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  • The Felony Rush

    The tenth and perhaps last in a series from Sgt. Adam Plantinga’s excellent 400 Things Cops Know: Street-Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman:

    Once the fleeing vehicle has finally come to a halt, your training dictates that you then conduct a high risk stop. You park your squad car in a position of tactical advantage and order the occupants out in a systematic, cautious fashion. But cops being cops, that’s not often how it goes. Instead of the high risk stop, you get the felony rush. Or the blue swarm, or the polyester pile, all different terms to describe cops, guns drawn, who run directly at the target car, sometimes in each other’s crossfire, sometimes jumping up on the hood of the fleeing vehicle, in order to yank the occupants out through any available open window, their adrenaline so high they can’t wait, like a kid tearing open her Christmas presents on December 24th. These same cops have the tendency to fade away once the excitement is over, and only the lengthy police reports loom. Everyone likes to go to the party but no one wants to clean up.

    I might to do a few more of these. But then that’s it. There are still 390 left in the book, and I’m not going to go through all of them. So buy the damn book!

  • Paperwork

    The ninth in a series from Sgt. Adam Plantinga’s excellent 400 Things Cops Know: Street-Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman:

    Most critical incidents you’re involved in take anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes to resolve themselves. The paperwork that follows takes hours. You’ve got the incident report, the clearance report, the inventory forms, the DA sheets, the arrest report, the prisoner statement, and supplemental reports for all witness interviews. Then the reports are signed by the lieutenant, copied, stapled and routed. But not all reports are copied in the same quantities or colors. The liaison office receives an extra clearance report. The incident report requires a pink copy that stays at the district and the clearance report, which was originally green, needs white copies that are sent to the DA with the green original routed to Central Records. The arrest report needs six copies, one for the booker, one for the captain, three for the county jail, and two for the DA. Some copies are one-sided. Some are two. Some are collated. Some are stamped. You stare at the Xerox machine dully and try to remember these clerical vagaries while at the same time thinking about how Baretta never had to do any of this crap.

  • Everywhere signs

    The eighth in a series from Sgt. Adam Plantinga’s excellent 400 Things Cops Know: Street-Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman:

    Police stations are papered in signs. Some offer guidance, like the one that says: In the absence of detailed instruction, please do the right thing. Others suggest a certain approach to life like the large No Sniveling placard. There are signs for district BBQs. Someone always seems to be selling a gun or a boat. Cops advertise their side jobs out to other cops—services in home remodeling, mortgage services, and party planning. The police assembly bears a large communicable disease chart to remind you what’s out there, a chart which includes tuberculosis and antibiotic-resistant staph infections as well as more exotic maladies, like Lyme Disease, pinworms, and whooping cough. The chart kindly reminds you that Hepatitis can last up to seven days outside the body. There are so many contagious diseases that can be passed from prisoner to officer that it makes you wonder why anyone in law enforcement bothers to come into work at all.

    My favorite sign, as I’ve said before, was the one that said: “Unlike the citizens of the Eastern District, you are required to work for your government check.”

  • Sometimes it’s just a job

    The seventh in a series from Sgt. Adam Plantinga’s excellent 400 Things Cops Know: Street-Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman:

    This job can turn sour for a variety of reasons. Maybe you got hurt in your last fight with a suspect. Maybe you have enough pending citizen complaints that it seems your solid, aggressive police work is actually being punished; you wonder if being a proactive officer is even worth the hassle. Perhaps a sergeant is breathing down your neck or your squad partner is good for nothing. Whatever the reason, you can adopt a lousy attitude rather quickly.

    You start to show up at assignments not because you want to make anything better, but because you have to. Then you do just enough at that assignment not to get written up or fired. You look at citizens with a growing Us versus Them disgust, resentful of a community quick to criticize the police for being heavy-handed, but at the same time not exactly lining up themselves to take a job where there is a reasonable chance of getting shot at and an excellent chance of working weekends and holidays.

    You will order zippers on your uniform shirts in addition to the buttons not because you want zippers, but because it will cost the city a few extra dollars per shirt so screw ’em. Or when the district captain comes into roll call and asks people to come up with ideas to stop auto thefts in the area, you might grumble, “I’ll take the assignments dispatch gives me, but you can’t order me to have an idea.” Or when you and your co-workers aren’t getting the off-days you request, you’ll band together and call in sick, the fabled “blue flu,” leaving the citizens short on protection, and leaving your fellow officers, who did choose to come in, short on backup.

    These attitudes are most prevalent among veteran officers. As a newer cop, you look at them and wonder if you’re seeing your future.

    At the same time, despite the challenges that come with the job, it’s good to keep in mind that this is the profession you chose. Not much point in bellyaching about it. During tough economic times when workers are being laid off across the country, you have a position that will not be outsourced any time soon. You are in an industry where business is always booming. Until the crime-fighting robot is perfected, you have plenty of job security.

  • There are good people, too.

    The sixth in a series from Sgt. Adam Plantinga’s excellent 400 Things Cops Know: Street-Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman:

    There are good people in the neighborhood. They work hard. They try to raise their kids right. They’ll even help you push if your squad car gets stuck in a snow bank. You see them out there, tending to their lawns, cleaning the broken bottles off the sidewalk in front of their house, shaking their heads as a car with chrome rims drives by, the bass turned up so loud it rattles the stemware in their kitchen.

