Spring Lake Park PD: Calm, Information, and a 20-Minute Crash Course
Why sending the robot down a corridor instead of an officer changes the whole call, a 20-minute crash course that got the entire department driving it, morale, customer service, and a robot that came out of a dirty crawl space good as new.
Featured: Vantage 2. Request a demo.
Transcript
In this career, you're going to do stuff that's dangerous and scary, and that's part of the job. But there was a certain kind of calmness that you feel when you send in technology like this and see that I'm not going to go down this corridor and meet a shotgun.
Information is invaluable. It's probably more so than any other career. We need information to know how we're going to approach a situation and hopefully safely resolve it. And we won't have to necessarily always escalate a force if we see that it's not necessary. And that's going to make police look good. That's going to make even potential suspects look good. If we can end it peacefully without creating a big scene, news doesn't have to get involved. Public information officers don't have to get involved. There's a residual effect to when you have to amplify force.
The robot, I literally ran everybody through a 20-minute crash course on how to use it, how to maintain it. And if you've ever played a video game in your life, you can use this thing. It's literally a click button joystick. That's it. So we've all been training our whole lives on how to use these without knowing we were doing it. Because when we used it, there was no, "Oh, what does this button do?" You literally grab a joystick and you start steering it around.
If a department decides to spend the money on a robot, that's also going to show the officers that the department, as an admin team, values their life enough to be able to try to get something like this. Not saying that administration doesn't value the life of their officers, but it makes morale go up. Like wow, they care enough about keeping us safe where they're willing to fork out the money to buy us a robot to make us just that much safer. Nothing's 100% in this career, but it definitely helps.
Being in an admin position, I've noticed that there's companies that are good with customer service and those that you won't hear back from for a period of time. Your company has always been great. As soon as we reach out, we get something back, whether it's email, phone, text, no matter what it is the customer service is good. I have the confidence to know that I can contact the company, and we can get that robot fixed.
When I brought the robot back after that burglary call, I blew it off with the air chuck just to get all the sand and junk out of it, and it's like it never went into any dirty crawl space. It was good as new again.