Cheating

So, I work hard to find crime.  I really do.  I stop cars, pedestrians, and bicyclists.  I drive around the shit areas looking for hidden nuggets of felony gold.  I like to stay busy.  I hate just sitting around.  Drives me insane.

I haven't really had yet what I would call a big bust.  In the city where I work, it is easy to find a little bit of tweak.  Drunk drivers are all over the place.  I can pretty much go to jail every night, assuming the call board is not overrun with BS calls.

I am noticing a trend lately, and I am wondering if anyone else has had the same experience.  The really good stops I have gotten lately, just fall into my lap, complete with bow and ribbon.

I am sitting at a red light the other night and this guy drives right by me and runs the red light.  It was bright red!  What the hell?  Didn't you see the cop car?  It ends up being a great car stop.

Car almost crashes in to me making this shitty u-turn.  Drunk driver that blows three times the legal limit.

I hear a crash on the side of the road, on a major street.  It ends up being two bangers stealing tons of crap from a huge illegal grow house.  There was literally a trail of soil from my location, to the grow house.  It was funny as shit.  Ridiculous!

I am not complaining, it just seems like cheating.  I seem to have all this stuff falling into my lap lately.  It almost doesn't count.

It makes me laugh.  Before I became a cop, I used to think street criminals were smart and devious and it would be difficult to outsmart them.  Now I have realized, if they were smart, they would work on Wall Street and be a legitimate criminal.

Rinse and repeat.

Last Friday night, I am driving in one of our gang/drug areas and this car cuts me off.  It was bad enough that I had to hit the brakes to avoid hitting him.  I light him up and he pulls over.

Me: Hmm...say, don't I know you from somewhere?  Oh yeah, I arrested you last month for possession of meth.  Wasn't that a Friday night?

Repeat Randy: Yeah.

Me: Weren't you in this same car with another fine upstanding gentleman about 20 feet from here?

Repeat Randy: Yes.

Me: Did you bail out or something?

Repeat Randy: Nah, the DA dropped the charges.

(What the fuck?!?  I did not even get a summons to court and neither did my partner!)

Me: Ok then.  Do you have anything illegal in your car today?

Repeat Randy: No.

Me:  Do you mind if I have a look?

Repeat Randy: Go ahead.

So, we do.  And what do we find?  A little dime bag of cocaine!

This time we tow his car, as he is parked in front of a driveway.  At the very least, he will have to pay to get his car out of jail.  I have no idea why the DA decided to boot his last case.  Lame sauce.

So let's recap.  Same guy, same location, same day of week and same time of day.  At least it was a different drug. 

See you next month, Randy!

Honesty is rare.

Honesty really does go a long way.  Case in point...

I am driving northbound on our main drag at about 1000 hours.  I am in the number two lane.  In my driver's side mirror, I see a vehicle with a burned out headlight in the number one lane, about 100 feet behind me.  I slow down to about 25 miles per hour.  The speed limit is 45.  I will do this from time to time to see what the person in the car looks like.  If they look like a gang banger or are from a drug area, I will pull them over.  They may have drugs/guns on them.

This person slows down to match my speed.  The car is still 100 feet behind me.  This goes on for about 20 seconds.  The vehicle then turns left in to a parking lot.  So, I pass a major intersection and make a u-turn.

I am now headed southbound.  I see the same car headed northbound again.  Shenanigans!  This person is trying very hard to lose me.  That ain't happening.  I know this city way to well.  So I make a quick left turn eastbound, turn an immediate right into an alley and another right back on to the main drag headed northbound.  I am now behind the one-eyed evader.

At this point, I am a little amped up.  Is this finally going to be my first pursuit?  Is this person smuggling anti-aircraft missles?  What the hell are they hiding?

So I light 'em up and they pull over to the right, almost immediately.  Game is up, I win.  I unholster my weapon and walk up to the car with my weapon behind my back.  I am ready for the worst.  As I clear the backseat occupants, I see a 1 year old baby girl and a teenage boy.  Hmmm.  In the front driver seat is a young mother and a teenage girl.  What the?  Not exactly the hardened criminals I was hoping to find.  I re-holstered my weapon.

I ask the driver, "Excuse me, ma'am.  Could you step out of your car and come talk to me?"  I really did not want to dress her down in front of her kids.  So I escort her to the front of my vehicle.  I hand my partner her identification and I say, "So, lets list this out.  You have expired registration, your headlight is out and your license is suspended.  Think carefully before you answer.  Now, why you think I pulled you over?"

"Because I was trying to ditch you.", she says.  I couldn't help but laugh, "Ma'am, that is absolutely correct.  Your complete honest, short, concise answer is the reason you will be leaving here tonight without a ticket."

I explained to her that if she had just drove past me, I would have seen her and her family in the car and that I would not have pulled her over.  But since she tried to ditch me, I assumed the worst.

I ended up giving her a notice of her license suspension and told her to call a licensed driver to come pick her and her kids up.  I told her not to drive again until she got her license renewed and her car problems fixed.


Yup...MIND=BLOWN.

Excuse me, but WTF are you doing?

So they have me training new officers right out of the academy now.  I don't feel like I am qualified, but there it is.  I never realized what a difficult thing this is to do.  When I was being trained, I promised myself, that when the time came, I would be patient with my trainee.  Lord knows I made my share of stupid mistakes.

At some point during the night I lost it and said, "Holy shit!  What the fuck are you doing?!?"  I am going to let him drive tomorrow, in the hopes that it will keep him pre-occupied and so that I can keep a close eye on him.  Wish me luck!

