Analogcabin: The Right

2007-09-03T02:22:00.000-05:00

Tonight I transported an arrest one of my buddies made. The charge was prostitution: he had been working an off-duty security job at a downtown apartment building and saw the car pull in by the back fence of the subsidized housing block next door. When the car blacked out and nobody got out of it, his curiosity was piqued. He walked up and shone his flashlight into the car just as the contracted blowjob was in full swing. The party of the second part was "Lindsay", a known local vagrant/crack whore. She has both syphilis and hepatitis C (but "just a little bit," she insists).

When we asked the guy how much his servicing had set him back, he told us ten dollars.

"You're lying!" Lindsay shouted accusingly. "It was five dollars!"

This was apparently quite the point of honor - she groused about it the whole time I drove her to County. "I don't know why he lied to you all," she grumbled. "He just offered me five dollars. And I wasn't too happy about it, either." She also complained about where he had parked. "That was so stupid," she said. I replied that he didn't seem like a very smart guy in the first place.

I guess the moral here is that when you compromise your professional standards, bad things happen.

2007-08-23T02:59:00.000-05:00

Conversation at street intersection, downtown Southern City, 22 August 2007, approx. 2200 hrs:

MOTORIST: I'm just gonna park on this street.
KRUPKE: OK, but you'll have to go around the block. This is a one-way street.
MOTORIST: Well, I have a commercial tag.
KRUPKE: That doesn't mean you can go the wrong way down a one-way street.
MOTORIST: Well, what if I back down the street?
KRUPKE: No.
MOTORIST: Sorry, I'm from Italy, I don't know any better.

END TRANSCRIPT

2007-08-16T03:53:00.000-05:00

Tonight, just before 2 am, I was tooling around Southern City's bar district on my bicycle. There wasn't much going on, many of the bar patrons were dispersed, and things were generally pacific. As I rolled past a BMW stopped along one of the side streets, I noticed it had a license plate expired the previous month.

What the hell, it's good for an activity stat, I thought, as I pulled over to the side of the road a little ahead of them. Once they passed me again, I double-checked to make sure I had read the tag correctly, popped into the roadway behind them, and switched on my strobing blue light. It was a pretty good place for a bike stop: they were a short distance from a stop sign, giving them less room and opportunity to speed up and away from me.

Stopping cars with a bike is a bit tricky, especially given that the SCPD bike rigs do not include a siren. The key is to stay close to them, to give them the opportunity to observe the light signal and figure out what it means. I give people a fair amount of slack on this - I know people aren't expecting to be pulled over by a bike, the strobe itself is pretty small, and I suspect it's easy to miss. I've lost more than one car because they accelerated along a straightaway faster than I could catch up to them, or caught a green light I needed them to miss in order to get closer. Not a big deal, and certainly not necessarily their fault. Generally, I don't even radio in that I'm stopping a car unless I'm fairly certain I've got them.

This particular guy stopped at the stop sign, and I got up right behind him. he flipped on his turn signal, which some people use as a signal that they're pulling over. I felt confident enough to announce it on the radio.

"Bike 13 to Control, traffic stop."

At that moment, he took a right turn onto the cross street and gave the car some gas. I cranked the pedals after him, shifted the gears up and followed. The dispatcher was prompting me to go ahead with the stop details, but I didn't answer, all my energy devoted to catching up. He hit another stop before Artery Street, a major thoroughfare that cuts through downtown. I got up behind him again, and firmly tapped the lid of his trunk with my hand, which is an improvised signal I use to get a distracted violator's attention. At that point, a woman in the back seat started opening the door, then shut it again. Did she see me? She must have. I panted the stop location into the radio, just before the guy made the right turn onto Artery, engine revving as he sped northward. The interior light, which had been on in the car up to that point, snapped out, plunging the inside of the car into darkness.

As I ferociously spun the pedals going after them, I said four words into the radio that I never had until that moment, the four words that cause every half-listening patrol officer to perk up his or her ears, slow their cars to the side of the road, and wait.

"Control, he's not stopping."

This is a phrase fraught with significance in police patrol. It's an early warning, a sign that things are not going as they should, the uneasy calm before the storm of a vehicle pursuit. You don't say it lightly. There comes a point in a stop, bike or cruiser, when you are certain you have done everything reasonable to signal them, and you're still getting no response. You know something's wrong, but you don't know what it is. It got everyone's attention. I heard units chiming in, checking themselves en route, asking clipped questions. "Make and model?" "Direction on Artery?" The dispatcher asked for a plate number, and as he was slowing to make a turn onto a tight one-way street, I caught up enough to yelp it into the mike.

I was on him then. The street he had turned on to is narrow, and choked with parallel parking. He had to slow down to pick his way through, and I took my chance to pull nearby. Control was asking for the plate number again (my transmission had cut out, apparently). I gave it to her, then maneuvered to a position alongside the driver's side, a little back. When all else fails in bike patrol, you knock on the window. I hate doing it, because it puts you in a lousy defensive position, but sometimes there's no other way to get your point across. The way he was driving made him seem not so much like a crazed desperado (or he never would have given me the chance to catch up), but I didn't know what his deal was. Drunk? Stupid? What?

