We Are the Cops (5 page)

They show all those inspirational officer safety films now but our shit is mostly, simply dealing with staying on top of things. I always say to officers, ‘Kick ass! Kick ass!’

Being able to defend yourself, being able to protect yourself, that’s important but unfortunately there’re people on the department who couldn’t fight their way out of a wet paper sack.

I carry a knife. In fact I carry a bunch of knives. I have one just for when I go to the bathroom, because we had an officer once, go to the bathroom and a guy came up behind him and he was on a head and this guy comes in and the next thing you know, BOOM! He jams him in and starts going for his gun. So the officer grabbed his knife, reached back and caught that artery in the guy’s thigh; he sliced it wide open.

So I carry one knife in my vest, two on my belt and another one on my hip. You’re not going to be good friends with a guy if you use a knife but it’s legal for us to carry them. I also carry two guns, one as a back-up weapon, here inside my shirt. So I carry two guns – and I’ve got another one in the car – four knives and pepper spray. I don’t carry a taser.

Most of the knives I use can be defensive but also used at scenes, you know? If I need to cut a branch out of the way, I’ve got a knife that saws. But some knives are for defence. This one in my vest is an attention getter. It’s a conversational piece. Some people carry a knife on the back of their neck too – on the back of their vest. You just reach up, grab it and come down. But most times, if you pull your knife out, that means you can’t get to your gun. But that’s why I also have a second, back-up gun. I used to keep it on my left side, under the shirt. Now I keep it on my right side. It’s a 40 calibre.

I’ve had one time where a guy tried to get my gun and I’m holding my gun in the holster to stop him from pulling it out whilst I’m fighting him. But I couldn’t get my second gun because if I went for my backup I’d have to release the other gun
and leave it open. So now I keep it on this side where I can reach it and shoot through my shirt. Bang, bang, bang. I’ve done that before - I have shirts with holes in them – just to practice.

We have moose accidents quite a bit. There’s certainly a lot of wildlife in Alaska and it seems that moose have a habit of going out on the roadway when you don’t want them to be on the roadway, especially if you’re in a little car.

One of the accidents I dealt with – where someone hit a moose – was a teacher on her way to the school. It was still wintertime and it was dark out and she was in a little four-door sedan car and ended up hitting this moose that had run out into the road in front of her. The moose just came up and hit the car, smashed in the hood and after it hit the hood it rolled up and smashed the window and started to cave in the roof a little bit, so it was certainly a scary moment for that driver. Kind of like, ‘Oh my God! Here’s a moose! And now it’s crushing my car!’ That driver escaped any injury but it sure did a number on her car.

A lot of time with the moose, we’ll have to shoot them and put them down. But we’ll call a charity to come salvage the moose meat and the moose meat will get dispersed to different people that the charity feels are in need of moose meat. It’s quite a thing up here – we have our dispatch centres that usually have a list of who the on-call charity is for the night, in case we end up dealing with a moose accident. So we’ll call them up and say, ‘Hey, we have a moose accident. We’ve got a moose here on Mile 90 of the Sterling Highway, come meet us and pick up the moose.’ And
they’ll have a couple of people come out and do their thing, pick up the moose and take it back to where they have a place set up. Then they’ll butcher the moose and take care of it.

I’ve shot moose a couple of times. Sometimes the moose are pretty badly injured when they get hit by a vehicle - but they’re still alive. So we would dispatch the moose, call the charity and have them come pick it up. The troopers, they issue us a shotgun, so they give us a large enough weapon to dispatch a moose.

It’s interesting because I’m not really a big hunter; my idea of getting meat is going to the store. I get my meat there. So it was quite a different experience for me when I started dealing with these accidents involving moose and I had to shoot the moose. I’d look at that poor injured moose and I’d have to kill it so it’s not suffering. But it was a different experience for me not being a hunter or having killed an animal before.

On one side of the street is the city and the other side of the street is the county. So a lot of the times we will donate our problems to the city. And it’s literally, ‘Get the fuck out of the county and go across the street if you want to be a dickhead.’

Or we’ll put them in our car and drive them ten or fifteen blocks up the road into the city and kick them out, or something like that.

Prisons – a lot of them are not rehabilitating people. A lot are actually making them better criminals or harder criminals or smarter criminals, stronger criminals. And they do it with taxpayers’
money.

