LOS ANGELES — One hundred sheriff’s deputies and 400 part-time deputies were laid off. SWAT officers were ordered back to the streets. Narcotics and gang units were disbanded. Helicopters were grounded.
K-9 survived.
To absorb more than $30 million in losses, the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department had to focus almost exclusively on answering 911 calls, but police dogs and their handlers survived the cuts. It’s a scenario that is playing out among the thousands of K-9 teams across the country that have survived deep budget cuts to stay on the job.
In part that’s because dogs are winning the popularity contest. In a few towns where K-9 dogs were cut, citizens rallied to raise money to keep the animals at work…
But there are other advantages to keeping animals on the job. They protect the officers they work with, do jobs that people can’t and use bites, not bullets.
“When you look at the tremendous savings in man-hours that are achieved
by using trained dogs to search for suspects or victims or narcotics or explosives,
it’s vey easy to recognize the fact that they are the probably the most
cost efficient tool we have,” said Officer Bill Cassell of the Las Vegas
Metropolitan Police Department.Dogs can run faster, get into tighter spots
and look more menacing than most humans. Plus they have stronger noses, better
hearing and better vision, at least under low light conditions…
Court cuts are bad news for everybody
[by Mark Nichols, American Police Beat, visit www.apbweb.com
to read entire article]
There’s good news and bad news. The good news is that cops and the agencies
they work for aren’t the only ones getting pink slips and seeing alarming
budget cuts. The bad news is that budgets for schools, courts and other government
functions are being slashed as well. According to a recent article in USA
Today by William M. Welch, unprecedented layoffs and courtroom closings across
the country have resulted in massive delays, dismissed cases and an increasingly
difficult working environment as tensions flare and stress runs high.
At least 15 states have put court workers on furloughs, eight have cut pay, six have imposed layoffs, and six have closed courtrooms to save money as a result of state funding cuts even as the number of legal cases is rising, according to the Virginia-based National Center for State Courts. “The longer this continues, the more the public is going to feel it,” Gregory Hurley, analyst for the National Center for State Courts told USA Today. “It’s going to be significant. Worse than anybody here remembers.”
The most dire stories come from California, where all courts are closed across the state one-day a month as a cost-saving measure…
… The most obvious sign of the cuts are longer wait times for non-criminal cases.
… In New Hampshire, all courts will be shut down Friday for the first of three furlough days over the next several months.
Court staff has been cut 10 percent over the past year, and the district and family courts which handle 84 percent of all cases have seen a reduction in court sessions of 12 percent. In Florida, officials instituted a full or partial hiring freeze for more than a year and laid off 280 employees from its 3,100-person workforce.
… The cuts are so severe there are already visual indicators illustrating the crisis.
Outside Los Angeles’ main traffic courthouse, lines of people trying to pay or contest citations routinely stretch around the block. On a recent afternoon, more than 400 people were still in line when the courts closed for the evening.
“If we do not find adequate solutions to these difficult problems, not just the folks in California but elsewhere will find the courts simply cannot be responsive to their needs as in the past,” McCoy told USA Today.
“And that’s a real tragedy for all of us.”
There’s a new cop on the beat. But this cop does not fight crime or make arrests. The new cops on the beat as far as this article is concerned are the growing number of “fiscal watchdog” groups, dedicated to exposing what they describe as egregious overtime abuses in public safety agencies.
To be sure, there have always been such outfits and most city newspapers usually do a “highest paid” list of public employees annually.
What’s different these days is the bang for the buck you get with a
headline like, “Cop clears a quarter-million!” in a recession…
Incidents caught on camera increase
department scrutiny of officers
Some say cameras expose behavior that
police
‘have gotten away with’ for years
[by the Associated Press, visit www.PoliceOne.com to read
entire article, March 18, 2010]
CHICAGO — Minutes after a suburban Chicago police officer was charged with striking a motorist with his baton, prosecutors handed out copies of a video showing the beating – taken by a dashboard camera on the officer’s own squad car.
In California, after a transit cop and an unruly train passenger slammed against a wall during a struggle and shattered a station window last fall, video from a bystander’s cell phone was all over the Internet before the window was fixed.
The same cell phones, surveillance cameras and other video equipment often used to assist police are also catching officers on tape, changing the nature of police work – for better and worse.