As I came alongside, he pulled to a stop on the right. I braked next to him, put out the location while hopping off the bike, and rapped on the window. He was a 30ish heavyset white male, giving me a look of stupid wonderment. A young blonde woman was in the passenger seat, and another couple was in the back. Adrenalin, sweat, and irritation were coursing through me, and I was not in the best mood, I concede.

"I'm pulling you over!"
"I didn't know," he said shruggingly.
At this, I snatched the handlebar of the bike and lifted the front wheel off the ground, tilting it so the blinking blue light faced the window.
"You see this?" I demanded. "Flashing blue light! It means, 'Stop!'"
"I didn't see it," he replied. I dropped the bike, and mentally ratcheted my pique down a bit. I asked for his license and registration. He gave it to me, and asked what the stop was for.

"Your tag is expired."
"Are you sure?" he said, with an edge of condescending disbelief.
"Yes, I'm sure!"

My backup rolled in at this point (in cars), so I returned to my bike with his info and worked on the ticket. NCIC gave a possible hit on his name, so I had to stop and read the alert to see if it matched up. It didn't (it was for a Hispanic guy about a foot shorter than this guy), though it would have explained some things. Burke showed up, with Hughes, the field training rookie who is riding with him. He grinned that it was a good learning experience, saying that Hughes had asked him earlier if I actually pull people over. Indeed he does, he had told her. At one point, Hughes approached the car, and conversed briefly with one of the occupants.

"They're asking why it's taking so long," she reported. I replied that I was nearly finished, but observed that I was wondering why it had taken so long for them to stop. She did not relay this. Smart rookie, she'll do well in this profession, I think.

I wrote him for the tag and for no proof of insurance. He had an insurance card, but it was expired. He insisted that if I called the insurance company, they would verify him, but I've had mixed results with that sort of thing, especially after business hours. To be honest it's not a big deal - both of these charges are compliance tickets; if he comes to court with proof he's gotten the violations straightened out, the judges always drop the charges. He was already coming to court for the tag, why not make it a twofer? Besides, I was hardly in a mood to do the guy any favors. I gave him his tickets, explained the procedure for them, advised him to stop for flashing blue lights in the future, and sent him off.

I could, I suppose, have charged him with failing to stop (a police bike is an emergency vehicle under the law), but that's a heavy charge I didn't think appropriate to the situation. Even after I had calmed down, he still struck me as an arrogant jerk, and while it's certainly possible he figured he didn't have to stop because he could smoke the bike cop, it's more likely he was just inattentive.

Of course, as it happened he couldn't smoke the bike cop. This time, anyway.

Southern City Bike Patrol:
You Can Run, But You...Well, I Mean, You Have to Run Kinda Fast.

2007-08-09T02:27:00.002-05:00

Tonight I learned the most astonishing thing: apparently, an angry drunk lady in Southern City's bar district pays my salary.

Crazy. I was wondering who'd been doing that.

2007-08-08T02:17:00.000-05:00

My bike patrol partner and I were riding past a takeout place in Southern City's rough East Side, when a man in the shadows behind the building happened to flare up his crack pipe. We grabbed the guy and the guy standing next to him, brought them out to the sidewalk, and handcuffed them.

As we were doing this, a pair of young women walked past. "Wow," I head one of them say to the other. "I guess bike cops really do arrest people." She then added, "I thought they were just getting exercise."

I protested that that was merely a side effect, as I helped ease my cuffed suspect to a sitting position on the curb. They laughed, and continued on.

Ironic thing is, we didn't end up actually arresting the guys. They didn't have any rock on them aside from the chip smoldering in the stem. The guy I had admitted freely that he was a crack user, but didn't even have any paraphernalia on him. I got his information and let him go. As for the smoker, he was a guy we were well familiar with. Every time we ride past as he walks down the sidewalk, he loudly mock-admonishes us "No speeding!" We decided the best course of action was to make him crush the pipe on the ground, and let him go with a reminder that should he hear or know anything about B&Es or robberies in the area, he owes us.

So I guess those girls were right. It is good exercise, though.

2007-08-02T03:04:00.001-05:00

Boredom does strange things to a person. Being stationed in Devil's Island, you live with that every day. I think I saw it with the most clarity about a year or so ago when I found myself chasing deer in the Fortress Pines subdivision, a densely forested gated community within the Devil's Island patrol district.

There's not much going on in Fortress Pines, except construction. The property is a sprawling warren of private, grandiosely-named streets containing large houses hemmed in by tracts of thick, swampy woods. The streets were laid in long before anything was built, so for a long time the subdivision was nothing but wide, smooth asphalt roads winding aimlessly through the woods before circling back in upon themselves. There were landscaped circles around nothing, and cul-de-sacs that had no houses. When I was first transferred to the Island, there were few houses even starting to be built, and virtually none that were inhabited. Midnight shifts had a strange vibe to them.

