We Are the Cops, page 4
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This woman calls the station. I’m doing a report. It’s like two o’clock in the morning.
‘Police, can I help you?’
This woman’s screaming hysterically and I’m pulling the phone from my ear. This was right before we had Enhanced 911.
‘What’s the problem ma’am?’
‘My baby’s not breathing!’
‘Okay. Where are you calling from?’
‘I don’t know where I am. I know the town but I don’t know the name of the road.’
I’m then having to multi-task. I don’t have any dispatch training. I’m a cop – I’m not a dispatcher. I’m trying to explain how to do child CPR whilst trying to get little bits and pieces of information about where she’s calling from to the ambulance, to get them rolling in the right direction. I’m basically doing this for four to five minutes.
‘Do you remember what part of town you came into? Keep doing the compressions, keep doing the blows. Did you pass any businesses?’
‘We turned left onto a major road.’
‘Okay, the main town road, this is good. Do you remember getting to a blinking light?’
‘No, we turned off before we got to a blinking light. There was a big picture of a strawberry.’
So now I know roughly where they are. I get the ambulance going in that direction and at the same time she’s screaming hysterically doing CPR on an un-breathing infant.
Finally I figure out where she was and she says, ‘I can see the ambulance!’
I’m like, ‘Thank God! I’m going to let the line go now ma’am.’
I got into the cruiser and started to head up that way and as I’m close by, the ambulance got on the air and… and… and all I could hear was a screaming child. So they managed to get the kid back. So…
(At this point the officer broke down and began to cry)
It certainly makes up for long nights of bullshit and drunks. You don’t mind getting banged up physically every now and then; it’s just the emotional toll that this job can take on you if you are not careful. It’s awful.
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Anybody you put cuffs on instantly becomes the toughest guy in the world – ‘I’ll fuck you!’ or ‘I’ll beat your ass!’ – because they know you’re not going to touch them when they’re in handcuffs.
So we used to have this thing where I’d say to my partner, ‘Hey, he’s got my cuffs on and I need them back.’
Then we’d take the cuffs off and as soon as the cuffs were off we’d say, ‘Okay motherfucker, what are you going to do now motherfucker?’
They’d always back down.
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The department has changed its ways a little bit. It’s been up and down over the years but now they’re actually letting us defend ourselves and use some offence. If someone throws a freaking punch at your face, you don’t have to risk trying a twist lock or an evasive move or run back and pull you’re stick out. Now you can block the punch and pop them right in the freaking pie-hole. But not everyone has these skills; everyone wasn’t raised in a bar or everyone doesn’t go to the gym and do the ‘Billy Blanks’ or MMA practice or anything.
What this job all boils down to, to me – after twenty-two years – is if you’ve got to kick someone’s ass, you’ve got to kick someone’s ass and you can’t let your own ass get kicked because you’ve got too much shit on. If you get knocked out by someone, that person suddenly has a taser and a stick and a gun to fuck up all your friends with. So you can’t lose. We won’t lose and we will survive. I was always told, ‘If you get shot, fight through it.’
They show all those inspirational officer safety films now but our shit is mostly, simply dealing with staying on top of things. I always say to officers, ‘Kick ass! Kick ass!’
Being able to defend yourself, being able to protect yourself, that’s important but unfortunately there’re people on the department who couldn’t fight their way out of a wet paper sack.
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I carry a knife. In fact I carry a bunch of knives. I have one just for when I go to the bathroom, because we had an officer once, go to the bathroom and a guy came up behind him and he was on a head and this guy comes in and the next thing you know, BOOM! He jams him in and starts going for his gun. So the officer grabbed his knife, reached back and caught that artery in the guy’s thigh; he sliced it wide open.
So I carry one knife in my vest, two on my belt and another one on my hip. You’re not going to be good friends with a guy if you use a knife but it’s legal for us to carry them. I also carry two guns, one as a back-up weapon, here inside my shirt. So I carry two guns – and I’ve got another one in the car – four knives and pepper spray. I don’t carry a taser.
Most of the knives I use can be defensive but also used at scenes, you know? If I need to cut a branch out of the way, I’ve got a knife that saws. But some knives are for defence. This one in my vest is an attention getter. It’s a conversational piece. Some people carry a knife on the back of their neck too – on the back of their vest. You just reach up, grab it and come down. But most times, if you pull your knife out, that means you can’t get to your gun. But that’s why I also have a second, back-up gun. I used to keep it on my left side, under the shirt. Now I keep it on my right side. It’s a 40 calibre.
I’ve had one time where a guy tried to get my gun and I’m holding my gun in the holster to stop him from pulling it out whilst I’m fighting him. But I couldn’t get my second gun because if I went for my backup I’d have to release the other gun and leave it open. So now I keep it on this side where I can reach it and shoot through my shirt. Bang, bang, bang. I’ve done that before - I have shirts with holes in them – just to practice.
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We have moose accidents quite a bit. There’s certainly a lot of wildlife in Alaska and it seems that moose have a habit of going out on the roadway when you don’t want them to be on the roadway, especially if you’re in a little car.
