Never Assume Anything!

I learned a valuable lesson the other night. Never assume anything with this job. That was the theme of my midnight shift.

The first call of the night came out as a domestic at the park. I arrived at the scene and another cop from another city was waiting to greet me with the victim. The incident happened just out of his jurisdiction and was now my responsiblity. He was trying to clue me in that the story was suspect, but being the rookie I am I did not quite catch on. I realized what he was trying to tell me later. I do not look like a rookie, since I am older, so sometimes officers assume I am the training officer and it is the other way around.

So I spoke to the victim and she told me that she was walking in the park when her ex-boyfriend, who she lived with for 6 months prior, attacked her in the park. I saw some bruises on her arms and I got excited. A righteous felony battery! I kind of honed in on this detail and did not think as much on the fact that she was obviously a meth head, probably a prostitute and her story had some holes. She said he was ranting about how he was "ex-military" and "killed people for a living" and then threw her on the grass. In retrospect, she was not wet and did not have any grass stains on her shirt.

I took down all her information, her story and anything else I could think of on my notepad and then went to contact the ex-boyfriend. I was ready to take him to jail as the night had been slow up to this point, so that made me happy.

As I walked up to the ex-boyfriends house I noticed that he was upstairs relaxing and watching porn with his current girlfriend. Not something I would expect someone who had just assaulted his ex-girlfriend in the park to be doing. Clue #1. I contacted him and he was very calm and genuinely suprised to see the police at his door. He was not sweaty and it was a hot night. Again, not something I would expect from someone who was ranting the way the victim said he was just 30 minutes prior. Clue #2. My partner spoke with his girlfriend and she said he had been with her the whole day and they had not even been at the park. My partner believed the girlfriend. Shit.

Now, I am not saying that there is no way that my victim was not assaulted, but I seriously doubt it. Not only did we not have a righteous felony, now we had to write a report about it.

The second call of the night came in hours later. At this point I had given up on the night as a whole and I was pretty sure nothing fun would happen all night. The city was dead. Dispatched informed me that county fire was responding to a 911 call and needed assistance with large Samoan males who were possibly resisting and had been a problem in the past. Sweet!

We arrive on scene with two other units. That is four officers in total. County fire is not even there. So I inform dispatch that county fire is not there with kind of a "what the hell is going on" tone. Dispatch informed me that County Fire was going to wait around the corner until we told them it was ok to come in.

As I am doing that, the door to the residence pops open and I pull my weapon out. The area I was working is not a good one. Out walks a small asian man who I am guessing is 100 pounds soaking wet and about 60 years old. So here I am expecting this big fight and it ends up being a medical aid with completely cooperative subjects. Haha...where are the huge Samoan males? Where the hell did that information come from?

I was already completely aware of the fact that calls come out that sound like nothing and turn out to be huge clusters, but this night was all about the opposite. It wasn't what I was hoping to happen, but it was educational. Never assume anything!

Bat-Belt

I have been working as an officer for about 4 months now and I think I may finally have my duty belt figured out. Why did it take so long?

In the academy, you do not have a choice how your duty belt is setup. You have your weapon, cuffs, silent key holder (with one handcuff key and whistle), baton/baton ring and your magazine pouch, in that order. You also have your pens in you pocket and a notepad in your back pocket. You have to have it exactly this way and you don't have all that much to worry about. Your weapon is not loaded and there are no rounds in your magazines. Nice.

Now that I am on the streets things change. I now have just on my belt silent key holder (with way more keys), weapon with weaponlight (16 rounds), pepper spray, two handcuff cases, full size flashlight ring, radio holster, collapsible baton holster, drop down taser holster (with small flashlight, two taser carts and latex gloves attached) and finally my magazine pouch (another 24 rounds). I also have on my person, my cell phone, field interview cards, pocket reference book, liquid paper tape (a must have!), two pens, a couple of pocket knives, black gloves, backup weapon (10 rounds) and my vest. I really need to weigh myself before and after sometime to see how much shit I am carrying around. Oh yah, and I usually jam my large notepad in the rear when I am on a call. That small notepad is next to useless. I only use it when I don't have the larger one.

That is a lot of stuff to put on your person!! So I have been tweaking the location of all of this crap since day one. At one point I had my collapsible baton closer to my mag pouch and I found out that certain times I would get in my car and the damn thing would jab into my gut. So now it is directly on my off weapon side. If it wasn't for the drop-down taser holster, I would still have some issues with space.
I also changed the orientation of my magazine pouch so that it is horizontal. After a 12 hour shift of that thing jamming into my bladder and I felt like I had to piss constantly. So now I have to re-train myself to pull out my mags horizontally...small price to pay, in my opinion.


Now I have seen officers who have room for all of this stuff and more, but they are overweight to say the least. I have no idea how those tiny female officers do it. I am going to have to take a closer look at their duty belts sometime. I am guessing they have to lose something or be even more creative than me.

It almost makes me miss the simple setup of the academy...but not enough to do that over again. =)

You can't give me a ticket on the freeway!