The deer, however, were always there. They would gather in groups by the roadside treelines, usually at intersections for some reason. They seemed to have little or no fear of Man, or at least not Man in Crown Victoria. What registered on their faces when they snapped their necks up as I rolled past was more a startled expression. They would stare right at me as I passed, but they didn't move.

They reminded me a bit of some of the gaggles of sullen youths who congregated on the corners in the "challenged neighborhoods" back when I worked Downtown North. Their game was to give us hard looks as we passed, and ours was to give them back; I'm surprised more cops don't drive into parked cars while doing this sort of thing. The deer, of course, had a less overtly hostile tone, but the overall sentiment appeared to be the same: "This is OUR ground. What are YOU doing here?"

I began running them off. I would roll up, pull to a stop, then get out of my car and sprint like a madman after them as they spooked and scattered into the woods. I never caught any, which is fortunate. I have no idea what I would have put on the arrest report.

I did this a few times on night shifts, and finally stopped when the cheap clasp at the back of my badge came loose while I was running and my badge almost spun off into the brush. It occurred to me that there was NO way I would be able to explain that loss. It also occurred to me that I was insane.

Which is a long way of saying that I needed a change, so when a nearing-retirement colleague suggested that I should put in for the bike patrol, the idea struck a chord, along with vague memories of defunct television dramas. After a long period, which included three written requests and the sergeant from the bike unit calling me personally and giving what he called the "hard sell", in order to convince me to join a unit I had volunteered for over a month previously, I got it. Off I went to a mountain-bike policing certification course given by the SCU Campus Police. I finished the training successfully, but not before eliciting the following actual comments from the instructor:

"That sounded like a pretty hard hit. Are you sure you're okay?"
"Wow, I've never seen that happen before."

Certification in hand, I was finally transferred from my exile in Devil's Island, and sent to the bike unit attached to the Downtown South precinct. Many adventures await me on those busy streets, along with potholes, obnoxious drunks, and almost limitless potential for grevious personal injury.

Let's roll.

2007-04-30T19:18:00.000-05:00

This is how bad the Culture of Weenies has gotten in our society: It's starting to affect the United States Marines. As a former jarhead myself, I can't tell you how much it pains me.

Anyway, yes, the essay was stupid and juvenile (seriously, two P90s? Please.), but the nature of the assignment really invites stupidity. While reading through Lee's rambling, goofy prose, complete with adolescent shots at The Establishment, one can't help but think that had he just waited a couple of years, he might have gotten an NEA grant for it. The real scandal here is how bad this honor student's spelling is.

But the action of the Corps is excessive, in my view. He has no history of behavior or discipline problems, unlike Columbine shooter Eric Harris, who was rejected by the Marine Corps when he tried to join. Every kid who says something stupid isn't Eric fucking Harris. In my NCO days, I dealt with a few young guys in my squad who had real problems. Some of them turned out to be damn fine Marines. Maybe this guy can hack it in the FMF, maybe he can't. This scribbling doesn't tell us, either way.

The best part of the article, though, is this quote:

"You might want to talk to him, talk to his parents, but the criminal justice system seems to be the last thing you'd want.'

That is from the head of the Northwestern University Children and Family Justice Center, Ms. Bernardine Dohrn. Yes, that one.

In other words, we live in a society where a guy who writes one dumb free writing exercise finds himself disqualified from military service, but the former head of a terrorist group that detonated actual bombs in actual buildings gets a cushy academic job and fawning documentaries made about her.

As we used to say in the Marines, a real clusterfuck.

2007-04-09T21:16:00.000-05:00

Early on in the task force, we were puzzling out the best ways to bait the trap, as it were. One of the guys, a senior detective, suggested that we should get ahold of an old worn purse, which might make a tempting target for a thief.

I thought this sounded like a pretty solid idea, and asked an ex-girlfriend if she had one I could borrow for a month, on official police business. I received the following reply via text message:

"Krupke, I worry about you. Try the dollar store. I like all my purses. Sorry."

So I struck out (again). I felt a little better when the married guys on the task force failed in this task as well. A dauntless bunch we are, indeed. Maybe that should have been a sign.

Anyway, in the end it wouldn't have mattered. In the kind of irony you can't make up, one of the guys provided a stack of broken DVD players he had lying around the house. These ended up missing from one of the task force's unmarked fleet vehicles. While it was parked in the fenced lot behind police headquarters.

Again, one knows not whether to laugh or cry.

2007-03-28T13:59:00.000-05:00

Some things I learned during my time on the Task Force, culled from hours spent doing the public safety equivalent of a tree stand:

Location, location, location.
Concealing the gun isn't the hard part; concealing the radio is.
Undercover vehicles are the rental cars of the law enforcement world: no one is really responsible for them, so they tend to be seriously ragged out.
Our shifts in the surveillance position were 40% shorter than normal patrol shifts, but they only felt 20% longer.
This may be the balmy South, but sitting in a parked car overnight with the engine off gets mighty cold.
Retailers in the balmy South do not stock a lot of thermal underwear.
If a song gets stuck in your head for the hours you spend in silent observation, it will be one you really hate. If not, you'll hate it eventually.
People walk their dogs at really weird hours, if indeed that's all they are doing.
Ditto smoking.
Night vision goggles are awesome, but less so when you have to do suspect descriptions ("Green skinned male, about 5'10", wearing greenish-black clothing.")
If one guy has the keys to all the task force vehicles, he has just guaranteed his alarm clock will fail.
If you remain still, you aren't as visible as you think you are.
And that's when your nose will itch.
Those "Icy Burst" Starbursts are really, really awful.