Some say cameras are exposing behavior that police have gotten away with for years. But others contend the videos, which often show a snippet of an incident, turn officers into villains simply for doing their jobs, making them targets of lawsuits and discipline from bosses buckling to public pressure.
• • •
In California when the Bay Area Rapid Transit officer slammed into a window with a suspect during a violent arrest, the cell phone video – viewed more than 160,000 times on one clip posted on YouTube – ended up exonerating the officer whose actions brought claims of excessive force, a union official said.
“It wasn’t the suspect’s head that caused the glass to break,” said Jesse Sekhon, BART police officers union president. “When you freeze the video and enhance it you see it was the suspect punching it with his hand.”
What’s more, video viewers rarely hear the frantic 911 call for help,
rocks hurled at an approaching squad car or the countless times police have
been called to the same house…
Can a car really be death-proof?
[by John Clark, http://auto.nowstuffworks.com]
In the 2007 Quentin Tarantino movie “Death Proof,” a maniacal driver named Stuntman Mike boasts that his 1970 Chevrolet Nova is exactly what the film's title suggests: It’s death-proof. In the hands of a safety-conscious driver, this would be a good thing. But Stuntman Mike isn’t all that concerned with safety – not his passengers’ or any hapless people who cross his path.
Mike has outfitted the driver’s side of his car with a cage and five-point seat belt to ensure his own survival when he hits other cars at high speeds. This is a good precaution on Stuntman Mike’s part because he enjoys doing just that – with gory results.
While the movie is fictitious, it does raise the question: Could a car really
be death-proof? Would it be like Stuntman Mike’s Nova, reinforced with
steel beams and shatter-proof glass? That likely wouldn’t be the case.
Instead, what’s ahead in the future of car safety – including
what may eventually emerge as a death-proof car – is more in line with
technological ingenuity than old-fashioned brute strength.
The best way to survive a car accident is to avoid it. So auto engineers are
hard at work coming up with cars that protect passengers not so much
by reinforced steel cages (although most vehicles have those, too), but rather
with technology that helps drivers avoid collisions altogether.
Stuntman Mike’s Chevy Nova is pretty cool. But the death-proof cars of the future will probably look a lot more like high-end Volvos, BMWs and Lexuses than a classic Detroit muscle car. And Volvo may be up first. As a working member of the PReVENT safety research group, the car manufacturer has promised an injury-proof car by 2020 [source: Reuters]. Those who can afford the luxury cars will benefit first; it’ll take some time for these cutting-edge safety features to make their way into economy cars.
Many of the features that will comprise accident prevention systems in the future already exist. The challenge will be tying these components together.
Why will these systems be able to handle accidents better than a car’s driver?
The Death-proof car
When humans are scared, our bodies freeze in the face of danger. This holds especially true when it comes to auto collisions. Research shows that the average driver takes about 1.1 seconds to react to an accident before braking [source: Fambro, et al]. This may not sound like much time, but considering that a reduction of 10 mph before a crash could cut the rate of death in highway accidents by 50 percent, that one second can be significant [source: Reuters]. What’s more, in half of all rear-end collisions, the brakes are never even applied by the oncoming driver [source: Volvo].
Auto safety engineers are working under the premise that if cars are making calculated decisions about an impending collision, accident rates will go down. By taking humans’ emotional reactions (or lack thereof) out of the equation, engineers may be closing in on a death-proof car.
Of course, the term “death-proof” may not be entirely accurate. Even the best systems fail. But engineers at the PReVENT project are researching how to build the most death-proof car possible. They’re reimagining some safety features available in today’s digital cars. Instead of using these systems to provide drivers with information to avoid a crash, the goal is getting the systems to think for the driver.
One existing safety feature is the precollision prevention system. It uses lasers, infrared sensors and cameras to detect obstacles ahead in the road. A warning light and an alarm alert drivers to the impending danger. The car then prepares for the accident by tightening seatbelts, engaging airbags and increasing brake pressure (and in some cases, applying the brakes on its own). Another system in place is blind spot detection. These keep an eye on other cars the driver can’t see, letting him or her know other cars are there.