One of the accidents I dealt with – where someone hit a moose – was a teacher on her way to the school. It was still wintertime and it was dark out and she was in a little four-door sedan car and ended up hitting this moose that had run out into the road in front of her. The moose just came up and hit the car, smashed in the hood and after it hit the hood it rolled up and smashed the window and started to cave in the roof a little bit, so it was certainly a scary moment for that driver. Kind of like, ‘Oh my God! Here’s a moose! And now it’s crushing my car!’ That driver escaped any injury but it sure did a number on her car.
A lot of time with the moose, we’ll have to shoot them and put them down. But we’ll call a charity to come salvage the moose meat and the moose meat will get dispersed to different people that the charity feels are in need of moose meat. It’s quite a thing up here – we have our dispatch centres that usually have a list of who the on-call charity is for the night, in case we end up dealing with a moose accident. So we’ll call them up and say, ‘Hey, we have a moose accident. We’ve got a moose here on Mile 90 of the Sterling Highway, come meet us and pick up the moose.’ And they’ll have a couple of people come out and do their thing, pick up the moose and take it back to where they have a place set up. Then they’ll butcher the moose and take care of it.
I’ve shot moose a couple of times. Sometimes the moose are pretty badly injured when they get hit by a vehicle - but they’re still alive. So we would dispatch the moose, call the charity and have them come pick it up. The troopers, they issue us a shotgun, so they give us a large enough weapon to dispatch a moose.
It’s interesting because I’m not really a big hunter; my idea of getting meat is going to the store. I get my meat there. So it was quite a different experience for me when I started dealing with these accidents involving moose and I had to shoot the moose. I’d look at that poor injured moose and I’d have to kill it so it’s not suffering. But it was a different experience for me not being a hunter or having killed an animal before.
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On one side of the street is the city and the other side of the street is the county. So a lot of the times we will donate our problems to the city. And it’s literally, ‘Get the fuck out of the county and go across the street if you want to be a dickhead.’
Or we’ll put them in our car and drive them ten or fifteen blocks up the road into the city and kick them out, or something like that.
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Prisons – a lot of them are not rehabilitating people. A lot are actually making them better criminals or harder criminals or smarter criminals, stronger criminals. And they do it with taxpayers’ money.
I believe people can turn around but for some people there’s no hope; they’re just hardened criminals – career criminals – they’re not going to change, they’re not going to come out and get a 9 to 5 job. They’re going to come out and if they want your iPod, they’re going to beat you or they’re going to shoot you and they’re going to take it. And that’s the way they are. So those people should be locked up, kept away.
It’s not about rehabilitating them, it’s just about keeping them away from innocent people.
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This woman took her dog into court. The magistrate shouts at her to take the dog out.
She said, ‘But your honour, this dog is my witness!’
The judge went crazy. There were four cops dragging her out, an arm and leg each, with her dog snarling and snapping at them.
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Our old booking facility had the old, electronic sliding doors that close real slow; big heavy doors, in the custody area. This one part of it was kind of a holding cell for all different kinds of people; you’d bring somebody in, you’d swipe your card, the door would open and you’d put your guy - your prisoner - in there and the door would close. Then another door would open to a room and your guy would go sit in there with multiple other people.
I was working on paperwork for one of my own prisoners. I went to get my guy out of the holding cell and the door opened real slow. Once I got my guy out, the door started to close again, real slow.
As it was closing there was somebody else’s prisoner inside and he wants to ask me a question and he goes, ‘O… o… off… officer. O… o… officer.’ And I could tell that he’s got a stutter when he’s talking. So the door is starting to close and he’s stuttering and he’s like, ‘O…o…o…officer, l…le…le…let me ask you a question officer.’
And the door’s closing and I go, ‘Dude, you’d better hurry up.’
And he’s like, ‘I… I… I just want to ask, I… I… d… d… do… do… do you know… do… do you k… k… know…’ And it’s just getting closer and closer - it’s just inches from being closed. And right before it closes he goes, ‘I… I… I… j… j… just… a… a… a… ah fuck it!’ And the door closes.
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I don’t know if it’s an average but I think most police officers do about twenty-five years service. Most of them figure, twenty-five is enough and then get out, although it depends on a person’s attitude and what they’re doing, I guess.
They did away with age limits in the States and we just had a guy – a colleague of mine – retire at fifty years. Fifty years service! He’s seventy-five years old. He came on in 1962. He was a patrol sergeant and he worked the streets right up to the end – up to the time he retired. It was incredible but he stayed in good health and good shape.
At fifty years he gets a hundred percent of his salary. The way it works is you get two percent for every year you work. So at fifty years, he retires at one hundred percent.
I don’t know how long he’ll live to enjoy it thought!
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One of our traffic cars hit a deer and it scurried off into the woods. Well, it damaged the vehicle and as Crime Scene Investigators, we had to go take pictures of it. In the process of going out there and doing all that, they had to shoot the deer and put it down and everything.
