Capstone: a ride-along report and a profile of a police service

The final lesson brings the course together in one assignment. Every student has now completed a ride-along with the Port Ardent Police Department: Amara on a Friday night with Officer Dev Malhotra, Marco on a Sunday day shift, Priya with the traffic unit, Linh in the communications center followed by four hours in a patrol car, and Jesse with his tribe's police department in Michigan over a visit home, with Professor Desjardins's approval. Each must write a report with two parts: a profile of the police service, based on public information and what they learned, and an analysis of the shift, connecting what they saw to the ideas of the course. This lesson walks through how to do both well, using Amara's report as a model.

Before, during and after a ride-along

A ride-along is a privilege, not a right, and it comes with responsibilities. Before the shift, students sign a waiver and a confidentiality agreement, read the service's ride-along rules and dress appropriately. During the shift, they follow the officer's instructions without argument, especially about where to stand and when to stay in the car; they do not interfere with police work, touch equipment or speak for the police; and they do not take photographs or recordings. Afterward, they protect the privacy of everyone they met. The report must never include the names, addresses, license plates or identifying details of members of the public, and it should name officers only with their permission. Professor Desjardins reminds the class that the people they saw on the worst night of their lives did not agree to become case studies.

A ride-along also requires observation skills that are useful for police work itself. Good observers note times, sequences and exact words where they matter, write their notes as soon as possible and separate what they saw from what they concluded. Amara kept a small notebook and wrote a line after each call, which made her shift log accurate. Marco, who relied on memory, found that by the next morning he could not remember the order of the calls. That, Professor Desjardins says, is the same lesson every new officer learns about notebooks.

Part 1: profiling the police service

The service profile describes the organization the student rode with, using the frameworks from lessons 2 to 6. It should answer six questions. Where does the service fit in the system: what level of government is it, what is its jurisdiction and which other agencies share or border its territory? How big is it: officers, civilians, budget and population served, with rates per 100,000 residents for comparison? How is it organized: ranks, divisions, units and shift system? How is it governed and overseen: who appoints the chief, how the budget is set and which bodies review complaints and investigate serious incidents? What is its workload: calls for service, the main types and response times? And how does the community see it: survey results, complaints and recent controversies or successes?

Most of this information is public. Services publish annual reports, budgets and strategic plans, and city council and committee agendas, budgets and minutes are posted online. National statistics provide comparisons. Students should cite their sources and note when figures are estimates or come from an interview. The code below shows how Amara turned Port Ardent's published figures into the key indicators for her profile.

# Port Ardent Police Department: key indicators for the service profile (2025)
population = 98000
officers, civilians = 204, 68
budget = 52_400_000          # operating budget, dollars
calls = 54300
p1_minutes = [4.2, 5.8, 6.1, 3.9, 9.4, 6.8, 7.6, 5.2, 4.8, 12.1, 6.4, 5.5]  # sample of priority 1 travel times
complaints = 64
trust = 0.68                 # community survey, all residents
p1 = sorted(p1_minutes); n = len(p1)
median = (p1[n // 2 - 1] + p1[n // 2]) / 2 if n % 2 == 0 else p1[n // 2]
print(f"sworn officers per 100,000 residents: {officers / population * 1e5:.1f} (US 2018: about 241)")
print(f"civilian share of personnel: {civilians / (officers + civilians):.0%}")
print(f"cost per resident: {budget / population:,.0f} dollars")
print(f"calls per officer per year: {calls / officers:.0f}")
print(f"priority 1 median travel time: {median:.2f} min; within 7 min: {sum(t <= 7 for t in p1) / n:.0%}")
print(f"complaints per 100 officers: {complaints / officers * 100:.1f}; trust {trust:.0%}")

sworn officers per 100,000 residents: 208.2 (US 2018: about 241)
civilian share of personnel: 25%
cost per resident: 535 dollars
calls per officer per year: 266
priority 1 median travel time: 5.95 min; within 7 min: 75%
complaints per 100 officers: 31.4; trust 68%

The indicators give the profile a factual backbone. Each number should be interpreted, not just reported. Amara notes that Port Ardent has fewer sworn officers per resident than the national figure, which is pulled up by large cities, and a relatively low civilian share, which may explain why officers like Dev spend so much time on paperwork that civilians do in larger departments. She also notes that the priority 1 sample, with three quarters of calls within the 7-minute target, below the 80% goal, is too small to draw firm conclusions, and recommends that the service publish full-year figures.

