I know that many TBPers have no love lost between them and the police departments throughout the nation.
Different point of view from one journalist who wrote the police beat, road on patrols, walked the streets with local cops and generally has seen things from inside out. You may not agree but what the Hell, isn’t that TBP is all about?
Courtesy of Fred Reed..
October 10, 2014
Several years ago I published in Kindle format my police-procedural novel, Killer Kink. Since then I have received thousands of emails–ok, five emails, but I’m rounding up–asking for a print version. Well, here it is: Killer KinkBuy it. We know where your children go to school.
See? I really was a police writer. Maybe the world’s ugliest. I’m not making it up.
I sometimes wish that people knew more about cops, who they are, and the world they live in. There are pretty good cops (most) and very bad ones (few) but accounts in the press usually bear little relation to the truth. What happens on the streets is not as clear, not nearly as clear, as the immaculately coifed indignations of the flickering screen would have you think. Permit me a few examples of routine ambiguity.
First, though, a journalistically unwelcome reality: Almost everyone charged by the police is guitly, no matter what Jesse Jackson thinks. There are two reasons. First, the perps are almost all caught in the act: They are swerving all over the road and blow museum-pickled on the Alka-Sensor, or caught coming out the window with the TV set, or the car is reported stolen and they are driving it, or caught slinging rock and it’s in their possession. Second, the case load is so great in the cities that the DA won’t paper a case unless he is sure he will win. The cops know this, and know the DA will raise hell with them if they send him iffy-maybe-could-be cases, so they don’t.
Cops engage in, and have to engage in, a lot of Not Quite by the Rules policing (NQBTR). Sometimes the rules just don’t quite work. For example, the aging widow in DC who didn’t sell in time when the neighborhood went bad and drug dealers started hanging on her corner. Property values died and she can’t sell for enough to buy elsewhere, and she is afraid to leave to walk to the grocery store past a cloud of dirtballs. The cops tell the dealers, “Get your sorry butts off this corner, now, and don’t come back.”
It isn’t legal, but the druggies don’t know it. Or maybe they do, but know better than to push their luck. They move to another corner, the old woman gets her groceries, and everybody is happy. Got a better answer? I don’t.
A modus vivendi often exists between the cops and the street life. One of the federal buildings in Washington, I forget which but maybe SEC, overhangs a tiled walkway, protecting it from the rain. I’ve seen a dozen grocery carts there on a wet night, each containing some homeless bozo’s life. The owners (almost owners, anyway: the carts were liberated from Safeway) slept on mats and, if they were gone early, the cops left them alone. And why not?
That was pre-9/11. Things may be different now.
The city is full of crazies, and the police have to deal with them. One night in an almost middle-class region of the city, the cop I was with got a call about a rapist in some woman’s home. The officer said he would look into it but didn’t seem much interested. That was odd, I thought. Anything “in progress” usually gets instant attention. Was this guy cold-blooded, or what? We casually drove to the location.
She turned out to be one of the head cases released to the streets years before to save the city money, a paranoid schizophrenic obsessed with being raped. She lived in a nice house paid for by the city. We went in. The walls were covered with obscene scrawled admonitions, “Stop putting your…” etc. The officer said a friendly “Hello, Mrs. Smith, where is he? Back there? Let me check it out.”
He went into the back part of the house for a minute or so, returned, and said, “He’s gone, you’ll be all right.” She thanked him, and we left. In a few days she would call about another imaginary rapist, and he would do the same thing.
Real-life policing. Got a better idea?
Chicago, the Austin district, I think, a bad neighborhood and under-policed. I was riding with a plain-clothes guy in an unmarked car. An old jalopy swerved dangerously in front of us. We stopped it.
Two old black guys, probably in their sixties and clearly drunk. License and registration please. Well, see, officer, I left my wallet etc, and I borrowed the car from a friend, I guess the registration is at, and I didn’t know the license plates were different, etc.
