Cop Stories & More

I was the supervisor on a Sunday, dayshift, which was generally our slowest shift (which is why I picked it), when our dispatcher asked if I would approve an unlock of a science lab for a lab assistant. At this time, we did not unlock locked rooms because if you were supposed to have access you would have a card access key that gave you access. Who were we to be deciding who gets access to what? Anyway, the dispatcher said that there was a problem with the tortoise.

Now, in the basement of the Duncan Hall building, lives a tortoise. His name is Jeremiah and he has been living at the university since before I was born, and I was nearing 50 at this point. When I first arrived at the university, the tortoise had “Please Do Not Release Me. I Am A Pet And I Won’t Survive In The Wild” painted on him because eco-terror was a thing then. People used to release lab animals to free them from their slave bonds. You’ve probably seen examples of that in the beginning of several apocalyptic sci-fi/horror movies.

Apparently, the problem was that Jeremiah had fallen on his back and that can kill a tortoise if left alone long enough, and the lab assistant next door couldn’t get to him. Her. Them? So to be fun, I radioed that I was responding “Code 3” meaning lights and sirens. Which I did. I noticed the other three officers on the team did as well. We all reached the building within seconds of one another and it was a race to see who would reach the tortoise first.

As we charged down the basement hallway toward the lab, a lab assistant and a professor who had come by after we had been called, watched wide-eyed as we sprinted to the room. And there, in the window to the lab, we could all see the tortoise. On his back. Struggling. Fighting for his very life.

“Wow, that was not the response I was expecting,” the professor said.

“Hey, when someone’s in trouble, we come,” I said, smiling. I took out my all-access card key and swiped it over the card reader to the lab. The card reader blinked red and nothing else happened. I tried again. Nothing. The other officers tried their “all-access” card keys. None of us could get in. Someone in the Biology Department had requested extremely restricted access.

“Well,” I said. “That was anti-climactic. This isn’t fun anymore.”

“Now what do we do?” the lab assistant asked. “We already tried to call the Department Chair, but no one answered and the voicemail box is full.”

I checked with my officers and no one had any ideas. Finally, after I updated the dispatcher, she asked me if I wanted her to unlock the entire building. She could only change the status on a building level, but she could unlock the entire building and then lock it back up again, when we were done.

“Do it.”

The entire building seemed to beep and the card access reader turned green. I opened the door and the lab assistant went in and righted the tortoise.

Whew.

Jeremiah was saved and the dispatcher locked the doors again and all was right with the world. At least for the moment.

The best calls are the fun calls, the happy ending calls, and the calls where you can honestly help someone. It makes you feel good inside.

And, as of this writing, Jeremiah is still living comfortably in his home in the basement of Duncan Hall.

I was assigned as the Public Information Officer at my agency for several years. I got along well with the members of the press for the most part and I only got myself burned a couple of times, and each time I learned something new. I say that I got myself burned, because the reporters are just doing what they are supposed to be doing, I was the one who got caught off guard, or forgot who I was talking to, or responded with a witty retort when I should have thought better of it. Anyway, one morning the university police received a call about a person down at the tennis courts parking lot. Now for clarification, this parking lot was literally just about 15 parking spaces, running alongside the city street, right on the edge of campus.

When officers arrived, it was clear that the person had been shot, and was already dead. Our detectives responded and began a murder investigation. The victim, it turned out, was neither student, faculty, nor staff of the university, and didn’t even live in the area. It appeared to be a body dump, which meant that he had been killed elsewhere and left on university property. Our Chief of Police, a retired member of the local city police called his former Chief and asked the city to take over the investigation, because it was clearly not university related, and the city had more resources to devote to this investigation. The Chief of the city police said, “No.”

The problem here, was that the city police department was taking a beating for having one of the highest murder rates in its history. The press was counting and even though the city was averaging about 15–20 murders a year, this year we were exceeding 40, for the third year in a row, and the year wasn’t anywhere near to completion. When the press began adding this murder to the city’s count, they responded with a “No way. That’s not our murder. That’s the University’s murder.” I was also fielding calls from the press asking why we were having so many murders, and I was responding that this was the university’s first murder in years, what were they talking about.

Ultimately, our detectives identified and arrested the suspect within 36 hours of the initial call. So on day three, when I received a call from a columnist from the local, nationally recognized newspaper, I was able to provide more information than I had previously.

