He's Growing What?

May 28, 2009

You get called out to a home located on the edges of the city, almost into the countryside. A nice looking home, long driveway, nice fencing, relatively well kept. You notice the place has a lot of ‘No Trespassing’ signs posted and there is more than one big, hulking Rottweiler guarding the property. This isn’t considered to be a high crime area so the security seems a bit “over the top.”

As you come up to the door, you notice at the side of the house there appears to be an enormous electrical entrance panel. Given its size you’d think it would be providing power to a hotel, not a simple two-bedroom bungalow. You knock on the door and a very nervous longhaired young man with prison tats answers the door. His eyes are doing the jigger bug and his body language is screaming “I’m hiding something, go away,” but he’s trying to be polite and accommodating.

You are there because there was a 911 call. You want to check to see if everyone in the house is ok. The young man insists no one called 911 and he would know, as he’d been home all day. The cries of a young child are heard in the living room. You walk into the house and find a small child sitting on the floor playing with a cell phone. The cell phone has 911 on speed dial. You check to see if the child is ok, and she is, just rather dirty and needs a diaper changed.

The nervous young man is now almost literally beside himself with relief and talks rapidly about how his kid is so smart and he is sorry she caused any trouble and thanks you for coming out to check as he tries to usher you out the door as fast as he can.

What’s going on here? What would you do? There’s a lot of information hitting you in this scenario, how will you respond to it? This kind of situation is much like the ones you will encounter in your Police Ready B-PAD test exam on the Police Ready website.

Remember when you had to respond to various scenes and tell examiners how you would handle what you witnessed? In this real life situation, you need to do the same thing, make sense of hundreds of pieces of information that are assailing you with the speed of light. These scenarios are the kind of day-to-day events all cops encounter and have to deal with. And now, what WOULD you do?

Note: the nervous young man was trying to hide a grow house with thousands of marijuana plants. Would you have figured that out?