Jodag.NET

Well, the final day of scenarios is over. I took the remediation test for the one I failed yesterday (child abuse) today and passed it. Now I’m just waiting to find out how many (if any) of todays scenarios I failed.

Did I mention that during these scenario testing days we (the academy has 46 cadets) are all placed into this huge old classroom on Fort Ord. We have plastic chairs, old style elementary school desks and sit there without talking all day long… it turns out yesterday we didn’t get home at a reasonable hour, it was 11pm. Tonight looks like it may be about 10pm or so.

If I did not fail any today, it turns out that I will get a four day weekend, at least that’s the word on the street for those of us who don’t have to remediate any after today. I’d really dig that if it comes true, though to be honest I’m more concerned with making sure that my job stays secure and I don’t get fired or anything crazy like that. I have no desire to bake fries, or clean toilets for a living so I’m not sure exactly what I’ll do if I get the boot.

Yeah, anyway, I guess we’ll see. I’m actually writing these and updating other little things around the site while I sit here between tests, with fourty six of us testing there is a significant amount of down time, just waiting to be called to report to a random crime. As I get bored of studying the law, proper procedures and departmental policies for each of the crime scenarios I take a break and mess around on the computer, like I’m doing now.

So, this has been an extra busy period of time I’ve had here as of late. I’ve wanted to update this site with some info, but just haven’t had the chance because it’s been so fucking busy. I’m here on Fort Ord at the moment going through what’s called, “scenario testing.” Pretty much some of the most stressfull shit I’ve ever been through in my life, but let me lead up to that with what’s happened the last few weeks or so.

A couple weeks ago, I got another taste of OC (pepper spray type shit that cops carry on their belts) and CS (tear gas, military uses). I really had no desire to get gassed with either of them, but it’s part of the training process to become a get your peace officer badge in the state of California. So, yeah, that sucked balls. OC is painful like nothing else, that’s for sure and thank god I don’t ever have to go through it again. Unless some cop gets frisky on me and pulls it out or some shit like that. I definately don’t really plan on using it on anyone else either, because when I got sprayed it was just so violently painful that I think I could have and would have taken on anyone at that point if I’d had an opportunity. That’s just me though, so who knows.

So after that, we’ve had the final written test for the police academy portion of this training I’m going through, and it wasn’t all that great either, better than OC but when you know your job is on the line if you fail a test, it adds a certain level of stress which I’m not really cool with. That leads me to this week and what we’ve been doing as well as how we’ve been training for it for the last couple weeks pretty much non-stop.

They are called Scenarios, we have 13 of them and they are basically staged crimes that we have to roll up into individually and take care of. The crimes range from a domestic violence situation to a felony vehicle stop to some dumb ambush (with our duty weapon SW 40.06 rigged up to fire paintballs). Going through them, there are legally mandated points you have to hit for certain ones, there is an order to other ones that you have to follow and through all of them you have to worry about officer safety, making sure that you are safe at all times.

So, acting out the parts of the suspects, victims and subjects in these scenarios are real actors that are hired specifically for these kinds of things to act as loud abusive husbands, battered wives, violent suspects and other nefarious things. We also have a few evaluators breathing down our necks while we are going through the scenarios and throughout all of this we have to remember that failing one of these scenarios means you have one chance to ‘re-test’. If you fail on the re-testing process you are out of the academy and out of a job, thanks for your time.

Today is day 2 of 3, yesterday we ran through 5 scenarios, starting at 8am and we got home around 10:45pm. Today is a shorter day, we started at 8 but should be home at a reasonable hour in order to practice and prepare for tomorrows set of scenarios. So far today I’ve run through 3 of them. Did I mention the fact that they don’t let you know if you passed or failed the scenario until the end of the day? Well yeah, they don’t let you know until the end of the day, that’s great. So all day long you are wondering if you did good enough in the eyes of the 3 evaluators to have passed or failed. I’m still waiting on my results…Update, I just took scenario test #4 of the day. It was the secret one that no one knew about. I think I passed it pretty well based on just dumb luck, but we’ll see when the results start showing up in another hour or so…

Update, I failed one of them. The one that I really didn’t want to fail because it’s a pain in the ass. So we have 4 more scenarios tomorrow and then Thursday I’ll be remediating that one in addition to any that might be problematic tomorrow. We’ll see what kind of job I have come next monday…

We are moving out of Orange County. The house is being packed up, and the plan is to be out by the end of August, then finding a place to live when I finalize my decision on which park to be stationed at. Overconfident in closing up shop down south before I even graduate… maybe? since I almost failed out of the academy today. This is actually the first time I’ve actually been nervous about the possibility of failing out. At various times I’ve thought about dropping for various reasons, but that would be entirely different than failing and being dropped out.

This week is a hectic one, but what we were doing today was EVOC (emergency vehicle operator’s course) training. Driving cop cars around cones type thing is what it boils down to (sample pic). Anyway, on one course (the one I thought was easiest of the three we were tested on) I hit a cone during the test, which means failure. You have one and only one chance only to remediate a failed test. So I practiced a few more times and for some reason was having a bit of trouble with it. Well, knowing that tons of cops out there can’t drive anyway and they’ve been through the same course and passed the same test as this one I decided to go for it again without too much further practice.

