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FBI Experience / FBI Citizens Academy
By
Yung Chen, Asian Chamber intern |
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Does anyone know that Phoenix, Arizona has a FBI facility-training center? Well, I sure didn’t! On October 26th, I was assigned to cover the FBI Citizens Academy Alumni Range Day by Asian Chamber executive director and FBI Citizens Academy graduate, Madeline Ong-Sakata. Also attending were Tom Tam, FBI Citizens Academy board member and guests Rocky Tang and Lisa Sakata. This Academy was created for ways to strengthen the field office’s relationship with the community. The FBI Citizens’ Academy started at 0900 sharp. There were roughly fifty people in attendance.
The morning began with a short business meeting and FBI updates. The speaker for the day was Special Agent Bob Meshinsky, a forensic specialist who gave a presentation on technology crime and theft. Bob does forensic analysis of computers and hardware. He is an expert that goes into a case and downloads everything that seems to be important evidence to another hard drive called a “clone.” He carries a black box that has all his special equipment that would allow him to download from hard drive to hard drive without letting the suspect know that he has cloned their hard drive. Then Bob would take it back to the office and analyze every single part of the clusters of the hard drive. He would try to recover any part of the files that has been dumped into the trash and see what he can get out of them. This is a very time consuming process knowing that hard drive these days have gone up to Gigabytes. Most of his cases were kiddy porn or other technological crimes. He told us a lot about his experience and situations that he had encountered. There was once, Bob said, that his team had planned everything as carefully as they could when the homeowner returned home suddenly and Bob was still downloading inside his home. Just before the man walked in, Bob and his team were hiding under this man’s stairs while the man walked right up the stairs without noticing them and Bob’s team had to use the back door to get away! Luckily they were all ok and the man never knew that anyone was in the house. This was almost like the movies. I had never imagined anyone that had been through this situation—thinking it only happens in the movies!
The final session was Firearms Training Exercise. This was an exciting session that I couldn’t wait to participate in. I had never fired a weapon before and was thrilled when this session came up. We went out to the firing range and there were two breakouts that we could try. The first exercise was simulations, this was a mock trial situation that one team was the bad guys and the other was the good guys and they were armed with a real pistol that shot out soap bullets.
This simulation taught us what FBI agents have to go through when they are in a real life scene pursuit. The next simulation was to stand face to face with a partner pointing a pistol at each other and see who was going to shoot first, the bad guy or good guy. Now this was a test to see how fast your reaction was in a situation like this and if you are the one that is going to be shot or visa versa.
The second exercise was shooting four weapons that FBI agents use. There was a 12-gauge shotgun, Glock pistol, MP5 submachine gun, and Thompson sub-machine gun. I was so amazed that I was able to shoot all four weapons!
The FBI Citizens Academy was a fantastic learning experience.. I would love to attend again in the following years to come.
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