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CopLand 10

So the last post was about how scary the shooting was, how quickly it happened and how the officers involved really had no time to think about it and how dramatic it was and all that.

This time, over the last few days, it’s been the banality of police work.

We did vehicle stops a few more times and at every scenario, it was some version of: “Here’s your ticket, have a nice day.”

(Yeah, yeah, pretty funny, huh? I’m'a write you a ticket that’s gonna cost you $100, and then I’m'a tell you to have a nice day. Not how I’ll probably do it, but you never know.)

The guy in charge of the scenarios told us, when it was all over, when we’d finished our last vehicle stop, that this was where most of our calls would end. Day after day, week after week, year after dreaded year, stop them, write them, send them on their way.

That was probably the most depressing thing I’d heard the entire academy. That I’ll spend twenty years doing something that basic and boring? Yeah, sign me up, hoss.

They told us we did some high end scenarios so we’d know what it was like. But the majority of our days will be spent with low end calls. That’s cool. As I get older and older — and yeah, crankier and crankier — the low end calls will be just my speed.

*****

A few posts ago, I wrote about this asshole in Chicago who beat the bartender and then tried to bribe his way out of the trouble.

He was indicted yesterday on a total of fourteen counts. Yeah, the battery was in there, but the majority of the charges were about the attempted cover-up.

They were because his partners tried to offer money, then tried to threaten with phone calls about drugs in cars. God knows what else the morons did.

Ironically, as those guys were being indicted, my class was doing a block on ethics. Interesting timing. Is it okay, is it ethical, to take a free cup of coffee from a 7-Eleven?

The linkage is this: I can promise you those Chicago guys took the free coffee. Maybe not specifically coffee and maybe not at a 7-Eleven, but they took the metaphoric coffee.

It’s a mind set. It’s a way of thinking that says, I’m entitled to this because I’m a police officer. I take a chance on getting shot every day for this community, they can give me a cup of coffee.

And maybe that’s right. Maybe a free cup of coffee isn’t so much to ask. Except for this: it isn’t free.

Free coffee always expects something in return. More patrol presence. Or maybe simply the officer’s presence in the store while s/he’s drinking it. Or maybe it’s all about the car parked out front. Regardless, that coffee wants something in return.

And if that 7-Eleven does get robbed? The manager, the clerk — whoever gave you free coffee on every shift for eight months — wants you there instantly, other calls be damned.

It’s not free.

Makes me a bit of a hypocrite, actually. I’ve taken free drinks from a store. One of the convenience stores on the north end of town offers free coffee or fountain soda to anyone on duty and in uniform. Yeah, I’ve swigged from that free cup a time or two. Not often because I’ve not been on the road, but a few times.

They’ve not asked me for anything, but maybe they have asked the regular road guys. But I actually believe it’s more subtle than that. I believe this store won’t ever say anything blatant. I believe they simply want those marked cars out front, parked obvious and blatant for everyone to see.

“See who we have in our store?” those cars ask would be criminals. “Go rob somebody else.”

Is that such a bad trade?

Maybe that’s just community service. Maybe that’s helping out the people — the business owners — who pay a big chunk of the taxes that become my salary and funds to keep my car running smooth and keep me in uniforms and bullets and all the rest.

What about meals at half-price? McDonald’s gives 50% off to people in uniform. It’s not from the local level, but the corporate level. So what does that mean? A corporate directive, but the cost is still borne by the local franchisee.

So do those local people expect faster service? Or is it something they just do and not really think about?

I don’t know, and maybe none of this matters. Except it does matter for me because I know this will come up. It will come up constantly, and sometimes it will be people looking for faster arrival time and sometimes it will be people who simply support law enforcement and understand how hard the job is.

But understand this: if I do take a free drink, it absolutely will not be coffee.

If anything, it’ll have to be — obviously — Dr. Pepper.

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CopLand 9

It was this fast:

“Unit one from dispatch. Report of a drive-by shooting. A silver Impala, occupied twice, male and female. Area of Willard Airport.”

