Police stress pt 8 (Yup, lots of stress)

This is a continuation of a series of articles regarding the different types of stressors that officers face daily, in their personal and professional lives from a personal point of view.

by Dave Robbins, retired Metro Officer

Along with these obvious producers of stress on the job, there were also the added issues of leadership. The motor division had its share of bureau commanders, so good, some not-so-good.
When we had the “good” ones, the morale was good and productivity was fine.
When we had the bad, well, you know.


When morale and productivity was low, all management saw was the productivity side of the equation. It never occurred to them that the policies and leadership quality could be at fault. The only way the bureau commanders could "fix" the problem was to lower the morale even farther by incorporating an autocratic dictatorship and “performance standard”.  A fancy term for quotas. This is usually what inept leaders do; instead of looking at each officer individually, assessing their strengths and weaknesses, and letting them know where they were excelling, meeting performance  standards, or deficient, they make a "one size fits all" method of deciding who is or is not proficient.

When the standards were met, even more stringent standards were implemented, because now that they were invested in this idiotic system of determining achievement, there needed to be some arbitrary way of separating the officers' performance.  Tickets were then scanned for “quality”, not “quantity”.  Violations were categorized by type.  Certain violations were deemed “goal oriented” and officers were required to write X amount of “goal oriented” citations.

The categories were confusing.  Also, you couldn’t write more than five citations to someone.  If you had more than five violations on someone, you were supposed to arrest the driver, but LVMPD policy states that you can only arrest on the most serious charge, not all the charges you could’ve charged them with.
So if you stopped a driver with an unrestrained child, no license, no insurance, unregistered vehicle, fictitious license plates, not wearing seat belts, open container, equipment violations, etc., you were supposed to arrest the driver.  That required waiting for a transport officer, one for the trip to jail and one for the child to be booked into Child Haven.


LVMPD policy also states that before you tow the vehicle, you should call someone to come and get the vehicle since everyone is in dire straits due to the economy. 


So, if the vehicle is unregistered and uninsured, you were still supposed to release the vehicle.  On several occasions, the “someone” would respond with the entire (usually irate) family. And on many occasions, the “someone” didn’t have a valid license.  In any case, each situation was a waste of the officer’s time (at taxpayer’s expense).


For many years, the traffic division was stationed in the “basement” of city hall.  Brand new area substations were being built to accommodate patrol officers but no plans had been made for a new Traffic Substation.  The old Southeast substation was then “refurbished” and traffic moved into that building, at the intersection of St. Louis and Atlantic.  The building was built in 1972 and still retained the 70’s features.  The showers were located on one side of a main hallway and the locker room (with 70’s style lockers) was positioned on the opposite side of the hallway, requiring a walk across the hallway to your locker.  Oh yeah, not everyone had a locker.  No workout facilities.  The substation wasn’t even listed in the LVMPD website as a substation.  The administration had no qualms about expressing their disdain for the traffic officers, often lauding traffic for their efforts to the public but then internally claiming traffic officers were a pain to deal with.  The majority of officers assigned to traffic were senior on the department and had a lot of very reasonable opinions about how to properly do the job.  The bosses wanted no part of that.   It was their way or the highway.  They often alluded to who lost the rock-paper-scissor game to address the traffic briefings.


During my tenure in the motor division, I was involved in many more accidents than any other traffic officer(9 total, I believe).  Each time I was hit, I was traveling less than 30 mph. Once I wasn't moving at all; a vehicle hit me while I was standing on the opposite side of the road dealing with another traffic accident. Sometimes I even had my emergency lights and siren on, and STILL got hit.  Some of those accidents required a trip to the hospital and some surgeries.  I became a familiar face in UMC Trauma.  Each time I was wheeled in on a gurney, I heard the familiar word “Again?”   Each recovery required doctors, more surgeries, therapy and the dreaded “light duty”.  My personal accident scenes were a favorite for the evening news.  “Metro motor cop gets hit…again…and again…and again”.  It was pretty bad when I would go to my favorite restaurant and the owner had a front page picture of my wreck, even in the foreign language newspapers.
After each time, I got back on the bike.
Hard headed?  Some say so.  Dumb?  Heard that too.  I was resolved not to let anything to keep me down and away from what I considered the best job on the department (okay, second best.  Gotta give cred to the Air Unit)
Some believed I had a “S#&t” magnet on my bike.
I couldn’t find it.  Neither could our mechanics. 
Was it on my bike?
To be continued…

