I love having new trainees (“rookies”) around the station. To keep up with the growth of the city, new officers (including myself) have been hired in the past couple of years. The recruitment staff has done a great job blending the number of true rookie officers with no experience with the number of experienced lateral officers from other police agencies. Rookie officers are usually respectful and enthusiastic. It’s probably because they’ve spent the last 6 months in the academy having to deal with training officers who are very similar to military drill instructors.

Today, I had firearms training with 8 new officers. Of those eight officers, I believe that 7 of them just graduated from the academy. 1 came from another agency. There were a total of 12 officers in the class (4 of us had at least 5 years of police experience and have been with Chula Vista for about a year) and we were taught some principles of combat shooting before getting to practice those theories on a live shooting range.

The class started at 8am. 3 other officers and I, who have been on the agency for several months, arrived at the classroom with only a couple of minutes to spare. We weren’t running late…we had actually been at the station for about a half hour prior to the class starting, but of course we had to go to our lockers, then got caught up in conversation with different people, before making it to the classroom.

When we arrived, all of the seats in the front of the class were filled by rookie officers. I found this to be funny. You see, when cops go to training or school, they never fill in the seats front to back. They always fill in the seats from the back of the class to the front. Now, in all of my years in this business, I’ve discovered that, unless you get to class 15-30 minutes early, you’re going to be sitting at the front of the class. This also means that the instructor is going to be asking you questions for the duration of the class. No cop wants to be the one having to answer all of the questions. If you don’t believe me, go to your local community college, take an administration of justice class and look at where the off-duty officers sit.

Anyway, the 4 officers with the most time on the department arrived to class last and still got to sit at the very back of the class. One more thing…I later discovered that the one new officer with prior police experience was sitting at the back of the class also.

In the academy, trainees are taught basic firearms marksmanship. Basically, they are taught to target shoot, which according to our instructor is much different from combat shooting. I noticed that the officers who just graduated from the academy were just absorbing all the new information. From the back of the room, you could see heads nodding in agreement with the instructor and, during the breaks, I overheard the new trainees talking to each other and making statements like, “This makes perfect sense” and “this is much different than the academy.” I used to be a firearms instructor and have done a lot of training with tactical teams. I know that at least one of the other experienced officers in the class was a competition shooter, so the principles being taught were not entirely new to us, but to the new trainees, receiving this information was the equivalent of handing a 16-year-old keys to a new Porsche. It’s very easy for a veteran officer to lose his/her enthusiasm for training. In any line of work, if you’ve been doing something for a long time, it’s easy to have a “been there done that” attitude. That’s why I enjoy attending training with newer officers. They are always so enthusiastic and that enthusiasm tends to rub off on you and you can offer suggestions and they soak it up.

Eventually, these new officers have to hit the streets. Obviously, you don’t want 8 inexperienced officers working on the same shift, so you split them up. We might have 2 academy graduates on each shift. It’s actually a bit comedic listening to them struggle on the radio and at calls. You can watch them and sense that they are over thinking. In fact, you can practically see the smoke coming out of their ears because their brain is on overdrive. Every now and then, I’ll be at an incident that a rookie may be handling. He or she has got their training officer next to them, observing. You can see that they are stressed out at having someone constantly looking over their shoulder and they sometimes look at you with a look on their face that says, “Help me out! Give me a clue!” and because you are not their training officer, you just look at that trainee, shrug your shoulders and shoot them a look that says, “Sorry pal, you’re on your own. I went through the same thing”. I’ve actually been with trainees who ask a victim a question then look at me with a look in their eyes as if to ask, “am I asking the right questions?” If they are doing fine, you just nod your head as an indication for that trainee to continue. If you don’t like the direction is going, you excuse yourself and the trainee from the citizen, pull him/her aside, and provide guidance to get that trainee back on track. When a trainee is unsure of what action to take, all he/she has to do is ask their training officer, after all, that’s what the training officer is for, but the trainee is usually too stressed out to think about that.

Eventually the light turns on for the trainee. It may take a few weeks or even a few months but it happens. All of a sudden, the trainee sounds fluid on the radio. He/she gets to a call in a timely manner and takes charge. They start handling the entire incident and all you have to do is cover them. They walk with a certain air of confidence. Just like anything else in this world, the job gets easier with repetition. In fact they’ll get to a point where they start recognizing locations. When they are dispatched to certain calls, they are able to picture the location in their mind and think about how to tactically approach.

At this point, everything has slowed down. He/she has gained enough knowledge and experience to be able to start working without the security blanket of a training officer. At this point, you have a police officer.

For more information on how to become a police officer, visit www.chulavistapd.org.

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