Part 2: the shift log and analysis

The shift log lists each call or activity with the time, type, priority, what the officers did and the outcome, without identifying anyone. Amara's log for her night shift with Dev began like this: at 19:22 a priority 2 fight outside a bar, two people separated, one cautioned, no injuries, 35 minutes; at 20:10 a priority 1 collision with minor injuries, scene secured, paramedics attended, one driver charged with careless driving, 95 minutes; at 21:45 a priority 3 noise complaint, party host agreed to turn music down, 15 minutes; at 22:30 a priority 2 call about a man shouting in a parking lot, who was in crisis, taken to hospital under the state's emergency evaluation law, three hours including the wait. The log continued through eleven calls and ended with two hours of reports.

The analysis is the heart of the report. It connects what the student saw to the ideas of the course, using at least four lessons. Amara's analysis made several connections. Most of the shift involved order maintenance and help rather than crime, illustrating Bittner's view of police work from lesson 1. The careless driving charge would now enter the justice funnel from lesson 2, and Dev's detailed notes would determine whether it survived review. At the bar fight, Dev chose a caution rather than an arrest after both men calmed down, and Amara walked through the decision tree from lesson 7: legal authority existed, the risk had passed, policy allowed discretion and a caution resolved the problem. At the parking lot, Dev spent fifteen minutes talking before the man agreed to go to hospital voluntarily, an example of the minimum force principle from lesson 4 and the procedural justice ideas from lessons 1 and 9. The three-hour hospital wait illustrated the workload problem from lesson 8 and the case for co-response teams from lesson 11.

Writing about discretion, community and wellness

The report asks students to analyze two discretionary decisions in depth. For each, they should describe the situation, list the options available, identify the law and policy that applied, state the choice made and evaluate it. Amara chose the bar fight and a later traffic stop, in which Dev gave a young driver a warning for a burned-out headlight rather than a ticket after explaining the reason for the stop. She wondered whether the outcome would have been the same for a driver who was rude, and connected the question to the research on attitude and discretion from lesson 7. Good analysis raises questions honestly without accusing anyone.

The community section describes who the officers met and how trust was built or strained. Amara noticed that Dev greeted several business owners by name and that he explained every stop. She also noticed that at the house party, a group of young people filmed the officers on their phones the moment they arrived, which Dev said was now routine and which he accepted as part of the job. The wellness section describes the pressures the student observed. Amara described the pace of the evening, the long hospital wait, the hurried meal eaten in the car at 01:30 and the moment, after the collision, when Dev sat silently for a minute before driving to the next call. She connected these to the operational and organizational stressors in lesson 10.

Reflection and next steps

The reflection is personal. Students describe what surprised them, what they learned about themselves and whether the shift changed their career plans. Amara wrote that she had expected excitement and instead found that the skill she admired most was patience. Marco wrote that his Sunday day shift was quieter than he expected and that he now understands why scheduling matters so much to officers with families. Priya discovered that traffic investigation uses many of the analytical skills from her fraud work. Linh wrote that the communications center was the most intense workplace she had ever seen and that she is now applying for a part-time call-taker position; she also wrote that Dev's habit of explaining every stop was exactly what her cousin never received. Jesse wrote that riding in his own community as an observer rather than a resident confirmed his choice, and that the officers there carry knowledge of families and history that no training course could teach.

Professor Desjardins ends the course where it began, with the question of what police are for. The students' answers are now more complicated and more interesting. Police are for keeping people safe, enforcing the law and responding when something ought not to be happening; they hold powers that democracies grant reluctantly and check constantly; they work inside a system of courts and corrections they do not control; they are shaped by a history that communities remember; and they depend, every day, on the trust of the people they serve. The courses that follow in the program will build the legal knowledge, investigative skills, community understanding and tactical abilities that the work requires. This course has tried to give them the map.

Students also present a five-minute summary of their report to the class. The presentation should highlight one finding from the profile, one discretionary decision and one question the student would like the service to answer. Professor Desjardins invites Sergeant Haddad to the presentations, and in past years several of her answers have changed how the service publishes its data.