    Some of them have lived in the same house for 20, 30, 40 years and now look around and don’t recognize the street they grew up on or the people that live there. The block has taken a turn for the worse and they’re talking about moving. They don’t want to move, mind you. But maybe they’d rather live in a place where they can watch their grandkids play without having to worry about stray bullets or vicious dogs. Maybe they want to look out the window and see kids racing each other on bikes instead of some teen in an oversized I Got That Snow T-shirt doing a hand-to-hand drug deal. You can’t blame them for wanting out. You don’t live there. You wouldn’t make it. Sure, you patrol those streets and alleys but at the end of your shift, you go home. That makes you merely a tourist. Not a guide, but a guest.

  • Cops and fitness

    The fifth in a series from Sgt. Adam Plantinga’s excellent 400 Things Cops Know: Street-Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman:

    There are uniformed cops on the street who are grossly overweight. Their prominent bellies make their equipment belt hang so low it seems inaccessible to them and they can’t chase a suspect more than a block without collapsing. To them, a five-foot tall fence they need to scale might as well be five hundred feet.

    In my current department, it is said that we have an officer who once dropped his gun and was too fat to bend down and pick it up so he just waited until a concerned citizen came along who retrieved his firearm for him. How can this be? Chalk it up to years of less than salubrious living, cumulative stress, drive-through Chicken Fingers, and indifference.

    There are incentives for staying in shape on some police departments in terms of extra off-time awarded, but there are certainly no penalties, so once you’re out of the academy, you technically never have to exercise another day in your life. Is it fair to the general public that they are protected by such gelatinous first responders? No, it’s not. But police unions tend to have a lot of juice, and they would never go for a system that penalized overweight

    But even given that, you know that some of the more rotund officers are among the best investigators. A detective with 20 confidential informants who can pick up the phone after a fresh homicide and get a line on the murderer in ten minutes is worth a dozen Cross Fit uniformed officers, even if he is packing 75 extra pounds and wheezes frequently.

    But if you are someone who regularly responds to hot calls, some basic level of fitness is necessary. If you throw one punch and then are immediately ready for a water break, it’s time for some soul-searching. You have to ask yourself, if you were in physical peril and called the police, would you want an officer like you to be the first one on scene? If your answer is a resounding no, it’s time to get off the street and into police administration, investigations, or maybe retail.

  • Youth: The future (prison) leaders of tomorrow

    The fourth in a series from Adam Plantinga’s excellent 400 Things Cops Know: Street-Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman:

    As a cop, it’s easy to get discouraged about the state of today’s youth. You don’t see much of the honors student bound for Dartmouth, because she doesn’t do anything that would cause her to come into contact with you. You mostly see the teen hustler wearing a jacket with dollar signs written on it gearing up to break The Ten Commandments but good. You patrol neighborhoods where toddlers chew absently on cigarette butts from the ground and 2-year-olds with matted hair and jam-smeared faces play unsupervised in the street. You see fifth graders with girls’ names tattooed on their arms. You talk to teenagers whose dad is locked up and whose mom is strung out on dope. The kid’s breakfast is a bag of chips and his lunch is a butter sandwich—which is exactly what it sounds like—and his friends are all just like him and some of them are carrying guns. Does it really come as a shock that these young people tend to fall out on the lawless end? They’re just little criminals waiting to become big criminals. The shock would be if they turned out halfway normal. You marvel at the few that make it. It’s the equivalent of muscling their way out of quicksand.

  • On Fighting

    The third in a series from Adam Plantinga’s 400 Things Cops Know: Street-Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman:

    People give off plenty of indicators that they’re looking to fight. Some precursors are obvious, like the clenched fists and the readjustment of the feet into an attack stance. Others are more subtle, like the lowering of the chin to instinctively protect their neck, or the rigid setting of the jaw or brow. Some people dry their hands on their pants to prep themselves for an assault. Many of these indicators are reflexive. People don’t even know they’re doing them. They’re tells, like poker players have. So it helps to pay attention to these signs and signals because if you see them coming from the guy you’re about to arrest, take your baton out and call for backup, because he’s not going quietly. He’s going to make you work for it.

  • On Gunshot Wounds

    The second in a series from Adam Plantinga’s 400 Things Cops Know: Street-Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman:

    The seriousness of a gunshot wound depends on a host of factors, including the type and caliber of round, the distance the bullet travels, and if anything is present to slow the bullet down (a wall, a door, another person) before the moment of impact. But it’s a given that anything into the spine is a disaster and close contact handgun rounds to the face can leave the victim’s molars spilled out on the ground, or can blast off half of their skull, leaving a conical section of bone and skin that resembles the head of a unicorn. Other than that, anything goes.

    Bullets rarely maintain a straight path. They loop and spin and sometimes follow the curve of the body. A shot into the arm can be “through and through” or it can ricochet off the elbow bone and explode the heart. A bullet entering the lower torso can rip through the intestines and cause lifelong complications or end up lodged in soft tissue without any lasting damage. Many gunshot victims in the latter category are released from the hospital the same day they entered, as it is often medically safer to leave the bullet right where it is. A shot in the buttocks can be a painful but ultimately colorful tale for the shooting victim to share with others, or it can result in an artery being pierced, causing the victim to bleed to death, something one of my sergeants witnessed years ago and to this day still cannot quite believe.

    I spoke with a man once who had recently attempted suicide by shooting himself just behind the left ear. The bullet caromed off the front of his skull, and exited out the top of his head, leaving him dazed but very much alive. I could still see the corresponding C-shaped scar on his scalp. I once investigated a shooting where a round entered through a woman’s back, shattered the shoulder blade, and came to rest perched on top of her right clavicle, jutting out like a marble without breaking the surface of the skin. As a police officer, you look at bullet wounds with both respect and wonder because you know that for a gunshot victim, the difference between life and death can be the narrowest of margins.

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