“Dispatch from One, I’m behind that car. Pulling it over now.”

“JesusGodhelpmeidontwanttobeherehekilledthatguyhesgotagunhetookmeouttamyhouseitsmyexboyfriend – “

“Ma’am, stop.”

“ – itsnotmeitshimhescrazyhesgotagunhesaidhedkillmedontshoot – “

“Ma’am. Stop! Stop! Driver stay in the car!”

A few pops. A shout. More pops. A scream.

“Oh, God. Dispatch from One. I shot her. Get medical rolling.”

And still more pops. More artificial gunfire. The driver, the boyfriend, shooting and shooting and where in hell did he get all these bullets, diving around the car, still shooting and then –

“Sir, drop the gun or I will shoot you,” from a different officer.

And it was over.

A breath, maybe two, and the scenario was over. Results? One man in custody, two officers with empty guns and hearts stopped. One lady – kidnapped at gunpoint by a crazed ex-lover – dead.

And one officer with only two rounds gone from his weapon, but repeating over and over, “I can’t believe I shot her. I can’t believe I shot her.”

The facilitator called time on the scenario and left all seven of us in that group long enough to get our own hearts started again.

How in hell had that happened? How in hell had a complicated, but still doable traffic stop – with three officers – gone so completely wrong so instantaneously?

It was supposed to happen that way, of course. The scenario, unbeknownst to those of us participating and watching from the sidelines, was designed that way. We were supposed to shoot. We were supposed to leave an innocent woman dead in the street.

Or we weren’t.

But we were supposed to be stressed, confused, scared, drowning in our own adrenaline, watching our peripherial vision decrease by 70%…that tunnel vision people under stress talk about.

What decision are you going to make? How are you going to handle that?

When I started this odyssey, I wrote (CopLand 1):

“But while part of me is incredibly excited, another part of me is incredibly terrified. See, I spent three years in the jail and my job was to warehouse people at the behest of another officer or the court or the State’s Attorney. Someone else — someone NOT ME — made the decision to arrest someone or sentence them or whatever the case might have been.

Now it’ll be me. I’ll make the decision.

What decision? The decision of whether or not to take someone’s liberty. To take away that most basic thing all people have – that thing Thomas Jefferson said was a right by nature — freedom.

And that scares the shit outta me.”

I was talking about arresting people, taking away their liberty. But shooting them, killing them, is the ultimate in liberty snatching. In fact, legally, it invokes the Fourth Amendment, the unreasonable search and seizure clause.

That scenario didn’t happen to me, though I was part of the peanut gallery and watched it. The entire time – and don’t fool yourself, the entire time was less than ten seconds from the time the suspect car stopped to the moment the driver gave up – I couldn’t believe how fast it all happened.

For eight weeks, they’ve told us when it happens it will be fast. It will be faster than I think possible, it will be the kind of fast that leaves people speechless and shaking their head.

And they were exactly right.

Brutally fast and at the same time, breath-takingly slow. I could tell you every single detail, every moment and movement, every shock of face and tighten of muscle.

It left the rest of us in the scenario, those who had yet to stop this particular car (and who would later stop it under different parameters, there was to be no more gunplay that day) shaken and quiet.

And it left all of us wondering what we would have done. Would we have had a body at our feet? Or would we have hit her with pepper spray to incapacitate her until we could sort it out? Would we have taken her down via hands, cuffed her and stuffed her in the car until we could figure it out?

And don’t forget, while making that decision and following through with it, the psycho ex-boyfriend is still shooting; shooting at the officer – me – and trying to kill the officer –

Trying to kill me.

I have no idea what I would have done. If there is anything I’ve learned in eight weeks, it is that I will not make a judgment until I’ve at least seen the shoes of the officer, if not actually walked in them.

