Police Ride Along

We were required to go on a Police ride along for my journalism class. I signed up with the initial thought that it would be fun. When I found out the time I would be going – 9 P.M. – I started to get nervous.

To be completely honest, I didn’t want to go. I was scared; not of the thought that I might be experiencing dangerous things, but that the cop would be mean. I didn’t consider police officers as nice people. In my defense, I’d never really talked to a cop while he or she was on duty. Sure, I’d been in the car of someone getting pulled over but I don’t think that telling the officer the reason you were speeding counts as a real conversation. I dreaded the thought of being in a squad car with a scary person that I didn’t know; out doing heaven knows what until who knows what time.

But I went. I drove Jane to the Police Station at 8:50 P.M. parked under a street light (well lit = safe) and got into the squad car of Officer Hagen.

First thing I noticed when I got into the front seat was the gun gently trucked in between the seat and the center console. I hate guns. They scare the pee out of me. Officer Hagen just so happened to be the leader of the SWAT team for Rexburg, Idaho. He had the biggest gun I have ever seen. I know that it isn’t called a “gun.” It has some fancy-schmancy technical name which he did tell me, but out of fear, I promptly forgot it. It had so many handles and do-dads sticking off of it I would have no idea how to even hold the thing. That loaded weapon rested against leg the entire night. I was little freaked out.

As soon as my door was closed and my seat belt on, we took off. Very fast. A person in a nursing home had a seizure and we needed to backup the ambulance. With the sirens blaring we zoomed down the streets of Rexburg. We would screech to a brief and hard halt at the each of the stop signs because the police are required to stop. I didn’t know that; I thought that traffic laws didn’t apply to police cars on a mission.

Anyway, at the nursing home I sat in the car. The paramedics get a little touchy if they have to rip off someone’s clothes to revive them and a random, uninvolved person is just standing there watching. I didn’t want to make anyone mad.

After the nursing home incident Officer Hagen and I started to talk. Surprisingly, it wasn’t awkward at all. He was a really nice guy.

I found out that the K9 unit squad car we were riding in was new – to him anyway. Later in the week he would be going to Kentucky to get a dog. It would be the third dog for the Rexburg Police Department. It would be his first and it would be a drug dog.

I was interested to know how police dogs were treated since their main purpose is to work, not to be a pet. Officer Hagen told me that the dog would stay in a kennel until it was time to go to work. Dogs get excited when they get let out of a cramped space and if the dog associates going to work as something positive, he will always love to go to work and he will work harder as a result. The dog will be let out of the kennel for 20 minutes a day when it isn’t working. I thought this was sad, but I guess that’s the life of a working dog.

Officer Hagen confided in me later – he was embarrassed to tell me actually – that the dog’s name would be Truck. Hagen has a two year old son who “can’t pronounce his T’s right yet.” Think that one through, it will make you laugh.

Hagen told me about his 10 year service in the Police force. Sadly, out of all the places he’s worked, Rexburg has the highest suicide rate. Also, with it being a college town the students sometimes get a little weird. College girls have been known to beat themselves up and violate their virtue with some kind of object in order to make a believable claim that someone raped them. All this will be done in an attempt to get attention or to make a boyfriend, who never proposed, feel badly. Craziness!

College kids also like to park. (Park: to go somewhere in a car and make out…hopefully that’s all they are doing.) It was a pretty slow night in Rexburg, according to Officer Hagen, so we went and found the parkers and interrupted their parking. Funniest thing I have ever done. I’m still laughing about it.

When we got bored of that we pulled people over. Officer Hagen is a pretty nice cop to get pulled over by. He only gave one person a ticket and that is because the person sped up in an effort to get away as soon as the squad car’s lights went on. We had to chase them so they totally deserved a ticket.

Officer Hagen told me stories of things he experienced on the job. Some of them made me laugh, others made me want to cry and some shocked me; all of them made me respect Police Officers more than I had before and realize that they are just normal people like us. (Who would have known?)

We talked to a county officer for a while (you know when the officers pull their cars up close to each other and talk through their windows…I did that. Yeah, you can be jealous) and I learned all about the drama of being a cop and what goes on in the department.

Before I knew it, it was 12:30 A.M. I asked Officer Hagen to take me home even though we were still chatting away and having fun. I learned a lot from my Police Ride along. I’m not scared of cops anymore and that is a pretty big deal for me.