2007-03-25T19:36:00.000-05:00

Over about the past month, I was pulled from my regular patrol duties and placed into a super-duper secret-squirrel plainclothes surveillance task force. I wasn't exactly dragooned, but it wasn't exactly voluntary either (much of police work is this way): one fine day in February, my unit sergeant called me at home.

"I've put your name in for this task force. Is that gonna cause incredible hardship for you?"
"Ehh, nah, I guess not."

So I sort of volunteered. I admit I was excited to go - it would at least be a change of pace from the dull day-to-day patrol on Devil's Island, a chance to work plainclothes, and a neat thing to put on my law enforcement resume. It was the first actual 9-5 job I have held in years. Granted, it was 9 pm to 5 am, but it's close enough.

For obvious op-sec reasons, I will not go into much detail about what we were doing or how we were doing it. The basic idea was to set up property crime opportunities in a specific patrol area, then lie in wait like crocodiles until someone took the bait, at which time we would jump out and grab them. This idea appealed greatly to me. It would be Catching Someone in the Act, which represents a kind of Holy Grail for the uniformed patrol officer. Cops on TV get to do this all the time, but in my experience it's pretty rare. By the time we get the call, get dispatched, get through traffic, and rush to the scene, the thief is gone, the damage is done, the robber or abusive stalker has vanished into the night, and we are left with nothing but scribbling notes, broadcasting descriptions, and avoiding the slightly accusing stare of the victim. He just left. You just missed him. It's like chasing Bigfoot.

Burke got a good one, back when we worked together. It was a domestic burglary in progress. The guy was battering down the back door of his ex-wife's apartment in the projects. We both raced up there, but Burke was closer. The door finally gave way, and the woman fled into the street, still clutching the cordless phone and screaming to the dispatcher over the open line. Burke rolled up in his car right as the husband laid a crushing closed-fist blow to her head, knocking her to the asphalt. He didn't get a second shot.

It's the kind of thing you want to do as a cop. It removes the penumbra of doubt that hangs over every crime report, the feeling you get that you're not getting the whole story. It's the flying tackle, the Bad Guys foiled, felonius interruptus.

Well, I'll spare you the suspense. We never got anyone to take the bait. We were careful, we changed up our routine, we monitored ourselves pretty carefully, I think. We just seemed to have the misfortune to try this during a sudden lull in the area's crime rate as inexplicable as the spike the previous month that had caused the detail in the first place. We did generate one arrest, indirectly, at least, but more on that story in a later installment.

It was kind of a grind, but I'm still glad I did it. It was indeed a change of pace, and I think I held up under the grind better than a lot of the other guys assigned with me. After all, my time on Devil's Island has left me very hardened to boredom.

2007-02-13T08:47:00.000-06:00

A few months back, Cpl. Chambers and I got called to the warehouse for a major retailer. The call was in reference to one of the security guards being threatened by her fiance. When we got there we were led to where she was hyperventilating with panicked sobs in the staffroom. They had had a nasty fight, she had broken up with him, and her mother (also his landlady) had informed him that he was no longer welcome under her roof. He, we were told, had called the complainant at work and stated that he was "coming down there" to "act on vaguely worded threats". As we were talking to her, he called her cell phone. Cpl. Chambers answered, identified himself, and attempted to dissuade the fiance from any rash actions. I, armed with a detailed description of his car, was dispatched to lurk in my blacked-out cruiser on the road leading to the warehouse, waiting for him to come by. From Hell's Parkway Median, I strike at thee. He didn't show.

A couple of nights ago, I got sent to the same warehouse on an alarm call. I went to the security shed to meet up with the guard, and this same woman was on duty there. She was reading this.

Now, I don't know for certain that it's the same guy. I didn't think it a good time to ask. But this job gives you nothing if not a keen and finely-honed cynicism. And if it is, the only good that book will do for her is if she throws it at him as a distraction while she flees the house.

Happy Valentine's Day!

2007-01-08T20:18:00.000-06:00

Working in Devil's Island and its environs, I have long since identified the two worst spots on Podunk Highway for traffic accidents. This is no brilliance on my part; any of the cops who work the area could tell you as much. The junction of Podunk and the interstate is one, and the intersection with T-Bone Drive is the other. The interstate wins on sheer numbers of wrecks, while the ones at T-Bone tend to be worse.

If I had the power to arbitrarily place traffic lights anywhere I liked, those places would top my list. Doing that would clear up most if not all of the wrecks those two spots generate, by clarifying just whose turn it is to cross oncoming traffic. I make this point to everyone, cop or civilian, with whom I discuss this. I've urged drivers and family members to contact their state legislators, the secretary of transportation, anyone. People driving past the accident scenes have rolled down their windows and told me, "Officer, there really should be a light here." And they're right.

