The tenth and perhaps last in a series from Sgt. Adam Plantinga’s excellent 400 Things Cops Know: Street-Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman:
Once the fleeing vehicle has finally come to a halt, your training dictates that you then conduct a high risk stop. You park your squad car in a position of tactical advantage and order the occupants out in a systematic, cautious fashion. But cops being cops, that’s not often how it goes. Instead of the high risk stop, you get the felony rush. Or the blue swarm, or the polyester pile, all different terms to describe cops, guns drawn, who run directly at the target car, sometimes in each other’s crossfire, sometimes jumping up on the hood of the fleeing vehicle, in order to yank the occupants out through any available open window, their adrenaline so high they can’t wait, like a kid tearing open her Christmas presents on December 24th. These same cops have the tendency to fade away once the excitement is over, and only the lengthy police reports loom. Everyone likes to go to the party but no one wants to clean up.
I might to do a few more of these. But then that’s it. There are still 390 left in the book, and I’m not going to go through all of them. So buy the damn book!