We Are the Cops (3 page)

You were busy. In Harlem you’ll do anywhere between ten and thirty of your own jobs – let alone backing up on jobs – in an eight hour period of time, especially on a weekend or a holiday. You and your partner were going from job to job to job. We’re talking about a place that was a mile square, half abandoned and burnt out and they were averaging seventy plus murders a year. One place! And there’d probably be five hundred shootings of people that didn’t die. It’s not as bad now though. It’s way better. They got the murder rate down. One year I think they had three, maybe five, if they even had that many. How did they get in down so low? A little bit of the police taking back the streets, you know? There was a period of time where the whole precinct, everybody, was on the same page. If there were lazy people, nobody would work with them or go near them. Everybody worked.

When you went to work, you knew that somebody was getting arrested, somebody’s going to jail and you’d work in groups and teams to make that happen. And so we just took the streets back. And over time, all these really bad guys, well, we’d put them all in jail.

Have I seen a difference in the people we’re hiring? Yes. The economy collapsing has caused a big problem. It’s caused a big problem because people are losing their jobs and the police department has been recruiting. So people are like, ‘Hey, the police department’s hiring! Where else can I get a job and earn potentially seventy-five to eighty thousand dollars a year? It’s
enough to still raise a family, I get full benefits and it’s a neat job. It’s the full package. Where else can I get that? Well, I’m going to go be a police officer!’

So the economy has kind of become our recruiter. Whereas in the past we were recruiting people that were in colleges or coming out of the military and people that wanted to be police officers, now they’re coming to us because they need a job. But they don’t realise the amount of commitment required or what this job entails. And so they come into the academy and we run them through a myriad of high stress scenarios and they realise very quickly, ‘Oh no, this is definitely not what I signed up to do.’

And so that’s where our attrition rate also comes from – they just go away because they realise that this is more than a paycheque and some medical benefits. There’s a whole other aspect to it that they didn’t realise; the dangers, the commitment that it takes. I mean, you get guys in the academy on day one who show up thinking that the second they graduate from the academy, they’re going to become homicide detectives. That’s the kind of mentality that we’re facing right now.

A lot of guys don’t want to go the supervisor route, as they don’t want to supervise these morons, because they are responsible for everything these rookie cops do. And they’re morons!

I was taught how to talk, I was taught how to walk, I was taught how to hold myself regardless of what the job was that I responded to. Now you have a guy with two years on the job teaching a guy with six months on the job. How does that work? I
got taught by guys with twenty years on the job.

You’re like a newborn when you go out there. There’s no way the academy can prepare you for what you are going to see every day and what you are going to do every day.

When they give you a radio and the car keys and say, ‘Well, good luck!’ That’s a whole different feeling.

And I think you see more in your first year in Baltimore than you would in your whole career in some other jurisdictions. It’s like dog years; one year in Baltimore is worth seven years elsewhere.

W
hether it’s catching thieves, arresting drunks or reporting a traffic accident, day-to-day policing can have its own challenges (I witnessed the widest range of emotions from officers on this chapter) and there is a lot of truth in the adage that ‘no two days are the same’. Simply being on the job – out on patrol, doing what people expect police to do – it is often the case that these are the days when the police officer will encounter the strangest, the funniest or the most dangerous situations. A SWAT officer told me that he had found working regular patrol to be far more dangerous than working SWAT because officers often patrolled alone and were unprepared when the unexpected happened.

Something I often heard officers say was, ‘All the stories just blend into one.’ That alone was testament to just how much a police officer does and sees day in, day out, throughout their career. I would occasionally see an officer struggling to think back and recall a particularly interesting tale to tell me about. But the truth is, each and
every one of them could probably give me enough material for an entire book on their own.

Being ‘on the job’ and working the streets every day, police officers become numb to what it is they are required to do and they often forget just how unusual their job can be. To them it’s just another arrest, another car chase, another incident. But to those who do not inhabit their world, it is all funny, fascinating, shocking and new. So I encouraged them to just tell me something – anything – even if they didn’t think it was all that interesting. But of course, these stories would be interesting and if that incident, whatever it might have been, had been the one, single thing the officer had told me about in the course of the interview, it would have been worth it for that alone. And by getting the officers to focus on just one of these incidents, it would always lead them to other stories as their memories opened up.

‘There are so many times I wished I’d kept a journal, just because everyday something happens that most people would be amazed by,’ an officer in Michigan told me.

