The week on patrol, August 1-5, 2011

We were short handed late in the week, but the call volume remained relatively low until Friday. I rode with A three nights and was the print unit on Friday.

Monday was my first night back in 10 days. We had nine units in the district, but two of them had hospital assignments, so we really only had seven units to run calls. My first call was a check by. N and K were dispatched to an assault in progress. The call slip said that a mother was beating her children. It was a regular call. I have been to the apartment at least three times in the last month. The complex has thin walls and the woman is loud. Each time the call has been unfounded. This time was no different. The kids had been crying and yelling, but not from a beating. Instead of beating the kids, she makes them stay in a sitting position (like if they were in a chair so they are supporting their body weight) against a wall or in the up position of a push-up. When she first opened the door, we saw one of the kids in the sitting position. All of the kids were fine, no marks or bruising, and they all had the same exact story. The woman was tired of us coming out and we are as well.

My next call was a CIT (crazy person) disturbance with a weapon. The caller was the crazy person. She claimed that a man with a small gun was sawing up through her floor. The only problem was that she lived on the first floor of her apartment complex. So, unless the man was a tunneler or a mole, she had nothing to worry about. We talked to her for a little while and did a little checking around to make her feel better. She was not a danger to herself or others, so we left her there.

My last call of the night was a disturbance. This was the fourth time tonight that the same complainant had called the police. Initially he called to report that he had been robbed and his vehicle had been stolen. The next three calls were to tell us that same basic information. He always added a little something like he had just seen his vehicle in the area or the guy that robbed him was standing on the corner. The problem was it was not a legitimate robbery. The guy had given his vehicle to someone in exchange for crack and wanted us to get it back for him. Outstanding.

A and I rode together on Tuesday. We had nine units in the district. Our first two calls were loud noises in another beat. Each time we were disregarded from the call when a beat unit became available. Nice. We were disregarded from our third call as well. We were dispatched to a traffic hazard. A car was disabled in an intersection. As we were enroute, another unit got on the air and said that he would take care of it.

We were finally dispatched to a call that we had to run, no one disregarded us. The horror. We were sent to a disturbance at a CVS. A homeless person went inside and was refusing to pay for items. The homeless person left the store before we arrived without stealing anything. The store personnel wanted us to find him and tell him to not come back to the store. We found him across the street at a gas station. I told him not to return to the CVS. He asked why and I said because they do not want you there. His exact response was, " Well, you can tell them to go f@&$ themselves." Then he stormed off. It was amusing.

Our last call was a person down. An elderly male was laying against the side of a business. An ambulance arrived first and they decided to transport him to a hospital. He had his medication with him, but he was disoriented and did not know where he was.

We had six units on Wednesday night. A and I rode together again. Our first call was a major accident.Three wreckers, an ambulance, and ourselves looked for it and could not find the accident. It was called in by an anonymous person who did not leave a name or call back number. Therefore, there was nothing else for us to do. We cleared it GOA, gone on arrival. 

We ticketed two illegally parked cars after being dispatched to the scene. A wrecker driver had called in the illegal parking. Then we checked by on an accident with a disturbance and were disregarded by the primary officer as soon as we arrived. Our next call was another major accident. Once again, no one could find it and we cleared it GOA. Our last call was an alarm in an upscale shopping area. It was false.

Thursday night we had 8 units. A and I rode together again. Right after roll call we checked by with N & K on a sexual assault of a juvenile in government housing. While the mother was at the store, her 15 year old daughter let 3 boys into the apartment, a 17, 15, and 12 year old. The 15 year old girl promptly disappeared into the bathroom with the 17 and 15 year old boys and did who knows what. While that was going on, the 12 year old boy cornered the 15 year old girl's two younger sisters, who are 10 and 12 years old. The 12 year old boy then pulled down his pants and told the girls to "suck his stuff." The 12 year old girl then grabbed a phone and said that she was calling her mom. That scared all of the boys and they ran out of the apartment. The 15 year old girl ran out as well before the mom got home. The young girls did not know where the boys lived. We drove around a little but did not see anyone out walking around.

Then we checked by with W on a disturbance at a hotel. It turned out to be a cluster. The call slip said that a husband had assaulted his mother-in-law. The family is from Phoenix and are here because some one is getting treated for cancer. There were at least 10 people staying in one regular hotel room. After hearing everyone's story, which were all different, we did not think that the mother-in-law was assaulted. However, the male suspect, told us that his daughter had gone missing the day before and that he had located her. She is 14 and was with a 20 year old male. Then we found out that he had a fight with the 20 year old male when he found them together. The 20 year old started telling the father what he had done to the daughter and that she was no longer a virgin. Then the 20 year old took out a large screwdriver to use as a weapon. The father got a bat out of the truck. Do not bring a screwdriver to a bat fight. The 20 year old was not there to give his side of the story. The father told me that he has 10 kids with three different women. His oldest daughter got pregnant at 15. We were not the primary unit, thankfully. This one was all over the place. The primary unit ended up supplementing the missing person report and then generating a new report to document everything else. No one went to jail.