The columnist was doing a story about the high murder rate in the city and wanted to know why the city wouldn’t investigate our murder. I explained that the investigating agency is almost always the originating agency, unless something directs the investigation to a different agency. The columnist answered back that this was all some kind of coverup as we both knew the murder actually took place in the city and that the city was just trying to spin their image as best they could. Had I not been able to give out the information, I would have been stuck for a good response, but because I had the answers, I told him the following:

Nope. The murder happened in county jurisdiction, more than two cities away from the big city. The victim and his buddy were stealing a moving truck from a construction site in a rural area in the mountains, but ran out of gas and abandoned it. A nearby homeowner, who we will call Craig, called the stolen truck in to the Sheriff’s Office. Deputies came out, contacted the owner and made arrangements for the owner to pick up the truck later. The deputies told Craig that if anyone comes and messes with the truck to call 9–1–1. The next day, the victim and his buddy came back with gasoline to finish stealing the truck. Craig came out with his pistol in his hand and ordered them to stay where they were until the deputies came back and arrested them. Victim and Buddy excused themselves, climbed into their car and drove off. Craig then fired a warning shot into Victim’s back. Buddy drove for a half hour, all while Victim bled to death in the passenger seat, to the tennis courts parking lot, twenty miles from the shooting location, and dumped Victim onto the cold asphalt. You know, as good friends do.

The columnist was disappointed and his coverup story went nowhere. But I noticed a definite change in the tone of the news coverage following the arrest. From things like “Random Murder Terrorizes University” to “Suburban Man Charged In Death Trying To Prevent Burglary.”

I worked for a university police department and we took missing persons reports all the time. Most of the time, we were able to find the people fairly quickly, or they turned up right away, because they were never really missing. Sometimes they had spent the night with a “friend” that the parents didn’t know about, or had gone on an impromptu vacation, or were too overwhelmed with school work to return missed calls. Or they were just being stupid. They’re kids—it happens.

But on one occasion, a student who worked in the school bookstore failed to show up for work. For about an hour or so, his co-workers and supervisors tried to get a hold of him, with no luck. One of his friends went to his off-campus apartment and knocked, but no one came to the door. Then they called the police. One of the patrol officers took a missing persons report and contacted one of the detectives that was on duty.

The detective spoke to the book store supervisor who explained that this student was always very responsible and had never failed to show up for work. The detective contacted the student’s mother to see if she had heard from him. She had not. The detective updated her as to what was going on and then had officers look for video cameras near the missing student’s apartment. After reviewing video, provided by neighbors, the detective found video of the missing student exiting his apartment building and getting into a car that had a rideshare sticker in the window.

The detective contacted the law enforcement liaison of the rideshare company and obtained the information that the missing student had been taken to the local airport. The detective drove to the airport and met with Airport Division police officers who helped him check for video of the missing student. They found video of the missing student purchasing a ticket at a specific airline counter. The detective and airport officers went to the ticket counter for the airline and determined that the missing student purchased a one-way ticket to Maui and did not check in any luggage. The video showed that he did not have any carryon bags either. The detective confirmed that, as far as the airline could tell, the missing student had boarded the plane to Maui, which had already landed.

The detective contacted the Maui police department and explained about our missing student and communicated his concern that the student seemed to fly to Maui with no real plan to stay or return. The detective said that his biggest fear was that the student had planned to commit suicide. The detective sent screen captures to the Maui police department.

And, surprisingly, even to us, the Maui police department called us back a few hours later, with the missing student sitting in their police station. They had found him sitting on the beach and collected him for a mental health hold, and then contacted us. We reported this back to his mother, who took the next available flight to Maui to recover her son.

One of the best, real missing persons reports we investigated.

People ask me why a university would need its own police department. Well, I worked for many years in university policing. My agency provided law enforcement services to a metropolitan campus of over 33,000 people, within a large city of about a million people. At one point during the campus’s growth, the university made it mandatory that all freshmen live on campus. They made this rule to fill the notoriously empty residence halls and increase campus funding, strictly a money decision, but apparently, no one thought to check how many incoming freshmen we would have, as the number of freshmen exceeded the number of rooms available.

So, in the long tradition of throwing good money after bad, the university decided to lease an entire condominium complex about four miles from campus. The Chief of Police told the university that he would need to hire five more police officers to provide service to this area (one per shift and one extra to cover absences). The university said that they would depend on the city police to respond to any calls for service from the condo complex, as they simply couldn’t afford to staff the additional police officers.