I believe people can turn around but for some people there’s no hope; they’re just hardened criminals – career criminals – they’re not going to change, they’re not going to come out and get a 9 to 5 job. They’re going to come out and if they want your iPod, they’re going to beat you or they’re going to shoot you and they’re going to take it. And that’s the way they are. So those people should be locked up, kept away.

It’s not about rehabilitating them, it’s just about keeping them away from innocent people.

This woman took her dog into court. The magistrate shouts at her to take the dog out.

She said, ‘But your honour, this dog is my witness!’

The judge went crazy. There were four cops dragging her out, an arm and leg each, with her dog snarling and snapping at them.

Our old booking facility had the old, electronic sliding doors that close real slow; big heavy doors, in the custody area. This one part of it was kind of a holding cell for all different kinds of people; you’d bring somebody in, you’d swipe your card, the door would open and you’d put your guy - your prisoner - in there and the door would close. Then another door would open to a room and your guy would go sit in there with multiple other people.

I was working on paperwork for one of my own prisoners. I went to get my guy out of the holding cell and the door opened
real slow. Once I got my guy out, the door started to close again, real slow.

As it was closing there was somebody else’s prisoner inside and he wants to ask me a question and he goes, ‘O… o… off… officer. O… o… officer.’ And I could tell that he’s got a stutter when he’s talking. So the door is starting to close and he’s stuttering and he’s like, ‘O…o…o…officer, l…le…le…let me ask you a question officer.’

And the door’s closing and I go, ‘Dude, you’d better hurry up.’

And he’s like, ‘I… I… I just want to ask, I… I… d… d… do… do… do you know… do… do you k… k… know…’ And it’s just getting closer and closer - it’s just inches from being closed. And right before it closes he goes, ‘I… I… I… j… j… just… a… a… a… ah fuck it!’ And the door closes.

I don’t know if it’s an average but I think most police officers do about twenty-five years service. Most of them figure, twenty-five is enough and then get out, although it depends on a person’s attitude and what they’re doing, I guess.

They did away with age limits in the States and we just had a guy – a colleague of mine – retire at fifty years. Fifty years service! He’s seventy-five years old. He came on in 1962. He was a patrol sergeant and he worked the streets right up to the end – up to the time he retired. It was incredible but he stayed in good health and good shape.

At fifty years he gets a hundred percent of his salary. The way
it works is you get two percent for every year you work. So at fifty years, he retires at one hundred percent.

I don’t know how long he’ll live to enjoy it thought!

One of our traffic cars hit a deer and it scurried off into the woods. Well, it damaged the vehicle and as Crime Scene Investigators, we had to go take pictures of it. In the process of going out there and doing all that, they had to shoot the deer and put it down and everything.

So we go out there and I pull out my knife and I field dressed the deer, got all the meat off of it. That meat is in my freezer. I did it the redneck way – no blood involved. The way I do it, there’s hardly any blood. I go in through the back. I do it inside out. I leave all the guts right inside. One side we didn’t get though. One side was pretty tore up from the accident.

My partner said, ‘That only took you ten minutes.’

I said, ‘It would only have taken five minutes if you’d keep your flashlight turned off.’ Because, you know, poaching in the backwoods, you do it in the dark.

Deer meat is really good meat. There’s no fat in it. It’s good-for-you meat.

But my partner had his flashlight on, so I was actually concentrating on what I was doin’. Normally I’d just do it in darkness and do it by feel.

But I’m no redneck. A hillbilly is a redneck that graduated high school. And I graduated high school.

Midnights are always a good time to play jokes on each other, like putting pepper spray on the toilet seats, so when someone takes a dump they get their ass on fire.

People have also been known to take a little nap on the night shift. That’s usually when the jokes start. We had a guy that fell asleep on the midnight shift; he’s out, he’s drooling.

One of our local residents came to the station and rang the bell. I opened it up and said, ‘What’s up?

‘That cop is sleeping in front of the station again!’

Now, a friend of mine is a heavy equipment operator and he’s got a ten-wheel dump truck. So I called him and asked, ‘Are you up right now? I’ll buy you a cup of coffee, I need you for something.’

He got his truck and we inched it up as quietly as possible. He got within ten feet of this cop’s cruiser.

I said, ‘Okay, when I tell you to, I want you to turn the bright lights on and get on the air horn.’

So he puts the high beams on and pulls the air horn - UUURRGGGHHHHHHH!

All I see is this cop waking up, eyes the size of dinner plates and he’s going at the steering wheel trying to turn the car, thinking he fell asleep at the wheel and he’s about to die! Hahahahahahahaha!