The tales and experiences I heard were a real mixed bag. Talks with some of these officers would last just a few minutes whereas others would, and did, go on for a good few hours. The stories ranged from funny to sad, routine to outlandish. Officers laughed, officers cried. The interviews varied widely and that, of course, is just how policing is.

Your friends always ask you, ‘What’s it like being a police officer? Tell me a cool story.’

And you have to wonder, well, what is a cool story? What do you mean by that?

Our officers encountered a guy sitting on the kerb, bleeding profusely from the testicles. He had gone to this man to get his balls removed and this guy advertised that he could do that. He did it in his house. So on this dudes kitchen table, he took his balls off and when we did the search of the house we found the balls in the fridge. In a Tupperware bowl. And his name was Dr Wang. I mean you can’t make this shit up! Wang, the ball cutter!

The long and the short of it is – no pun intended – the victim had sought out this person through some homosexual website and sought out this guy because he wanted his testicles removed. Apparently there are a lot of people that want this to happen; there are people that want this done. But at the time you couldn’t just go into a doctor’s office, because they wouldn’t do it. So there was this website – eunuch dot com or some crap – which is where he found this cat. So he goes in this guy’s house, they have some small talk or whatever and then he jumps up on the dining-room table and this kid proceeds to remove his testicles. Now the kid said that testicles are a delicacy and he actually had them in a Tupperware bowl in the refrigerator with some, like, strawberry pie. And they had even shared some pie. You can’t make this shit up! Have some pie and have your balls cut off!

So the officers show up and they see the guy and his jeans are just saturated in blood. At first we were treating this as an assault with intent to maim – this is what we’re thinking – but the victim
said that he hadn’t been assaulted. He said that he had come here for this express purpose.

Well ultimately, you’ve got to charge somebody with something; you don’t call the police and have all this going on without somebody going to jail. So they charged the guy with operating without a medical licence. Wang, the ball cutter.

I got called to relieve a swing shift unit – they were doing a standard burglary report but they had to go and do something else – so me and my partner went to take over and we made contact with the two officers.

They’re like, ‘Yeah, we cleared the house, everything’s good. Here’s the owner of the building. He’s got all the information so that you can take the report or whatnot.’

So we’re sitting there and as my partner and I are talking, this stuff starts falling off the roof above us – you know, the popcorn ceiling, so to speak.

I’m thinking, that’s odd. And then, ten seconds later, - ‘CRASH!’ – the suspect comes falling through the ceiling, literally right onto the table in front of us.

The guy had scampered into the roof when the previous two cops came but they didn’t go up and check that area.

The burglar was hiding up there and as he was trying to sneak out he just happened to drop right through the roof, right onto the table where we were sat! We were literally sitting down, taking the report and started to see a couple of white things falling and then we look up and CRASH! He comes right down on top of us.
And we’re like, ‘Whoooooa!’ and then the scramble was on! We got him into custody but we had a chuckle about it later on.

We told the previous two guys, ‘Hey, thanks for the prisoner!’

How about that!

I stopped this woman for speeding once. You know what she said to me? She said, ‘Oh officer, it’s just that I really need to take a shit!’

I mean, what are you supposed to say to that?

Had this interesting vehicle situation once, where this one-legged guy was having a fight with his girlfriend. It was night and he got out of the car in six lanes of road. He crawled across the first three lanes, got to the median, started to cross the next three and then got run over. Then he got run over again. And then he got run over a third time.

When we arrived we were trying to figure out what happened here, because there is blood splatter but the blood’s not disturbed. This doesn’t even make sense. How does the blood not get disturbed yet the blood is splattered? Well, finally we found out he got run over and over and over. The blood would collect in pools, cars would run through it, splattering the blood and then the blood would pool back in again. And so the blood looked undisturbed yet it was splattered. He got run over several times and he was quite a way down the road from the initial impact.

I had a brand new trainee with me that was pretty green and was just kind of getting in my way whilst I was trying to deal with
this situation – I was there to train him but I had to deal with things and he was getting in the way – so I sent him looking for the guys other leg.

I said to him, ‘Obviously a car took off his leg, and this leg has gotta be somewhere, so go find the leg.’

So he spent half-an-hour looking for the leg before I finally explained to him that this one-legged guy never had it to start with.