About one month into this lease, Housing Services received a complaint from a resident at the condos. We’ll call the complainant”Brad.” Brad was on parole and was a large man, about six feet and 250 pounds. Brad was sharing a room with a smaller, nerdier roommate, whom we will call Doug. Brad said that one night, while he was asleep, Doug snuck into his bedroom, climbed into Brad’s bed, and began to fondle his genitals. Brad woke up and while his immediate response was to punch Doug into a coma, he decided violence would only send him back to prison, so he called the police.

The city police responded and their first question was, “Do you want to press charges?”

Brad thinks, well, I don’t want to go through the legal system, I’m on parole, that could backfire on me, so he says, “No, I just want this documented.”

The city police wrote a one paragraph report noting the date, time, location and that one roommate had “inappropriately touched” the other roommate. They had many, many other calls to get to, where people actually wanted to press charges.

Housing Services had come to expect police reports from us that were detailed and inquisitive, providing the information that they needed to respond to complaints, even when people did not want to press criminal charges. When Brad made his complaint, Housing Services obtained a copy of the city police report. They then asked the university Chief of Police how to get the rest of the police report narrative. He told them, “That’s it.”

Housing officials were very upset by this and couldn’t understand how a professional police agency (the most professional, if you listen to the city’s spin doctors) could write such a worthless police report. Various university police personnel explained to them at various levels and at different times, that the city police had more important things to do than to complete a full criminal investigation for an incident that was going…let’s see, checking the old, AAA roadmap of life…nowhere. By their perspective, it was a stupid call that didn’t warrant a police report at all, except that the reporting party wanted some documentation.

Housing then asked if university police officers could go and investigate this incident. The Chief said that it did not happen within our jurisdiction, that would require a change in the memorandum of understanding with the city, in which we had specifically assigned them responsibility for the condos. So Housing Services had to do their own damn work.

And that’s one (of many) reasons why universities have their own police departments.

I was a young police officer, in only about two years, but I had a degree in English Composition, so when I asked to go to Report Writing Instructor school, I was allowed to go. When I got there, the class was made up of about thirty students from various law enforcement agencies around the San Francisco Bay Area, and even a couple from out of the area. It was interesting talking to police officers from outside my direct jurisdiction and especially talking to officers from weird agencies like my own university police department. There were two officers from a parks police department, a guy from a local railroad police department, and three from a nearby military base. They said that all three had to attend because no one in their unit knew how to read, except them. I made friends with the deputy who was sitting beside me in class who came from a nearby county, that we will call Santa Cruz County.

As the class was in Emeryville (where Pixar is headquartered), after the second day of class, two deputies from another county, that we will call Scary County, invited a bunch of us to dinner in San Francisco, right across the bridge from where we were staying for class. About eight of us went and the two Scary deputies told us stories, like that their Sheriff was still upset that he couldn’t just roll around the county in a police car and collect protection money from the business owners like he used to. And that a marriage certificate is only good in the county that it is issued in. You know, “jokes.” Some of the other officers began leaving money on the table and heading back to the hotel in Emeryville. I was too young and new and didn’t realize that was a smart move here. Neither did the Santa Cruz deputy.

Finally, the server brought the bill and set it down on the table. One of the Scary deputies flashed his badge (which looked VERY similar to the SFPD badge), and said, “SFPD doesn’t pay in this establishment!”

The server, very flustered, took the bill and left. My heart was nearly beating out of my chest. I made eye contact with the Santa Cruz deputy and he nodded and took out his wallet and put three $20 bills on the table. I did the same. Thank God I carried cash back then. And then he and I left the restaurant as the manager approached the table.

As we were leaving the restaurant, we saw two SFPD officers leaning against their car on the other side of the street. I wish I could say that it was me, but it was the Santa Cruz deputy that made a beeline toward them.

“Hey, you guys might want to go in there. There might be a problem.” And then we hopped in my Toyota and drove back across the bay.

The Scary County deputies did not show up for the rest of the class.

I was working in our Administrative Division, where part of my responsibilities included recruiting for vacant positions. During one recruitment, I had a candidate that was a bit older than the rest, in his early 40s. He had previously been a police officer at an out of state university, so we were excited to see him in person and looked forward to hiring him as a new police officer. When he arrived in person, he was dressed appropriately in a suit and presented himself professionally.

