This is an excerpt from the chapter, “Field Training Officer.”
As discipline, there were a few shifts in which I drove my car and made him sit in thepassenger seat. For an eager recruit, this is a tough sentence. Eventually, Recruit Brian started to come around. After our three weeks together, I felt that he could do the job. I let him know, though, that if he reverted to his normal way of driving, he would lose his job. He would be too much of a liability to keep.
Within just a few weeks of solo patrol, Brian had his first at-fault car accident. A few weeks after that, he had had his second. I had transferred to a different precinct but heard that he had also been written up for Insubordination towards his Sergeant. I realized that it was just a matter of time before he would be terminated or forced to resign. The end came when he tried to drive his police car across the grass median of a divided highway. There was a piece of metal sticking out of the ground that he did not see that punctured his gas tank. At the same time, his tires got stuck in the mud. This only became worse as he spun the tires deeper into the mire. When he tried to back up, he went back over the piece of metal which made a spark and set the police car’s gas tank on fire. Brian was able to get out, but scratch one police car.
Needless to say, that was the end of Brian’s short law enforcement career. Not that this is a bad thing. I’m not sure that you would want him coming to your house if you had an emergency. That is assuming that he could find you and managed to get there without getting into a wreck or burning up his police car!
