How do you Find Addresses?

[SAPD]

How do you all find addresses called to, do you all use GPS technology on your laptops or are you suppose to become familiar with your area streets and if so how big are your patrol areas?

[Joxer]

You use a map (when needed), become familiar with the major streets and narrow the address down by major intersections that given in the call, and learn the hundred-block system for your city

[sbrad]

^^
What he said. And if I can't find it in the map book I call the dispatcher and hassle them until they tell me where it is.

[michiganstud]

All the addresses here are pretty much standard systems.

Even are on one side, odd are on the other. They start at a point and go up from there. There are 100 blocks, 200 blocks and so on. Once you figure them out you know exactly where each block would be.

They are also the same for streets that are parallel with eachother. If one street is a 200 block then the street over will also be 200 block.

[slim202cop]

The test that I had to complete to become a Certified Officer was the test of finding places on my beat through familiarity and WITHOUT the aid of a map. Being that I grew up in the area where I patrol, I know the area like the back of my hand.

My own mind can guide me to an address quicker than ANY GPS or MAP ever could.

[SAPD]

If I become an officer her in my city would I be able to request to patrol the area I grew up in or do they put me where ever there is vacancy?

[wild800]

Just tell your sergeant your preferred beat on your first day, LOL...and then pray! Just kidding, most likely you will be assigned to whichever beat that your Field Training Officer is assigned.

[mcsap]

After time, you learn a LOT of the streets and areas. I cover an area of 80 square miles and when I don't recognize the name of a street, we have a map based program in our laptops in where I input the street name and number and the map zooms in and blinks on the actual plot of ground that bears that address.

I can also ask dispatch for a cross street which helps clarify. With the 5 small towns and 3 big townships we cover , we have a LOT of duplicate streets. Each of the small towns has a Main St, Maple St, Water St. etc. It can be confusing at first.

[SAPD]

thnx guys for your responses.

[Switchback]

Well, I started in NYC and it was a bear trying to get around there. It's not like we respond to calls, but when you go on a mobile surveillance, the map really didn't cut it. You were just forced to rely on your partner and pick it up really quickly!

Now days, I regularly cover the northern 1/4 of the state, predominantly focusing on a few metropolitan areas. I learned the major roads rather quickly. However, even after 6 years here, I still rely on the GPS pretty often for the more obscure addresses. It beats the crap out of a map!

Then, when doing sweeps, we can push-pin all the addreses and work in a much more organized fashion.

[Group9]

It's tough when you cover a large area. I always have a detailed map book for the area I am working. Sometimes, it's a lot quicker to pull over and look it up than to just keep driving in the direction you think (hope) it is. I also have a Garmin GPS I keep velcro-ed to my dash now. It is pretty cool once you learn to work it.

Rural areas are the worst. My whole group got lost in south Louisiana late one night after serving a search warrant. I would love to have had a recording of the radio conversations while we were trying to un-lost ourselves and trying to describe to each other where we were ('There's a swamp on my right and a marsh on my left'). :D