We Are the Cops (25 page)

So I’m the old guy at that point – been on fourteen, fifteen years – and these other kids that have been on a year-and-a-half, they don’t what to go and ask their sergeant anything, so now I’m the fricking guy they all come to.

So I’m making a car stop and I pull this guy over – a meth cook. His girlfriend’s a prostitute – a documented prostitute – who’s got a small warrant. So I’m standing there by the window getting ready to do my business with this guy and this kid comes up and he’s doing the cop cover thing. I talked to this guy a little bit and he had a shitty attitude – he was being a little prick – this customer we had.

And I said, ‘Look, asshole, if you tell me where the dope is, I won’t take your whore girlfriend to jail.’ I think I called him a piece of shit and her a whore, which were both accurate.

But this kid is standing over there and he’s like, ‘Sir!’

Great, so now the kid’s calling me ‘Sir!’ So I go, ‘What?’

He goes, ‘You can’t say that.’

‘Like, what are you talking about?’

He goes, ‘You can’t say that.’

I’m like, ‘What the fuck? Are you kidding me?’ Yeah, like I don’t want to offend anyone by calling them ‘whores’ or ‘pieces of shit’! The guy’s a fricking meth cook – he’s got dope, he knows I know he’s got dope. His girlfriend is a whore and she
has a warrant. So it is what it is!

Within two weeks of this incident, a different kid – although it may as well have been a carbon copy because, you know, they’re pumping them out like Willy Wonka chocolates; he’s a clone of this other kid – and I’m on a car stop. Well, this guy fricking hit me. So I grabbed him and bounced him off the hood and threw him up over the windshield and I’m putting the cuffs on him.

This kid’s like, ‘Sir! Sir!’

‘What?’

‘You can’t do that.’

I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’

‘You can’t do that.’

‘The guy fucking hit me! Absolutely I can do that!’

Apparently they’re not teaching that. It’s not allowed any more. Now it’s, ‘sir, what can I do to make you stop hitting me today?’

The difference between the old days and the new days! And all the guys who are enforcing these policies now – all our administrators – are the guys who used to, you know, sprinkle a little whiskey on themselves, take a few shots and then sit in the alley with the ten-dollar bill hanging out of their pocket, making like they’re a bum so that people would come up and try and steal their money. And then they’d beat the shit out of them. These guys’ careers were built around that; half of your assistant sheriffs and deputy chiefs now, that was what they did for amusement and law enforcement.

So that’s probably a hack on a lot of people’s asses – that ‘do as I say, not as I used to do’ programme.

The difference from when I joined eighteen years ago is that when you were put on the street, you were put on the street with a seasoned veteran. That was how you learnt and many times you would be in these situations where the seasoned veteran was, let’s say, ‘heavy handed’, because he had already been on the job for twenty years.

I’ve seen guys get kicked in the ass just for drinking a beer in the street whereas nowadays you would just take his identification and write him a ticket. So things have definitely changed.

Policing has changed to a point where you use your mouth more as a weapon then you do your hands or your stick. You try to talk your way out of a situation or talk someone down from a situation more than you did years ago. That’s the good side of it. The bad side of it is that people are not afraid of the police anymore. There is no retribution anymore because the courts have a revolving door system – you arrest somebody and they’re in and out in a day.

Another problem is that police officers – who were once viewed in court as someone who would get on the stand and be truthful – are now looked at as liars and a lot of this comes from these past cases and the heavy handedness of police officers, especially with everything that was brought out with Rodney King and OJ Simpson.

You have to remember that the new officers who are joining
the job now, they were the youth back then. They saw what was happening back then and they didn’t agree with it – they were the rioters, the protestors and the college students. But now they’re police officers and they look at us old timers and believe we were wrong in the way we were policing back then. Because of this, there is no camaraderie amongst us anymore. That so-called ‘blue wall of silence’ has broken down.