Their story was likely true, or close enough. The cop knew that old black guys don’t steal cars. This is called “experience” or, in the media, “profiling.” The cop also knew that if he took them in, the magistrate would let them go on recognizance because the available cells were full, give them a court date, which they wouldn’t keep, and the next day they would be drunk again. They weren’t criminals and didn’t need to be in jail. On the other hand, the driver was drunk at the moment and dangerous. Solution?
He locked their car keys in the trunk of their car, figuring the two would be approximately sober by the time they figured out how to retrieve them. They would be driving smashed again the next day anyway but not for a few hours. We left.
Got a better idea?
DC, summer night, walking a foot-beat in empty streets. We encountered a blonde woman, forty-fiveish, crawling on the sidewalk in cruddy jeans. She was sick drunk, incoherent, barely able to stand, with the grey-vegetable look that comes of living on gin and Vienna sausages. She protectively clutched a bottle as if it were her child, obviously terrified that the cop would take it away—as he should have. Technically should have.
Technically, he should have taken her in for public drunkenness. But why? There was nowhere to put her. Cells are few and usually full of people who ought to be in them. The city can’t afford to send endless alkies to Betty Ford. The next night would be the same thing. She would die of liver failure no matter what we did.
We watched as she crawled on all threes, clutching the butte in her free hand, into an alley. We went on our way.
Got a better idea?
In a suburb in Prince George’s County, the drug-and-gang situation had gotten so bad that mothers were afraid to walk their kids in strollers. It was ugly. The question had become who was going to control the streets. Somebody up the power ladder decided that enough was enough.
A massive police presence followed. I went with the cops. Police cars parked everywhere. When a couple of bangers congregated on a corner, a cop stood two feet way, looking at them. If they walked down the sidewalk, he walked five feet behind. This is not optimal for selling crack. A civil-rights lawyer would have called it police harassment. It was. It was intended to be. It probably wasn’t legal.
Maybe two weeks later, I saw women pushing strollers along the sidewalk. No bangers. They had just moved to another region to do the same thing.
Real-life policing.
Crimea River.
Fuck Cops.
CES
Stucky hain’t done enuf sinning to go to heck, nor has he been good enuf to pass them pearly gates so in his next life he will be a cop in Joisey. Got any better idea?
I have a lot of better ideas.
Almost all the examples are bullshit in my opinion. Let drunks keep driving drunk. Let crazies keep making false reports. Let cops break the law to save an old lady from bad decisions she made.
I did like the way the crack dealers were dealt with.
Do I have better ideas?? No not at all….. because in every one of these examples, the officer was doing the best in his ability to offer a balanced approach to very complex situations. What I, (and most other people on this forum) have a problem with, is officers beating the shit out of, outright murdering, taking peoples money, violating citizens basic Miranda rights etc etc and having their superiors condoning their illegal activities, or in most cases aiding and abetting their behaviors, all in the name of “serving and protecting” their jurisdictions. The problem being that the judges and DA’s are supposed to uphold the constitution when this type of behavior happens, only goes to solidify the fact that nothing ever happens to bad cops, and they can do as they please with impunity.
Yes there are lots of great police officers out there, such as the examples you provided. The trouble is that the elected judges and DA’s need to do their part to weed out the bad one’s that make the good one’s look bad. Unfortunately we see the continuous rise in police brutality continue unabated every single day in the media, and that’s what’s pissing us all off. No one feels safe anymore, when the police can be worse than the thugs. At least you know what to expect from street thugs…. not so from bad cops.
These cops sound like good ones to me but I can still resent the bad ones out there that abuse their authority that draw the majority of media attention.
I do have a better idea since he asked. Force the liberal progressive ass-hats to do all of the things they expect the govt to do using their own money and resources. For instance, if you don’t believe in the death penalty then you pay an extra tax to house and care for those spared by your generosity.
