We Are the Cops (13 page)

But to me, that was an act of God. No fuckin’ question about it. She was probably the worst shot on the department and she beams his ass, right in the fuckin’ head.

I don’t know, maybe it’s just me because of my spiritual beliefs but I believe that I have the right to take a life if I need to.

Every time you get involved in a shooting you have to go to
the shrink – the psychiatrist. I had to do an interview and write all these things down and then they put it into a computer. So besides him analysing me, I now get analysed by a computer, too. And he showed me the computer printout and everything’s down there – there’s like a baseline – everything’s down below the baseline but there’s one that’s way high up. I mean, clear to the top.

I’m like, ‘What is this? What does this mean?’

‘That’s the computer saying that you’re lying.’

‘What do you mean?’

He’s like, ‘The computer’s saying that going through this experience, you should not be all down here so the computer’s saying that you’re giving false answers.’

I’m like, ‘I don’t know – this is just the way I feel. I don’t feel that I’ve done anything wrong. I don’t feel any shock or trauma or sorrow over this. I was just stopping somebody who was doing bad things and that was my job.’

I have spiritual beliefs and I believe that we’re not supposed to take a life but in the defence of ourselves or others, we have the right to do that. If there are bad people out there trying to kill good people, then we have the right to use deadly force in order to stop it. I don’t feel any great sorrow or anything that I did my job and shot somebody. I’ve never killed anybody but I can’t see it being that big a difference, in my mind.

Some people can’t take it though. I know some officers that have been in shootings and they’ve left the job because they couldn’t deal with it, psychologically. But this is what we do.

I
was sitting with a police officer in a harbour-side restaurant, eating excellent crab cakes…they really were very good – big lumps of crab meat, perfectly seasoned… anyway, where was I? Ah yes, Baltimore – and having never seen the TV show ‘The Wire’ and my only knowledge of Baltimore being ‘Hairspray – The Musical’, I wasn’t ready for where the conversation was going to go. When the officer I was dining with lowered her voice to talk to me about ‘blow-jobs’, I almost stopped eating. Only almost, though, because those crab cakes were amazing.

The funny thing was, even though she had spent part of her career walking the streets of the city, pretending to be a prostitute, she still struggled to use the actual words of the acts she was requested to do by the ‘johns’. She was embarrassed. And that’s one of the things with vice – there’s an awkwardness to it, like sleeping with a new partner for the first time. It’s about sex and dirty little secrets and fetishes.

Some officers’ though – usually the men – had no problem telling
me all about the filthy little situations they found themselves in. Speaking to officers about vice was always eye opening; just when you think you’ve heard it all, along comes on officer with a look in their eye of, ‘I can’t wait to see the expression on your face when I tell you about this’.

There was a lot of embarrassed (and not so embarrassed) laughter, when these stories were told. And it can be a lot of fun – if dressing up like a prostitute or pretending to be a pervert is your idea of a good time. You get to see and – almost – do all the things that you are about to arrest somebody for, without actually having to physically do whatever they were expecting you to do. I imagined it would be like an actor who always has to play the good guy, suddenly getting offered the part of the villain.

Of course, such a shadowy and bleak world has its dangers and as the officer in Baltimore reminded me, it isn’t victimless, despite what people sometimes think. Whether it’s the girl prostituting herself out through desperation or the spouse at home, unaware of their partner’s secret life, vice can ultimately be devastating for all of the players involved.

We had a guy called ‘Bloody Charlie’. He drove up to our undercover officer who was pretending to be a prostitute and goes, ‘Are you on your period?’

And she’s like, ‘What?’

He says, ‘Are you on your period?’

She’s like, ‘No!’

And with that, he drives off. So we can’t arrest the guy, as
we don’t have anything on him. We were all like, ‘That was the weirdest thing.’

Later, we were picking up prostitutes – we’ve got somebody out there patronising the prostitutes, making the deal, then we make the arrest and put them in the van.

So I’m driving and I say, ‘You know girls, I want to ask you something. Have you ever had a guy drive up to you and ask you are on your period?’

They were like, ‘Oh, yeah, Bloody Charlie.’

We were like, ‘Bloody Charlie?’

One of them goes, ‘Yeah, all the girls know him. He only likes to fuck girls when they’re on their period.’

