Recently, I made a lengthy motoring journey to visit my elderly aunt for her 95th birthday anniversary. It encompassed about seven and a half hours on the road from St. Louis to Wichita. Now, long drives are second on my bucket list of all-time, most fun activities only to getting my teeth ground down. All by my lonesome, too, which made the trip even more fun-filled. To pass the time, I listened to old radio classics on my satellite radio, and, I kept an eye out for law enforcement. Not to avoid them, but rather to see what I could glean in the few seconds I could eyeball officers while barreling down the highway.

Other than a Missouri trooper directing traffic after a horrid accident on I-70, I didn’t see a single cop until I crossed the state line into Kansas. THAT was very much another story. In relatively quick succession. I encountered four officers, either state troopers or local deputies, who had stopped vehicles in the beautiful Flint Hills of Eastern Kansas for various infractions. It really gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling, too, to see that in every instance the officers had made a passenger side approach. In one case, a young officer almost ran from his cruiser to the passenger side while he also touched the driver’s trunk for identification purposes. I could only presume he was so speedy because he didn’t want the driver to notice he was making a passenger-side approach. Don’t know, for sure. In any case, it gratified me to see that every cop along the way had adopted an approach that I have long, long advocated for many reasons for officer’s safety. Continue reading Podcast: Thumbs Up To The Passenger-side Approach →