One of the things about police work that I liked was the independence and the autonomy. You’re out there by yourself, you don’t have anybody sitting there looking over your shoulder, not even your sergeant.

A sergeant will have maybe eight guys to look after and most of the old time sergeants, well, you couldn’t even find ‘em, much less have ‘em show up for a serious call or something. You wouldn’t know where in the hell they might be. They were probably with their mistress or who knows where. You couldn’t find them.

So, you were on your own and I loved that. I loved that independence, that autonomy of being out there and making my own decisions, deciding how I was going to handle a situation.

Before I became a cop, I used to work on an assembly line. I hated assembly line work. I hated somebody looking over my shoulder. Police work was great, though. You checked your car out and you hit the streets and you were on your own. Sure, you had to answer the radio calls and you went to where they sent you but otherwise you were totally your own boss. You could make
your own decisions as to what you were going to do. And back in the day you really had to screw up royally to get into trouble.

I guess I took to it like a duck takes to water. I liked it. I liked being out there by myself.

There was always a level of complaints that came with the job. Back in the day, I received a lot of complaints. The reason? Because I didn’t take any shit and I made a lot of arrests. The way it was looked at back then was, if you’re an active guy and you make a lot of arrests and you’re very involved, then you’re gonna get a lot of complaints because that’s just the nature of the business. People don’t like being arrested and being made to do things they don’t want to do, so they figure that the only way to get back at you is to make a complaint. So I got a lot of complaints. Some of those complaints may have been legit. Most of them probably were not.

I got this complaint one time and I actually enjoyed going down to testify for it. We were chasing a car with four guys in it and at one point this car got blocked in by other cars at a red light, the car couldn’t go anywhere. The passenger in the front seat threw a gun out of the window and then the car proceeded to smash through every car in front of it to get away. I was the passenger in the squad car so I jumped out to recover the gun but at that point the lane ahead of us had cleared, so my partner takes off after the car. So now I am left standing on the corner and I’ve got the gun but everybody’s gone, right? They grabbed these guys twenty blocks away in some building and naturally they got
stomped. They tried to get away and they got stomped. You don’t try to run from the police. They got their asses kicked. Now I’m twenty blocks away, I’m standing there holding the gun, right? But I became the arresting officer.

One of the kid’s mothers didn’t like what she saw, so she made a complaint. She thought there was too much force used. I was the arresting officer so I got the complaint. I go down to the complaint review board and I confirm that I was the arresting officer and they ask me to tell them what happened.

‘I really can’t tell you what happened,’ I told them.

‘What do you mean you can’t tell us what happened?’

‘Well, I was twenty blocks away when these guys got apprehended.’

‘What do you mean you were twenty blocks away? You’re the arresting officer. Who else was at the scene?’

But I really didn’t know who was on the scene. There were cops from four different commands on the scene. My partner could testify to the apprehension and I could testify to seeing the guy throw the gun out of the window so it was all good. As far as who beat them? Couldn’t tell you.

Nothing ever came from it because everyone knew it was all bullshit. The complaint was just retaliation against the police for arresting these people. The more important the person was on the street, the more likely you were getting a complaint.

I had a funny arrest once where there was a local criminal who was kind of a tough guy – a cop fighter. We were in the precinct
one day and this other young fellow – who is known locally as being a homosexual – he comes running into the precinct and he’s going, ‘He’s going to kill me! He’s going to kill me!’

He’s running around the precinct and we are all just staring at this little homosexual guy. Then the criminal – this tough guy – comes in chasing him.

He goes, ‘Come here you little faggot! Get over here!’

And the other guy’s going, ‘He’s going to kill me! He’s going to kill me!’

The tough guy chases him around and then chases him out of the precinct.

We’re all just standing there looking at each other saying, ‘What the hell was that?’

So we go running out and the tough guy has got him at the front of the building and he’s smacking him around. We arrested the both of them in order to find out what was going on. Turns out the criminal – the tough guy – he was horny and drunk and he wanted to hit the little homosexual guy in the butt, to get some sex.

But the little guy had said, ‘If you don’t get some KY Jelly to make it easy on me, I don’t want you to do it.’

So they got into an argument and he started chasing him down the block. And you have to stand there and listen to people and go, ‘Oh really? Oh…’ and be this sensitive person, but inside you are laughing your head off.

This is what you’re fighting about? This is why you are running around the precinct? This is why you want to beat this guy up?

You can’t make this stuff up!