Research Summary

POLICE
    
A police department is an agency of a community or government responsible for preventing and detecting crime. There are a few different kinds of police. There are detectives, FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), bomb squads, patrol officers, etc.

The basic police mission is to keep order by enforcing rules of conduct or law. A police officer has 5 basic responsibilities
#1: Prevention of crime. Provides basic police services.
#2: Criminal investigation.  Detectives investigate homicide, robbery, and narcotics.
#3: Traffic control. An officer will direct traffic at a busy intersection.
#4: Special police units. Some units deal with hostage situations or bomb disposal.
#5: Non criminal services. Officers may be called on to locate missing persons or lost children.

Different people in the police department earn different amounts of money according to their rank and years of service. Here are some averages:
•    Police chief - $87,037
•    Deputy chief - $75,266
•    Police captain -$70,177
•    Police lieutenant -$63,059
•    Police sergeant -$55,661
•    Police corporal - $49,299.

S.W.A.T. stands for Special Weapons And Tactics. SWAT is a special group of highly trained police officers who go on missions that are too dangerous for regular police officers. To be on the SWAT team, they must go through a large amount of special training and must pass an obstacle course test including a 5 mile run, push ups, sit ups, crunches, etc. (They must complete this in a certain amount of time). There are lots of bad aspects of being a SWAT officer. Some of them are danger, frustration, and the thought that you might not get to see your kids the next day. The good things about being a SWAT officer are you get a lot of money and you help people. There is also a lot of pride in being one of the best. SWAT officers work almost everywhere but mainly they work in the field, and wherever they are needed. SWAT officers don’t really have a fixed work schedule. They must be ready for anything at any given moment.

There are three special teams when the SWAT unit is going to infiltrate a house. There are negotiator teams who try to solve the problem with the suspect using either phones or talking face to face. There are also containment teams who contain, control, and protect the crowds at crime scenes. The third team is the entry team, which enters and searches the building.    
 
 

Military Police  (M.P.)
 
Military police first appeared in the Revolutionary War (1775-1783). They weren’t needed again until the Civil War in the 1860’s.

Many officials believe that terrorism and warfare will become bigger problems, requiring more military police and more SWAT teams.

MP training requires officers to: run, march, and do a lot of exercises so they can keep their bodies in shape. Officers must learn about weapons and practice using them.

The Humvee armored vehicle is equipped with mirrors, storage space, armor, a machine gun on top, and a radio antenna. The government is building a new armored vehicle called the ASV (Armored Security Vehicle).

Military police use lots of equipment. This equipment includes an M-9 pistol, M-16 rifle, M-2 machine gun, Squad Automatic Weapon (S.A.W.), Mark-19 Grenade launcher, helmets, gas masks, batons (wooden clubs), handcuffs, radios, radar, and bullet-proof clothing.

Who I Interviewed And What I Learned I interviewed Creg W. Miller at the Yakima Police Department on January 28, 06. Creg is a police and SWAT officer at the Yakima police dept. He does patrol work and trains new officers and is also a defensive tactics instructor. He also does drug recognition with DUI to stop people that are drinking and also people who are on medical drugs. He works with child abuse neglects. He has been on the SWAT team for about a year. Creg did not have to go to college. He started out in the Selah police department but then moved to the Yakima police department.     One technique he uses to catch criminals is to buy drugs from the suspect and then turns around and arrests them. The tactics that officers use in ”SWAT”,the movie, are similar to the tactics that real SWAT officers use. They must be a police officer for at least 2 years. To be on the SWAT team requires an all day test. First you must pass an obstacle course. You must run a certain distance until you get to some bars, hop over the bars, run up a hill to dip bars, do 10 dips, keep running some more, go over a balance beam, hop over two walls (six feet), run to pull up bars, 6 pull ups, run down a path for a certain distance until you get to a bar 1 foot off the ground, then do mountain climbers (scissor feet back and forth 25 times), run to sit up bench, 20 sit ups, run down to monkey bars, do 25 pull ups, run to push up bar, do 35 push ups, run down a path to a 180 lb. dummy, drag it 60 yards! They must complete this in a total of 9 minutes! After that they must go to the fire station 5, rappel by cable off of the third floor. Then they must go to a big building with a small crawl space for a Claustrophobic test. The test is simple, you must crawl through a maze and find an orange traffic cone while wearing a gas mask. Oh yeah, I forgot, it is pitch black! At the end of the test they ask you a few questions and if they like what they hear then they offer you a spot on the team. The worst case he has ever been in is the shoot-out that he had with a man here in Yakima. They were buying drugs from the man and the man got scared and ran away so SWAT started chasing him. When the man got to his car, he grabbed his gun and started shooting at them. He got out of his car by the Nob Hill am-pm and took the clerk hostage! The man finally gave in. Creg thinks that the Las Angeles police department (LAPD) is the most important in the history of SWAT. They originated S.W.A.T. in LA in the early sixties, so they had the first SWAT team. They knew that L.A. was big and had lots of people that are so devoted to crime. They thought their officers were not able to take care of what they encountered so they rounded up a group of highly trained officers but those officers were different than other officers. They were highly trained and equipped with more deadly weapons. Some officers carried normal weapons like pistols but the SWAT officers had automatic guns. SWAT had better ballistic shields and vests. Swat teams must be careful where they shoot so they don’t accidentally shoot an innocent person. The thing that has changed the most in recent years is the technology. They now have less lethal weapons. Now they have a gun that shoots out big rubber bullets and a gun that shoot out hard bean bags. Budget constraints are one of the biggest problems facing S.W.A.T. teams. Creg predicts that the S.W.A.T. team in Yakima will grow larger and get more people. There are 25 people on the S.W.A.T. team.

Bibliography Green, Michael.  SWAT Teams. Mankato, MN: Capstone Books, 1998. “Police”, Microsoft Encarta Reference Library 2005, 2005, 1-3 “Police”, World Book Encyclopedia, 2004. Spokane police, S.W.A.T: “We give it R best” http://www.spokanepolice.org/spdswat.htm

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