We started in on the interview questions, which he answered with aplomb. His answers rang honest and knowledgeable and he was even able to answer specific questions about our university, itself. He had clearly done his homework. It seemed to me that everyone on the interview panel was as impressed as I was. Finally, at that time, HR allowed me to ask one question that was specific to the candidate’s resume.

Our candidate looked more like a truck driver or maintenance man than your run of the mill police officer, a very blue collar, down to earth type. And yet, there on his resume was a Masters Degree in Criminology. I don’t have a Masters Degree, so I was impressed and I asked him, “Please, tell me about your journey to obtain a Masters Degree.” And we all settled in for the heartwarming story of overcoming adversity, how he was supported by his family, and how he reached goals that he had believed were out of his reach.

What we got was, “Well, my church operates its own university. Because we are a Theocracy, we are not required to abide by the California Education Code. And, since I am on the Board of Trustees for the university, based on my training and experience, I bestowed upon myself, a Masters Degree in Criminology.”

I could hear the other panel members mentally scratching his name off their list. We completed the interview process and thanked him for his time. During this recruitment, candidates would get a background packet at the end of the interview, so in case they were chosen to go forward, they would have a head start on completing the thirty-page personal history statement. HR required that everyone get one, in order that we were not singling anyone out.

So as I walked him out, I handed him the packet and explained what it was for. He looked at the packet for a moment and said, “Sergeant, I just want to give you a heads up, before you start my background investigation. Just something that will probably pop up, but…My church also has its own court system and it awarded me custody of my kids following my divorce. But the Los Angeles County Superior Court awarded custody to my ex-wife, so there was a little dispute there.”

In that moment, I tried to figure out how to convince the interview panel to send him forward, so that I could do his background investigation.

No such luck.

Many years ago, when I was a young officer, only about two years on, we had a presidential candidate come to campus and give a speech. Most of the university police officers were assigned to the actual event which was a few blocks from the police station. I was the sole officer assigned to patrol, which made me the Watch Commander. I had been given very specific instructions to handle everything that I possibly could myself. I was not to call for backup from the officers on assignment unless it was an emergency. Also on campus were many officers from the large, metropolitan police department that surrounded the university, as well as agents from multiple federal agencies.

I was assigned to meet the victim of a crime at the police station to take a report. When I drove into the parking lot, I saw that all of the spaces were taken by city police cars. Hmmm. So I pulled up and carefully chose a spot that only blocked two of the city police cars in their spaces. I hopped out, told dispatch that I had arrived at the station to contact the victim and walked up to the police station.

“Hey! You!”

I turned around and saw a city police sergeant, with six service stripes on his sleeve (meaning that he had already worked for thirty years and was still on the job) pointing a finger at me.

“Yes?”

“You need to move that car. I can’t have my guys blocked in, in case they have to respond to an emergency.”

I nodded. “I understand. Same with me. Why don’t you move one of your cars out of a space and block your own vehicles in (all their cars are keyed alike, so any officer can drive them), then I can park in the space and do my job.”

“Fine.”

We stood there looking at each other. I could tell that he wasn’t happy with me.

“I’ll be inside taking a report, just let the dispatcher know when I can move my car into a space.” I turned to walk into the police station.

“Hey, you need to move your car. Now.” This time, when I looked at him, I could see that he was literally shaking in anger.

“I said I would move my car as soon as one of your officers vacated the space. Until then, I will be inside taking a report.”

The sergeant was nearly apoplectic now. “I want to talk to you Watch Commander, right fucking now.” (In his agency Watch Commanders are lieutenants, in my agency it was the most senior person on the shift).

“Yes, sir. I’m the Watch Commander. How can I help you. Would you like a complaint form?”

We had now travelled to a world that the sergeant didn’t understand. His face turned red, but I couldn’t tell how much was anger and how much was embarrassment when he realized that he held no sway over me. We stared at each other for a moment. He didn’t say anything else so I went inside. While I was talking to the crime victim in our briefing room, a city officer knocked and poked his head in the door.

“Hey, we’ve made a space for your car. Think you can move it before the sarge strokes out?” He smiled. A genuine smile.

I excused myself from the crime victim and moved my car into the empty parking space.

