Archive for March, 2007
Saturday, March 24th, 2007
It was such a good week at the academy.
Physically I felt great. Intellectually I was on fire. In the training scenarios, trying to figure out exactly what the suspect was lying about, holding my own with an armed robber leaving a bank and carrying a gun, issuing a handful of tickets to a driver on a darkened road in the middle of the night.
It all went so well.
Then Chicago happened.
More correctly, Chicago was reported. It actually happened more than a month ago.
You’ve all seen it or heard about it. A drunk, off-duty Chicago cop being denied another drink and turning his anger from a customer to the bartender.
And beating her brutally. I almost wrote senselessly, but that just doesn’t fit what he did. Neither does ‘brutally,’ to be honest. In fact, I have no words for how horrified, how absolutely enraged, how dry-mouthed with fury I am at this asshole member of CPD.
As a former journalist, I have been trained to write ‘alleged,’ as in ‘Allegedly beating her brutally.’ Except we know it wasn’t alleged. We all saw it. Over and over, given us by a security camera installed four days before the attack. Hanging quietly in the corner of the bar, recording everything Anthony G. Abbate did.
The way he yelled at another customer. The way he shoved that customer until the bartender, a five-foot, four inch woman who weighed in at a buck-fifteen, got in the middle. The way he shouted at her and then strode behind the bar.
The way he punched her. Kicked her. Threw her to the floor like a pesky napkin stuck to his shoe.
At the academy, we’re in a news bubble. Yeah, I check my news websites everyday, but things happen in the world that I don’t know about until the weekend when I catch up.
But I — and my entire class of 75 future coppers — knew about this mere hours after it was reported by a TV station in Chicago. We knew because we got hammered with the video late Thursday afternoon in class.
Ironically, our class Friday morning was Citizen-Police Relations. And our instructor, a 30-year member of the Illinois State Police, was stunned into near speechlessness. He hit us with that first thing Friday morning and for nearly two hours, we discussed it.
CPD has better than 10,000 officers, most of us knew. And this guy, this Abbate — who lots of people in later news accounts said was frequently drunk, frequently badging people, frequently threatening and shoving people including a homeless man who had the temerity to enter Abbate’s watering hole — was just one man.
A single officer. Less than 1/10,000th of the total force of Chicago cops.
And his actions were already painting every member of CPD, and many of the rest of us around the state and nation, with the same bitter, angry brush. Don’t believe me? Run ‘chicago cop’ and ‘bartender’ through Google. Dig up a bare handful of news sites with comments sections.
People are angry over this. People should be angry. Our instructors, who hammer recruits with integrity and honesty, are angry. Our instructors should be angry.
Most of the cops in my class are angry.
But we should be furious. We should be frothing at the mouth, spitting blood, pulverizing rocks in our bare fists furious.
That man, at least in public perception, is us. Behind that badge, regardless of the kind of badge or the jurisdiction, we are all the same.
This isn’t the kind of bullshit as the FBI abusing its power for National Security Letters under a provision of the Patriot Act. That was huge, scary, Orwellian; scary like a nuclear exhange is scary. But this…this…abortion of a cop…was frightening like a match held too closely to a face.
This was down the street. This was a man given the duty of protecting my Mama. Not national security or our borders or anything as amorphous as that, but my Mama in her car and her home and going into a grocery store.
The barkeep’s name is Karolina, and she’s a woman with a husband and a 16-month old son who was working a second job. Doing her job efficiently and well. He was drunk and so, as a barkeep, she cut him off.
No more booze. His response was to beat her.
But that’s not everything. Not if you’ve watched the entire video. Before the beating, Abbate can be seen yelling at her and flexing his muscles like a low-rent Hans and Franz from Saturday Night Live or a fifty cent Governor of California.
And during the attack, there are two men, one on the left side of the frame and one on the right, who do nothing. Absolutely nothing.
No, not technically correct. The man on the left makes a cell phone call. 911, maybe? Thus far there are no records of a 911 call. So who did he call before he fled the bar like a chickenshit, rather than helping the bartender?
Who knows but here’s the next thing: she took his beating.
Yeah. The genetic mutant of a cop was going after that man, the one on the cell phone, apparently taking a chair with which to blast him, though some reports say the copper put the man into a headlock and punched him.
