It was another quiet Saturday night in Rexburg. As I rode through town with Officer Maybee of the Rexburg Police Department, he explained that vigilance is his primary job. “Even though this is America’s Family Community, we still need to be careful. We need to be prepared.”
And prepared he is. The console in his Dodge Interceptor bristles with buttons and switches. The center console contains a police radio, controls for the sirens and lights, and an electronic lock for guns. Additional lights, built into the lights atop the car, include specialized spotlights, illuminated arrows for directing traffic, and others. There's a lot of equipment in the cab of the car, including a locking gun rack with an AR-15 and a pump action shotgun.
There's a camera mounted to the windshield, peering forward and back at the same time. It's tied to a system that automatically records when the siren is turned on. Microphones throughout the car are capable of recording any word said in the car by an officer, a passenger, or the arrested perpetrator. The back seat is separated from the front by heavy Plexiglas.
As we drive around town, he points out minor traffic violations committed by nearly every third driver. “There’s a lot of stuff we don’t pull people over for most of the time,” he tells me. Apparently many stops are made to give the officer a reason to look into the vehicle - it lets the officer check the driver against open warrants, spot drugs or alcohol, or anything else that's out of the ordinary. There are a multitude of reasons to pull people over; driving violations, lights out, backing up without watching behind the car, etc.
After a couple hours of quiet driving, I’m given a tour of the police department offices. As we enter the rear of the building, I’m struck by how small a space the police operate in. He shows me a holding cell, a small Plexiglas cell that was no more than 5 feet by 8 feet. It's under constant surveillance by video camera.
Booking happens right there, with mug shots taken right by the holding cell. Suspects stand in front of a wall while holding a date number display. They have a counter of equipment for breath analysis. It looked like bubbling jars of water. Apparently the process is more complicated than simply blowing into a tube; the equipment has started malfunctioning and won’t be fixed until a specialist from Boise has a chance to come look at it.
The finger print machine was surprisingly high tech - there's no paper or ink involved, instead they use a system similar to a flat bed scanner, where fingertips are pressed against the glass. They're recorded digitally and fed into a state cataloging system, compared against other prints already in the database.
The interview rooms are small, suffocatingly so. It's a tiny, cramped room, and it's under both video and audio surveillance. The microphones concealed in the ceiling are sensitive enough to pick up even a whisper - there is no privacy in the interrogation room.
There's a standing file of open warrants, so that names can be immediately checked as they are called in from traffic stops or brought into the station. There's a separate system to interface with federal and national information databases. It's used for cross-referencing finger prints. I ask Officer Maybee if it’s like CSI. He just laughs.
“You know, on those TV shows, they can go to any computer and check these things in a few minutes.” He chuckles again. “It’s not really like that.” Not only is special access required to check prints against other databases, but it’s often a long grueling process. Biometric information, the unique identifiers that allow a computer to distinguish between various sets of prints, is not as speedy a science as one might hope. Generally, biometric data only helps to narrow the search. Most of the checking is done the old fashioned way – a human visually comparing one set against another.
In the office with the print computer, there's a board on the wall displaying some of the more unique weapons and items that have been confiscated. The board is covered in knives, clubs, pistols, drug pipes, even throwing stars. It’s a grim reminder that even in Rexburg crime can occur; and it’s neither kind nor graceful.
No comments:
Post a Comment