the side of the road were using radar guns.
Thanks to officers Loughman, Taylor, and Sachen for spending their time with us and putting up with our annoying questions. I can't recall what's on the schedule next, but I'll write up a summary afterwards. If you want to read about some of the other classes, I've linked to them from the Citizen Police Academy page.