These features signal to a driver that a potential problem is near. PReVENT is working on using these features to actually take over when that problem goes from a potential threat to a real danger. The group is engineering intelligent car systems that analyze the impending situation from all angles – literally. So while the driver’s frozen in terror, the car’s navigating out of an accident.
PReVENT’s vision of a safer car is one that uses information from satellite navigational maps to detect hairy road conditions – like hairpin curves. The system will monitor blind spots for the presence of other cars, pedestrians and obstacles, tracking the speed and direction of each. With all of this information, the car’s onboard computer will calculate the best course of action to take, whether it’s applying the brakes, swerving or both [source: ICT Results]. In the future, car navigation algorithms may make risk assessments – like determining that running over a squirrel to the left is preferable to hitting a woman pushing a stroller to the right.
While there may never be a truly death-proof car, an automobile that aims to protect against injury is quite plausible. More people are injured in car wrecks than are killed; auto fatalities reach about 1.2 million globally each year, while there are about 50 million injuries around the world [source: Reuters]. If the technology being developed by PReVENT is refined and widely introduced, both of those statistics may dramatically decrease in the near future.
Pittsburgh police implement changes
year after tragedy
New police weapons,
Allegheny 911 dispatch system aimed at safety
[from Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, visit www.PoliceOne.com to
read entire article, April 5, 2010]
PITTSBURGH — Pittsburgh police wasted precious minutes waiting for two accurate, long-range rifles to arrive before they could match the firepower of a gunman who killed three of their comrades and injured a fourth.
Almost a year after the deadly Stanton Heights shooting, police have purchased 46 assault-style service rifles and plan to buy up to 50 more by year’s end, and 911 officials are poised to begin using a $10 million emergency dispatching system.
“April 4 brought to the forefront that there was a need for that type of weapon, and it wasn’t available,” Deputy Chief Paul Donaldson said. “We had to wait for SWAT’s arrival to do the extraction.”
Three-day training courses to use the rifles, akin to the military’s AR-15, began last month and run through November.
Donaldson expects 30 percent to 40 percent of the 910-member police force to qualify to use the rifles, which officers must sign out from police zones when they take a cruiser on patrol. About 20 have been distributed to supervisors so far, he said.
The rifles will be kept in locked boxes in police cruiser trucks and used in extreme “standoff-type” emergencies before specially trained and armed SWAT team members arrive, Donaldson said.
“You’re not going to have officers knocking on your door with a rifle slung over their shoulder,” Donaldson said.
• • •
Delays in ordering the rifles’ electronic scopes and muzzles – used during training exercises to reduce noise – made the process “longer than we would have liked,” Donaldson said.
The rifles likely will phase out use of police shotguns. In his 35 years of experience, Donaldson said only one suspect was shot and killed with a bureau-issued shotgun. He expects the rifles to see similarly limited use.
“It will give us much more firepower than what we possess now,” Donaldson said.
New weapons aren’t the only upgrades intended to improve police officer safety.
Allegheny County’s 911 center this month will begin training 250 dispatchers and call-takers on a $10 million computer-aided dispatch system…
The overhaul will replace separate city- and county-based systems that are 20 and 11 years old, respectively, and allow police cruisers equipped with computer terminals to use the system's “silent dispatch” option, Full said.
That means a 911 dispatcher can send information about an emergency call to a police officer without using public airwaves accessible to anyone with a police-band scanner, including those who intend to harm police.
For the first time, dispatchers will be able to see a real-time map of where GPS-equipped police cars, fire trucks and ambulances are in Allegheny County. If a police officer, for example, stops responding on his or her radio, dispatchers can quickly determine an officer’s last location.
“Time means a big difference in saving somebody’s life,” Full said.
The system will have more memory to store a history of 911 calls from addresses in its database, Full said, but he wasn’t sure how far back its history could go.
The computer system is scheduled to be activated Aug. 8.
“We really do believe that it will contribute greatly to additional officer safety,” Full said.
Improving officer safety has been one of the 911 center’s most pressing goals since April 4.
A part-time 911 call-taker failed to relay a warning to the officers about weapons in the home of Richard Poplawski, who is accused in the killings.
Since then, 911 operators have been required to question callers about weapons in homes and relay that information to responding officers, Full said.
The call-taker involved in the April 4 incident went through extensive retraining
and remains employed…
