First dumbass of the New Year

Sadly I won't be working tonight. Pity, because I love New Years Eve.

That's when the real stupid people come out. And if I'm on my game, I can get one and start the year off right.

The last New Years that I was out, I stopped a kid for drunk driving. BAC of .24. He was all over the road when I saw him and there was no shortage of cause for the stop. He failed SFST's miserably and I locked him up. He was a college boy and he literally cried all the way back to the station and accused me of ruining his life and sentencing him to a lifetime of poverty because his dad had told him that if he got a DWI, there'd be no more money for college.

So he went out drinking, got blitzed and decided to drive, yet it's somehow MY fault?

Disposition: 15 days jail time, to be served on week-ends around his school schedule.

The year before, it was another stupid college kid. This one decided to step out into his parents' back yard at midnight and fire off an AR-15 rifle. Incredibly, I was just finishing up a traffic stop in front of that house, and my red and blue lights were bouncing off of everything. How he coulnd't have seen that I'll never understand, but sure enough, just as I was walking back to my cruiser...BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

My first reaction was to dive for cover behind a tire. Then when I realized that it was just some New Year's dumbass--one who was very close by--I went looking. And since I could hear him and his buddies laughing and see his muzzle flashes, it wasn't hard to find him. I peered around the corner of the house and watched him finish off his magazine, and when he dropped the empty to reload the rifle, I rounded the corner with my service pistol drawn, proned the three of them out, and eventually took bright boy and the rifle into custody.

And the shocking part was that you could clearly see the lights from my cruiser still bouncing off of the wall of the neighbor's house. When I pointed that out to the moron and his two buddies, they claimed that they hadn't noticed that. Idiots.

Disposition: Plead to misdemeanor Reckless Discharge of a Firearm. No jail, one year probation with conviction set aside on completion. Rifle forfeited and now in service with our department's training branch.

Oh--and I got yelled at for not calling for and waiting on back-up.

Anyway, be safe and be smart tonight. I won't be out there but lots of my peers will be. Don't be one of those people that we have to protect everyone else from. Trust me--you won't like it.

Working hard to be stupid

Some people really have to get up early to make sure that they're the stupidest one on the block.

In the case I recall, it was some of the angry upper-class spoiled suburban white kids that make up the local Indymedia / Copwatch faction.

For those not familiar with these losers, it's as I've described--a bunch of patchouli-reeking white kids whose parents sent them to college, probably just to get them out of the house, but who skip classes to sit around smoking dope and hating the police.

Now why would a bunch of suburban white kids hate the police, you ask? It's pretty much a combination of resenting any and all authority (because their parents didn't teach them to respect it) and anger because the police keep getting between them and their dope. So they form a group called "copwatch" that has no purpose other than to harass the fine men and women who go out to protect and serve their often thankless communities. They put up websites where they make up lies about police abusing people and they typically find glee in any situation where a police officer is injured or killed...basically they're punks.

Well it wasn't too long ago that some of these little vermin read in the papers that several of our local police agencies were engaging in proactive police work in a couple of public housing complexes that were seeing a serious spike in street crimes. Part of what we were doing was "jump-outs" where we'd roll around four deep in an unmarked car, or six to eight deep in a van until we saw a suspicious person or group and then we'd...well, we'd jump out, stop them, identify everyone, and determine who was and who wasn't supposed to be in the area. This was easy to do and completely legal because the complexes are municipal property and have posted rules barring non-residents from being present unless visiting a resident. Typically we'd wind up searching a lot of people and recovering all sorts of drugs and guns, and we also scooped up quite a few who were either wanted on outstanding warrants or had been previously barred from the complexes. we made tons of arrests and removed a lot of hard-core criminals from these complexes, undoubtedly while deterring others from even coming around. The street crime numbers started to go back down and life was starting to get a little better for the decent non-lawbreaking residents.

And then the Copwatch kids showed up.

When they found out about our jumpouts and other selective enforcement practices (like towing all unregistered cars), they issued a press release stating that they would start patrolling these complexes to protect the "rights" of the citizens that we were harassing. basically they meant to stop us from stopping the criminals, and to hell with the residents that the criminals were preying on. And after announcing plans to show up and start videotaping us and educating citizens as to their rights vis-a-vis the police, they popped up one fine Saturday and started walking around with their video cameras, eagerly anticipating some police misconduct, no doubt.

Well sad to say, we weren't doing any operations at that particular time, so they didn't get to see any police in action. But they did get to see some real crime, because four of them showed up at our station with assorted black eyes and split lips (still reeking of patchouli) and demanding that we--the police that they hate--DO SOMETHING. Apparently the sight of these dopey white kids walking around this all-black housing project with expensive video cameras, watches and cell phones was just too much for the local hoods to ignore, and the Copwatch kids wound up getting beaten and robbed by the very hood rats that they were there to support.

And then they came to US--their sworn enemy and sole target of their harassment campaigns--and demanded that we go back up in there and find the criminals who had their stuff.

Yeah, ok. Just as soon as we finish laughing at you.

Needless to say, we never saw those particular doofy losers up in 'da hood again. I'm betting that mommy and daddy eventually bought them all new electronic toys to replace the ones that they'd "donated to the Urban Way".