Camaraderie amongst officers is there but I don’t think it’s as strong as it used to be. When I came on the job we were all twenty-one, twenty-two years old and everyone drank together, everyone partied together, everyone worked together. It was fun and we were busy. We had bar fights every night. We had some tense summers and some tense moments. I equate it as being similar to somebody going off to war with a group of guys. You learn very quickly that you have to trust and like one another in order to work with one another.

We’re still busy but it’s not like is used to be. In the 90’s there would be 10,000 people out on the street having a block party and you were vastly outnumbered. You don’t get that now. It’s not like that anymore.

Take away the volume of high-risk calls and you don’t get the solidarity.

Prior to 9/11 I was doing high-end criminal intelligence. After 9/11, I somehow automatically became a terrorism expert. We were all suddenly doing counter-terrorism investigations. There
was no training – it was just go out and do it. ‘You’re a detective, you know how. Just get it done.’

I think we are a little bit more refined now but still, there are lots of people who have no clue what they are doing. None whatsoever.

With West Coast policing, the culture is very, very different than East Coast policing. You don’t have multiple generations of cops. Our police department, in its current form, started in 1973. Prior to that, there was a PD and a County Sheriff’s that go back into the fifties. But our ‘town’ – for lack of a better term – really became a city of any consequence after the fifties, so we’ve only been working it sixty years.

You know, you’ve got New York and Chicago and Philadelphia, and some of these places where you’ve got generation upon generation of cops and a culture that is very, very different. Like New York, for instance – the NYPD has a very different culture in how they view policing and doing a favour for a fellow officer, or things that they would say. Like, back there it’s nothing, you know, if you pull over another officer for a moving traffic violation, ‘Oh yeah! Take it easy, see you later.’

I mean we’ve got people here on my own police department that’ll issue you a citation in two seconds, knowing that you’re a cop! Knowing that you’re a cop on
their
department! Staggering. It’s mind blowing to me but it happens.

That stuff doesn’t happen with any regularity in New York or Chicago. But those cities have had major corruption investigations
and major corruption identified and we as a young police department haven’t gone through those same growing pains – and we’re talking about sheer size as well. I mean, New York’s got what? Fifty thousand officers? We’ve just peaked at 23 or 24 hundred. So the culture hasn’t gotten around to the same ‘taking care of each other’ mentality, which is very common in New York and which is why for so long they’ve skirted the police and mobster association; because guys who are working foot beat in Manhattan, they’re going to know every restaurant in their area. And the wise guy may say to a cop, ‘Hey, come on in and eat at our restaurant – no problem.’ And then that association builds over years and years and years and years.

I can’t attribute that to corruption but I can attribute it to knowing your area and knowing the people in your area. And that leads to a kind of odd mutual respect for the other’s arena, so to speak.

Are there policemen here that are taking bribes to protect drug dealers or major criminals? No. Are there people that are doing things that are a violation of our state ethic laws or taking gratuities that are questionable? Yes, there are. And it drives me nuts.

Someone in a mid-level position taking or aggressively soliciting tickets to a professional sports event or a free meal in a restaurant, for example. It’s beyond perks of the job. Perks of the job are maybe parking illegally for five or ten minutes or some local person giving you a free cup of coffee – a de minimis perk. But when you start to get into things of value, of a couple of hundred
dollars, and you’re doing it frequently? Yeah, that’s a little questionable.

People will give away things for free to curry favour with someone of high rank in the police department, maybe help them with a favour or get them out of trouble later on. Keep them off the radar if they are a particular establishment – a bar maybe – with some problems. There are a variety of reasons why somebody may do that.

When you have any organisation of 40,000 people, some are going to be corrupt. There’s nothing you can do about it.

I don’t like cops. When I was at the police academy they brought in this guy, he was a sergeant in the detective bureau and he was training us in ‘police life’, the police lifestyle, the police culture.

He actually said this, these words were his instruction to us at the police academy: ‘Now, you need to understand that once you become a police officer, the only people who are going to understand you are other cops, so you need to make sure that all your other friends are cops. You only hang out with cops, because they are the only people who will really understand you.’