Is that not nasty? So ‘Bloody Charlie’ is the guy that drove up to our undercover that day and tried to patronise her. But she wasn’t on her period so he didn’t want to do it. How disgusting is that?

When I came out of the academy they used to put you on the foot squad to make you walk around to try and take all the piss-and-vinegar out of you, so you didn’t go out and wreck a car on your first day out there. So I’m in the foot squad for three days, in this horrible little shopping centre where literally no one wants you there – it’s not in a good neighbourhood so there are only, like, five stores. They don’t want you there. And I’m thinking, ‘Did I make a horrible mistake? I can’t believe that I just went through six months in the academy to be trapped here. It’s June, it’s hot and I’m just miserable.’

Then I get a phone call at home – after my miserable three days on the foot squad – and it’s the vice sergeant, from the district. He told me who he was and asked me if I was willing to work vice – young female cops like me often get asked that. Remember, I’ve been on the streets for three days. So I said, ‘Sure.’ I could either stand in a shopping centre in a hundred degrees, doing absolutely nothing, or I could go out there and lock people up.

So, day four, I’m working vice and I get a little bit of training from the two guys I’m working with, about what I should do, what I should expect, and then they just send me out there. We’re locking up people by the wagon-full because the area was known for prostitution. The guys would lock up the prostitutes and I would lock up the johns. In the first three months I got drugs, I got guns, I got wanted felons – you name it. And then, of course, I got the experience, as I had to testify in court almost every single day, because we were locking people up every night.

Being in a courtroom full of people was an experience. I had to say all those things. Some of the stuff I didn’t even know what it was. So I literally had to say all those bad words in an open court. If I got lucky, they did a silent reading of the statement and charges, but if they didn’t, I had to get up there and testify and say, ‘And then he asked me for… this!’ Things like, ‘half and half’- meaning half sex and half oral sex. Or they would ask you for just oral sex – and you can fill in the term they used for it yourself – or they could ask you just for sex.

The sex in itself was illegal. The oral sex, you had to get a price on. But for me, because I was new at it, I’d get a price for
everything. I made them tell me how much they were going to pay me. So yeah, I had to testify in court – hundreds of people in there – to this stuff. I’m twenty-two years old and it was embarrassing. Even the judge once said to me, ‘I never saw anyone turn that red in my entire life.’ He told me I was hilarious.

I mean, I’ve done a lot of things in my career but I look back on that and just laugh, because here I am, some girl from the suburbs, and I’m standing out there on North Point, prostituting myself. My parents would be so proud! And I was literally getting the education of my life. It was a very funny moment in my career.

But we didn’t have a booking district, so we had to go to the next district along, to book our prisoners and there was a particular sergeant there – a desk sergeant – and you know what these desk sergeants can be like; grouchy, unhappy campers and they’d say all kinds of stuff to you. If you screwed something up, they would let you know.

So I come in one night and I actually had a guy who had offered me five dollars for a particular sex act. I didn’t know what I was doing, so I said, ‘Sure.’ And I locked him up. I didn’t care if he offered me five dollars or fifty dollars – it’s all the same to me because he’s going to jail. So anyway, I get in there and the desk sergeant is reading the charges and he was like, ‘Oh, honey, you know if you dressed a little better you’d get more than five dollars!’ He was just shaking his head at me.

I thought about it afterwards and I spoke to one of the other girls and asked her what I should have done. She said, ‘You should
have told him to go to the ATM machine and get more cash!’

But I literally had guys ask me for stuff that I didn’t even know what it was. I was twenty-two years old. I didn’t know anything about life, let alone the sex trade.

A guy once patronised our undercover prostitute with his three-year-old in the back seat. It was three days before Christmas and he told his wife he had to go and get more Christmas lights for the tree and a gallon of milk. But she wanted him to take the baby so that she could take a shower. So he takes the baby, he goes to get the Christmas lights and a gallon of milk and as he’s out driving he sees our prostitute – our undercover officer – who happens to have very large boobs. He saw her and he thought, ‘The hell with it, I’ll get a quick head before I go home.’

He drove up to her and she said, ‘But you have a baby in the back seat.’