I was assigned to attend a training at a hotel about three hours drive from the campus, and I was happy to hear that the new sergeant would be attending with me. The new guy had come from another department and probably had more experience than I did but had encountered some roadblocks in his career, so he joined the university police. He had worked some of our special events and I got along with him well; he was a good guy and I was perfectly okay spending six hours in a car with him. We will call him Tom. To attend this training, we were going to drive down to the hotel during a work shift, in an unmarked police car. I wore my jeans and a t-shirt and sweatshirt with a cartoon character on the front; tucked my gun in the back of my waistband and my badge to my belt. Tom showed up in a short-sleeve polo and jeans; badge and gun in a fanny pack (back when they were popular). We were good to go.

I drove as we headed out of the station into rush hour traffic. It took us ten minutes to get one mile to the South Campus but we were joking around, having a good time, fat, dumb, and happy. We were stuck in traffic, inching forward, waiting for a couple of lights to change and then we would be clear and on our way. Tom, laughing at something I had said, turned and looked out the window. That’s when I heard the voice.

“What the fuck are you looking at?” It was the guy in the work truck in the next lane, literally screaming out the window.

Tom turned to look at me with a confused look on his face, then slowly looked back at the guy in the work truck. “What?”

“What the fuck are you looking at?” Screaming so loud, he’s almost unintelligible.

Tom looked over at me again, then, to my surprise, Tom turned and shouted, “I’m looking at you, asshole!”

With the guy in the work truck now in a shouting match with Tom and literally trying to climb out the window to fight with Tom, I reached up to grab the forward red light that folded into the ceiling of the car and pushed it down into the windshield. Tom watched me and looked surprised, like he had just remembered that we were on-duty cops.

“Oh yeah, that’s good,” Tom shouted.

Tom grabbed the radio and called in our car stop while I maneuvered behind the work truck and turned on the solid red light. The truck pulled over and the driver jumped out. We did too, hands on our guns. I ordered him to sit on the curb with his hands on his knees.

“I’m sorry, guys. If I’d known you were cops, I wouldn’t have bothered you guys.”

I looked at Tom and back to our guy on the curb. “And it would be perfectly okay for you to start a fight with regular people?”

Our motorist, Bob, was high on methamphetamine and driving on a suspended drivers license. Two patrol officers from the university arrived and took Bob to jail for DUI and suspended license and towed away his truck. Tom and I wrote our supplements and then got back in the car and continued on our way to the hotel. Training was…otherwise uneventful.

Nine months later, I was reading the local newspaper and saw Bob’s name. It turns out that Bob had a road rage problem with some gang members. They chased him all the way home and stabbed him to death on his front lawn.

Some lessons are harder learned than others.

I joined California law enforcement when the basic policy for a pursuit was, “We will drive as fast as we have to, as far as we have to, to catch them.” However, after I nearly shit my pants in my first high-speed pursuit of a motorcycle (who got away by driving at 80 MPH the wrong way down a one-way street) I did everything I could to avoid pursuits. But around 2010, we hired a new Chief of Police who decided that high speed pursuits were a bad idea. He explained his perspective that a high-speed pursuit is the equivalent of deadly force based on the danger that bystanders were exposed to, and after listening to his explanation, I agreed. Aiming a two-thousand pound machine down a random street full of people can be nothing but disaster. Anyway, this Chief changed our policy to prohibit vehicle pursuits unless the suspects had committed a violent felony.

On one particular mid-afternoon, I was supervising a day shift and had stopped a couple of transients at the corner of 9^th and William Streets. It was a simple alcohol infraction, so when my officers rolled by to check on me, I gave them a four fingered wave, indicating that I was “Code 4” or no further assistance needed. I completed my notes, chatting with the two homeless people when one of my officers (Tommy) radioed that he was being flagged down regarding a theft of beer from the liquor store at 8^th and Williams Streets.

Tommy got back on the radio and put out a description of the suspect’s car and reported that they were headed northbound on 8^th Street toward San Salvador Street. At this point, I was back in my car and driving northbound on 9^th Street when I saw a car shoot through the stop signs at the intersection of 9^th and San Salvador Streets. My first instinct when I saw this car was to hit the gas and turn on all my lights to go after him, however when I reached the intersection, I saw Tommy pull around the corner from 8^th Street, slowly, without lights and siren, and then I realized that this was the people who had stolen the beer. I immediately pulled to the curb and turned off my lights to be clear that I was not in pursuit.