I was talking to a local PD sergeant about the scenario today and he brought up something I hadn’t thought about. An officer is forced to make a decision in a split second about whether or not someone is a threat, about whether or not they have a cell phone or a gun (and let’s not forget the recent development of a cell phone that IS a gun…shoots 4 .22 bullets), or a fat wallet or a gun, or maybe a Blackberry or a gun. And if someone ends up dead, 99 times of 100, the officer is excoriated.

But if a homeowner has three or four minutes to decide someone is breaking into his home, or thirty or forty seconds to decide someone is carjacking him, and ends up killing the bad guy, he or she is generally considered a hero.

I’m not saying every homeowner or car owner who saves themselves should be prosecuted. Nor am I saying every officer who kills someone is automatically right in what he/she’s done.

I guess what I am saying is try to remember the last time someone jumped out of a room or a closet and scared you. Or the last time someone came around a corner in a quiet office and startled you. Could you have decided whether or not they presented a deadly threat to you? And if they did, could you have done anything about it? Not hours later, not days and weeks and months and years later, but then and there. In that split second when your hair stood up and your breath stopped and your stomach dropped.

I hate to say this, but I’m glad the recruit officer had to shoot that lady. As vile as it sounds, I’m glad it happened because until that moment, thoughts of killing someone had been theoretical.

At that moment, even in the artificial atmosphere of the scenarios, it became absolutely real.

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CopLand 8

So here it is, the best random comment made this week by someone in my class: “We taught them how to mop hallways and they taught us how to smoke crack.”

HeheheHAHAHAHAHA, that cracks me up. Said by an officer who spent a few years in the jail. They’d get people serving time for smoking crack and get them minor trustee jobs mopping hallways. Apparently, that was the trade-off, mop water for crack knowledge.

Much funnier than the previous best random comment: “But I don’t want to wear a penis on my head.”

That one I have no context for at all. I heard it in class one day. I have no idea what the class work was about, I have no idea what the current conversation had been. I have no idea about anything that could have led to that.

The bell has now tolled eight times for eight weeks down.

(Wow, that sounds like a cool noir novel title, doesn’t it? Eight Weeks Down…might have to figure out what that story line is.)

(And yeah, don’t fret, I’ve already figured out what the police academy novel is going to be…I have no friggin’ idea when I’ll write the damned thing, but I know what it’s going to be.)

Eight weeks down and five to go. Really only four serious weeks because that last week we’re learning how to do graduation and taking our final academy test and taking the 9,497 question state certification test and moving out of our Section 8 housing and turning in our academy gear and all that rot. Mostly that last week is cake.

Unlike this next week.

We’re far enough along now that there isn’t much class room left. A few random things here and there, but mostly we’re done with that. Mostly, at this point, we’re into scenarios. We’ve been doing those all along, but now they’re different.

Now we don’t know what they are.

When we started, we knew exactly what each scenario was. A stolen bicycle report. A low-rent domestic that would have no resistance by the bad guy. A Terry stop, again with no resistance.

But Friday, we started with not quite knowing what we were getting. A service call was all we were told. In one, it was a loud noise complaint. Maybe a domestic, maybe a party, maybe some other thing. In another situation, it was a store clerk having a problem with a customer. But what did that mean? A theft? Someone banned from the store? Someone drunk and passed out?

And in the last? A silent alarm at a closed business. In other words, a building search.

Rock and Rooooooollllllllll!!!!!!!!!!

Wouldn’t have thought I would like wandering around a dark building with a tiny flashlight, hoping like hell I didn’t get hurt, but I did.

Actually, now that I think about it, it was – once again – much like working in theater. Cripes’a’mighty, I gotta tell ya, there are have been so many instances were working in theater has actually helped me as a police officer. Who’d’a thunk it? Maybe that’ll be the next CopLand.

So, yeah, I dug it, but I did want to whack the instructor who put the thing together.

I was told to put together my team of three people and we were escorted outside. We waited there for a few minutes, in ball-freezing cold that ripped right through my sexy brown polyester pants. Eventually, we were told to start the scenario.