Arguably, I do in fact have that power. Whenever I work a wreck, there is a tedious, arcane state form I fill out to diagram and explain the events of the accident. This form is sent off to the state highway department in order that its statistics and meaning may be discerned. Theoretically, after enough iterations of the same bang-up filter in, someone spots the pattern and takes steps to rectify it. Theoretically. An officer I work with who did a tour in Traffic Division tells me that they address these things only after they result in enough deaths.

Today, just a moment before it was time for my shift to go home, a woman in a mid-sized late-model SUV was making a left turn onto T-Bone Drive. In doing so, she apparently misjudged the amount of time she had to beat an eighteen-wheeler that was coming the opposite direction. The truck driver tried to avoid the collision, but there wasn't much to be done. The prow of the truck slammed square into the passenger's side of the SUV between the front and rear doors. It went spinning off the side of the road, destroying a telephone junction box and shearing a stop sign off like a blade of grass. The SUV came to rest on its right side.

The occupants were all properly belted in, and taken from the scene by the county EMS wagon. The driver was in stable condition. The four-year-old was in stable condition, possibly with a broken bone. The two-year-old in the back seat was listed critical. The special team that investiagtes traffic fatalities was called out, just in case. Despite his child seat and the side airbags, his head appeared to have rammed into the bar that runs through the window on the passenger side. The glass was all gone, and the bar was bent outward, and though I'm no trained expert, it looked to me to be the result of a round object striking it at high speed from the inside of the car. Blood was spattered on the door, the windowframe, and the air bag. A tangled clump of his hair was still stuck to the metal. When my relief arrived and I left the scene, there was still no word.

I wonder if they'll give us that fucking traffic light now.

UPDATE 01-09-07: I talked to one of the paramedics when I went into work today. The boy was rushed to the trauma ward. He lived for about two hours.

A lot of people did what they could. The car manufacturer that designed the air bags. His mother who strapped him in his car seat. The truck driver who tried to avoid the collision. The paramedics who drove fast. The cops who cleared traffic for the ambulance. The drivers who got out of the way. The doctors and nurses who fought to save him. We tried. And we lost.

Maybe we'll win the next one.

ANOTHER UPDATE: In one of those rare twists where things end up better, it turns out the information I got was wrong. Apparently, there were several accidents in the county that day, and the paramedic I spoke to wasn't talking about the right one. After getting a number of conflicting reports, I decided to cut through it and just call the hospital to ask. I got bounced from department to department, the journey of my phone call following the arc of the boy's treatment. Trauma to Pediatric Intensive Care to the hospital floor. He apparently didn't spend much time in the hospital, and his condition was upgraded fairly quickly. I think they thought I was insane:

"Hi, I'm calling to ask about [NAME]. What's his status?"
"Oh, he was released a couple of days ago."
"OK, we got some conflicting reports, saying he was dead. So he's okay?"
"Um...he was the last time I saw him."

Thing is, when I first heard he was dead, I told my supervisor. He had been on scene, and I thought he might want to know. He in turn told our lieutenant, who then made a statement to the press. So there was an article published, identifying this kid by name and saying he'd died. I hope someone keeps a copy of it for him. When he gets older he'll think it's hilarious. We look stupid, but better an embarrassed bureaucracy than a dead toddler.

Since the kid wasn't dead to begin with, I suppose this doesn't fit the strict criteria for a miracle. But I'll take what I can get.

2006-12-30T18:29:00.000-06:00

In an eye-rolling but entirely predictable development, Reuters has run this piece in response to the execution of Saddam Hussein.

Basically, this article typifies everything I despise about the establishment media. It's a jury-rigged opinion piece masquerading as a news item, with little in the way of newsworthy fact (Death-penalty opponents oppose an execution? Seriously?) and even less of honest argument - no contrary points of view are included or even hinted at. Why, exactly, is this news? Why is it one of the top headlines at Yahoo? When conservatives bitch about "selection bias" in the media, this is the kind of thing we are talking about.

Still, I did enjoy the following quote, since it unwittingly illustrates a transnationalist mindset that never fails to inspire gut-busting laughter:

Former Belgian foreign minister Louis Michel reacted to Saddam's execution by saying "you don't fight barbarism with acts that I deem barbaric."

Ooh, sorry about that.

2006-12-01T19:10:00.000-06:00

I hate traffic.

I had just come over the Milton Bridge on the interstate, en route to check an abandoned station wagon that the shift supervisor wanted me to tag for later towing, when a beige mid-model Toyota pulled in front of me. Using my finely-honed observational law enforcement skills, I noticed that it didn't have a rear license plate. I cruised behind it for a bit, waiting until we approached the exit ramp, which provided a safe spot to pull over, then popped the blue lights and gave a gentle tap of my siren for emphasis.

"This guy gets a ticket," I decided as I got out of the cruiser. It wasn't until I got up to the car that I realized "this guy" was a nervous 15-year-old girl in the uniform of St. Jude's, the tony Catholic school in Devil's Island. So much for "profiling".

