I was a university student, majoring in English, preparing to be a high school English teacher, and working part time at the University Police Department. On this particular night, I was working in the dispatch center, helping out the only dispatcher on duty by handing out equipment to police officers and other student assistants at the public window. We had a new sergeant on duty; he had come from another local university, only because it was a large, famous, private university it was far more well-funded than the public university that I worked for. But as many other police officers who had left that agency called the private university “The Evil Empire,” I had to assume that excellent funding did not equate to a comfortable working environment.
So I was standing at the window when the new sergeant came in, joining me, the dispatcher, an officer using the typewriter (Yes, typewriter. This was before computers. Actually, I think we had one of those cute little Apple MacIntosh towers), and at least one other student assistant. The dispatch center was actually fairly small, so this was a large crowd for the room, but it was early in the shift and we hadn’t started working in earnest, yet.
The new sergeant, we’ll call him “Ted,” moved to the space between the two dispatch consoles, which put him right next to me, him facing into the room and me standing right behind him, waiting in case anyone came to the window. Sgt. Ted was friendly and jovial and checked in with each of the employees, calling us all by name and chatting for a few minutes, earning small degrees of respect each minute. Sgt. Ted also told excellent stories from his time as an officer in Orange County and at The Evil Empire. Stories like the time officers chased a drunk suspect, on foot, all the way to the beach where the man ran off the cliff and fell to the beach below. The man shouted, “Call me an ambulance.” Sgt. Ted said one of the officers on the scene shouted back, “You’re an ambulance.”
This night, as he stood there in front of me, he was telling a story about a dispute between the Orange County Chiefs of Police and the local Border Patrol Commander. As he told the story, I looked at the gear on his belt. Sgt. Ted carried a large, Smith & Wesson revolver, even though all the other officers at our agency carried semi-automatics, so this was a curiosity to me. I examined the revolver, sitting in the holster and then moved on to looking at the other gear. I recognized all the gear, including the speed-loaders at the front of his belt. But there were two small leather boxes with front snaps on the back of his belt, behind the revolver, that I didn’t recognize. As Sgt. Ted told his story, I figured that I would just surreptitiously unsnap one of the boxes and glance inside. I reached out and unsnapped the box.
And the box flopped open and bullets spilled all over the floor.
As my face flushed hot in embarrassment, I dropped to the floor and began scooping up bullets. I expected that I might be shouted at but that being laughed at was a certainty. But it didn’t happen.
“Oh, Wes,” Sgt. Ted said, matter of factly. “You found my drop pouches.” He turned to the others in the room, who had not started to laugh at me yet, and asked, “Have any of you seen drop pouches?”
Even the other officer in the room, a young man, not much older than me, shook his head. Sgt. Ted, allowing me to collect all the bullets on the floor, continued. “So drop pouches contain extra bullets in case I go through both speed loaders in a gunfight. I just reach back,” and he demonstrated with the empty drop pouch. “Unsnap, and let the bullets fall right into my hand. Then I can load them right into the gun.”
I handed him the bullets and he replaced them in the drop pouch. “Thanks for getting those, Wes,” he said. And that was the last I heard of the incident. Sgt. Ted was only with us for a few weeks before the Command Staff sent him away to look for another agency. I don’t know why he was dismissed, because in the few weeks that I worked with him, he made a significantly positive impact on me and helped me form the basis of how I supervised my staff when I became a sergeant; treat people with respect and always take the opportunity to teach them something new (or old, as the case may be), acknowledge mistakes, but don’t overreact. When I look back on my law enforcement career, all the things that I did right and all the things that I did wrong, I feel like the good outweighs the bad. And Sgt. Ted? I hope I made you proud.