Our next call was checking by with M on a person down. A male was passed out in the grass just off of a major street. An ambulance arrived right after we did. We tried to wake him using a sternum rub. At first it was ineffective. With a little more pressure, it started to have the desired effect. I would rub, and he would scream. We would ask questions and tell him to open his eyes and he would scream and spew profanities. This went on for a few minutes. The ambulance crew had seen enough and realized that our jail would not take him since he could not walk. So they grabbed their stretcher. We picked him up, placed him nicely onto the stretcher, and secured him to the stretcher. He had some minor injuries and did not have a wallet in his pocket. To us it looked like he might have been tossed from a vehicle, but he was so uncooperative, there was nothing else that we could do.

Then all was quiet until 6 AM when we were dispatched to a disturbance. The call slip said that a young male wearing shorts and no shirt had just walked into someone's house. Wonderful. We arrived at the house and the female caller met us on the street. She said that he was still there. We walked up to the house and found the male sitting in a chair on the porch smoking a cigarette with the female's boyfriend. A took the lead and started asking him questions. It went nowhere quickly. A asked him where he lived and he responded with "earth." He would not tell us his name. He gave us at least 6 different addresses. At one point he said that he was homeless (he smelled homeless), then said that he lived with his parents. He had no idea where he was or how he got there. Then he got a little belligerent and we thought that we were going to have to fight him. Then he calmed down again. He seemed to be cycling up and down. We wanted to get him to his parents if possible. That seemed like the best alternative. He gave us an address that was close and a description of the house. We took him to that address and the description he gave us matched the house. We were hopeful. Our hopes were dashed when no one answered the door. He continued to be evasive and gave us no real information. We had enough. From the way he looked and the answers that he gave us, it could be easily articulated that he was high on some substance. So, we put him in jail for public intoxication. Once we arrived at the jail, he decided to cooperate and gave me all of his real information that I was able to verify on the computer. The entire call was a little surreal.

Friday night I was the print unit. I checked by with A on a person down and then I was asked to check by to lift some prints from a vehicle that had been burglarized. The owner of the vehicle had left his briefcase in the backseat and then gone inside to eat at a restaurant. Shockingly, when he returned to his vehicle, the window had been smashed and the briefcase was gone. The primary unit asked me to try to lift a few prints from the outside of the vehicle. I lifted a few, but they were all smudged. Prints on the outside only prove that a person touched the vehicle, not that they burglarized it. But I did not mind making the effort.

Then from 2:30 AM until the end of the shift, things went a little crazy. There were drunks, disturbances, loud noises, alarms, people down, with everything else mixed in as well. Some of the calls were interesting, and some were not. A few of the interesting went like this. I was the first to arrive on a person down to find a male shirtless passed out in the hallway of an apartment complex. His shirt was a few years away from him. The call slip said that the male was trying all of the door handles in the hallway. I used my flashlight to give him a sternum rub in an attempt to rouse him. He stirred a little, so I rubbed a little harder. This did the trick and he opened his eyes. He sat up and I noticed that he had a tattoo on his back, the logo of the NY Yankees. Interesting. He kept trying to stand and I kept having to force him to stay seated where we wanted him. We asked him where he lived and he said, "right there." Over and over, no matter how we asked him, he gave the same answer. We asked for street name, street number, apartment number, roommates, and he kept saying "right there." That earned him a trip to jail. He had just turned 21, and apparently had not yet figured out how to handle his alcohol.

I volunteered for another person down call because all of the beat units were tied up on other calls. This one involved a male passed out behind the wheel of a car. It was called in by a wrecker driver who was hoping to get a tow out of the deal. I found the male and he was passed out but breathing behind the wheel of a car. The motor was on, but the car was in park. The vehicle was parked legally in a parking lot. After consulting with a supervisor, I decided to let the male sleep. I had no way to know if he was drunk, but if he was and he decided to stop in a parking lot to sleep it off, I was not going to punish him for that decision.

My last call was a picture call. J and W called and asked me to take a few photos of their scene and suspect. They had been dispatched to a burglary of a motor vehicle in progress. They were searching the area and saw a male that matched the suspect description from the call slip. They jumped out of the patrol car and the suspect took off. He ran to the nearest apartment complex and the first apartment door he tried was open and he went inside and slammed the door shut. J was right behind him in pursuit so he did what he should have and kicked in the door. The suspect was on the floor in the living room after having dropped his gun by the door. They took him into custody without further incident. I took pictures of everything since the district attorney's office asked for them.

That concludes another week on patrol.

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