Tommy then radioed in that the suspects were turning southbound on 10^th Street. But they didn’t. Entering the intersection on a red light at a high rate of speed, they hit a Cable TV van, sending it ass over teakettle down the street to where it ended up on its roof. The suspect car spun in circles, sending broken glass in all directions. Another of my officers (Tony) arrived on scene from another direction, and seeing the crash happened, called on the radio, “TC (traffic collision). TC at 10^th and San Salvador. We need fire and ambulance at this location.”

I hit the gas and drove up on the suspect car as the suspects started to climb out. I pulled my handgun and keyed up my radio called, “10-96 (high risk pedestrian stop-send assistance) on two.” I then ordered the two men to stay in their car until Tommy and Tony arrived to handcuff the two men and place them in different cars. A fourth officer (Mike) arrived to check on the driver of the Cable TV van. Now my entire shift was stuck in an intersection because a couple of guys couldn’t be bothered to pay for a case of beer. But up until this moment, I didn’t think about my dispatcher and what he was going through.

Adam, in dispatch, had handled my pedestrian stop, but I hadn’t cleared that stop. Adam now believed that something had gone wrong with my pedestrian stop on 9^th and Williams Streets and I needed assistance. And then the last radio traffic he had gotten from Tommy was that his suspects were headed southbound on 10^th Street. Adam believed he was also managing a pursuit down 10^th Street and that Tommy needed help for that. And then he believed that Tony had gotten into a collision trying to assist in Tommy’s pursuit.

It wasn’t until he began asking me how many city police officers I wanted to assist that I realized that something was wrong. Why do we need city police, we have everything covered. It took several exchanges between me and Adam for us to get on the same page as to what was going on.

So, a non-pursuit policy didn’t really help us on this occasion, but overall, it is still a good idea. Almost as good an idea to call in all your activity so that the dispatchers know what you’re doing.

A lot of police officers are apprehensive of DUI arrests because they tend to involve a lot of paperwork for a fairly minor violation, and as I have said before, cops tend toward laziness. DUI arrests require a regular police report, a vehicle report for towing the car, a DMV form for suspending the driver’s license, the occasional accident report (three forms), a booking sheet, an arrest affidavit, and sometimes, a property form. And then there are the crime lab forms. God forbid the person refuses to give a breath or blood sample (urine samples are no longer an option) and you then have to write up a search warrant to take blood. DUI arrests can be a lot of work for a low-level violation, but DUIs cause massive carnage in our country every year. So far this year, we are at one DUI related death every 52 minutes in the United States, or about 10,000 per year (one third of all traffic fatalities). When I first became a police officer in 1990, DUI related fatalities exceeded 15,000 per year and reached almost half of all traffic fatalities. I have never had an ethical problem with making a lot of DUI arrests, plus, they tend to be fun.

When I make an arrest for a DUI and there are passengers in the car, I try to obtain identification for the passengers, as well. They are witnesses, after all. And it seemed to me that almost every middle-aged, upper middle- class male that I arrested for DUI had a female passenger. However, there is a box on the booking paperwork that asks for an emergency contact for the arrestee, just in case they become sick or injured while in custody. I would ask these men who to put in this box and invariably they would say, “My wife.”

“Is that the woman that was in the car with you?”

Wide-eyed shock in response. “Uh…no.”

“Okay. You realize that if you go to court on this, we are going to call her as a witness, right?”

Same deer in headlights expression. I never went to court on any of these cases.

Several times, everyone in the car was drunk, but intoxicated passengers would ask if they could drive the car so that it wouldn’t get towed. I would give them the breathalyzer which would show that they could not legally drive, and then I would tell them, “No.”

But sometimes, when trying to give people a break, we would allow them to call a sober person to come pick up them and the car. The sober person would arrive, we would hand them the keys to the car and then drive away. But we aren’t stupid, we would have an officer waiting around the corner, and when the car went by with one of the drunken passengers behind the wheel, we have now made two DUI arrests from the same car. And this time we towed it away.

There were times during night shift where I would just park at the edge of campus and keep an eye on the riff-raff visiting the nearby Jack in the Box restaurant which was open 24 hours. On one occasion, while I was parked there, I saw all the cars stop for a red light and then go on the green. Except for one car. It just sat there in the lane. The driver opened her door and fell out onto the asphalt, picked herself up and staggered around the car. I watched the passenger slide into the driver’s seat and promptly pass out while the original driver struggled to open the passenger side door which may have been locked.

