2014 MPO SET TO BEGIN

A new teaching year is beginning for myself and my fellow members of the Philadelphia Police Department's Advanced Training Unit, with a handful of new courses to be presented and refreshers coming on a few more.

Each year, the Municipal Police Officer's Education & Training Commission (MPOETC) develops four courses as mandated classroom training for all of Pennsylvania's law enforcement officers.

In Philly, it is the ATU's job to present those courses to the vast majority of the city's 6,000+ officers, detectives and supervisors. The ATU also provides fee-based training to 'outside' jurisdictions such as the police from SEPTA, the university police at Temple and Penn, and a few other agencies and municipalities.

Each MPOETC course is presented as a half-day of training, making for two full state-mandated days in the classroom for each officer. Every single year, the 15 or so members of the ATU staff will provide instruction to roughly 25,000 attendees in a couple of thousand sessions.

However, for 2014, that number will expand, because every two years all officers are also required to receive recertification training in CPR and First Aid. The CPR training is a full day. The First Aid training is a half day, and the PPD always takes advantage of the other half day to present some type of additional training.

Snow All About Perspective

For some people here in the Philadelphia area and across the northeastern United States it's panic time for the third time this winter, the 2nd time in five days.

For others it's a time of excitement and anticipation. Fact is that snowfalls, even large ones, in these modern days are really all just about perspective.

Are you one of those people who reflexively have to run out to the grocery store when a large snowfall is predicted?

I stopped out at my local Acme supermarket last Friday evening just before the most recent two footer was supposed to hit. I just wanted to have a couple of 'comfort' treats in the house. By the look on the bread shelves you would have thought it was the end of the world.

The crowds bum-rushed the supermarkets and the neighborhood groceries, stripped the shelves bare of all milk, bread, eggs, and cigarettes, and then retreated to the comfort and safety of their homes where they battened down the hatches and prepared to ride out the inevitable burial inside their homes that was being forecast.

Overnight on Friday the snow began to fall, and then all through the morning and early afternoon on Saturday the storm intensified, just as predicted. The weathercasters got this one right on, and by the end we had received more than two feet for the 2nd time this winter.

But a funny thing happened by Sunday morning or afternoon at the latest.

None of Our Business

A leading business website, Inc.com, billed as 'The Daily Resource for Entrepreneurs', has released its annual list of 'The Best Cities for Doing Business'.

Where do you think that Philadelphia ranked on their list of 393 metropolitan areas?

A top-ten city by population, you would think that Philly would probably be there somewhere among the leaders, right? Well, before we get too excited, let's examine some of the criteria that the e-zine factors in order to formulate the rankings.

What 'Inc.com' does as an overall approach is that they analyze job-growth data as supplied by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the previous calendar year on 393 metropolitan statistical areas across the country.

The list just released was specifically derived from analysis of three-month rolling averages of the BLS state and area unadjusted employment data from January 1995 to September 2006. It uses four measures of growth to rank all areas for which data was available for the past ten years.

These four measures are: recent growth trend, analyzing this and last year; midterm growth, averaging 2001-06 rates; long-term trend, analyzing 1995-2006 data; and current year growth.