BOOT, DECONFLICTION, AND PENDING FURTHER LEADS - 070

Right-click and select "Save As" to download this podcast episode to your device.

TRANSCRIPT:

This week on the Writer's Detective Bureau, boot, deconfliction, and pending further leads. I'm Adam Richardson, and this is the Writer's Detective Bureau.

Welcome to episode number 70 of the Writer's Detective Bureau, the podcast dedicated to helping authors and screenwriters write professional quality crime-related fiction. And this week I'm answering your questions about being on field training as a trainee police officer, how interagency deconfliction works for narcotics investigations, and what paperwork duties in the Detective Bureau might really look like. But first, I need to thank my gold shield patreons, Debra Dunbar, from debradunbar.com, C.C. Jameson from ccjameson.com, Larry Keeton, Vicki Tharp, of vickitharp.com, Chrysann, Larry Darter, Natalie Barelli of nataliebarelia.com, Craig Kingsman of craigkingsman.com, for their support. And to Joan Raymond of joanraymondwritinganddesign.com for upping her monthly pledge to the gold shield level. And I am also hugely thankful for my coffee club patrons. I really do appreciate you. You can find links to all of the writers supporting this episode in the show notes at writersdetective.com/70. And to learn about setting up your own Patreon account for your author business or to support the show for as little as $2 a month, visit writersdetective.com/patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N.

For those listeners here in the United States, I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving, and regardless of where you are in the world, I am thankful for having you as a listener. I spent my Thanksgiving at home fortunate not to have to work, surrounded by friends and family, which more than makes up for the fact that I will be working through Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, which I'm happy to do so. My counterpart will be able to be at home with his little ones on Christmas morning. With this being the last day of November, it also means we've hit the end of NaNoWriMo, so if you were taking part, I hope you hit your writing goals.

All right, let's get into this week's first question. This week's first question comes from Darlene Chaney, who posted in our Facebook group, which if you haven't joined yet, you can quickly find by going to writersdetectivebureau.com/facebook. Darlene writes, yep, it's me again. I've been told that a rookie cop has to have their field training officer, FTO, with them at all times while on duty. Is this correct? Darlene posted this in our Facebook group and gold shield patreon, Craig Kingsman, helpfully replied, well, the rookie can use the restroom by himself. In all seriousness, FTOs are there to train the new officer. So yes, if they are still in the FTO phase, meaning still in field training, they should be with them at all times when out in public. And this is primarily for the trainee's own safety.

As I've mentioned on this podcast before, the majority of the tactics that we've developed over the years when it comes to officer safety tactics, are one's learned from officers being killed in the line of duty. So if your trainees only law enforcement experience is having gone through six months of a police academy or however long it was, then they still have a ton to learn about doing the job safely in the real world, meaning not getting themselves or their partners killed. When you are out in public and you're in uniform, things happen in an instant. And it seems that some cops, and I know that military veterans will attest to this too, but it seems that every squad or unit has someone that gets more than their fair share of the random, crazy, unavoidable stuff happening to them or right in front of them. And we call these officers shit magnets. Shit magnets will have the DUI car crash happen right in front of their patrol car. Or they will walk out the door of the coffee shop and right into a domestic violence situation unfolding. Shit finds them just like a magnet.

And the thing is, as an FTO, you don't know yet if your boot is a shit magnet. Boot is slang for trainee, which is very old school and completely stolen from the military. So now you know why basic training is called bootcamp in the military. Some agencies in Southern California at least, still call their trainees boots informally. And department admin may frown on that term as it often sounds slightly derogatory, especially to an outsider, but in reality, it's a reminder to the trainee that you still don't know anything yet despite what your Police Academy Spirit Award or Top Gun Award or whatever might have you believe, we all want to feel good about our performance. But being on FTO is a time to learn and a time to perform without excuses. Excuses mean you're justifying your mistakes rather than learning from them. Being called a boot is that regular reminder that you aren't there yet. You need to keep your focus on learning, on seeing and on demonstrating that you can do this job. Oh, and the term rookie can refer to a newer officer that may or may not still be in field training.