The bartender, an immigrant from Poland, jumped in the middle of it and knocked Abbate off balance. The cop — hopefully soon to be a former cop and newly minted DOC inmate — slipped, slammed into the bar, then turned on her.
She stopped that man from getting hit; that man who then ignored her getting hit.
I can’t even believe the total amount of bullshit that went on in that bar. I can’t believe it happened, that two men stood and watched, that it took what appears to be at least one older guy to stop it, that she reported it to the cops two days later but they couldn’t arrest Abbate until March 14 because he had checked himself into rehab.
What? Rehab? Yep, the Great American Apology. Any problem at all can be solved, or at least softened, by immediately checking into rehab. In other words, it wasn’t my fault, the Daniel’s made me do it.
Excuse my French, but bull-fucking-shit.
But hold on, we’re not done yet, there is more.
Abbate is suspected of attempted bribery — within minutes of the beating, someone popped in to the bar and asked her how much she wanted to keep it quiet. She said no thanks and the next call was to the bar’s owner, with threats of finding drugs in his car or Karolina’s or both.
The heart stops at the sheer balls of that. I mean, you’re already a coward because you beat a woman less than half your size (250 pounds versus 115), and because you fled to rehab to avoid arrest and now you’re trying to buy her off. And when that doesn’t work, you threaten her with jail time?
Get the hell outta my industry, you’re giving the rest of us a bad name.
I am so angry about this, so furious that this happened to a woman trying to get her bills paid, and yeah, selfishly angry that I’ve already had to answer to friends of mine how the hell this guy could ever get a CPD badge, I can barely breathe.
One of the aspects of America that makes me crazy is the endless march of lawsuits. For everything, all the time. But this time, I would give this woman money out of my pocket to make certain she has the ability to sue the holy bejesus outta this guy.
And no, CPD and the taxpayers of Chicago will not have to pay the damages. He was off-duty and out of uniform, and even had he been on-duty, he would have been outside the scope of his employment and training. This will land, hopefully like a baseball bat to the head, on him and him alone.
Did he think he’d get away with this? Did he think Chicago and the rest of the state and the country would sit back and blow this off? Sadly, I don’t think he thought at all. (And yeah, I know this kind of thing happens too frequently and does, in fact, get blown off). But I do believe the moment it was over, he understood exactly what he’d done.
If he hadn’t understood, the attempt buy-off and the threats would never have happened. As for sorry it happened, I believe he’s sorry only to the extent that he got caught. After all, have any of you heard any reports of apologies? Any statements of regret?
Not a peep. Even after a month-long stint in rehab, where he cleaned himself up, got control of his hostility, came to grips with his alcoholism. Not a sound.
The only silver lining — and it’s not much of one at all considering her injuries and the injuries done to every single police officer in this country — is that it happened while there were two classes of future officers at the acedemy. More than 150 students, all asking and being asked the hard questions about our field and our members and our selves
Hopefully the answers are the right ones.
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Wednesday, March 14th, 2007
I came. I sprayed. I screamed.
Actually, it wasn’t quite that bad. I didn’t actually scream, though there was a moment, call it thirty or forty seconds, where I damn sure wanted to.
The worst part of the entire experience was the hour and a half in class just before the spraying, where the instructor explained to us why it was going to hurt (the percentage of oleo rosin and capsicum or some shit) and why it was wrong to call it Mace.
Mace, he said, was a brand name.
“Like Kleenex,” he said.
“Well, not quite like Kleenex,” I offered, “seeing as how Kleenex doesn’t actually leave you in the middle of the floor, crying like a baby, screaming like a first grade school kid, and blowing snot rockets all over yourself.”
So not quite the same.
Anyway, Mace is a brand. The actual crap is O.C. spray.
And it sucks. Just so we’re clear on that part.
But the build up was the worst. Talking about it and then talking about it some more. And then, when we were done with that, talking about it some more still. And then more still.
I mean, come on already, juice us, let us run the obstacle course, and be done with it.
What’s that, you say? An obstacle course? Why, obviously there is. They couldn’t just juice us and let us drive home.
So we did an obstacle course. Get juiced, run about 100 feet down a sidewalk, into a door — that you had to find while your eyes were burning — crawl through a hole in a wall, fight with a ‘bad guy’ outside, run inside and handcuff another ‘bad guy,’ shoot a dead center laser shot, then run back to the start, where beautiful, life-affirming water awaited.
Did I mention it sucked?