I passed, as I’m sure you can guess by the fact that I prefaced this story with the statement, “I almost failed out…” so yeah. but still stressful, since failing would be a pretty good blow to my pride, though I guess I could stand to be knocked down a peg or two, I am a cocky sumbitch.

The fun stuff was slipsliding the car around on the concrete with a solid film of water on it. Good experience, it reminds me of 180′ing my truck on the way to Big Bear a few years back…

So, my academy class has finally gotten the list of vacancies that we are going to be filling after we graduate. What this means is now there are alot of people jockeying around to find out where they want to go, who is above them in rank and where they want to go. Then if possible trying to convince those above them in rank to go somewhere else. I’m in a pretty good spot, ranked 7 or so out of 44 so I won’t have too much of a problem getting a park that I want. The most interesting aspect of this for me then is watching the group interactions as people try to get what they want from people they might or might not like, I like group dynamics, mob mentalities are extraordinarily entertaining to me to try and figure out. It’s almost random, but it’s not. There is some predictibility if you can identify enough of the people in the mob, what their motivations are and how brave or underhanded they are. Watching this class sort out some big issues like which park they are going to get stationed at will be interesting to say the least.

Now all I have to do is pick which park I want to spend the first two years of my career at. If anyone out there has any feedback…http://www.parks.ca.gov/parkindex/ check out the list of all the parks in CA and let me know what and why.

Outside of that, there’s not too much interesting going on outside of the regular old life and how interesting that manages to be on a consistent basis. I wish I had started something like this in the beginning of the academy, so maybe I’ll backtrack a little and do it post-mortem. But this week we handled a suicidal person, a prowler, a robbery in progress, a burglary, a suspicous pedestrian stop and something else that was kinda banal so I forgot it by now. If I was more interested in talking about each of those experiences and how to handle them this is where I would go into that. But I’m not at the moment, I want to get back to checking out the vacancy list.

Just for fun…picture for the loyal

So the academy keeps on rolling along slowly but surely. We have learned about general criminal statutes, sex crimes, the criminal justice system, crimes against children, use of force, and a ton of other little things. We have our body armor, police protective gear (the belt with holster, baton, cuffs, and all the other goodies) and are required to wear the gear every afternoon so we can get used to moving around with it on. The gear really is quite restrictive, but you get used to it after awhile. Not much of an update, just a little writing to waste some time and give my mind a break from studying.

Today I was hoping to see my sister up in San Jose, so I called her in the morning from Morgan Hill where I was doing a load of laundry. We made plans for later in the day and I called Scott to see if he wanted to waste any time with me until then. Turns out him and his wife had no big plans this weekend, which is shocking in and of itself as those two are always out doing something or other, so I went up to his place after going and seeing Ryan and Tyler’s gravesites at Mount Hope.

So, the three of us went to a newly redesigned and reopened Oakridge (mall) and had a look around. After this was done, Scott and I went out and played 6 games of 21, of which he won 4. Despite the fact that he hasn’t played in over a decade, that fool has some solid D. I’ll have to work on not being thrown around by his superior bulk. Hopefully as we play more, he’ll get into better shape (read as: lose some weight) so he won’t be able to use that fatass of his to move me around so much.

Then I got back to the academy grounds, since my sister wouldn’t be able to meet me up until later in the night that I was able to stay out. When I got back, I took care of some errands/crap that I needed to and went over to the piano to practice the little bit I know. It just soothes me, while I play that stupid little set of keys I smile, my heart calms, my mind relaxes and I’m just in a different mood/mode. As I was fumbling around, one of the other people in the hall came over and helped me out a little bit, showed me a couple other things to do and played the piano very well, I didn’t catch his name, though I appreciate his help.

I learned a bit of piano today from one of my classmates. On the Asilomar conference grounds there is a main check in hall, with a piano in it. A few of us were playing ping pong and then started playing the piano, so today they showed me how to play a part of a simple tune called chopsticks I think. I have no rythm, in fact I can’t even spell that word correctly, but I did thoroughly enjoy playing the bit of the song, and listening to others play the whole thing more correctly and cleanly.

Today was the first day of BVST 27’s academy class. I’m not going to get too far into detail, as I a) don’t have time and b) don’t have the inclination to do so. But the class is pretty large, 47 on the roster total though my roomate never showed up, so we actually only started with 46. Since I have no roomate, I have twice as much room as everyone else, which was somewhat lucky, though there are drawbacks as well. I have no one to double check me in the mornings, no one to discuss the class subjects we had that day with and no one to BS with in general when I’m not out with the class. Good and bad, we’ll see how it goes overall.

I did enjoy coming back to the central coast area of California though, the softly rolling golden hills, spotted with green oaks here and there are what I grew up with and it’s just nice to see that not too much has changed up here in general.