He says, ‘It’s three months old. She’s not going to know you’re giving me head. Come on, let’s go, hurry up. I’ve gotta get home and put the Christmas lights up.’

And all of this is on tape. So we locked this poor bastard up and had the wife come and get the baby.

She’s like, ‘What did he get arrested for?’

We said to him, ‘You tell her.’

He told her, ‘I got arrested for a driving suspension.’

She’s like, ‘How the fuck can your licence be suspended? Your licence is not suspended.’

She arguing with him on the phone and he just tells her that
it’s suspended, hands me the phone and tells me to hang it up.

He’s like, ‘Please don’t tell her. Please, please. I just had a baby with her, please. You don’t understand, for nine months she wouldn’t give me sex and then she has the baby and she still doesn’t want to have sex. All I wanted was some fucking head. That’s all!’

I actually felt bad for the guy.

But our Lieutenant said, ‘Fuck him.’ After we arrested him, she went up to the car, grabbed the baby and said, ‘You’re an animal.’

She was so pissed off at this guy for putting the baby’s life in jeopardy. Remember, you’re picking up women with scabies, HIV, all this stuff, and on top of that, you’re in a bad neighbourhood. He literally went there, to that area, to get head, with the baby in the car.

I didn’t tell the wife shit but the undercover told her. She said, ‘There’s no way the wife’s not going to know what her husband’s doing. He put their daughter’s life in jeopardy.’

When I worked prostitute detail, they used to have to go lock the girls up before they would let us go stand out on the street. There would be a couple of us and they would have to get the real girls and lock them up first, because if you put us next to them, we would look way too healthy and way too clean. I mean, they used to tell us to go out in the garden all day, get really dirty, don’t shower, and then they’d want to black in one of our teeth. But I’m not doing all that, you know? That’s just not going to happen. So
they would have to take all the unhealthy, really disgusting, open sores girls off the streets and then they could put us out there.

It was an experience men will never have. Obviously they would pick up the girls, so they had their own experiences, but I had a trucker try to pull me through his window one time. Luckily the guys that I was working with were watching me and they saw it. And I was unarmed – back then we had revolvers but there was nowhere to hide a revolver. No radio, either. You just have to trust the guys you work with. They’re watching me. But if they’re taking a break, that could be a problem.

That was a funny time, but sad too. I think about these guys and most of them are married and they had families and they were going to pick up some nasty junkie and have sex with her and then go home to their wives and their families. People think it’s a victimless crime but I don’t know. I never saw it that way.

We were in what we call the ‘P-van’ – the prisoner van – and I’ve got all the arrested johns in the back seat. I was doing the paperwork in this unmarked van, with the prisoners sitting behind me. It had no police markings or anything, so we could pull into an area and not be noticed. We would move up when we made an arrest, cuff the johns and put them in the van. We’d then back the van up and park it in a nondescript area so that we weren’t noticed and do the paperwork. So, I’m looking down, writing the arrest reports to get it started, so that when we get back in the office we have less to do, when all of a sudden I hear a bang on the hood of the van. There’s a guy getting head from a prostitute on
the hood of my van and the prisoners are sitting there watching this. She’s blowing the guy on the hood of my van!

And I go, ‘What the fuck is this?’

And all the johns – in one voice – from the back of the van go, ‘How come he can do it but we can’t?’

I hit the siren – WHOOOOP! – and get out of the van.

The prostitute jumps up. She’s got a pack of cheese doodles – which are like Cheetos – in one hand and orange cheese doodle shit all over her mouth. She’s got cheese doodle all over her lips, she’s got cheese doodle on her hands and she’s got cheese doodle in her hair. The guy then starts to pull his pants back up and he’s got cheese doodle all over his frigging dick.

He says, ‘It’s not what you think!’

This is the shit you can’t make up!

We were like, ‘It’s exactly what we think!’

When I was the undercover john, the signal was that I would take my hat off; that would be the sign that the deal was done, because sometimes the radio wasn’t working right. The other officers could hear what you were saying but you would always take your hat off because sometimes you’d drive into an area and the radio signal would be lost. You could be making a deal with a prostitute and she might have HIV or something and she’s trying to pull your zipper down, and you’re like, ‘Hello? Is anybody hearing me?’, so you would take your hat off to make sure they knew you had made the deal.