The past two days have been spent at the police academy for a seminar. This counts as my job shadowing requirement for school. It was pretty entertaining, to be honest. I’ll start from Day 1 and describe what I did, then Day 2.
This day opened up with a presentation about Homegrown Terrorists like Dzokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Timothy McVeigh. After this and some bad but free coffee, a briefing about the Boston Marathon bombing given by a special agent bomb technician (Who is also the father of a guy from my school and was the point of contact for my shadowing) who was actually there. He put this picture in his Powerpoint, and there has been confirmation from several sources that that was him. I put the circle around him.
Okay, I didn’t legit drive it.
The moonshine class was interesting, because now I kind of want to be an ABC agent and bust these guys, then afterward tear their place apart and blow it up. Because you can. That sounds fabulous.
I didn’t learn nearly as much in the Spanish class, but I learned some interesting stuff about gangs. Not saying they’re good, but they’re kind of fun to learn about. They do weird things.
Day 2 ends that awkward Day 1 phase where you’re all “omg what do i do??????” We started out with a Human Trafficking presentation by the Assistant Attorney General, which I feared would be a repeat of Ken Cuccinelli’s speech at my school last year. Basically that was a reelection speech and had nothing to do with law. It put the principal to sleep. This one was actually better, much more informative. At the end she said “I had to make sure this was 100% law enforcement because some cases I don’t want in the community.” Cue the ten random teenagers looking around wildly like “Umm…. you didn’t check very well.”
Later we were called out in a Social Networking presentation. He also said Snapchat was just a sexting app. Funny, Mom uses that app. She Snapchats me. Awwwwwwwkward. The guy also said to check their Snapchats even though you really can’t unless you take screenshots. The woman in front of us told the girls I was sitting with and I not to sext and stuff like that. Which we don’t. In this presentation we also saw a video of a pedophile singing this song that made me laugh really hard despite the bad situation it was from.
Following this and lunch we went to Sovereign Citizens, which are basically stupid people who sound crazy but really aren’t. They think that the laws don’t apply to them and dump paperwork on anyone but a sheriff and/or shoot them. Here is a really funny video about them and a good way to deal with them, which we watched. Don’t try to apply logic to it. They’re really dumb. Another “law enforcement sensitive” presentation I’m not going into.
The second class was fake IDs, and Virginia IDs/Drivers Licenses are the best of the bunch. They have everything from microprinting to UV text, and other cool stuff. They’re hard to fake, but others, not so much. They’re surprising realistic now, but the standard will always be “Good enough” not “good.”
At the end of Day 2 Mom and I went to go see the Plain White T’s at a waterpark. They gave a short concert, but afterward Mom and I went in the lazy river while they did Meet and Greet stuff. They happened to cross a bridge over it while we were going under it, and I said hi and said it was a great concert. Tom Higgenson told me to be careful in the river. That kind of made my day.