With cell phones you can bet that by the time you’re running the driver, he or she is texting friends announcing the stop. That means help may be on the way for your suspect, whether help is on the way for you or not. It might be time to re-evaluate the purpose of being the backup officer.
It’s natural, and expected, to focus on the primary officer and the occupants of the vehicle. I can’t argue that a cover officer should assist in watching the occupants and join in the fray if there is resistance. But we may be entering an age where the risk of distraction (or even ambush) is greater from sources other than our initial contact.
One strategy is to consider deploying farther back from a typical traffic stop back-up position to increase our field of attentive view.
At the very least, we need to be increasingly aware of our surroundings and watching for confederates of our contact subjects.