So I watched a few other class members do their thing, my ‘nads tightening up with every new player in this bizarre game, and then I finally went.
No problem, actually.
I got sprayed — an orange gel across the bridge of my nose but closer to my mouth than my eyes — and I ran. And before I hit the door, I realized that crap tasted a little like Jack Daniel’s. Swear to God. Had just a bit of whiskey taste to it, with a touch of rum.
Or maybe I just desperately needed a drink, I dunno which.
Hit the door, through the hole in the wall, took down my bad guy –
–why doesn’t this hurt?–
– and moved on to my cuffing –
–I don’t get it why doesn’t this hurt?–
– Got the bad guy cuffed up and headed for the shooting –
–no, really, why doesn’t this hurt even a little bit?—
– Did decently on the shooting but tasted just a hint of burn on my lips –
– come on, shouldn’t it hurt by now? –
And raced back to the end of the course, surprisingly intact, unhurt, unbowed, head held high and a MANLY sort of pride in my chest, bursting from my chest, in fact. Then I headed to the hose to wash it off.
Yeah, you got it. Suddenly I felt like I wasn’t eating my beloved Tabasco, but had BECOME my beloved Tabasco.
As soon as the incredibly cold water hit me, I was done. Fork me, I’m cooked.
I washed my face, used Dawn dish soap, which, along with Johnson Baby Shampoo, absolutely helped clean me up, then walked away. Sat facing the breeze and opened my eyes.
That was an entirely new lesson in pain. And for those few seconds when I was able to keep them open, the pain was actually worse than my heart attack. Different kind of pain, but way painful nonetheless.
But after a few minutes, it was over and I was good. Most people had to take a half hour to get back together, I did it in about ten. Am I a super stud?
Uh…no. I got a less than manly dose of the stuff. And I ain’t no kina proud, I’ll take a little boy’s dose and call it good, no problem.
So it didn’t kill me, though for a few seconds I wished it had. I did pretty well, didn’t cry like the baby I am genetically predisposed to be, didn’t throw up or stop during the obstacle course.
But I still question the wisdom of making recruits get a blast of it (which they’ve only been doing since 2001, by the by, so the old guys have no idea what we’re talking about). I think what’s really going on is that the old guys have developed a bit of sadism and are probably videotaping the entire thing.
“Hehehehhaaaaaawwwwwwhhhaaawwww,” I can hear them laughing. “Watch this one! He hurt so bad, his eyes actually popped outta the backa his head.”
Yeah, haw haw friggin’ haw. That’s funny. Maybe funnier still when I blow your fucking toe off and soak the wound in O.C. spray.
Excuse me, soak the wound in MACE.
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Tuesday, March 13th, 2007
So tomorrow, just after we’re all fat and happy from lunch, we get to get sprayed with Mace. O.C. spray. Pepper spray. Whatever you want to call it.
Mmm-mmm-good.
Can’t wait for that crap.
Yeah, yeah, I get the theory behind it: that we need to know what it’s like so if a bad guy ever gets our Mace and sprays us, we wont’ be totally paralyzed with surprise. We need to experience what we might have to do to someone.
Just like control tactics and ground fighting. We train in that stuff, we get to experience that stuff. Ditto Tazer training. Those who might do it to someone, who need to be certified in it, have to experience it.
I understand all that, I just don’t like it.
I guess my question is this: I am trained to shoot people.
So who gets to shoot me…you know…just so I can experience it?
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Sunday, March 11th, 2007
For a moment, and it was only a single, terrible, nerve-shattering moment, it was chemo all over again.
I was tired. Not lack of sleep tired, but weak tired, as I had been most of last year. During physical training, I found it hard to raise my arms for various exercises, hard to keep my legs moving when we ran, hard to catch my breath beyond anything other than a shallow, slightly anemic breath.
It was the kind of weakness that had, so many times that month, simply invited me to gently pass out.
It was mostly, but not completely, physical that day. Other things played into it, dragged me down physically. LuAnn, the woman who absolutely did whatever needed be done during that last, awful year, was hurt. She’d slipped on the ice, cracked her tailbone, was home alone trying to run the household and the bookstore and I couldn’t do anything to help. I stressed about that.
The first exam was looming here at the academy. I stressed about that.
Desperately, I miss my wife and my mutts. I stressed about that.
And then, later in the day, I got cold.