Cops certainly helped me during my transition from boy to man. I could have gone to jail a dozen times. A few too many drinks, barroom scuffles, any number of bone headed behaviors. A little discretion on the officers part went a long way towards getting me to adulthood in one piece. They don’t seem to make them like that anymore.
This rant is BS. When you are under the eye of Copfuks, do not talk to them and always plead not guilty.
Spot on starfcker,
When I was younger, I had cops do me big favors and they were humans, not anymore. Nothing more than union thugs.
@IS,
Would you really trust the people who run the DMV or who tried hard to railroad the Duke Lacrosse players (stopped only by the kind of lawyers only millionaires can afford) to decide who lives and who dies?
I’m all in favor of the death penalty, only it has to be administered at the moment of the crime’s commission by the intended victim or helpful bystander, not some political flack seeking reelection and his taxpayer paid cronies.
I don’t trust the monopoly court system to decide even the most trivial matter; they suck at it.
Our problems with cops have two foundations:
1. Too many laws.
2. Too much evasion of personal responsibility.
A nation of sheep invites a government of wolves, and the solution to people who are not self-governing is not to prescribe an endlessly detailed list of do’s and don’ts backed by badged enforcement agents.
As paradoxical as it seems, the harder they try to enforce Order from the top, the more chaos they generate.
Get RID of seatbelt laws , drug laws and everything in between. Drop back to crimes recognized under English Common Law and treat every other conflict between people as a TORT, NOT A CRIME.
dc. sunsets, I think you missed my point which is…….if you are opposed to the death penalty then you get to pay extra money to keep the scum alive and those who are in favor of it get to stop paying. I wasn’t speaking to the judicial application of it but the financial. When liberal progressive ass-hats are forced to stop spending other peoples money and spend their own, they get conservative REAL QUICK.
So I follow the pigs to a reported break-in at a grocery store and find the place a mess. The robbers have come in through the back door and gone stright for the cigarette counter. There are cartons strewn across the floor and about half the stock is missing. The thieves have pried open the cash registers, the lockbox containing the float is missing and the ATM in the store has been busted open and destroyed, though the money is still inside.
The pigs are taking notes and while they are surveying the scene they pick up a few of the cartons that were left behind and put them in the back of their cruiser. A few bottles of whiskey go in the back as well. The owner is the store is insured, so what does it matter if some more stock goes missing?
Real life policing. Got a better idea?
So the pigs pull up on some stoner kid at the skate park. Bleary-eyed with incoherent speech, the teenager is obviously intoxicated. A small amount of cannabis is found during a search. The drugs are confiscated, along with the $60 the kid had in his pocket and the future prison inmate is let off with a verbal warning. The kid was obviously carrying cash to buy drugs, so the officers feel that the money is better off being spent at their bar when they finish their shift. Dangerous narcotics are off the streets and the pigs get to drive home drunk after work. Everybody wins.
Real life policing. Got a better idea?
So the pigs are in their cruiser on a friday night and some drunk young man is walking down the street with his friends. The youth hurls abuse at the pigs “Hey Cunt…stable. Your fucking tail-light is out. You should write yourself a ticket!”
Responding to the the act of terrorism, one officers exits the vehicle and pursues the criminal on foot while drawing his baton. The other follows in the cruiser when the young man predictably flees the scene of the violent crime. The youth is so drunk that he stumbles around a corner and decides to hide behind a lamp post. The officer in pursuit does not even break stride while he brings his baton down on the head of the violent attacker. Dazed and confused, the young man raises his hands over his head in order to protect his torn scalp and has two fingers broken while repeatedly resisting arrest.
The young man is taken to the police station and placed in a cell. He causes a ruckus, asking for medical attention and damages public property by bleeding all over everything in his vicinity. He has to be physically restrained in the holding cell, several times by multiple officers over the next few hours, until he is finally calm enough to receive medical attention for his self-inflicted injuries.
Real life policing. Got a better idea?