Trust your instincts

It was about 0300 hours and a call came out for a burglary just occurred near one of our crappy neighborhoods.  It is one hour from my off duty time, so I am sitting at the station typing up a report from earlier.  The station clears out as five cars race to the location.  We are there quick as there is very little traffic at that time of night.

As I am turning left in to the apartment complex where the burlgary took place, I see a bicyclist in dark clothing cross the street.  Now my first instinct is to stop that guy just in case he is the suspect.  I have no suspect description and very little information at this point.  Instead, I follow my area partner into the complex as I am trained to do.  I don't want him to go in there alone.  As I complete my left turn and drive into the complex, this goes over the radio, "Units responding to burglary, suspect described as male hispanic in black clothing riding a bike."  SHIT!  I hit the brakes and reverse like a bat out of hell.  My other partner sees me and follows me.  He has no idea what I am doing, but he trusts that I am not just testing the reverse gear.  I hear another unit over the radio say he just saw the suspect go southbound into a housing tract.  He saw the same thing I did, but he was blocked by a median.  Stupid medians, they should all be banned!

So I patrol check the area and come across the bicycle in a front yard.  The next door backyard gate is open.  Approximately 5 minutes have passed.  We set up a perimiter and call out the helicopter.  The helicopter finds nothing and after searching two backyards we give it up.

I am still stewing today.  SO CLOSE.  Now, would it have been a good thing to leave my partner to go in there alone?  I am pretty sure there were units coming in from the other side of the complex, so he probably would not have been alone, but ehhhhhh...maybe.  It is kind of a damned if you do, damned if you don't thing.  Do I wish I would have stopped or attemped to stop him when I had the chance?  HELL YES! 

I am still a new Officer.  I have been doing this for two years, but I am still new.  I had to make a split second decision and I went the safe route.  Not a bad choice, just an inexperienced one.  If I could have stopped time, to think it out, I would have realized...hey, it is 3 o'clock in the morning, he is cutting across the street dressed in all black clothing, and he is riding towards a shit neighborhood.  Hey dumbass, he is your guy!  I friggin' knew it too. It is not unheard of in my town for people to be riding bikes at that time of night, but there were red flags there.  It is time to start trusting my instincts.

The good news is, he will do something stupid and we will meet again.

Unchaosyness...I made up a word!

Lately, it has been slower than molasses in January. There has been fog at night and freezing cold weather...for California. It has been down to 40 degrees people! That is way too cold to stab your homies!
I am due to work tomorrow night and I am hoping for something, anything to happen. I see that it is supposed to rain again this weekend. Blech. Gangsters like the rain about as much as I do it seems.

That brings me to a thought. When people hear that I am going on patrol when I talk to them, they say something like, "I hope it is a slow night!" or "I hope the criminals stay indoors for you!" To which I usually reply, "I hope not!" At this point I get a strange, "What is wrong with you?" look.

Do I want people to get hurt? No. In fact part of the reason I do this job is to keep people from getting hurt. Do I want all hell to break loose in my city when I go to work? Oh yes. I think this is only something the patrol officer who really loves his/her job can understand. Is this mental? Probably. Do I care that I am possibly mental? Nope.

You are sitting in your black and white on a slow night. A call comes out of unknown trouble at a local night club. You get there and people are all over the place, some of them are bleeding and they are all looking to you to do something about it, they are all trying to talk to you at once and they are all drunk. Who is a victim and who is a suspect? What happened? When did this happen? Where did the actual crime occur, was it at the club or did it just end here? Why did the crime occur?
Ahhh...chaos. Love it. Making sense out of the nonsense.

OCD Pens!

You wouldn't think so much time and effort would go into choosing a writing implement.  I am here to tell you otherwise.  I have been through at least five different types of pens in an attempt to come up with the PENultimate patrol pen.  See what I did there?

My favorite so far is the Pilot G-2 Retractable Gel Ink Rollerball Pen, 0.7 mm, Fine Point, Clear Barrel, Black Ink.  BOOM!

http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/794047/Pilot-G-2-Retractable-Gel-Ink/?cm_mmc=Mercent-_-Google-_-Pens_Pencils_and_Markers-_-794047-%7Bcopy:IQ_PE%7D&mr:trackingCode=48066F1B-EC81-DE11-B7F3-0019B9C043EB&mr:referralID=NA

You need a pen that is sturdy enough so you can "press hard, three copies", cheap enough that you do not mind losing it or voluntarily giving it up after someone soils it, and writes pretty consistently.

Now, when you get out of the academy, you wear your shiny expensive pens in your shirt pocket.  You want to look BAD-ASS and dialed in.  That will last about as long as you polishing your boots every day. 

I have one pen in my shirt pocket and one of those pen shaped handcuff keys.  I keep an extra pen stuffed by my taser in case the other one goes out.  Your pen is one of the most important things you can have.  If you don't have a working pen and a notepad, you are pretty much useless.

Quick little academy/real life tidbit.  During training in the academy, they told me I could use my pen to double lock handcuffs.  How convenient!  Yeah, you do that a few times and your pen will start leaking ink.  Pen ruined.  Don't do that.  I don't remember who told me that, but I question their expertise.  I figured out that was a bad idea after I went through about 3 pens in one week.

I think I started obsessing about pens during training.  I had to write EVERYTHING down at an extremely fast pace.  If I had to stop to shake the ink in the pen, I missed something.  What did the dispatcher say about the guy with the gun?  Oh never mind, I am sure it was not important.

Am I a weirdo obsessing about pens? For those patrol folks out there, do you have a favorite pen?