Officer Safety Warning Signs

Best Practices AMAURY MURGADO

OFFICER SAFETY WARNING SIGNS Refuse to let yourself become comfortable, complacent, or careless, and you reduce your risk of becoming a casualty.

I

PHOTO: AMAURY MURGADO

PHOTO: LT KEVIN DILLON

t’s no secret that I use acronyms and vival techniques. In a sense, you don’t other mnemonic learning tools in my have a choice. The hard part is when it’s teaching. Because I use them so often, times of famine. people will approach me and share their Famine is when there is a significant favorites for me to ponder and possibly stretch of time when nothing happens use. Ron Kelley, a retired motor officer of any consequence. These periods and fellow police academy instructor in consist of minor calls where officer Florida, brought me a mnemonic device safety and survival are rarely chalthat he uses when teaching, mentoring, lenged. These types of calls include or coaching. He uses a “list of C words,” traffic complaints, vandalism, and takwhich I renamed C4 for this article. C4 ing lost property reports. is a short list of what you do not want It’s during these lulls that individual If he is close enough to touch you, to become: Comfortable, Complacent, officers start to make choices that dehe can hurt you.

Careless, and a Casualty. These descripfine their survival ability. They can stay tors help remind you of the importance of officer safety and alert or they can allow themselves to start lowering their survival, and of what can happen when you forget. guard because of a false sense of security. When things are Originally, C4 was designed with traffic stops in mind. slow, some officers start to relax and their use of proper tacHowever, over time I found that the concept had a wider ap- tics start to taper off. It’s my belief there should never come peal for trainers and a broader application for officers. C4 can a time in your career when you get so comfortable that you be applied to virtually any field encounter. It is a type of flow forget the violent nature of our business. When you do forchart that can be used as a helpful reminder of what to avoid get, you slip into the next category: complacency. or as a possible explanation for a tragedy. When it comes to safety and survival, officers’ success or failure is affected by COMPLACENT the quality of their decisions and the choices they make.

For some, this is the point where the crystal ball syndrome kicks in. Since nothing has happened for a while, they think COMFORTABLE they know the outcome of each call before it happens. These The nature of our business has someare the officers who start saying things times been referred to as being a time of like, “Nothing is going to happen,” or either feast or famine. Defining feast is “Relax, it’s just a group of college kids.” easy; it’s when you’re hopping from call One of my all-time favorites is, “It’s just to call. If you’ve been a cop long enough an alarm; it goes off all the time.” These you start to notice that when it’s busy, officers start to take things for granted. calls come in similar batches. One night They confuse good luck with having the calls are mostly domestic violence. used good tactics. They no longer work Another night might consist of burglarat keeping their edge but instead work ies. Then there is a rash of robberies or at losing it. multiple instances of gang involved vioUnfortunately, the longer something lence. The point being, the nature of the doesn’t happen (to test officer safety Don't get so complacent that you calls keeps you on your toes by forcing and survival), the more officers tend to start leaving your vest at home. you to use good officer safety and surlower their guard. As the lull continues, 16

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Best Practices the more the subtle changes in downplaying survival attitudes start to add up.

These officers start to ignore core principles and begin to take shortcuts for the sake of convenience. They start to compromise their tactical advantage.

You know these officers well. They remember to keep the air conditioning running on a call but forgo parking their

cars a few houses down and unsafely park right in front of a residence. They are the ones who then walk up to a doorway and don’t stand off to one side for safety. They perform a traffic stop without calling it in first. They start to handle calls requiring backup by themselves even though there is no exigent circumstance compelling them to do so.

These officers explain everything away.

“Don’t worry, it’s just Luke and he’s just been drinking again.” They start to think that their ballistic vest is a little too hot and throw it in their back seat thinking that they can always put it on if they need to. The danger in being complacent is that it always leads to carelessness.

CARELESS We all have moments where we are inad-

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CASUALTY Consistent carelessness is a symptom of

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vertently careless. There are rare instances where our emotions get the better of us and we take chances we shouldn’t. Or, we get so busy that we leave a step out or forget to do something. I am not referring to this type of sporadic carelessness. What I am pointing to is the daily repeated acts of carelessness that occur because someone just doesn’t care enough to do things right.

It happens when an officer just blows off officer safety and survival considerations as if they are not needed.

A good example is the officer who continually responds to a repeat alarm call and just says, “To hell with it, it’s just another false alarm.” He or she doesn’t consider the possibility that this time might be the one where the suspect is waiting behind the counter with a shotgun.

Officers who think this way ignore the reality that every time you go to a call it’s the first time. Yes, it might turn out to be another false alarm. But you don’t know that until after a call has been handled.

When officers make a habit of being careless they put themselves and others in line to become a casualty.

1. C4 stands for Comfortable, Complacent, Careless, and Casualty.

2. C4 is a flow chart that helps defines success or explains failure.

3. Don't leave the safety of yourself and others to chance.

4. Care enough about yourself, others, or your family or find another occupation.

5. You should never be less than ready during any situation.

PHOTO: AMAURY MURGADO

of the fatal errors listed.

Don’t misunderstand me; I’m not saying you should treat all calls like a SWAT operation. My point is you never really know what you have until you get there.

Don’t violate the principles of officer safety and survival; instead, vary your tactics as necessary. You might be at different readiness levels throughout your shift,

but you should never be less than ready for anything.

Amaury Murgado is a special operations lieutenant with the Osceola County (Fla.) Sheriff’s Office. He is a retired Master Sergeant from the Army Reserve, has over 25 years of law enforcement experience, and has been a lifelong student of martial arts.

Don't forget to use your car to your advantage.

yourself, your fellow officers, or being there for your family at the end of your shift, then why are you posing as a cop?

You read about it all the time; the how, why, and under what circumstances officers get hurt. All I can do at times is scratch my head and wonder why as I read about some of the bad decisions and poor choices someone made. You’ll get no warm and fluffy comments from me here because someone chose to be a bullet sponge.

Though I feel badly when any officer gets hurt or killed in the line of duty, it also chaps my backside that in a significant number of cases, the injuries sustained or death incurred could have been prevented. If the officer had just used better tactics, had been in better shape, or had just cared more, it would never have happened. All of these things and more are in the officer’s control well beforehand. Of course, in the law enforcement community there are those who don’t help much either. They often sidestep the real issues to be politically correct and, by doing so, keep enabling the same mistakes.

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ALWAYS BE READY eryone’s business. The C4 mnemonic is but one way to help you remember that.

It’s also a tool to use when you are teaching, mentoring, or coaching. It reminds me of what was drilled into my head when I first became a cop almost 26 years ago.

The academy and FTOs pushed what was called the Ten Deadly Sins (or Ten Fatal Errors): a list of 10 things that would surely get you hurt or killed if you did them. If you’ve never seen this list, do yourself a favor and search for it on the Internet. Not only does it still apply today, but you can see how C4 helps explain each

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