Citizen’s Police Academy – Week Five

Week five of Citizen’s Police Academy, woo hoo! Some of you may be wondering, “what about last week?” Well, last week was an interesting week for me as I was battling being sick, so I didn’t blog much. We also spent all of last week in the classroom, which was interesting, but I just didn’t have the energy to write about it. We talked about the department’s working with the Hispanic community, drugs and alcohol, and interdiction. I may write about it later, we shall see.

We spent this week in Operations Division. The Operations Division is primarily responsible for crime prevention, traffic enforcement, crime prevention, recovery of stolen property, more crime prevention, apprehension, accident investigations, even more crime prevention… you get the point.

Carmel has about 75 officers in its Operations Division. They usually work three days on, two days off, two on, three off. They work twelve-hour shifts that either run from 5 a.m. – 5 p.m. or 5 p.m. – 5 a.m.

For those of you who complain that Carmel writes a lot of tickets… you might be correct in assuming that. They made 19,843 stops last year and out of those they gave 11,770 warnings. I don’t have the exact number of tickets they wrote, but when I looked at the motorcycle officer’s ticket book, there were a lot more tickets than written warnings. But he did say that he does give people a chance to see the speed limit sign and slow down, the problem is that people aren’t paying attention and keep on speeding.

I think the part that I enjoyed most about the Operations Division was checking out the motorcycle and the police car. Officers Spillman and Williams were pretty awesome to let us check out their vehicles. Officer Spillman made several points to remind us that he is no longer the shortest one in his unit… so I’m guessing they’ve given him a hard time in the past.

Here’s a few pictures from our evening in Operations Division. I’ve also posted a video from YouTube of a motorcycle officer (not Carmel PD) doing a solo run on his motorcycle. Enjoy!