And I mentioned that because rookie is what Darlene referred to in the original question. So rookie can be both a boot or somebody who's no longer on field training. So anyway, back to the field training aspect. Since this is an uncontrolled training environment here in the real world, it's the FTOs job to assess and manage what the trainee is and is not yet ready to handle. And FTOs are acutely aware that getting separated from your trainee can get the trainee killed in a matter of seconds. We've all seen TV shows where the bad guy leads cops on a foot pursuit and the duo of cops get separated. That happened in real life to an FTO friend of mine and when he found his trainee on the other side of a fence a few seconds later, his rookie was already in the bad guy's headlock, which when you carry a gun on your belt is a life threatening situation.

The bad guy ended up losing that fight, but he was very lucky he didn't get shot by the FTO or the trainee for that matter. One more thing to note is that once a trainee is employed and starts field training, the trainee from a legal standpoint is a fully sworn police officer. They have a badge and a gun and full police authority like police arrest powers, and this is after they successfully complete a police academy, but the FTO period is where the real learning happens. I equate it to learning to drive. You took the driver education class, then you drove with an instructor or your parent while you had a permit, and then eventually you passed your driver's license exam and the DMV issued you a driver's license. But how much did you really know about driving in the real world on the day you passed your driver's license test? That first six months or one or two years or where you really learn to drive. Maybe some close calls that taught you some important lessons or getting yourself into situations where you had to rethink how you could handle it better.

That's what field training is like. And even when a boot finishes field training, there's still going to be learning the job for years to come, which makes them a rookie even if they aren't a boot anymore. And speaking of, boot was the title of a memoir written by an LAPD officer about his time in field training back in the 1980s. It was written under the pen name of author William Dunn, or William Dunn was the pen name that was used. I don't know his actual name, and it was published in the mid 1990s. So I don't know if you can still find the book, but it is a great read if you can find it.

Chris Lefebvre writes, I'm curious about the potential for abuse of deconfliction protocols. Could, for example, corrupt members of a rural sheriff's department who profit from drug trafficking use deconfliction as a means of counter-surveillance. By that I mean spotting outside agencies who may be conducting investigations in or near their territory without their prior knowledge. Thanks for any possible insight. It is quite valued. Great question, Chris. Back in June, 2017, I posted one of my APBs, the monthly emails I send out. I posted one to my blog that covered the topic of deconfliction, specifically regional information sharing systems, which is known as riss.net or riss.net R-I-S-S. To save you from having to go back a few years in my blog, I will explain that RISS is made up of several regional law enforcement clearinghouses across the country, and when I'm going to run certain types of operations like narcotics in this case, I will let that clearinghouse know.

Now, I don't do this for a ton of different investigations, it's more of these proactive ones like a narc case. So let's say for example, I'm posing as a drug dealer that's looking to be paid in guns. That's my intention with my investigation and I'm running this operation in the city of Los Angeles. I will let that clearinghouse know. So I'm running this operation, but what happens if there's another police agency I don't know about that has it's undercover cops posing as gun runners also in the LA area? When they call into the clearinghouse to notify them of their intended operations, I will get notified that they have a similar operation running in the area. And this in theory, the whole purpose of this clearinghouse should prevent both of those teams of cops from investigating each other or worse, ending up pointing guns at one another.

So that's how the system is supposed to work and why we have deconfliction. Now, there is a pretty significant vetting process to access these clearinghouses. So it's not like you can just call up and tell them your name and your agency and what you've got going on. You have to be granted access to the clearinghouse, and that usually comes with a need to know like being assigned to an investigative unit that works these kinds of cases, as well as having bosses on both sides, both the Police Department and in the clearinghouse approve your application and there's this whole check and balance thing that happens. But to get to your question, Chris, I guess it would be possible that locals could be tipped that way, but they'd have to have their own active in operations going in the area that the clearinghouse is notified of.

