There was a local “drunkard” that we dealt with on a regular basis. He had lost a foot at some time in the past, so he was in a wheelchair. We will call him Jacob. Nearly every time we saw Jacob, he was completely intoxicated, usually unable to even push his wheelchair forward. Unfortunately, we often had to take him to jail for drunk in public because he was just too far gone. There, he would sober up and be released without charges (time served, we called it) and he would return home near the campus by light rail.
At one point in my career, I was a training officer, and I had been assigned a police officer trainee who was at serious risk of failing out of training. One of his trademarks was that when the training officers would get fed up with his inability to make a decision and intervene, he would get frustrated and say, “But I was just about to do that.” So I began carrying a paperback book with me.
We responded to a call of an intoxicated person in the quad and when we arrived, it was Jacob. Jacob was unable to speak coherently and was in no condition to be on his own. The trainee began trying to interview Jacob, but Jacob wasn’t listening, he started to wheel away. The trainee began following Jacob around the quad, because Jacob was only going in circles. The trainee finally applied to brakes to Jacob’s wheelchair so that he couldn’t go anywhere. But now, the trainee didn’t know what to do with him. He didn’t know how to take a wheelchair bound man to jail or even place him in custody, although he was already technically detained. I started reading my book and forty-five minutes later, the trainee finally lost his cool and began screaming at Jacob, saying some very unkind things about drunks and transients.
I intervened. I explained to the trainee how to arrest a person in a wheelchair, to ask for another officer so that we could carefully and safely place him in the back of the car, load the wheelchair into the trunk, because the jail would take care of that, and not to shout at the suspect because the trainee was angry that he didn’t know what to do. We booked Jacob into county jail for drunk in public, but after that, I always had a paperback ready in my gear.