Some parts of police training just go in cycles.
The Emporia Police Department has been teaching its “bicycle cop” course again this week, training a handful of officers from Hays, Independence and the Emporia State University police department. For this sort of training, Emporia is the place to be — Kansas only has three instructors and two of them are here.
It can take a while to get used to bike patrol, said Lt. John Koelsch, one of the bike patrol instructors.
“Most officers are not avid cyclists,” he said. “The adage of ‘Once you get on a bicycle, you never forget how to ride’ is only true to a certain extent.”
“It definitely shows you the muscles you don’t use on a regular basis,” Joshua Burkholder of the Hays police department said ruefully.
Emporia has had a bicycle patrol since 1993.
Bicycle patrols have their limitations — you can’t carry a lot of equipment and there’s no back of the car to put an arrested person into. But that’s counterbalanced by a lot of advantages. Bikes can go places a car can’t. They attract less attention than a police car, making it possible to hide in the shadows and keep an eye on things. And most officers find that people come up to a bike more easily than to a cruiser.
“It’s more open to the public,” said Jason Bonczynski of the Hays police department, who has been on the bike patrol for seven years. “You have more contact with the public, you’re not isolated in a patrol car.”
Of course, it’s not as simple as mounting the bike and zooming off. At the week-long course, officers learn how to ride up stairs, how to use the bike for cover, even how to shoot with bicycle gloves on. And of course, there’s that incomparable experience of riding hard and then being asked to dismount and run 40 yards uphill.
“They have to change to a different muscle group when they’re off the bike and running,” Koelsch said.
But it’s a handy skill to have, especially in certain situations. Jeremy Rhodes of the ESU police noted that it’s a lot easier to get around a college campus by bike than by car.
Of course, there are always local conditions to get used to.
“In western Kansas, it’s a lot flatter,” Burkholder said. “These hills are killing us.”
The training concluded Friday.
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