Citizen's Academy-DRE/Traffic Safety

This past week has been very interesting as well as exciting on the academy. On Thursday the topic was traffic safety and talking with a DRE. Do you know the top 3 traffic fatalities? The number one death is no seat belt. The second one is speed and the third is OWI'S. I would of never guess that. Then we had Sgt. Belz talk to us about his job as a DRE. Do you know what that stands for?
Drug Recognition Expert. He is like an investigator. He gathers all information when someone is picked up for OWI and then he is the one to question them to see if they are on other drugs besides alcohol. It was very informative. I had to do one of the Field Sobriety Tests in front of the class. Oh, boy! I ended up doing the Walk and Turn test for when someone is stopped for alcohol. I have never been picked up for drinking so I had to walk the 9 steps with one foot touching the other foot on a straight line and count my steps out loud and turn around and go back again counting out loud. Do you think I passed this test? I didn't and I never had a drink. Before I did this I explained to him my situation of my health and they do take that into consideration. So if you have a handicap of some kind then the DRE can figure that into the situation and that is why the breathe test is given to see if alcohol is present. This DRE has been doing his job for quite sometime He has done 140 drug evaluations and out of that he is 95% accurate. That means he knows what drugs a person could be on before the urine sample. The urine sample is the last step in doing a drug evaluation.The DRE told us he has a story for every question someone would ask. Man, was I surprised at the stories he had.
This week's food was, pasta casserole, green beans, bun, banana, oranges or apples to pick from and cupcakes.

Citizen's Academy

You are probably asking what is this? Our county has offered what is called "Citizen's Academy" in which the Sheriff's Office offers for 10 weeks free a training about the office. Our county hires quite a few citizen's to help run the Sheriff's Office. I thought this sounded exciting so I asked my husband to see if he wanted to go and he did. We also get free food from the jail if we want to. The topics they will be talking about are
1.Administration
2.Communications(dispatching)
3. Support Services
4 DRE/Traffic Safety
5.Field Services
6. Media Relations/Internal Affairs /County Attorney
7. Firearms Special Unit (we get to shoot guns)
8. Investigations Drug Task Force
9. Jail
10 We Graduate

One of these classes we get to ride with the Sheriff car. I can't wait for that. Another class we get to drive the car. So stay tuned every week I will put something new up at what we learned in class.
This week we talked about Administration and how the Sheriff's office runs, what includes the budget, the history of the office, how many employees. Our Office has 82 employess and they hire 18 citizen's to help keep the budget down.
The menu for food was Chicken and rice casserole, bananas, orange slices, assorted cooked vegetables, cookies and brownies. We did eat there and I must say it was good.