After twenty-two years on the force I can only think of about three guys – cops – that were beaters and bullies. But I’m sure there’re many, many more.

In my twenty-two years I’ve hit three people in handcuffs – in twenty-two years. The first one was as a rookie. I was working ‘graveyard’ on my own and everything’s a fight. You’re working graveyard, you’re in Vegas and just north of here was my neighbourhood – it was Paradise and Flamingo. There were titty bars and there were redneck bars and everything was a fight, which was fun; so I went through uniforms like mad because you’re always rolling around on the ground.

Well, back to my first guy, punching him in handcuffs: I’ve got a guy and I’m taking him to jail and this is before we had cages, so he’s sitting on the passenger side. I opened the back door – because when you get to the jail you have to take your gun, weapons and all your other crap off and drop them in the back of your car – I’d opened up the back door to put my gun and stuff in and as I leaned inside, this guy’s sitting in the front seat – on the passenger side – and he just leaned back from the front seat and spat right in my face. It was less than a second after that that I went BANG! – I just drove his head right straight back, down into the seat. Then I put my stuff back in my holsters, closed the car door, went back around, got into the car and drove him to the frigging hospital. That was the end of that. It was that simple. I didn’t sit there and hammer on him for ten minutes, I didn’t call him names, I didn’t kick him; it was just ‘spit’, ‘smack’ and off we go to stitch you up.

Where else are they going to give you a gun, a badge, a fast car and tell you to go play with ten of your best friends every night?

D
riving down the interstate, the cop sitting next to me was fairly quiet. He was expecting a ‘ride-along’ but he wasn’t expecting to tell his life story to the English guy holding the small, slightly sinister looking, digital recorder. In between dealing with a traffic accident, reporting a hit-and-run against a garden fence and looking for a missing ten-year-old child (whose mother suggested we locked him up when we found him, which we did), I did my best to assure the officer that everything was above board and that he could speak to me openly and in confidence. Even so, he remained quiet and seemed to have little to tell me. That happened sometimes.

I asked him about his career and in particular, the various roles he had taken on, in an attempt to find something we could discuss. He casually mentioned that he had been a K-9 handler and I was about to skip onto something else when suddenly he started talking. And he didn’t stop talking – or smiling. The officer’s face beamed as he talked about his dog and it was obvious just how much his dog had become a
part of his career. For some other officers I spoke with, it was career defining.

Obviously many of these dogs are genuinely brave and smart but it was when one particular officer was telling me about just how incredibly stupid his dog was, that I became struck by what was a real sense of loyalty, not just dog to handler, but handler to dog. The crazier the dog behaved, it seemed, the bigger the grin that would develop across the officer’s face as he recounted past glorious – and not so glorious – incidents.

In many states across America, K-9’s – police dogs – carry the same status as police officers themselves. Many dogs will even have their own badge. Each year, many police officers are killed in the line of duty in the United States. Many K-9s are too and each year the duty deaths for police dogs, reaches double figures. To their handlers, to their departments and to their fellow officers, police dogs are one of the team.

I’d just become a K-9 officer - one of the first that the department had had for years - and I had this dog that was a ‘green’ dog, which means it can’t do anything; it can bite the shit out of you and that’s about it.

That dog just ate me alive for about eight week on the training course until they eventually got rid of it. I still have the scars to prove it. He didn’t like to give up his toy and he didn’t like to release when it came to the bite work. He would get pissed off – like, ‘you’re taking something away from me and I don’t
like it!’ So his way of lashing out was to bite the shit out of me. I liked the dog but I didn’t like the fact that he was biting me all the time.

So they got rid of that dog and they got me a second dog. I had him for a week but that dog
didn’t
bite. So then I get my third dog. This one was ‘titled’ and it did everything that I needed it to do. Then about a month later I ended up getting bit by another dog, on the hand, just a few days before we graduated. We were doing release work and I was wearing a training sleeve, which had an open end with a wooden dowel on the inside so that you could hold onto it and it wouldn’t get pulled off your hand. But the dog came up, missed my arm and caught my hand and just ripped the skin, basically. So I was out of work for four months. I had an infection, so the skin didn’t heal and I had this big, giant hole in my knuckle.

So after four months I go back to work and I’m on the streets with my dog and one night he was supposed to bite somebody but when I gave him the command, he kind of looked at me like, ‘bite who?’ That was the icing on the cake for me and that dog.

