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.