Stress of the Job

This is a continuation of a series of articles regarding the different types of stressors that officers face daily, in their personal and professional lives from a personal point of view.

by Dave Robbins, retired Metro Officer

Returning to riding the motorcycle after my first accident was harrowing, to say the least.  I was always on edge.  Every revving engine, screeching tires and passing vehicle raised the hairs on my neck.  I was constantly looking in my mirrors and panning the horizon.  I didn’t want to be on the roadway.  I never finished my motorcycle field training before the accident. 

I had my doubts.

I went to accident scenes and tried to make heads or tails of the evidence presented to me. 

It took a long while before I felt somewhat comfortable riding.  You never feel comfortable after being involved in an accident.

My first exposure to a fatal accident investigation was near the Charleston underpass, by the “Holsum” Bread Company.  My supervisor had already arrived and began walking me through the scene, describing skid marks, the dog who had been hit, the end position of the vehicle and the dead person (He was outside the vehicle) with the top half of his head missing and the brain lying in the gutter.  After my amazement of the brain’s position and lack of apparent damage, I tried to recreate the pre and post-accident events.  Very confusing.  Even the officers on scene were having a difficult time deciphering what had happened.

The traffic Fatal Detail arrived a short time later and after a brief walk-through, described what had happened.

The dead person was the driver of the vehicle.  He was not belted in.  The impact into the guardrail, spun his vehicle, which caused his body to be partially ejected, but his leg was hung up in the window.  His body was flung into the front of the windshield and his head hit the windshield wiper just right, causing his skull to pop open and eject his brain which rolled down the embankment and into the gutter.  The dog (still alive, but with a broken leg) was a stray that just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

After attending a few of these scenes with senior motor officers, I felt comfortable with my accident investigations and even became interested in the dynamics of a vehicle accident.

For example;

A person with metal piercings/jewelry in their face will almost certainly receive “interesting” injuries when they fail to wear the seat belt and their face impacts the windshield, or if the airbag deploys and the metal snags in the material of the airbag.  Flaps of skin are peeled back, requiring many stitches.

If a human skull hits a corner of a vehicle, it will pop open and launch the brain.

Drivers and passengers not wearing their seat belts that are ejected from the vehicle during the accident don’t always survive and sometimes are crushed by the same vehicle they were just in.

If someone fails to properly store objects in the trunk or outside of the passenger area of the vehicle, the objects become missiles when the vehicle is involved in an accident.  In many cases, those objects were responsible for the deaths of the occupant(s).

Sometimes, a person that is literally run over by a vehicle will survive their injuries.  One of my investigations involved a small child that was run over by a large SUV, over his chest area, causing a “hydraulic” effect, swelling his head to almost twice the normal size, and thankfully, the child survived.

Vehicles are now designed to crush and absorb the force of a collision, but able to keep the passengers relatively safe.  Unlike your first car, which was probably built completely of steel and hardly dented the bumper when you ran into something.

The front windshield is a laminate and will act as a “net” when something impacts into it while the side windows break into small pieces to avoid large shards of glass flying around and also allow the window to break if someone is trapped inside.

Part of our duties was to investigate employee’s on-duty accidents.  I found there was definitely a double standard.  Many supervisors, without knowing anything of accident investigation, would automatically accuse the employee to be at fault.  On many scenes, I would describe what had occurred, sometimes with witnesses help, and the supervisor would say, “So it’s our fault”.  I would explain it again to reiterate that it wasn’t and get the same response.  On many occasions I would ask if the supervisor would like to complete the accident report. 

Some accidents were the employee’s fault, with varying degrees of damage.  Some required citations to be issued by the supervisor, others did not meet the criteria by policy or statute for a citation, but some supervisors felt it was necessary to cite all employees.

