"ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS FLORIDA COPS HAVE ABOUT THE LAW, 2008"

$30.00 per student Begin the course at anytime

Each week you will be exposed to a new legal topic that will enable you to be a more effective law enforcement officer while simultaneously limiting your exposure to costly law suits. You can review the material at your own pace.

This course was created for and is utilized by members of the Polk County Sheriff's Office.

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NEW FEATURE- Police administrators can now sign up all of their officers and receive a training log for their files. This will help to defend against federal Section 1983 "failure to train" lawsuits (there is an additional fee for this service).

If you are a law enforcement officer in Florida, then this is a “must have”. This course provides answers to the most common questions that Florida officers have about the law. This course will answer questions that you have had about the law and dispel some myths that you may have been erroneously clinging to. We priced this course so that every officer could afford to attend.

This course was created by Paul Kurtzweil, a lieutenant with the Polk County Sheriff's Office. He has 17 years of experience and is well known for his knowledge of criminal procedure and Section 1983 law. He has created legal trainings for his agency for many years, has taught criminal procedure at the Florida Gang Investigators Annual Conference, and has even been consulted by officers from other agencies. Paul has a tremendous amount of field experience and has supervised a variety of different units from patrol to investigations.

Paul has created a course that provides simple, and straight-forward answers to common questions that Florida cops have about the law. He originally created this course on his own in order to better prepare his own deputies and detectives; however, he decided to make it available to other agencies as well.     

The following are a few questions that are answered in the program:

Arrests, Warrants and Entries

Can I enter the home of a third party to make a warrant arrest if I reasonably believe that that the person named in the warrant is inside?

If the person named in the warrant has a new address that is different from the one that appears on the warrant, can I still make an entry into his home?

For the purposes of making an entry, is there a difference between a felony and a misdemeanor arrest warrant?

Do I have to “knock and announce” before entering the home to make an arrest pursuant to a valid arrest warrant?

Can I search the other people in the car (their actual person) if I arrest another occupant?

If I make contact with a subject immediately after he has exited his vehicle and then subsequently arrest him, can I still conduct a “search incident to arrest” of the passenger compartment of the vehicle?

If I walk up to the front door of a house and can see Cocaine on the table through the front window, can I make an entry to retrieve it?

Filling in the gaps in state statutes

How do I determine what was in the “curtilage” for the purposes of the burglary? 

Can a person be convicted of Driving While License Suspended or Revoked for sitting in the driver’s seat of a parked car in a store parking lot?

Can a person lawfully operate a motor vehicle in any state in the United States with a valid driver’s license issued by another country?

If a person signs another person’s name to the citations does it constitute a forgery? And, can the citations be admitted into evidence in spite of the fact that F.S. 316.650(9) says that a citation cannot be admitted into evidence?

Interviews and Interrogations

If the suspect has already been arraigned on the charges that he or she was arrested for, am I permitted to question the suspect about unrelated crimes?

On a standard traffic stop, am I required to read a subject Miranda before questioning him about a criminal traffic matter (DUI, DWLSR, Attaching Tag not Assigned)?

If I conduct a non-custodial interview with a suspect, but had already decided prior to the interview that probable cause existed for the arrest, is Miranda required?

If the suspect has already been arraigned on the charges that he or she was arrested for, am I permitted to use another inmate to try and elicit a confession or admission from the defendant?

Detentions and Searches

Can I order the driver out of the car on a traffic stop if all I have is a traffic violation?

Can I order the passengers out of the car on a standard traffic stop?

I think you may be surprised by some of the answers to the questions above. These are just a few of the questions and topics addressed during the course.

“Why do I even need this course? I can just plead “good faith” if I do something wrong.”

You may be wondering why you need this course anyway. After all, you can just keep filling in the gaps in your knowledge of Florida law with a combination of common sense and myth. In the event that your actions are challenged, either by a supervisor or as the defendant in federal court, you can throw out the patented defense used by ignorant cops everywhere: “I was acting in good faith.”

I will quickly list the reasons why you should take this course:

1)   You want to be able to put more people in jail. 

2)   You want the State Attorney’s Office to stop “no billing” your cases for poor police work. 

3)   You do not want to be named as a defendant in a 1983 civil rights suit. This option can result in you being held personally liable. That’s right, you are risking your personnel finances if you make a mistake.  

4)   You are tired of your supervisor giving you bad advice and you want the information to prove him or her wrong. 

5)   You are a police administrator and you do not want your agency to suffer a multi-million dollar judgment against it for failure to train. 

Let’s talk about the defense that you planned to use: “I was acting in good faith.”

When you find yourself named as the defendant in a Section 1983 federal suit, your only defense is qualified immunity. The layman’s terms, this means that you would not be held personally liable for the actions that you took during the course of your duties. This includes the mistakes that you make. 

Sounds great, right? Here is the catch. If the court determines that the mistake that you made involved a statute or constitutional right that is “clearly established”, then you CAN be held personally liable. You may be interested to know that the majority of the material in this course has been ruled to involve “clearly established” constitutional rights.  Yes, that means you better know this stuff!