So I got rid of him and I called the trainer the next day and I told him about the incident and he said he’d call the broker, who was the guy who would get dogs for our department.

I said, ‘Look, I’m about ready to put a fucking bullet into this dog and throw him in the fucking river. This is bullshit. He ain’t worth a damn. He’s taking up space in the back of the car.’

So I told them that I wanted a Malinois. I ain’t fucking around this time. So I get this Malinois and it was a total retard –
I probably shouldn’t have been in K-9 because I had nothing but issues. Anyway, I get this dog and the head trainer says to me, ‘I hope they give you a pretty decent sized Malinois because you’re so tall.’

Well, he gets this motherfucker out and it’s a standard sized Malinois. Forty-four pounds. And it’s sick, you could see ribs and everything. This dog had come right from Slovakia. They picked him up at Newark – at the airport – and then brought him to me. So I’m thinking that they obviously don’t take care of the dogs, especially if they’re getting rid of them. And they do say that the K-9’s in the States are the rejects from Europe. But so what, he was skinny, whatever.

So next thing you know, they start evaluating him and he does okay and everything. So it was like, ‘Here he is. Here’s your dog.’

Well, I put him in the car and for the next twelve weeks it proceeds to pee out of his ass in my fuckin’ car about twenty times a day. Every time he goes in the back of the car, he shits all over it. Diarrhoea. Well, being the retard that he was, he circled. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Malinois but they pick one way and then they go around in circles, so he would do that in the car and the shit would end up all over the fuckin’ car. I mean it was obvious that he was sick so I took him to the vet.

I said, ‘Hey doc, there’s something wrong with this dog. He’s peeing out of his ass. He’s not putting any weight on. In fact he’s losing weight.’

So he tells me that there’s nothing wrong with him.

I’m like, ‘There’s got to be something wrong with this dog.’

But the doc says no. No worms, no nothing.

Twelve weeks in – I’m a few weeks from graduating – he’s skin and bones. He’s still peeing out of his ass. This motherfucker, there’s something wrong with him. I’m telling them that they need to find out what’s wrong with this dog because I can’t have this. We’re so busy, if he shits in my car, I don’t have time to clean it up, because now I have to go somewhere that has a hose and clean shit out of the car. And nine out of ten times, he’s got it all over him because he’s kicking the shit all over the fucking back of the car.

So I bring in what bit of a stool sample that I can to be tested and they find out that he’s got round worm, hock worm and whipworm. I’m like, ‘Well, what the fuck!’

Next thing you know, they put him on the medicine and then, within a couple of days, his stool is nice and hard, he’s putting on a little bit of weight but he’s still shitting ten, twelve times a day. So I’m like, ‘He’s not eating enough food to be shitting what’s coming out.’

He got down to forty-two pounds and I get him out of the car one day and hooked a leash on him. I’ve got a car that says ‘K-9’ all over it, I’ve got a vest on that says ‘K-9’ all over it and this lady is driving down the road in her car, sees this dog and she suddenly screeches to a halt and she says, ‘Oh my! I’m gonna call the SPCA on you!’

I said, ‘For what?’

She goes, ‘That dog is sick!’

So thinking quickly, I said, ‘This isn’t my dog!’

She goes, ‘What you mean it’s not your dog?’

I said, ‘This isn’t my dog. I found this dog and I’m about ready to go arrest the owner right now and put him in jail for abuse!’

She says, ‘Oh, I was about ready to report you for animal cruelty!’

I said, ‘Yeah, that’s where I’m going right now. To arrest the owner.’

So anyway, I take him back but they say that now there’s nothing wrong with him. In the meantime they want him changing vets. So now I’ve got this dog with sixteen weeks of school and probably another four months later we get a new vet. I take him in and I said, ‘Listen, this is what he had, this is what he’s doing. I don’t care what you have to do to this dog. I’ve got urine, I’ve got stool, I want some blood work done, whatever the hell it is that you need to do to find out what’s wrong with this dog. If he’s got to go back, let’s get him the fuck out of here. That way I can have a dog not shitting all over my car.’

The vet says, ‘I bet it’s Giardia.’ Giardia is an intestinal parasite, which basically doesn’t allow the food to stay in the intestines to get absorbed and broken down and makes it go right out instead.

Sure enough, it was Giardia. So I get this medicine and within two weeks, just like that, he’s blown up, nice and healthy.