Not just an external cold from standing at the shooting range, shooting in 30 degree weather, but the scary, internal cold that typified so many days when the chemo seemed to thin my blood or slow the flow of blood or whatever it was that left me freezing in a house baked to 80+ degrees in sweats and under a comforter.
So that moment, when I held my Glock .45 semi-automatic pistol hard out in front of me, my right elbow locked, my knees slightly bent, my right foot back and turned about 45 degrees off perpendicular to the target, when it all flooded back to me.
For that handful of heartbeats, for that single breath, I was back in chemo.
And then I shot the shit outta that target.
Better than 100 rounds and not a single one went anywhere near outside the ten ring.
In other words, absolute dead fucking center.
Shooting the cancer?
Maybe. I know I have a tendency to deal with things on a delayed basis sometimes.
Back when LuAnn and I first started dating, we bought a mutt. Max, we named her. She was a great – though flighty and high-maintenance – dog. Eventually, she got sick and we had to have her euthanized. I never really came to terms with taking her to the vet in the morning and having her killed in the afternoon.
A couple years later, I toured with the David Taylor Dance Company as tech director and we hit Reno for a seven day stand. In the middle of that stand, I had a dream and in it, Max came along and said, “That was me, telling you goodbye.”
I cried like a titty-baby for a week.
Yeah, yeah, sounds like crap, like liberal touchy feely bullshit, I know. But it happened and those of you with pets will absolutely understand that and those of you without pets never will.
So I have a tendency to deal with some things way after they’re done. Maybe feeling the chemo in the day’s events was part of that.
And maybe I’m just filling up space on the blog to say I wrote something.
But I do know this: I am a million miles further up the road than I was last year at this time.
March, 2006, I was just days away from discovering my biological father had died of cancer. I was in the middle of the toughest month I had because the chemo needed to be adjusted. I was barely able to make it through some days because of all the bullshit.
Now, a year later, I’m doing half an hour of physical training every damned morning, Monday through Friday. I’m three weeks off doing a power test in which I ran a mile and a half in 14 minutes, 31 seconds, benched 80 percent of my body weight (which was thankfully low because of the chemo diet!), did 30 sit-ups in a minute, and stretched some odd inches beyond my toes.
And I’m doing it as the oldest 40-year old you’re ever gonna meet.
I definitely ain’t no ironman, but overall, I’m feeling pretty good right now. Even that day when it all came back to me and I was snapped back to ChemoLand, I knew it was temporary. I knew it was a few bad days piled on top of each other.
I knew it would pass.
Not in months or weeks or days, but in minutes, maybe hours.
I knew, just like I knew when I took that last fucking chemo shot, that I was going to be good.
And something else: I don’t really spend much time thinking about all this crap. Corn-pone as it sounds, I don’t really have time because I spend too much time thinking about tomorrow and next week and next month.
Actually, truthfully, all I’m thinking about right now is friggin’ graduation day at the academy. May 10th, and not a moment too soon.
‘Cause after that? I get my own squad car.
With lights and sirens and everything.
Cool.
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Thursday, March 1st, 2007
Nearly two weeks in at the cop academy and I’m not nearly so terrified.
Where last week I was nervous of offending a senior class member (Trey? Scared of offending someone? Come on…never happen), now I’m more closely aligned with my own long-standing DNA: if I offend you…rah, rah, rah, bite my hump.
In fact, I have a hard time with the whole senior class/junior class crap. A pile of the senior class members have taken it upon themselves to be as full of asshattery as humanly possible.
“Make a hole for the seniors,” one belted out yesterday in the hallway.
Make a hole? For people who’ve been in class six weeks longer than me? Hell, a whole bunch, of not most, of them don’t yet have a single day in at an agency and I’ve got three damn years. Yeah, I don’t think so. How about this, senior wretch? How about you lick the sweat off my…well, you get the picture.
What I love, in almost the same extreme that I hate the senior/junior class bullshit, is the classroom. The administration warned us, the first couple of days, that our first weeks would be massively front loaded with classroom days. Lots of law, lots of use of force, lots of officer presence and verbal judo and the like. Hours and hours and days and days of sitting in a class room, verbally tussling back and forth about what constitutes this crime or that, how this is mitigation or aggravation, use of a deadly weapon or simply the threat of a deadly weapon, how this person is in a protected class, how that person isn’t. Lots of Power Point presentations, lots of note taking. The kids – and the median age in my class is 22 – hate all the classroom work. Hate it with a seething, drooling, blood-spewing fury that I can’t begin to fully describe.
