Exp. 1

So the first observation that I did was at the POST academy out in Meridian. This is the academy that the officers to be are trained. The instructor that was teaching the cadets was very helpful and actually thought it was a pretty cool thing for me to be doing. For the fact that it was explained to him that I has a student at Boise State, getting my degree into Criminal Justice, and wanted to learn and obverse the community of police officers. So he was very helpful. One thing I didn’t anticipate was that he was going to have be participate in the class. By this I mean, before the class started he had me get up in front of the cadets and introduce myself and let them know what I was doing. After doing so, I noticed that several of the cadets straightened up in their seats, as if I were doing an evaluation of them as cadets and that it was going to affect their graduating from the academy. SO right off the bat I figured that they weren’t going to act in a normal manner and the observation was going to be slightly watered down because they were going to be acting in a normal manner. After about 15 minutes this was not the case. They seemed to have forgotten that I was there and were much more focused. The course that they were going over was proper procedure in common scenarios that they were going to come across on a regular basis such as, domestic dispute, disturbance, etc…
During one of the breaks I was able to talk to a couple of the cadets and got some really good info on their back grounds, what made them enter into law enforcement, were they wanted it to take them, and if they wanted to go federal or even thought about it. SO I got little interviews with some of them. The answers to most of the question really surprised me because it wasn’t the answers that I expected, or maybe they weren’t the answers that I would have given to the same questions. The Instructor also said that he would be more than willing to set a time for an interview.
As I was talking to the instructor, another instructor approached and joined the conversation. He turned out to be the Sergeant in charge of operations. He too was very intrigued about my assignment and wanted to help also. With that being said, and long story short, he offered to allow me to observe some instructional videos that the DEA had sent them about drug bust. Which has actual footage from a camera crew that fallowed the team. It was a good day of observation. Next time I get to observe field course work.