Junior Year- Week Twenty-Seven

     This week was basically focused on a new take down technique that may be extremely effective when someone turns into you from an escort position. When they turn to you and swing at you, you have to be able to take control of the situation and remain in a positive time frame or else your not going to be able to win this fight. Criminals will often turn away from an escort position because the officer isn't technically restraining them or arresting them therefore they feel they can easily get out of it.  But a train officer would stay in positive time frame and be able to remain in control of the suspect.
   We had practiced and practiced more Spanish command vocabulary. Spanish Command vocab is so us as American officers who have spoken English our whole lives have some way to communicate with someone from another country or maybe an illegal immigrant. We would rather talk to them than having to use force to make them understand. Since Spanish is the second language in American it's going to be extremely useful on the streets. Since it's the second language there are a lot more Spanish speaking Americans in the united states than most believe. The words we are learning and practicing are words and are from a program that had been designed to teach the military Spanish so they could communicate when they were placed in foreign countries. In the end it's going to be an extreme advantage to know and may give me the job over someone else.
   Since tomorrow is St.Patrick's day and there is going to be a lot of alcohol consumption throughout America. Our forensics class had started the section on Serology, which is the study of bodily fluids, blood,urine, semen or saliva. It's the study of blood alcohol levels in these fluids, which is kind of the reasoning behind the breathalyzer testing. We learned that silica beads or silica gel is what can show the amount of alcohol in a persons breath therefore before breathalyzers had been created they had silica beads that were placed in a tube and a suspect intoxicated person must blow into this tube. Well the amount of color change that had taken place had shown how intoxicated someone had been. The silica beads mixed with alcohol have a property change that takes place. It's mostly in the color of the beads.
   Today we had been tested on how well we could do physical things and speak a foreign language. It's alot harder than someone thinks. We train in the techniques and everything but when we are speaking were speaking English than suddenly we have to take somethings were trained on start speaking Spanish to someone. We were also tested on all the words on our vocab list. The test wasn't extremely difficult because it had been the first test we had taken on it therefore Mr.Lavery knows that it's new and kind of hard to do since it's not our native language. We will be tested on it again with more Spanish commands.

Junior Year- Week Twenty-Four

Our lessons in both forensics and criminal justice are kind of the same things. We are learning about crime scenes and how to handle and secure them and make sure that we are observing everything. For forensics we had done mock crime scenes, we were placed in groups and gotten our parts for the scene we had been given to act out. After that we had made questions, rather obvious questions that almost everyone should be able answer after have seen the scene. We than acted ours out and discovered that its really hard to recall even some of the most simplistic things when a crime is being committed. Some of us couldn’t even remember the name of the man involved in the robbery or what the name of the suspect was. My group couldn’t figure out what the victims had dropped when they were running away. So when the crime is being committed it’s hard to remember and see what is really happening the first time that’s why witnesses and cameras are so important because what the witness saw may not be actually accurate.

In criminal justice we had been lectured about the importance of making sure we had secured the crime scene and collect all the possible evidence even if it doesn’t really seem that important to the case. Every detail of the crime scene is extremely important in catching the suspect. Mr. Lavery gave us some examples like a gum wrapper at a scene of a murder in a house, doesn’t exactly seem to important but the killer could had touched that wrapper when he had put the gum in his mouth just minutes before murdering the victim. So small things can definitely g a long way when it comes to evidence and you only have one chance to collect it all.

As well as secure the scene is important you must be trained to be able to handle if someone does attack you when the house wasn’t cleared properly. So we worked in 203, our lab, in order to better prepare for working on the streets. We learned outer wrist locks and variations of the wrist lock. We also learned finger locks and once put things together realized that both can be very effective when you are dealing with someone trying to put you into a negative time frame. Negative time frame is basically going to result in the officer being killed. The suspect should never have the ultimate control over the officer. In order to remain in control the officer must continue to stay in a positive time frame