And then there's a record of who was notified and why. The clearinghouse doesn't just pick up the phone and say, this team's working in your area. There has to be a potential conflict identified through both the location and the time of the operation. Now, that said, we typically do give notification to the local agency whenever we're going into another area regardless of the whole clearinghouse thing, and that's just to let them know that we're working in their city. This is a courtesy that most agencies do, not just as a courtesy, but also prevents potential blue on blue situations where if we're trying to do a drug bust and we got beards and long hair and not in a typical patrol uniform, it helps for the locals to know that there are undercover cops working in their area so we don't end up getting shot if we're in the middle of doing a bust.

And when we are doing those narc busts, we might even ask for the local department to provide a patrol officer or two for a uniform presence during a bust. So that would certainly alert the locals to our presence in their city if that works for your story. Now, that said, if I had any inkling that my case had sprung a leak, like the Rural Sheriff's Department was running protection for their local drug dealers or they were doing some sort of profiting off of them however that thing unfolded, that would become the priority investigation right there for me. So public corruption cases are huge deals, so that would actually develop into a great case to work. That would definitely make more of a difference in that community than just arresting a local drug dealer. So I hope that helps Chris

Erika Perra asked, if a detective is on desk duty and is assigned to look over the paperwork of all the squads open cases, what minor errors might he pick up on like an officer failing to submit form A or maybe someone submitted form B when it should've been form C? Ideas would be welcome and please, specific terms would be appreciated. Great question Erika. The ever elusive paperwork shuffle. Realistically, there wouldn't be many errors to pick up on when it comes to procedural stuff like that because the reports the officers write are not turned in until they've been approved by a supervisor. So if form A is unattached, the patrol sergeant kicks the report back to the officer to fix. Technically, most detective work is desk duty. But I think I know what you're getting at. So if you're looking for ideas, what kind of monotonous duty you could give someone something relating to doing boring paperwork stuff in a detective bureau? I do have an idea.

And first, I should explain that any crime reports that come from patrol that aren't already cleared by an arrest are reviewed by a detective supervisor like a detective sergeant, who will either assign the case to one of the detectives in their unit or they will suspend the case because there aren't any leads left to follow up on. So I hope that makes sense. So the detective is the gatekeeper here on whether a report gets assigned to a detective or not. And those or nots are, as we say at my department, suspended pending further leads. So if you're looking to punish one of your characters with some monotony, you can have them assigned to follow up with the victims on all of these about to be suspended pending further leads reports, where he has to call each victim and double check that there's nothing else to add to the report.

So for example, the city is having a rash of car burglaries, but there's no usable evidence at the scene. The sergeant assigns your guy to call each victim to double check that nothing else was stolen, that they don't have any ring doorbell videos or that the burglar didn't conveniently lose his wallet inside the car and the little old lady just discovered it and meant to call the detectives. You can definitely have some fun with this, especially if he's spending his mornings listening to how Mrs. Anderson thinks her cat, Mr. Sniffles, can pick the car burglar out of a lineup because Mr. Sniffles looks out the window all night long. And if you're writing a Cozy Cat Mystery, I really hope Mr. Sniffles really does prove the annoyed know it all detective wrong.

Thanks so much for listening this weekend. It was great getting to meet so many of you at $20 Vegas. You don't have to have published your book to send me a question. You just have to go to writersdetective.com/podcast, and fill out the form. Last week was Patreon's Thank You Patreons Day, where I gave away Writer's Detective mugs and bags of Writer's Detective Coffee to a few lucky winners and all of my gold shield patreons are getting Writer's Detective gold shield lapel pin badges. So if you're interested in getting one, check out writersdetective.com/patreon, to learn more. Thanks again for listening. Have a great week and write well.