I asked her for her license, registration, and proof of insurance. In the academy they taught us a standard, line-by-line verbal procedure for traffic stops. The great Marcus Laffey called this "Robocop Berlitz". You start by introducing yourself, to wit:

"Good [Time of Day], [Sir/Ma'am/Dirtbag], I am Officer Krupke of the Southern City Police Department."

I normally dispense with this, to be honest. It makes the whole thing sound too canned, which may signal to some that I'm short on experience or confidence, and can therefore be safely messed with. Plus, it seems pointless: they obviously know what I am, or they wouldn't have stopped. As for my name, it's written on my shirt for easy reference. Work with me here, people.

I don't start with the stereotypical "Do you know why I pulled you over?" bit either. I generally prefer to ask for the license and assorted goodies, and tell them afterwards what the stop was for. I find that this reduces the opportunity for people to argue over my probable cause as a way to delay or avoid showing their documents. However, if someone asks in a reasonable way, while digging for their license, I will typically tell them. Give a little, get a little.

In this case, however, I didn't have to say anything. The girl began stammering an explanation of her offense (Robocop Berlitz dictates that you ask the offending motorist if they had some special reason for whatever they did. I find that it's generally unnecessary.) Her parents had just bought the car and had the plates on order and had gotten plates earlier but they were the wrong plates and sent them back and were going to get them tomorrow and I'm just on my way to school and I live in Devil's Island and -

She handed over a recent bill of sale, with her father's name and address on it. But that was all she could furnish. She didn't have her driver's license with her, there was no registration, and she had no proof of insurance either. Her parents had gotten the insurance and there was a card and it wasn't in the car and she didn't know where it was and -

I asked her to produce a student ID and tell me her date of birth. I asked her if she had a driver's license in the state computer. Her expression and the pitch of her voice indicated that she realized this was not going well, but she complied. My hand-held computer two-way pager Cop-Berry thingy confirmed that she had a valid license issued to her, and the car was registered in DMV to her father in Devil's Island.

Back in the USS Krupke, I mulled my options. Her not having her license with her wasn't a big deal, because DMV had her on file. The lack of an insurance card was a bit more serious, but as recent as the car's registration file was, it seemed reasonable to assume it was insured, and besides, I blame the parents. But not having a license plate is not the sort of thing you can easily overlook. Anyway, knowing the Southern City Traffic Court system, if she shows up at her court date and the plates have been fixed, the ticket will be dropped. So I wrote her for that one.

I returned to the car, citation in hand, and was unsurprised to find big wet spaces under her eyes, her eye makeup flaking into them. I'm instinctively suspicious of the ones that start sobbing the minute you pull them over - someone's been practicing in the mirror. I'm more sympathetic to the ones who are able to keep it together while I'm conducting the initial investigation, but then as they sit in the car waiting for me to render my verdict, worry and doubt and stress until they finally lose it. They save their tears until it's really too late to do them any good. It is, after all, an upsetting experience - more so when you're a new driver. I handed her the ticket, explained the court procedures, and sent her on her way.

So, that was my big contribution to the public safety today: I made a little girl cry.

I fucking hate traffic.

2006-07-27T13:40:00.000-05:00

Conversation in SCPD booking area, July 2006.
Charge: Trespassing

KRUPKE: Have you been drinking today?
SUSPECT: Yeah, I had - you know those jugs of pre-mixed Malibu rum?
KRUPKE: How long ago was that?
SUSPECT: (thinks) I guess I started around ten...
KRUPKE: Ten a.m.?
SUSPECT: Yeah.
KRUPKE: When did you stop?
SUSPECT: I don't - next thing I remember, I was surrounded by cops...

2006-07-05T20:10:00.000-05:00

Working extended shifts this month, today I found myself running low on gas two hours into my tour. My supervisor gave his blessing for me to leave Devil's Island, strike out on the interstate, and go back to the SCPD's fuel pumps. As I was heading toward the Southern City interchange, I saw an Industrial City PD cruiser pulled over on the right shoulder with his blue lights flashing. As a small matter of professional courtesy, I steered my car behind his, activated my lights, preparing to get out and find out if he needed help with anything.

While putting the USS Krupke in Park, I noticed that the rear windshield of the ICPD car was shattered, with a large chunk of its glass gone. Through the unshattered part I could see the back of a head in the driver's seat. The person it belonged to appeared to be alive and speaking. Still, when I got out and approached, I moved in at a jog, and found that my hand went to the grip of my gun. As I passed between the ICPD car and the retaining wall of the interstate, I glimpsed an older female prisoner in the back of the car. The ICPD officer was in the front seat, talking on his radio handset. I felt a small bit of relief. Probably a piece of road debris, I reasoned, had been thrown up in traffic, damaging the car, and he was reporting it. Embarrassing, perhaps, but not that serious. I rapped on the window with my knuckle, and he rolled it down.

"Somebody just shot at me!" he said abruptly. His voice had tones both of adrenaline and annoyance.