This is more of a rant than a post, but it is my blog dammit!

I was in the hospital and a lady walks up to me and says, "Excuse me, sir." I pull my best Officer Friendly voice out and say something like, "Yes, ma'am. How may I be of assistance?" Imagine Superman standing in the wind with his cape flapping behind him and his head held up high. I am sure it was something like that. So she asks, "Is it true that you cannot give me a ticket if I am on the freeway? Since you would be in the jurisdiction of the Highway Patrol."

So I say, "That is true! In fact, if you run from me and cross the border of my city, I have to slam on the brakes before I hit another cities jurisdiction and explode!" Ok, I did not say that, but wouldn't that be awesome?

Ok, so here is the skinny. California Highway Patrol, County Deputy Sheriffs, local city police, college police and some other coppers that I can't think of are all police officers in the state of California. That means they can pull you over anywhere in the state of California.

If you happen to blow by me on the freeway breaking the sound barrier, I may pull you over. Now, I don't like making stops on the freeway, so I will get on my nifty PA system and tell you to exit. You would need to be going pretty damned fast for me to light you up on the freeway or doing something monumentally stupid. I like to stay in my area when I do traffic stops, just in case I am needed by one of my area partners or vice versa and the freeway is freakin' dangerous.

Shotgun!

My partner and I were just leaving the scene of a welfare check and I hear this voice from inside the car go, "ALERT!" It startled me a bit as I had never heard the car talk to me before. So I asked, "What is it, car 2948?" It turns out the voice was coming from our little Lo-Jack box to my left. I knew that the box was there, I had just never heard it go off before.

So I call it in, "Flytrap, I'm at walk and don't walk and I am getting a Lo-Jack signal with 6 bars on ABC123." Dispatch responds and tells me that particular number is tied to a silver mercedes license plate number 1ABC234.

We and like 5 other units, spend the next 15-20 minutes driving very slowly around our area trying to find this damn car. We went from 4 bars to 20 bars. Now for those of you who don't know, and I did not know until this incident, that 20 bars means you are right on top of the stolen vehicle.

After about 20 minutes my partner notices his kids in the car next to ours. So we slow down and wave to them. At this point the whole Lo-Jack thing seems like a wild goose chase that is going to amount to nothing.

I hear over the radio, "Houston, confirm the plate is 1ABC234 on a silver Mercedes?" Dispatch comes back, "Houston, that is affirmative." Houston responds, "Houston, I have the vehicle at the freeway on ramp at walk and don't walk, felony stop." Oh shit!

I know that Houston is a one man unmarked car. So we flip on the lights and sirens and start booking hard to the felony stop. It was approximately 6pm, so traffic was moderate and people just will not get out of our way. I am picturing in my head Houston having this car full of felony dirtbags at gunpoint by himself, so we were going just slow enough not to break the sound barrier.

We are just about to round the corner to the felony stop and I call out, "Flytrap, on scene." I want Houston to know I am there and that I am going to be coming up along side him.

As we drive up, I realize that we are the first unit on scene, so I whip out the shotgun and point it at the driver's head, who is craning his neck around to get a good view of me racking the shotgun directly at his noggin'. Now this I will never forget, as I rack the shotgun, the driver's eyes just about pop out of his head. If he had any inclination of resisting, it was now gone.

After all the units arrive and we are ready to clear the car, we have the driver step back, search him quickly and plop him in the back of a unit. I still have the shotgun pointed at the vehicle. There is a K-9 at the scene, so after we announce that we are going to send the dog, the handler lets him loose and the dog leaps into the car. I almost laughed after I see this dog wagging it's tail leaping into this felony stop car.

We call out to dispatch, "No more units needed, Code 4." We ask the suspect some questions and to my suprise he lays it all out for us. "Yeah, so I was walking by this car and saw the keys on the dashboard...so I took it. Oh and I was going to use the screwdriver to take off the license plates later. I saw you guys driving around like twice, what took you so long to catch me?"

That was pretty much it. I was riding that high for the rest of the night. I still remember after I racked the shotgun, I couldn't feel the safety. So I looked down to make sure my finger was in the right place. It was. I will chock that up to weird things that happen to you on a quick shot of adrenaline. I was able to keep myself calm with some tactical breathing exercises. I still couldn't tell you which way we drove when we left the scene. I was in kind of a daze. They say the most dangerous time for an officer is right after something like that. Your body does weird things to recover from all that excitement.

I made it through my first major incident with no mistakes and no injuries. That is a success in my book.

DUI Patrol Shift

I had my first patrol shift the other night. It was an 8 hour shift and our mandate for the night was to arrest DUI drivers.

My partner asked me what I was comfortable with doing and I told her I wanted to do as much as she was comfortable with me doing. I really wanted to jump in and learn as much as possible. So I ended up running the radio and doing 90% of the paperwork.

I did not really have a problem with the radio and the area we were patrolling I grew up in, so I pretty much knew where I was the whole night. The paperwork was about what I expected, there was quite a bit to remember and there are so many unwritten rules that I am going to have to create cheat sheets to keep it all straight in the future.

