Brihard said:
Secondly, if someone wipes out on a motorcycle, you've probably got paramedics and police responding to that. If someone chooses not to wear their bucket, splits their head open and leaves chunks ont he roadway, that's trauma that first reponders may have trouble dealing with. They, and potentially society pay for the impact of that driver's poor decisions.
Our department took that into consideration before we left the academy. They subwayed our recruit class down the old morgue, when it was still on Lombard St., to watch autopsies. They also showed us some of the old favorites like "Mechanised Death", "Red Asphalt", "Highways of Agony" etc.
Waste basket in the aisle for those who needed it.
( When video-tape came along later, they actually archived quite a private collection of their own. )
They really wanted to be sure that we understood what we were getting ourselves into. If you showed signs of stress ( we had not heard of PTSD back then ) during probation, you were let go.
Regarding Sikhs and motorcycle helmets.
As far as I am concerned, it's a tempest in a teapot compared to how much road safety has improved since when I hired on back in 1972.
There were no helmet laws back then for
anyone, if I recall correctly. For sure there were no seat-belt laws until 1976.
No laminated and tempered glass windshields, airbags, crumple zones, side-impact beams, collapsible steering columns, padded dash and side boards, child car seats, improved fuel system integrity and fire retardant materials ( "the barbeque that seats four" is no longer on the road ), MADD and strict DUI enforcement, more convertibles ( before A/C in cars became common ), "suicide doors" and car doors with serious jamming problems on impact, etc...
You would almost think they are trying to put us out of business.