"Are you OK?"

"Yeah. I mean, I guess so." He briefly looked down as if to examine himself for bullet holes or arterial spray on the steering wheel. He then indicated the woman in the cage behind him. "She says she's OK, too."

"When did this happen?"

"I don't know. It just happened. Like, thirty seconds ago."

I started looking around, going into a slight crouch in the narrow channel between concrete and door panel. I'm not sure why - the stretch of I-666 we were on was elevated, and I couldn't see any vantage point from which someone might have fired from, or be preparing to fire from again. I hadn't thought quite that urgently about lines of sight and fields of fire since I'd left the Marines. A siren behind us announced the arrival of the first ICPD backup. A worried-looking officer bailed out of the car and started running towards us. I gave him a thumbs-up, and he nodded in relief.

The shot-at officer, a stocky guy I'll call Mason, got out of the car as more and more cruisers pulled up. His buddy grabbed him and asked him the same dumb questions I had. Others positioned their cars to block the lane, while Mason started telling the story.

The woman in the back, it turned out, was not a prisoner at all. She was just some poor little old lady that Mason had agreed to transport to the hospital because she was worried she was having a nervous breakdown. One is fairly certain this whole little episode hadn't helped. Mason wasn't sure where the shot had come from, exactly, but the most likely explanation was that it had come from another car on the roadway. He remembered a truck passing him, and then hearing the shot and the smashing glass.

One of the other cops suggested that maybe it hadn't been a gunshot; apparently there had been reports of kids lurking by the interstate and throwing sundry projectiles at passing cars. Mason insisted, with no small irritation, that he had heard the shot. That ended the inquiry, and the ICPD guys set about dealing with the scene. Supervisors were called, more cruisers arrived, and I imagine various brass were leaping on the radio in order to make themselves heard. I told what little I knew. Mason lit a cigarette, placed both his hands on the concrete wall, and leaned forward, breathing deeply.

I explained how I had happened on all this, and as they didn't need anything more from me, I told Mason I was glad he was okay, and he thanked me for stopping. "I hope the rest of your day is better than this," I said lamely, and got back on the road.

You just never know. It doesn't matter where you are, or what you're doing, you never know.

I was pulling into SCPD HQ when an unsettling bit of math occurred to me. A half mile or so before seeing Mason's car, I had pulled off the road to check on a disabled car. It was a brief stop, just enough to verify that she was okay and getting ready to drive on. Mason had said the shot was fired thirty seconds before I got there. Had it not been for my brief delay, I would have been about another thirty seconds down the road, placing me square in the area where it had happened.

If this was some nut with a yen to shoot at a cop, any cop, well...

You just never know.

2006-06-23T20:53:00.000-05:00

Several of the officers in the Devil's Island contingent are off on vacation, the result being that I've been working 12-hour day shifts all this week to make up for the gaps. Today, eleven hours and seventeen minutes into one such, I was dispatched to the Nouveau Acres subdivision to take a report of stolen money.

I was, I admit, not in a terribly charitable mood at this news. It had been a long, hot day and about the last thing I wanted to do was deal with typical NA roommate drama; to take a report from some post-adolescent twit who would bristle at the slightest suggestion that their decision to allow their friend's cousin's ex-boyfriend to crash on their couch while he "worked some things out" was somehow less than stellar. A report that would surely earn me grief from the unit detective for handing him a penny-ante impossible crime.

The actual situation was somewhat different. Our complainant was a middle-aged woman with a mousy, nervous manner. The victim was her 16-year old daughter, who I'll call "Kylie". Kylie had been robbed; someone had rummaged under her bed, pulled out the paint can where she stashed her summer job's wages, and taken about $300. They didn't take it all - the envelope was lying in the middle of the floor, and I could see a twenty still in it. There had been no forced entry, and nothing else in the house had been taken.

Kylie and Mom's suspicion, with which I and the shift supervisor agreed, was that the culprit was probably Kylie's sister, 19 years old, three weeks out of rehab (coke), and staying temporarily with her mother and sister. Sis wasn't at home when we got there.

The complainant's ex-husband, a hotshot computer exec living on the other side of the country, had been furious and demanded that she call the police and have the scene fingerprinted. The problem there, as we explained to Mom, was that the Crime Scene team, by policy, wouldn't process the scene unless the theft were $1000 or more. Even if they had, the presence of Sis's fingerprints in the house where she is living is of pretty limited value. And Kylie couldn't be sure when exactly the theft had occurred, other than that it had been sometime in the previous week. The likelihood of a successful prosecution, if that was something Mom even wanted to pursue, was pretty low. We gave Mom what advice we could. Kylie mostly sat on her bed in dejected silence and sniffled, occasionally nodding sagely as we outlined the basic inability of the Machinery of the State to stop a 19-year-old junkie from stealing from her little sister.

It was then that it struck me: I had been in this house before.

Sgt. Rudy and I had responded there, shortly after I was transferred to Devil's Island. It was an EMS call. The mother had tried to kill herself by sitting in the garage and idling the car. She was unconscious but not quite dead when Kylie came home from cheerleading practice and found her. She opened the garage door and called 911, saving her mother's life.

