Customer Reviews

Surviving the Street: Officer Safety And Survival Techniques

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Surviving the Street: Officer Safety and Survival Techniques is a very basic yet solid primer on officer safety practices. This is a good book for new officers hitting the streets as well as seasoned officers who need a refresher on the basics. Seasoned officers tend to get complacent over time and begin to take short cuts and risks that can lead to serious and fatal mistakes.

This is one of those books that is easy to overlook as useful and beneficial. For example:

New officers will say: "I already know this information. It was taught in the academy." Or, they will say, "My FTO drilled this information into my head for 12 weeks...I got it." (If that is the case call your FTO and thank him or her)

Seasoned officers will say: "Yeah, that is how it is supposed to be taught BUT in the real world we do it this way..."

Essentially, depending on where you are in your career you will interpret this book differently. I say that no matter where you on in your career this will be a valuable book as long as you keep an open mind and keep your ego out of the equation.

The book was written in 2005 so it is pretty up to date and relevant. Chapters 1 - 3 cover basics such as: statistics about officer safety, fatal errors, bad habits and shortcuts, mental preparation, physical preparation, skills you need and equipment concerns.

Beginning with chapter 4 and for the remainder of the book it goes over specific calls such as: suspicious persons and situations, vehicle contact, prisoner handling, under the influence people, crime in progress calls, safety defusing disturbances, domestic violence, safe structure searches, high speed pursuit, raids, handling emotionally disturbed persons, off duty survival, terrorist threats and surviving other dangers of the job.

As you can see this is a Officer Safety 101 class. Each chapter can easily fill up volumes of books. But, remember this simple truth: It is the basics that will keep you alive.

Overall, I highly recommend this book. It is well written and successfully covers the subject material in a clear and concise manner.