On the other hand, I love it. Love it love it love.
Call me a class room geek, I guess.
Always have been…though my Mama will dispute that because my high school grades were good only when it was a music class.
There are few things I enjoy more than learning and this is – so far – an incredibly intense learning experience. Some of this stuff I have direct experience with (many of the laws and elements of crimes and radio communications and whatnot) from working in the jail and some of it I have indirect knowledge of from reading or writing or riding.
I’m digging this whole thing. Way more than I thought I would.
I’ve even digging the physical training part of things, though to be honest, I’m having a hard time with it. Sucking wind most days, in fact. Sucking wind, actually passing out at one point, whining like a titty baby at most other times.
One interesting thing I’ve noticed is the abundance of type A personalities, which makes sense if you think about it. We all wanna be cops. In other words, we all want to be in control. Ditto want A’s want. We are all, to some larger degree than the public at large, control freaks.
Not that that doesn’t fit me anyway. Hehehe, deny deny deny, but I’ve always been a bit of a control freak. Goes along with having a huge ego, I think. Being a writer takes both of those things. An ego large enough to believe anyone gives a shit what I write about – like now, for instance – and control freaky enough to want to create and direct everything that happens in my own little fictional world.
So last week, what drove me the craziest, aside from the military style discipline (what? Trey’s having a problem with discipline, with being told what to do? Shocking…SHOCKING), and a bearded man lecturing me on how and when to shave, was a feta-cheese bimbo.
We eat Bromley Hall, the campus dining hall. Good food. Lots of variety, lots of healthy stuff with just enough unhealthy but fun stuff to keep me interested. But within the first twenty four hours, I discovered that most of the sorority bimbos rarely — if ever — get out of their pajamas.
And I ain’t talking about breakfast time. I’m talking about all damned day!
At breakfast? Pajamas and house slippers. Lunch? Pajamas and house slippers. Dinner…at 5:30 p.m? Freakin’ house-slippers and pajamas! And one of them actually drags a bottle of Kraft Feta Cheese salad dressing down to meals with her.
Okay, lemme understand this. You come to university, no doubt on Daddy’s dime but you can’t actually be bothered to go to class (unless they’re wearing pajamas in class these days) and you are so contemptuous of what Bromley hall serves that you bring your own incredibly obnoxious dressing? I mean, it’s not even Ranch or French or anything normal. It’s freakin’ Feta Cheese. Come on, who eats that crap? I’m not even sure you can legally get that shit in Texas anywhere other than Las Colinas outside of Dallas.
So the other night at dinner, after after doing a mile of jogging, backward jogging, side to side right and side to side left, and skipping, then adding another eighth mile of lunges and finally, literally, passing out during PT then spending the entire rest of the day team-building and sitting in a class room…. In other words, after working my ass off for nearly twelve solid hours, I see this chick who can’t be bothered to go to class or get a job talking on a cellphone wedged between the side of her face and her shoulder WHILE SHE’S CARRYING A MEAL TRAY…UPON WHICH IS SITTING A BOTTLE OF FETA CHEESE.
I had a bit of a meltdown while Chad Hall, a deputy from my own agency, told me to shut the hell up (though I’m not sure woman could actually hear me), and rushed me through my dinner and out of the dining hall.
Please, stop the madness.
Don’t buy Feta Cheese and don’t let your daughters carry a cell phone. And make them get dressed. For at least an hour a day, they should be in something other than pajamas.
Now, lastly this go ‘round, a bit of an apology.
Last time, I managed to offend a deputy at my sheriff’s office. AB was upset with me for saying that I’d be a real police when I graduated. She thought that somehow I believed working radio or the jail made someone less than a real police.
If that was what it sounded like, it was purely unintentional. Having spent three years in the jail, I know how hard that job is. I know what it’s like to fight with someone tweaking on meth or coming down off heroin or simply being drunk and stupid. I know how hard dispatchers work when every single cop in the county and all the towns are screaming over the radio for something, when 911 needs dispatching, when there’s a fire or whatever. So apologies for insinuating they weren’t real cops. They are. They absolutely are.
Okay, I’ve gotta go shine my shoes for tomorrow’s inspection. Yeah, friggin’ inspection. Come on, already, give me my certificate and lemme go catch bad guys.
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