Kylie is, by preponderance of the evidence, the most mature and sensible person in that particular household. It's doubly a shame her money was stolen; she'll need it to pay her therapy bills some day.

2006-04-16T13:14:00.000-05:00

On this Easter day, I'd like to share a story with you about harmony and tolerance in religious belief.

But I don't have one, so I'll share this one, which again suggests that while it is by no means required to be an arrogant, small-minded absolutist to be a tenured university professor, it also never seems to hurt.

2006-04-13T14:48:00.000-05:00

Things have come to a pretty pass in the Fascist States of America when a guy can't even leave an average everyday pirate vs. ninja event without getting hassled by The Man.

At least he didn't flip out. 'Cause that's what ninjas do.

2006-03-18T08:34:00.000-06:00

This is the great thing about the law enforcement business: it's not as glamorous as many people think, but there is still always the possibility that you'll come to work and star in your own real-life Dadaist masterpiece.

Then again, this might happen.

2006-03-16T03:37:00.000-06:00

Tonight, I was working an off-duty job, guarding a building full of antiques. The still of the night was broken by the police radio, which dispatched one of the downtown units to a call from the management of a parking facility of some sort, in reference to a couple having sex in a parked car.

That wasn't the way it was described, of course. Although the South is not nearly as straitlaced as both it and its detractors typically insist, every now and then the Bible Belt tendencies will surface. The dispatcher put it, "in reference to a couple in a vehicle, having relations."

Whether the responding officer legitimately missed it, or whether he was having a little fun on a slow night, I don't know, but he responded, "What were these parties doing in the car?" Following an uncomfortable silence, the dispatcher replied in a quiet but deliberate voice, "Having relations."

The dispatched officer rolled to the call, followed by his backup. She was the one who cleared the call: "Parties were advised to get a room. All units back in service."

Another ember of social disorder quenched.

2006-01-18T17:29:00.000-06:00

Today I took a report from a woman who was being harassed by her crazy ex-boyfriend. In the space of three hours she got over 200 text messages from him. The irony? She works for a cell phone company.

I won't disclose the content of the messages, but I can assure you that text messages lose none of their bizarre abbreviated cutesiness even when they're trying to be threatening.

2006-01-16T17:58:00.000-06:00

Here's a piece of Devil's Island logic: today I was working a series of break-ins to garages and parked cars that happened overnight in the upper-scale Noblesse Pointe subdivision. One of our complainants was a guy who carries a state concealed weapons permit, who in his garage and in and around his car has a .44 Magnum, a .40 automatic, and a .380 compact, for purposes of defense. Fortunately, none of the guns were taken when someone was able to rifle through his garage and car because he doesn't lock any of his doors.

We also got a report of child abuse called in by an out-of-state relative, which sounded pretty serious. The household in question had come to the attention of the SCPD a number of times in the past for domestic violence, so we weren't shocked. Upon investigation, however, it turned out to be a tussle between the semi-estranged idiot father and his young son, which did not quite exceed the parental authority to discipline children. Or, to put it more simply, even abusive shitsticks occasionally (and probably accidentally) act within their rights.

We spoke to the father by telephone. He refused to meet with us, and when Cpl. Chambers, my supervisor, talked to him on the phone, he had to weather a storm of loud lawyering-up just to tell the guy that we didn't find anything to base a charge on. As it says in Proverbs, the wicked flee when no man pursueth.

The mother wasn't there when we visited the house; immediately following the incident, she went off to her therapist to talk about what had happened. Priorities.

Also, in honor of Martin Luther King Day, I was dispatched to a report of a "suspicious vehicle" occupied by three black females on one of the main roads. I asked for further description. "It's silver," I was told. I located what I am reasonably sure was the car in question (it was silver). The passengers were three middle-aged black women and one white woman (this last was not considered suspicious, apparently). They looked about as threatening as the Sunday School Bake Sale Committee. They turned out to be from some do-gooder outreach organization offering assistance to the deaf. They asked me (I am not making this up) whether I knew of any deaf people in the area. I referred them to the Community Association.

I asked Dispatch, would the complainant like to be informed on the results of my investigation? No, they would not.

Lastly, while working one of the break-ins, I was confronted by a five-year-old girl who had never seen a police officer up close before. She fixed me with a grave, serious look, and asked with the utmost gravity, "Do policemen ever get presents from Santa?"

Only if we're good, kid. Only if we're good.

2005-12-28T00:36:00.000-06:00

I've been to some nasty boyfriend/girlfriend fights in the course of my Public Service, but this is a new one on me.

I was particularly struck by this passage:

Police initially issued a statement saying Abell, 24, had swallowed the phone. A spokesman explained that investigators weren't able to talk to her until after the surgery.

Do tell.

2005-12-24T23:29:00.000-06:00

I was going to post something poignant and heartfelt for the holiday, but I have to report to work Christmas morning, so screw it.

A very Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it. For those who don't: well, you have a nice day too. And sorry about everything being closed and stuff.