The fifth tenant of Below 100 is WIN – What’s Important Now? Many of us practice decision making every day without stopping to think about the steps we take to achieve our goals. That is true whether the decision relates to what we eat for breakfast, what route we take to work, what the priorities are in our schedules, how we operate our vehicles, or other everyday tasks.
In the law enforcement and corrections environment, we must train to address not just those mundane, every day decisions. We also must train to make life and death decisions in nanoseconds –…
Keeping your mind on your driving and avoid target fixation
Remember, you can’t do a single thing or help a single person if you don’t get there. Studies show that when a driver is not focused on the road for just 4.6 seconds at 55 MPH that it’s equivalent to driving the length of a football field while blindfolded.
Always increase your safety zone if distractions arise to improve reaction time and to avoid other drivers who are distracted around…
For years, the scariest of infectious diseases was HIV. Today’s nemesis, however, is hepatitis C (hep C), a virus that is spread by contact with the blood of an infected person and eventually causes liver disease.
While health officials estimate that about 1 million people in the United States are HIV infected, about 3 million to 4 million Americans are infected with hep C.
Several factors make hep C a deadlier adversary than HIV. For example, HIV cannot live outside the body, whereas the hep C virus can live outside the body for up to seven days. One drop of…
On August 13, 2014 Judge Jorge Cueto of the 11th Judicial Circuit Court in Miami-Dade County issued an order declaring Chapter 440 unconstitutional (Florida Workers Advocates, et al. v. State of Florida). The FSRMF has no active FSWCSIP members in the 11th Judicial Circuit, therefore there is no immediate impact to the Fund. Final disposition of this issue is months away while the appeal process plays out. Steve Coonrod, partner with the defense firm of McConnaughhay, Duffy, Coonrod, Pope & Weaver, P.A., has provided an excellent summary of the FWA v. State of Florida case which is included in this …
Wow! What an exciting time it is as technology is helping to keep law enforcement officers and members of the public safer!
The whole world seems to be talking about autonomous driving these days, and company after company is jumping into the effort to have self-driving vehicles to one degree or another. Even if you ignore the completely self-driving configurations, just think of how far automobile technology has advanced in the last decade – many new cars have features such as self-braking regardless of who, if anyone, is driving the vehicle.
At the Florida Sheriffs Risk Management Fund, we are…
According to a study of police suicides from 2008 through 2012, the number of officers who took their own lives was twice the number of officers killed by felons. During each of these four years over 125 law enforcement officers died at their own hand. Statistics on this topic since that time have not been accurately maintained.
Officers have survived attacks and violent encounters because they kept a clear mind and used it to its most creative potential. The typical officer has only seconds to react – but it is in these few seconds that lack of clarity can be…
Statistics show that wearing body armor reduces the chance of bodily injury or death caused by any physical injury including a car accident. The best vest you will ever wear is the one you’re wearing if you are shot. 36% of officers killed in fatal shootings between 2003-2012 could have survived but were not wearing their vest.
Officers that do not routinely wear body armor are 3.4 times more likely to suffer fatal injuries from a torso shot than officers who routinely wear their body armor.
Wearing body armor can mean the difference between life and death.
Just as we lose too many officers in completely avoidable single-vehicle crashes, the sad truth is that police dogs die in hot cars all too frequently. The Officer Down Memorial page reports at least 64 police K-9s have died on U.S. soil from heat exhaustion between January 2011 and August 2015. According to the Connecticut Police Work Dog Association, another 12 police K-9s have died from heat exhaustion between January and July of 2016.
In South Carolina, K-9 Emma died from heat exhaustion after she was left inside her handler’s vehicle for about 90 minutes — although the car was…
I’ll have to admit, it has been more than a few years since I worked shift work, but I can still clearly remember the good and the bad that came with it. When I was a young single guy, I enjoyed the evening shift when I could get off at 10 p.m., close the town up and sleep late the next morning.
The night shift came in handy, especially after I got married. My first child was colicky, and my wife would be up all night and was ready when I came in at 6 a.m. for some relief. It…