And all this ‘be a wolf, don’t be a sheep’ bullshit and all this macho, testosterone-laced, ‘we’re the only people that can count on each other and you can’t trust anybody or count on anybody else’.

I fucking work with people who believe that. I work with people whose only friends are cops. And they watch cop shows on
TV all the time. When they’re together all they do is talk about cop shit. They carry their guns with them to the bathroom. They carry their guns with them when they’re mowing the lawn!

They make fun of me because I sometimes forget to carry my gun at work. Like, when I’m in plain clothes, I’ll leave to go out and when I return five minutes later I think, ‘Oh shit, I left my gun in my drawer.’ You know? I’m more devastated if I forget my pen than my gun because I use my pen everyday; I haven’t used my gun once. I’ve never fired a round.

They think I’m the freak because I don’t have any cop friends, I don’t watch cop shows, I don’t talk about cop shit, I don’t carry my gun with me everywhere I go, I don’t wear my outer bullet proof vest when I’m leaving the station to go to Seven Eleven to get a Slurpee and come back; I’m not worried that I’m going to be shot all the time.

And another thing too, I’m a detective and I wear a suit either with or without a tie everyday – it’s a different type of uniform. But most of the guys I work with wear khaki pants and polo shirts. I can tell that when they’re speaking to people, these people that they’re talking to are looking at them and thinking, ‘Who are you, clown?’ They look at me and there’s a sense of authority and I get a little bit more respect because of the way I’m dressed. But of course my co-workers all make fun of me because I wear a suit every day. It’s the opposite of normal thinking.

And here’s another issue: most cops have never worked in the private sector. All the ones that I work with have never worked in the private sector. I worked in the private sector for fifteen years
before I was a police officer, so I understand about dressing for success, dressing for the job you want, not for the one you have and all of the other subtleties that go into dealing with people and working for a business. A police department is a business in many ways, but they just don’t get it.

When I go to somebody’s house to interview them or I’m out talking to people about a case, I don’t have my tactical vest that says ‘POLICE’, with my radio and my cuffs and all my stuff and my gun sticking out when I talk to ‘em; I’m in a pair of slacks and a jacket. I’ve got a pen. I put them at ease. When I knock on the door, people answer because they don’t see all that. But all my partners – all my partners in the detective bureau – they go out like they’re on a SWAT raid. Just to talk to people!

They say, ‘But it’s for my protection.’

And I’ll say, ‘But aren’t you worried that you’re drawing more attention to yourself and if someone did want to target the police, you’re identifying that you are police?’

When I’m out in my suit, with my badge under my jacket and my gun tucked in my pants, nobody knows I’m police. They might think I’m the door-to-door cable TV salesman or something. There’s a low-profile way to do it, people. It’s a different mindset. I’m completely different. I have always used the intellectual, methodical, thinking, talking approach. I don’t do it by intimidation. Most of the guys I work with wear the big, thick boots; they have their knives tucked into all their shit; they’ve got the Oakley gargoyle, black glasses on, bald head, toothpick. They’re trying to look as badass as they can. I would rather look
friendly and have ‘badass’ in my back pocket. I can defend myself as well as any of these other guys can – I’m 6’3”, 220 pounds, I’m trained like they are, I’m strong enough, I have the abilities to defend myself just as good as they do, I just don’t need to portray that. Why do they do it? Either because they’re insecure or they just think that’s what cops do. Cops are supposed to look like ass-kicking Nazis. I mean, it’s trained at the academy: be an ass-kicking Nazi.

We all hated this one guy. This guy – this cop – was ostracized. He was on his own and he ended up leaving the precinct. But even if you’re an asshole, even if I don’t like you and you don’t like me, it doesn’t matter. We both work here.

Here’s one of the greatest sayings I was ever taught and I use it to this day: ‘Protect your asshole’. They may be the biggest asshole on the planet but if you do not protect your own asshole nobody else is going to protect him for you. So it didn’t matter. Anybody who legitimately needed help, got help. You never left anybody hanging or swinging in the breeze.