Some of you might have been around long enough to remember one of the early officer safety, patrol procedures books “officer down, code 3 …” It was written by Pierce Brooks with significant backing from Motorola. If you don’t know the title, it’s okay. The book’s focus – addressing the 10 Deadly Errors – is what is significant.
Those errors are:
1) Failure to watch the suspect(s)’s hands
2) Apathy towards suspects
3) Lack of rest
4) Tombstone Courage
5) Preoccupation
6) Missing pre-attack indicators
7) Taking a bad position
8) Relaxing too soon
9) Improper searching and/or cuffing
10) Failure to maintain gear
A couple very competent police procedures attorneys, who have been career reserve cops, are working on updating the original work. Both have written at length on Terry stop and Terry search issues.
They got me involved in the project. The collective “we” doesn’t want this to just be a west coast centric project. And, rather than being “don’t do this, this was wrong / bad,” I’d like to use a bunch of “damn, he/she/they did that right!” examples as well.
To meet both of those goals, I need to reach out and ask for success stories. If you can share, we will redact the hell out of agency/individual identifying information, but we need as much detail as possible – reports, interviews, etc.
I can and will share work email addresses for us if that will make sharing information easier.
Please let me know if you have or know of an event you can share. Thanks.