So here is what I took from my experience the other night. I don't know shit. People have told me that your academy training is necessary, but your training does not really begin until you are out on the street. This became very clear to me as I was struggling to keep up with my partner during the night. She kept a fast and furious pace that kept my head spinning.

Now, I have been on many ride-a-longs as a civilian where some pretty crazy shit happened, but with the uniform on I have responsibilities and I was at high alert for over eight hours. To say that I was exhausted after eight hours of patrol would be an understatement.

In the academy they teach you how to properly exit a vehicle and do everything you need to do to keep you and your partner safe. It goes something like this for the passenger seat. Take off your seatbelt, turn on the spotlight and point it at one of the mirrors of the vehicle in front of you...etc. Now twice I went to get out of the vehicle and was jerked back because I still had my seatbelt on. I don't think my partner noticed, but I felt like a moron both times. I quickly realized that when you are sitting in a seat with a vest on you can't feel the seatbelt. So you don't realize you still have your seatbelt on. It is the little things.

We nabbed two drunk drivers, wrote 4 citations, did 6 traffic stops and one pedestrian stop. It was a full night when you consider that each DUI arrest lasted 3+ hours to write all the paper, tow the cars and conduct the investigation.

The good news is that I learned quite a bit and did not make any big mistakes. I pretty much just followed my partners lead and stayed hyper aware.

This weekend I have my first patrol shift where I will be working an area and responding to calls of service, domestic violence, loud music, fights...etc. So any comfort level I procured doing traffic stops will not apply. To say that I am looking forward to it would be the understatement of the year. It will be a long week.

Don't reach for an officer's weapon.

Ok, so I am at a concert last week and some drunken moron walks up to me and starts talking to me about how his cousin's brother's former roommate is a cop and at some point of the conversation he decides it is a good idea to touch my expandable baton. I am not sure why he did this, but let me enlighten you on my thought process and very discreet actions. He never noticed being alcohol soaked.

Step 1:
Man reaches forward towards my baton...my hand goes on my 40 caliber sidearm and I think, "Is he really reaching towards my baton?"

Step 2:
Man touches baton...my thumb on my weapon hand opens up my holster and unlatches it as my left hand holds on to my baton and I think, "Ok, don't panic, he is just drunk and a jackass."

At this point I am also thinking about step 3 where he closes his hand on my baton and starts to pull. My weapon would have come out of my holster and he would have been pistol pointed.

I don't know this guy from Adam. So I don't know what his intentions are and I still don't. I was too shocked that he even did that to ask him what the hell he was thinking. I am just telling you what was going on in my head when he did that.

What have we learned from this folks? Don't touch an officer's weapons...ever! I am not sure if it would be more or less dangerous if the officer in question wasn't a rookie and a bit jumpy from all the horror stories he had just heard in the academy. If you do, chances are I am thinking of ways I may have to kill you if you somehow are able to get out my baton and start swinging.

In general, while I am on duty and in uniform I do not like to be touched by people I don't know. If I am working and you walk up behind me and grab me by the shoulder to get my attention, don't be suprised if I do not look happy to see you. You probably just sent a little adrenalin shot through me and took a year off my life.

Rookies are jumpy. =)

Newbie

So I have been working now as a sworn peace officer for a few weeks now and I am just starting to feel like a police officer. The first couple of shifts I had I kind of felt like an imposter or just someone along for the ride. It has nothing to do with the people I work with or my training officer, it is just how I felt being in uniform.

Most of my shifts so far have been special events and airport duty with a patrol shift thrown in there. I think the airport has been my best learning experience so far as the training only lasted 2 days and then I was let loose to wreak havoc. There is really to that much to do at the airport and it is not very complicated.

So my first shift where I really dealt with the public was a concert. Myself and a more experienced officer walked around the concert for 8 hours responding to calls of service (if we could hear the radio) and monitored the alcoholics.

Being that this was my first experience walking around a public area with my uniform and bat belt, it turned out to be a very surreal day. I don't think my hands ever left the vicinity on my weapon for fear of some drunken a-hole grabbing my weapon. In the academy the TAC staff or drill instructors are constantly trying to take your weapons off of your duty belt and if they succeed you pay dearly. So the thought kept popping into my head all day even though logically I knew that it would not happen.

The other thing I am just getting used to is people coming up to me and asking me questions like I have all the answers. Now, at the airport after only working 3 shifts there I pretty much know where everything is, but at the concert I had no friggin' clue where anything was. The good news was that my partner had no more of a clue than I did.

I haven't really done anything super exciting yet, but that is probably a good thing while I am just getting used to being in uniform. I have yelled at a few people and threatened citations, which I cannot write until I get the training, but they don't know that.

I do have to say that everyone I have met at the department has been really cool and patient with my stupid questions. I learn quick, so I am sure that helps.

I will post more as more exciting things happen. I am sure it is just a matter of time as I have some patrol shifts coming up.