I am currently assigned to the Ventura Police Department Motors Unit working traffic. A typical day for me is we started 0730, pick up our necessary equipment being cameras and going out and conducting traffic enforcement, sometimes investigating traffic accidents. Motors Unit is very specific to traffic enforcement and investigation of traffic collisions, more specifically significant injury or fatal traffic collisions. The education that we go through is beyond the scope of a standard patrol officer. Some entry-level patrol officers will achieve a basic traffic accident investigation course. Myself and other officers in the motor unit go through an intermediate advanced and some of them a reconstruction traffic accident investigation class, which is just a greater knowledge of mathematical equations to determine speed of collisions. Some of those equations are relative to the crush factor of cars. First and foremost, you have to complete a police academy. We have one locally here through Ventura College and there are also other agencies outside of this county that provide other academy courses that you can self-enroll in. Once you've completed an academy, you can apply the city of Ventura through human resources and go through a background process once you're hired. Get some time on as a patrol officer, working traffic, staying in touch with the traffic unit and knowing what the issues are that hinder the city's collision rates and working on enforcing those problems so that we can kind of keep our collision rates at a lower occurrence. Once the position comes available for the motor's unit, it comes down to a application process which generally consists of an interview and in a roundtable discussion with the individuals in the unit currently and ultimately a decision from command staff. One of the greater issues across the nation is speed and people trying to maintain the speed relative to what the posted speed limit is for a given location. Other associated issues are always following distance. A safe following distance is a two second count of the vehicle in front of you passing a fixed object and then you catching up to or passing that same fixed object. You want to stay safe at distance from the vehicle in front of you. For pedestrian's, it's not abiding to crosswalk signals. IE, they're crossing without a walk sign, bicyclists riding in the inappropriate direction. As a bicyclist, you're supposed to move with the flow of traffic same as a car does. Those are probably the biggest issues that would help lower traffic accidents rates throughout the city. I kind of consider this area of Ventura County specifically and spending a lot of time in Ventura. It's got more of a natural field to the area in which I grew up in in Ohio and it just, I kind of consider it my west coast home if you would. It's a great place to grow up. It's got great community, great school systems and overall this department is great camaraderie. Real family oriented, very close knit group of people and it's a fun place to work.