Officer.com Police Blogs & Podcasts

Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

This column isn’t just about cops that get drunk. This column is about cops that get drunk and then drive cars. To commit the offense of drunk driving in this context demonstrates a level of irresponsibility and bad judgment that far exceeds that of the typical drunk driver.

Drunk driving has always been one of my pet peeves. When I was a cop, I was “the DUI guy.” Sometimes I had DUI enforcement as my primary assignment, but more often I would just find them (in the city where I worked, they would find you if you stayed in one place long enough), or other officers would call me to take them off their hands, something I was all too happy to do. They would write a brief supplemental report detailing their reason for the stop, and I would take it from there. Unless the case went to trial, they were free to resume whatever they had been doing. I knew that this person was not going to be the cause of someone having to be scraped off of their windshield later in the day, and that gave me considerable satisfaction.

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Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

Tim’s excellent adventures find him in Las Vegas this week for the annual conference of the International Association of Property Crime Investigators. After this, Tim gets to stay home for a while, which both he and his dog will appreciate. When I was a cop, I used to think that I’d really enjoy a job where I traveled a lot. I do really enjoy my job, but the traveling part is losing its charm after most of the last three weeks on the road.

I hadn’t heard of the IAPCI until a couple of months ago, when I saw the announcement for this conference. I’ve only been through the first day, but so far I’d say that this is one of the better police professional conferences I’ve attended. The presentations have been fresh and interesting. Not all of the attendees are cops–quite a few are from private industry, like AT&T, Wal-Mart, Walgreen’s, and Mervyn’s. But this is an area where private industry has as much or more to gain from pooling resources as do the cops, so it’s a happy marriage.

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Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

I spent the last few days at the annual meeting of Police Futurists International, which is held in conjunction with the World Future Society’s annual conference. This year, we were in Minneapolis. One of the presentations I attended discussed the use of RFID devices. “RFID” stands for Radio Frequency Identification, and most of us know them as those anti-theft tags concealed inside merchandise that are supposed to be deactivated when we buy the item. When they’re not, an alarm sounds as we exit the store. In some businesses, the alarms are so commonplace that no one even looks up when they go off.

What made the news most recently was the announcement that my home state of Washington was going to start placing RFID tags in its driver licenses, starting in 2008. This came a week after I received my new passport in the mail. The new document has a small gold symbol below the words “United States of America,” and indicates that it, too, contains an RFID chip.

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