As promised before, I want to share my experiences with my new internship at the Prescott Valley Police Department. Unfortunately, I have not found too much free time to head over there too often, but the time I do set aside has been well worth it! I had the chance to go on a patrol ride with another Volunteer. He is actually attending graduate school at Riddle. (small world!) He is a really nice guy and he helped me to learn a lot more about law enforcement. Unfortunately, there was not too much excitement the day we went out for a ride. One guy ran out of gas at an intersection, so we got to direct traffic. There was also a car accident with a school bus (no one was harmed). Looked like the lady driving the car was not paying attention and rear-ended the bus driver. We stayed on the scene until officials came and took over. We wrote a few parking tickets, and did some house-watch requests. It was pretty fun!

I also spent some time trying to perfect my recovery of fingerprints on objects such as glasses and windows. It is a LOT harder than it looks. But it was a great learning experience and the head of the forensics department told me that my lifted prints looked better than some of the officers’. (shhh…we do not want to hurt their feelings. ha ha)

Just recently, I had the opportunity to go to Flagstaff to the big forensics/evidence lab. We took evidence from 5 different police stations around here (Prescott, Prescott Valley, Sheriff’s Department, Chino, and the Indian Reservation) and put them in the evidence van and took it all to the lab in Flagstaff. It was a nice drive. I learned a lot more about the chain of custody and how important it is to log everything that is done with the evidence because it will be used later in court. It is really interesting!

If you are interested and intrigued with security, forensics, and/or working for the government or law enforcement, I would really suggest volunteering for your local police department. They are all very helpful individuals and they are very willing to teach you as much as they know and once you have worked with them, I bet you any one of them would be willing to write you a nice letter of recommendation which will come handy once you are looking into a future career in the government. It is a lot of fun and educational!