So we go out there and I pull out my knife and I field dressed the deer, got all the meat off of it. That meat is in my freezer. I did it the redneck way – no blood involved. The way I do it, there’s hardly any blood. I go in through the back. I do it inside out. I leave all the guts right inside. One side we didn’t get though. One side was pretty tore up from the accident.
My partner said, ‘That only took you ten minutes.’
I said, ‘It would only have taken five minutes if you’d keep your flashlight turned off.’ Because, you know, poaching in the backwoods, you do it in the dark.
Deer meat is really good meat. There’s no fat in it. It’s good-for-you meat.
But my partner had his flashlight on, so I was actually concentrating on what I was doin’. Normally I’d just do it in darkness and do it by feel.
But I’m no redneck. A hillbilly is a redneck that graduated high school. And I graduated high school.
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Midnights are always a good time to play jokes on each other, like putting pepper spray on the toilet seats, so when someone takes a dump they get their ass on fire.
People have also been known to take a little nap on the night shift. That’s usually when the jokes start. We had a guy that fell asleep on the midnight shift; he’s out, he’s drooling.
One of our local residents came to the station and rang the bell. I opened it up and said, ‘What’s up?
‘That cop is sleeping in front of the station again!’
Now, a friend of mine is a heavy equipment operator and he’s got a ten-wheel dump truck. So I called him and asked, ‘Are you up right now? I’ll buy you a cup of coffee, I need you for something.’
He got his truck and we inched it up as quietly as possible. He got within ten feet of this cop’s cruiser.
I said, ‘Okay, when I tell you to, I want you to turn the bright lights on and get on the air horn.’
So he puts the high beams on and pulls the air horn - UUURRGGGHHHHHHH!
All I see is this cop waking up, eyes the size of dinner plates and he’s going at the steering wheel trying to turn the car, thinking he fell asleep at the wheel and he’s about to die! Hahahahahahahaha!
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After twenty-two years on the force I can only think of about three guys – cops – that were beaters and bullies. But I’m sure there’re many, many more.
In my twenty-two years I’ve hit three people in handcuffs – in twenty-two years. The first one was as a rookie. I was working ‘graveyard’ on my own and everything’s a fight. You’re working graveyard, you’re in Vegas and just north of here was my neighbourhood – it was Paradise and Flamingo. There were titty bars and there were redneck bars and everything was a fight, which was fun; so I went through uniforms like mad because you’re always rolling around on the ground.
Well, back to my first guy, punching him in handcuffs: I’ve got a guy and I’m taking him to jail and this is before we had cages, so he’s sitting on the passenger side. I opened the back door – because when you get to the jail you have to take your gun, weapons and all your other crap off and drop them in the back of your car – I’d opened up the back door to put my gun and stuff in and as I leaned inside, this guy’s sitting in the front seat – on the passenger side – and he just leaned back from the front seat and spat right in my face. It was less than a second after that that I went BANG! – I just drove his head right straight back, down into the seat. Then I put my stuff back in my holsters, closed the car door, went back around, got into the car and drove him to the frigging hospital. That was the end of that. It was that simple. I didn’t sit there and hammer on him for ten minutes, I didn’t call him names, I didn’t kick him; it was just ‘spit’, ‘smack’ and off we go to stitch you up.
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Where else are they going to give you a gun, a badge, a fast car and tell you to go play with ten of your best friends every night?
3
K-9
Driving down the interstate, the cop sitting next to me was fairly quiet. He was expecting a ‘ride-along’ but he wasn’t expecting to tell his life story to the English guy holding the small, slightly sinister looking, digital recorder. In between dealing with a traffic accident, reporting a hit-and-run against a garden fence and looking for a missing ten-year-old child (whose mother suggested we locked him up when we found him, which we did), I did my best to assure the officer that everything was above board and that he could speak to me openly and in confidence. Even so, he remained quiet and seemed to have little to tell me. That happened sometimes.
I asked him about his career and in particular, the various roles he had taken on, in an attempt to find something we could discuss. He casually mentioned that he had been a K-9 handler and I was about to skip onto something else when suddenly he started talking. And he didn’t stop talking – or smiling. The officer’s face beamed as he talked about his dog and it was obvious just how much his dog had become a part of his career. For some other officers I spoke with, it was career defining.
Obviously many of these dogs are genuinely brave and smart but it was when one particular officer was telling me about just how incredibly stupid his dog was, that I became struck by what was a real sense of loyalty, not just dog to handler, but handler to dog. The crazier the dog behaved, it seemed, the bigger the grin that would develop across the officer’s face as he recounted past glorious – and not so glorious – incidents.
In many states across America, K-9’s – police dogs – carry the same status as police officers themselves. Many dogs will even have their own badge. Each year, many police officers are killed in the line of duty in the United States. Many K-9s are too and each year the duty deaths for police dogs, reaches double figures. To their handlers, to their departments and to their fellow officers, police dogs are one of the team.