I had seen enough. I pulled onto the roadway and blocked the car with my car, just in case the new driver woke up and I called for backup. The first driver had crumpled to the ground beside the passenger door, so I placed her in handcuffs and walked her to the curb, then went back and hooked up the new driver and walked her up to the curb.

Now, for me, this is the funny part of the story. I was working this shift to cover another supervisor who was on vacation. When the two officers from the shift arrived, I asked one of them to tow the car and the other one to take the two prisoners and put them in the holding cells at the police station. These two officers then began peppering me with questions as to my observations, my probable cause, the charges that I placed them under arrest for. I was confused. Did they not think that I knew how to make a DUI arrest? Were they questioning my abilities, thinking perhaps I had lost my mind? I told them, “Hey, just tow the car and take the two prisoners to the station.”

They stared at me for several seconds, then the more senior officer began telling the younger officer, “So, you’re going to write in your report that the sergeant made the car stop…”

I laughed. Loud. It was funny. I realized that they were so used to their regular supervisor making arrests and then giving them the report that they thought I was having them do all the work. “No, no, no,” I said. “I’m writing the report. Everything. Just tow the car and park the two of them in the holding cells.”

They both looked very relieved and took care of my requests. And just to be clear, I only made one DUI arrest, the second “driver” I arrested for drunk in public, since she didn’t actually do any driving.

Now, there were always the DUI drivers who were driving down the Light Rail Train tracks instead of the roadway, or the multiple people I arrested while I was on bicycle patrol, but the women who offered sexual favors in exchange for being released were a fairly regular occurrence. One woman, who had been driving like a pinball careening off the concrete support columns of a university parking garage, looked around at the officer that had stopped her, me (the backup officer), the four police cadets and two parking officers and offered to give the primary officer a blowjob if he could just let her go. He shook his head and then looked at me and said, “It couldn’t possibly occur to her that this might work unless it’s worked before.”

I had one shift where I had a civilian ride-along in the car with me, when I pulled over a car for driving 80 MPH in a 35 MPH zone. When the car stopped, we both watched the driver and passenger switch places. This was another occasion where I had the passenger arrested for drunk in public, because he could barely give us his name. But the driver, a young woman with a thick, Irish accent, ended up in the back of my car, arrested for DUI. On the way to jail, she asked, “Can’t I just give you a blowjob and you let me go?”

I laughed. “Why would you even ask that when I have a civilian ride-along in the car?”

“That’s okay, I’ll blow him, too.”

My ride-along looked at me with a questioning look. I shook my head. No one is getting a blowjob.

Finally, there was the young woman, who while in the back of the car, kept asking very personal questions about me. I kept my answers very vague. When we arrived down at the jail, the correctional officer began speaking to my prisoner and asked her, “So, how’s your night going?” (That must be a joke for the COs).

She sighed. “I finally meet a really nice guy, and he takes me to jail.”

Now, even if I found her attractive, what kind of foundation would that establish for a relationship? Eeeek.

Every year, the county where I worked engaged in a type of DUI reduction program called “Avoid the 13.” This was for the original thirteen police agencies involved in the program, but by the time I had become a police officer, the program had actually grown to seventeen agencies, including my university police department. I took part as often as I could and received awards for making more than five DUI arrests during the 22-day program.

On one particular DUI patrol shift, where my whole assignment was to make DUI arrests, I made my first arrest at just about 9:30 PM, after stopping a car for driving the wrong way on a one-way street. During my investigation, I determined that the suspect had just come from a Christmas party at a local restaurant, which happened to be situated between the university and the freeway. When I was done booking this prisoner into jail, I returned to campus just after 11:30 PM. As I was driving back to the police station, I stopped another car driving the wrong way on a one-way street. This turned out to be my second DUI arrest of the night, and it happened to come from the same Christmas party. I finished booking that prisoner and drove back toward the police station at about 1:30 AM the next morning, when, as you might have guessed, I stopped a car for driving the wrong way on a one-way street. This was my third and final DUI arrest of the shift, and it also came from the same Christmas party.

I don’t know if they were all using Apple Maps or if the restaurant gave bad directions to the freeway, or if the Beat Gods had simply felt that I was worthy of this honor. Either way, it worked out for everybody. I got to set a record and all those people got home alive, just later than they had expected.

Happy Holidays, everyone. Stay Safe.