He was a monster, man. He didn’t look like much – he was so little sitting next to me – but man, he was a beast. And it’s funny, because none of the people in the city had ever seen a Malinois before. They always assume a police dog is a German Shepherd.
So I’d get him out the car and they’d be like, ‘Yo, what kind of dog that is?’

I’d say, ‘Man, that’s a fox. That ain’t no dog.’

‘For real?’

‘Yeah.’

One time I told them it was an Australian dingo. They believed me.

So anyway, after all that, I worked him for about four more months and then the department lays us off – me and the dog. But I kept the dog. Still have him.

My dog wasn’t the greatest dog out there but he’s found felony amounts of narcotics and he had two apprehensions in the time that I worked him. We didn’t do a whole lot of tracking, because, you know, it’s urban city, but he had two solid apprehensions.

When he was still a new dog, we had this one guy who had done a burglary. He’d broken into his ex-girlfriend’s house four times within twenty-four hours. So I get there and one of the officers on patrol had called for me because the guy was supposed to be in the house. So I go up and they say, ‘Yeah, these guys chased him into this vacant house.’

They went inside and they checked the upstairs and the downstairs but they didn’t check the basement. The house was vacant. It had no roof, big holes in the floors. Now, the rule of thumb is, wherever my dog goes, I go, and wherever I go, he goes. If it’s not safe for me to go, it’s not safe for him to go. And if it’s not safe for him to go, it’s not safe for me to go.

So I figured, let me see if I can bluff this guy out. I get to the top of the steps and we have a K-9 announcement we have to make before we put in the dog. So I make my announcement, I wait. Now, my dog wasn’t a barker at all. Put him in the car though, the motherfucker will bark for ten hours non-stop. So I make my first announcement, make my second announcement, I make my third announcement. My leash would double up, so I could open it up and let the dog go a distance. The house had trash on the steps, there was probably about three feet of trash in the basement and as I said, there were holes in the floor. So although I didn’t really want to do it, I thought that I could bluff the guy out. So I’m like, ‘Fuck it, let’s see what he does.’

So I open up the leash and he goes down the steps, down about six feet. He’s got his nose in the air – they call it ‘casting’ – and I’m like, yeah, he’s got this guy. So I reel him back in and I unhook him and I say, ‘Find him!’ Then I shout out to the guy, ‘Here he comes, motherfucker!’

So I go walking down the steps and he’s sniffing around and there’s just trash everywhere. And there was what looked like a steel cabinet laying over at an angle. My dog comes up and he jumps up on the cabinet, he’s got his nose in the air, he goes around and all of a sudden, BOOM! He runs inside this thing and I hear, ‘AAARRGGGGHHH!’

So I pulled the cabinet back and I’m by myself. Now, I probably shouldn’t have done the searches by myself because it’s not safe but at the same time if there are other officers there and the dog goes up to them and starts sniffing them or coming in their
direction, I have to say, ‘It’s okay’, meaning, that person’s alright. But I don’t want him thinking. I want him doing his job and reacting to what he’s given, so I would do the searches by myself. So anyway, I’m pulling this cabinet back and it takes me three tries and finally I muscle it over and my dog is on the guy. I grab my dog by the collar, he releases and I hook him up. I then tell the guy to start walking out of the building and he falls a couple of times and he almost gets bit again. I load him up in the car and he has to go to hospital because, you know, he has to get checked out.

So we get him to hospital and he had these tiny, black, knit gloves on. It was wintertime, it was cold and he had a great big, giant coat on too. And I’m like, ‘Hey man, where did he bite you?’

He said, ‘Oh, he bit me on the hand.’

I’m like, ‘Fuck, man!’ Because I wanted it to be somewhere good, you know, maybe on the leg or something.

So he took his gloves off and he had a bite mark across his hand. Then the doctor comes in and he’s checking him out and he’s squeezing the bite and the guy’s yelping. So I then started laughing because number one, I thought it was funny because the bad guy got bit and number two, I know what it’s like, because I’ve got bit on the hand too. I apologised but I told the guy and the doctor that I had been bitten myself during training and I know what it’s like. I was just glad that someone else was feeling my pain for once.

But that incident was like seeing your kid walk for the first time. There were no issues. That dog was out there to work. I had issues with other dogs but this one, well, I trusted him. It’s like
having a rookie cop – until he’s proven, you don’t know what to expect out of them. So it was like the greatest day ever. I just wish he’d bitten him somewhere good.