We entered a building with a looooooong wide hallway, so many doors off that hallway that we couldn’t even count them all, at least two corners around which there was no way in hell we were going to be able to see, and absolute darkness.

Great. Thumbs up on that.

So we pinned the entire hallway with light (the assumption being that if a bad guy is there, he probably won’t move into the light) and I went to clear the first room. Palms pressed together, gun in one hand, flashlight in the other, sweat already breaking on my brow and between my cheeks, heart rate climbing a bit.

I cleared the room, and found, near the end of that clear, an open door leading into another room.

Well, ain’t this special? Had to get another officer to pin that door while I cleared the second room. Then I went into the second room and found –

–Another open door leading to a third room.

Son of a bitch. So I stopped, wiped the sweat away, thought about what I was facing. Handled the third room just like the second. And what did I find?

Tha’ss right, kiddies, a fourth open door.

I had a Charlie Brown moment. “Aaauuuuuugggggghhhhhhhhh.”

But knowing there might be bad guys in the place, I didn’t give voice to the scream. See, that would have been tactically unsound. Like Colonel Kurtz, and his ‘methods’ that had become ‘unsound.’ I know you guys aren’t official police like I am, and therefore have not had the same high-dollar, high-intensity traininge. You’ve not sat down with tacticians, and strategists and SWAT team members and the like, but you should probably be able to figure out that screaming in frustration during a building search would be…uh…bad.

What I had expected to be a single, small room, maybe two minutes to clear, became six small rooms, full of furniture and hiding places…call it nearly twenty minutes to clear.

Though it seemed like both twenty seconds and twenty hours.

How odd, I realized halfway through, sweat stinging my eyes and the muscles in both forearms exhausted from my hyper tightened grip on both weapon and light, that time both sped up and slowed down.

But I and my team got through it and did a generally good job.

It was fun. Lotsa fun, in fact.

Just as much fun as being able to say to friends, “Call me Grissom. Gil Grissom.”

We did a crime scene practical Friday morning that involved breaking into teams and collecting evidence from a crime scene, then packaging and cataloguing all the evidence.

My team got an aggravated criminal sexual assault scene.

Extremely bloody.

Lots and lots of evidence to gather, process, package. Scary stuff, too. Bloody and other-fluid stained sheets, bloody panties and clothes, a gun, a blood rope, all kinds of other stuff. Suddenly I understood why it takes evidence techs hours and hours to clear crime scenes.

The other big thing this week: drugs. Spent two days doing drugs. And as we were in the middle of learning that UPS guys and FedEx guys and mail carriers and the like were never held liable for the drugs they delivered (lots and lots of drugs simply get mailed around the country every day), the post office in Princeton was shut down because of a white powder.

Yeah, ‘cause Princeton is very high on the Al-Queda hit list. Damn near everyone in town thought anthrax. Come on, gimme a break. Ain’t no freakin’ anthrax in Princeton.

My thought was: coke to a local dealer. The guy I had in mind had just gotten outta prison and was living at the local flop house.

Officer Friendly suggested checking the post mark.

“Come from Columbia, did it?”

Ah, the cynicism I so miss while at school.

All in all, with the exception of daily early morning physical training, things are going swimmingly well.

But here’s the thought that festers in me right now: suddenly, come last Monday, my class, with all its head cases and whack jobs and no experience control freaks, became the senior class.

That just has disaster written all over it, doesn’t it?

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CopLand 7: The Dreams Begin

I was driving the Hyundai again. An old, white, beater with white and black striped tiger seat covers. Except I wasn’t driving it, I had it the shop.

There were office areas at either end of this shop. They were connected by a covered garage-like area with open doors on one side. So the place was flooded with natural light.

I was there in casual clothes, but with my gunbelt and weapon, my OC spray and baton, my badge, my brilliantly shined name badge. I waited for a mechanic or someone to come tell me what was wrong with that Hyundai I’ve not owned since the mid 90’s in Denver.

