I started out the week by working on a holiday. I had a partner for two nights and moved back to my old beat.
Since I have a little bit of seniority on the department, I have the opportunity to be off on some holidays. The holidays are staffed by volunteers and then by seniority, with the least senior people getting ordered in to work on the holiday. I was given the option to have it off, but I figured that I would work it and earn some easy comp time in the process. After roll call, I walked to the parking garage and found my shop (our term for patrol car). One of the first things that I was trained to do after finding my shop is check the backseat for weapons or contraband. The last thing that we want to happen is for a prisoner to leave a weapon in the backseat and for the next prisoner to find it and possibly use it. So, I opened up the back door of the shop and began my inspection of the backseat. Sitting on the floorboard on the driver’s side of the backseat was a crack pipe. Wonderful. That means that a prisoner had a pipe in his possession when he was put into the backseat and then left the pipe in the backseat. It also means that the officer who put the prisoner into the backseat did not check the backseat after getting the prisoner out, which is another thing we are trained to do.
So, it was now up to me to make the necessary phone calls, tag the crack pipe into the narcotics division to be destroyed, fill out the paperwork, and write the found narcotics report. I tried to contact the officer who had last driven the shop in an effort to find out the owner of the crack pipe, but was not able to get in touch with them in the middle of the night. A few days later, I was able to talk to the officer. They said that the only prisoner they had in the backseat during their shift was a prisoner that they picked up from the city jail. They had to get the prisoner warned at the county jail and then returned the prisoner to jail. What that means is that the prisoner had been searched by no less than the arresting officer, a jailer, and the transporting officer and they all missed the crack pipe that was in the prisoners possession. Crazy. It is no wonder that every few years we receive mandatory training in searching techniques.
I was notified by the desk Sergeant Tuesday night that I was going back to my old beat. The one for one switch was approved by the LT. I am still on late side, but I am back in the district that I have mainly worked in for the last 10 years. Tuesday, was my last night riding north of the bayou. The desk Srg asked B and I to ride up there because quite a few people were off in the district that night. We were notified at roll call that most of our communications were down. Our police radios and mobile computers were not working. There was a fire department channel that we get on our police radios that was still functioning, so all of patrol for the entire city was working off of one channel. We normally work off of 10 different channels. Only in-progress calls were getting dispatched until the other channels came back online. The only other time that I have seen the radios go down was during Tropical Storm Allison when everything flooded. The radio channels came back up relatively soon, but the computers did not until very late in the shift.
A few hours into the shift, B and I were dispatched to a criminal mischief of a vehicle. Once we arrived, the owner told us that he was awakened by his car alarm. He looked out a window and saw two males fleeing on bicycles. Since his truck has been burglarized a couple of times in the past, he has installed surveillance cameras. He took us inside and showed us the footage of the incident. His vehicle was parked out on the street. Two males pedalled up and punched out the door lock. Then they entered the vehicle and started searching for something to steal. After looking around for about 15 seconds, the vehicle alarm sounded and they fled. What made the incident interesting, was the owner’s question for us. After showing us the video, he lamented that this had happened to him and his neighbors numerous times over the past few months. He installed lights and cameras and a vehicle alarm, but it keeps happening. He asked, “What else can I do?” I thought, how about park in the garage?
When B and I pulled up, I noticed that the house was connected to a perfectly good two car garage. Maybe, just maybe, the garage was built to hold two vehicles. It would stand to reason that if your truck was secured in your garage instead of parked out on the street, that it would not get damaged or broken into every few weeks out on the street. I understood his frustration, and I would love to put some BMV suspects in jail, but in the immortal words of Jerry Maguire: Help me, help you.
Wednesday night found me back in my old beat. It was a particularly slow night with nothing really going on.
I was dispatched to a disturbance early in the shift on Thursday. A male was banging on the door of an apartment and would not leave. Myself and another unit arrived and found the male. He said that his friend lived in the apartment and that he had left $500 in the apartment under the carpet. We knocked on the door and found out that they were, in fact, friends. We then asked if we could check for the money and were not able to find it. The male who lost the money told us that it was no big deal. He was not worried about the $500. He said that he would leave and would not bother the male in the apartment any longer. We were not called out the apartment again that night. Once again we were not getting the whole story. Who leaves $500 in someone else’s apartment? And when the money is gone says, “no big deal?” This issue was not resolved, but it was postponed for later.
The rest of the shift was spent checking loud noise calls and illegal parking calls. In the past we have had a big problem with wrecker drivers calling in illegal parking calls in hopes of getting the tow. Seems like a conflict of interest to me. The frequency of the calls by the wrecker drivers had slowed down dramatically, but it is starting to pick back up again.
I was asked by my supervisor if I would allow another officer who was coming back from a medical issue to ride with me for a few days. The LT wanted to make sure that the officer was ok and fit for duty. I had evaluated the officer about a year earlier and got along with him, so I agreed as long as I had no liability. That was agreed to and Friday night was O’s first night back on the street in over 6 months. It was Friday, so I was the print unit. This would allow O to ease back into night shift patrol. We checked by with a few officers and then were called to take some photos. I took a few pictures of a male and female. The male had assaulted the female at a bar. The female had fought back so the male had some injuries as well. Turned out that they had been married and the male did not appreciate the female coming into the bar with a new man. He went to jail for assault. The rest of the shift was uneventful.
That concludes another week on patrol.
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