After the accident, the employee was subjected to an “Accident Review Board” consisting of a board of department members to review the accident and the employee’s culpability and adjudicate administrative discipline, ranging from no punishment to hours of suspension.

Many ranking members of the department have “skated” from on-duty collisions without so much as a talking to.  One lieutenant rear ended a citizen while riding his police motorcycle, causing injuries and never received a citation.  I investigated a motor officer’s single vehicle accident consisting of striking a concrete barricade while responding to an officer’s request for assistance after being shot several times.  No damage to the barricade.  The bike was damaged, not beyond a few scrapes,  and the officer was injured slightly.  The supervisor arrived on scene and began writing a citation for “not maintaining a travel lane”.  I strongly questioned that decision.  The supervisor said he “had to”.  I told him that he didn’t and to look at the circumstances.

It was frustrating at best, not knowing if we were being backed up by the department and our decisions, based on law, were even being considered.

I then realized that our traffic substation was not even noted on the LVMPD website as a substation, even though we offered all the services of a substation.

OF course, our substation was considered a “dinosaur” by department standards.

To be continued…

Police Stress Pt 6.

This is a continuation of a series of articles regarding the different types of stressors that officers face daily, in their personal and professional lives from a personal point of view.

After my accident in June 2000, I was then resolved to my recovery. 

Except for one thing that I was not prepared for.

After my accident while riding the police motorcycle in June 2000, I didn’t realize what I was in for afterwards. 

LVMPD’s Fatal Division of the Traffic Bureau investigates accidents involving officers with severe injuries or fatalities.  During the investigation, they mark the roadway with paint to indicate skid marks, positions of vehicles, bodies, etc. and the marks do not fade away quickly.  Needless to say, the marks were on southbound US95 near Rancho and I traveled over the accident scene every day, sometimes several times a day.  I saw the marks, drove over the marks and relived every part of the accident each time I did.

I already was having my doubts about getting back on the motorcycle after the accident, but experiencing the “shock” of driving over my accident scene was having a negative effect on me.  Each time I drove over the scene, I felt a strange sensation, sort of like an electrical surge going through my body.  I finally knew what “freaking out” was.

I was trying to deal with those feelings, doctor’s visits, physical therapy visits and the dreaded “light duty”. 

Light duty is reserved for those employees injured at work and/or recovering from an injury or a medical procedure.  While some employees relish staying busy, even injured, light duty was the bane of the injured officer.  You would usually be transferred to a civilian position, hopefully still in your particular bureau, and be assigned usually to desk duty, depending on your injuries.  I could barely walk.  Every bone and muscle ached.  My broken arm caused a lot of problems driving and felt wonderful every time I bumped it.  I had to buy new clothes as there is a dress policy if you are assigned to the office.  I racked up mileage on my personal vehicle driving to work, doctors, therapy visits, etc.  The work load of the light duty employee could be heavy or light, but usually entailed doing work that no one else would care to do.  My first duty?  I was given a large box of radar guns, apparently that had been stored away for a while due to the large accumulation of dust on the box and asked to package each gun for delivery to a repair facility.

Fortunately, I was assigned to the “Hit and Run” detail of traffic, so I was still assigned to the Traffic bureau.  I didn’t know most of the employees there but we grew close and had a good time working together.

Not sure if you remember my time in field training from my previous article and how the field training sergeant advised me that my field documentation of the trainees was too long and how he didn’t have time to read such a long dissertation.

His office was directly next door to the Hit and Run office.

He would repeatedly come into our office and proudly display pictures, printed on LVMPD equipment and time, of women that he had been dating and those he planned on dating.

No wonder he didn’t have time for reading.

I recovered from my injuries thanks to a great surgeon, supporting doctors and physical therapists. 

I now needed to deal with my fears.  Do I want to get back on the bike?

I had support from my co-workers with whatever decisions I made.

I’ve always been one not to let anything scare me away from what I wanted.  I wanted to ride the motorcycle.  “Live to ride and get paid to ride”.

So back on two wheels I went.

Was it the best decision?  There were times…many times I wondered.

To be continued…