While I waited, bad guys dressed in blue coveralls and hidden behind black, protective face masks — not ski masks or the like, but actual protective masks designed for sparring partners or hockey players or something — slipped into one of the two office areas. They took everyone hostage.

I remember my heart rate slipped up through the stratosphere. I remember my skin got hot and sweaty, that my stomach lurched two or three times.

And I remember that when I headed toward the second office area to call someone to do something about the bad guys, more bad guys had already taken those people hostage.

So I stood in the in-between, hands shaking, mouth dry as the desert in which I grew up, absolutely terrified. I had no idea what to do, or if I should even do anything. I had no idea who to call, or even if I should call anyone.

Should I race in, gun blazing, rescue every body? Should I try to negotiate? But more to the point, could I even trust what I was seeing? Was it actually a situation gone south? Or was I misinterpreting because I didn’t have enough information?

LuAnn didn’t bat an eye when I told her. Anxiety, she said. Nervous and uncertainty. Lack of self-confidence. You’re not sure you’re going to know what to do when it’s all up to you.

Right now, she said, you’ve got 71 other newly minted officers, as well as 10 or 15 instructors, all standing there watching everything you do. Making certain, in other words, you do the right thing, make the right decision, think things through slowly and certainly. And role-players in each of those scenarios — wearing those black face masks and wearing blue coveralls — who you absolutely know will not hurt you. They may push, but they’re not going to suddenly shoot you or beat you bloody.

In other words, you’ve got a safety-net right now. But you’re almost done, she said. Pretty soon, you won’t have all that back-up. It’ll be you and a squad car, save a few weeks with a field training officer. You won’t have 71 classmates or a handful of instructors or anyone else.

You and — since you’re a county deputy with officer back up better then 10 or 15 minutes away — you alone.

And now you’re dreaming your anxiety: that you won’t make the right decision. Worse, than you won’t even be able to truly recognize the situation to make a decision.

The pity is: she’s right.

This has happened to be before.

Back in Denver, when I joined a writers’ group headed by Edward Bryant — a legend in the speculative fiction field — I was terrified. But I was also a fan of the Denver Nuggets basketball team.

How does that matter? Well, I had a dream that I had joined the Nuggets but that they wouldn’t let me ride on the bus with them. That I was so bad I had to take a separate car to the games. Ed was on the bus, as was Dan Simmons and Peter Straub and others.

But not me.

There was another Nuggets dream later. It’s fairly foggy, lost to the twists and turns of memory, that involved me riding the bus but unable to sink any free throws.

So this is what my brain does when I’m unsure. It feeds me dreams where it illustrates in graphic detail my own perceived failings.

Yeah, thanks for that, really appreciate it.

LuAnn’s fairly certain I’ll have more of these. And she thinks they’ll all be dressed up in criminal situations that will be mostly gray, where nothing is quite what it seems.

And they’ll come, she and I both believe, because I’m getting close. As of 39 minutes ago, as I write this, it has been exactly six weeks since I started this particular journey.

Which means exactly what?

First and foremost, that there are just a couple days less than six weeks left, and right now, that’s about all I can see clearly.

Obviously, my subconscious is looking further down the line. It’s peering down past the academy and past my FTO days.

Yeah, I’ll have a supervisor on every shift I work and if I get completely in the weeds, that super will get me back to a manicured lawn, but still and all, it’s mostly my decision — a decision based on correctly reading what’s actually going on as opposed to what seems to be going on.

And as much as I like to be in control, this kinda freaks me out.

But it gigs me, too. Part of that dream was watching myself contemplate busting ass in there and saving everyone. Just like when the chemo dreams started and I kept dreaming I wore Indiana Jones’ hat and saved everyone all the time.

That was all about beating cancer. This, I suspect, is about beating my own self-doubt.

Great, just what I freaking need. More navel-gazing and intellectual sparring with myself…’cause I’ve NEVER done that kind of thing.

In my fiction, the main guy almost always just yanks the steel and gets to blasting. Somehow, I don’t think they’d let me do that now….

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