On new cops and clues...

Sorry for the absence--training and year-end leave got in the way.

But I'm back, with this neat tale of one who almost got away.

Yesterday, one of my guys gets dispatched to a 1-car non-injury crash right out of roll call. Since he forgot to take the rookie that I’d placed with him for the day, I corralled the rook, tossed him into my cruiser, and took him up to the crash scene.
When I got up there, it was just my guy and two cars—the one wrapped around a utility pole, and another one that was just there for some reason. I was starting to get irked right out of the gate. I like my crash scenes run a certain way, and uninvolved bystanders are never included, family and friends of the involved parties in particular.

I walk up to my guy—a fairly new officer himself. He told me that the female driver was claiming that as she was descending the highway on-ramp, a car that was ahead of her made a sudden u-turn and came back up the ramp at her, forcing her to swerve to avoid it. In the process, she claimed, she struck a utility pole. But one look at the skid marks and the damage to the car told me that her story was crap.

“Whose car is this?” I ask, pointing to the uncrashed one.

“Oh, that’s the boyfriend of the woman who crashed,” he replies.

“And he’s here why, exactly?”

“I dunno. When I got here he was here waiting with her.”

“Get rid of him,” I said. I could already tell from the scene that this was likely going to involve more investigation and I don’t need boyfriends or anyone else dipping in from the sidelines.

Then I approached the woman standing next to the crashed car. I asked her if she was ok, and she replied that she was. I saw that she was smoking a cigarette, and noticed that she kept her cell phone in front of her face. “I’m on hold with my insurance company,” she explained.

Uh-huh. “Well how about if you call them back in a few minutes? We’ve got to get a few things wrapped up here so we can get you and this car out of here.” She smiled, and hung up the phone, just the perfect picture of cooperation. “Here, it’s awfully cold out here. Why don’t you come back and have a seat in the back of my officer’s cruiser for a bit, just to get you out of the weather.” She smiled again and followed me back to the responding officer’s car. I asked her to put the cigarette out, the put her in and closed the door. Then I went back to talk to my officer.
“What do you have?” I asked him. “She drinking?”

“Oh, no, Sarge,” he replied. “I checked but I couldn’t smell anything on her.”
“Of course not,” I told him. “Not with her out in the open air, smoking that cigarette to mask her breath, and covering her mouth with that phone. Now why don’t you go talk to her again now that she’s had a minute or two to sit in that closed car and see what you think.”

“I’d already seen her eyes and I knew. But now I wanted my new officer and the even newer rookie to pick up on it, and hopefully realize what mistakes had already been made here. Sure enough, when they came back after talking to her in the closed car, without the cigarette or the phone in front of her mouth, they'd been able to smell the tell-tale odor or alcoholic beverages and they told me that they wanted to do field-sobriety on her.

“Yeah, I kind of figured that you would. Now do you see why I wanted her boyfriend out of here?” They nodded, knowing that had he still been here, he’d have been one more variable, and might possibly have interfered with the process. Talking a person into performing the tests could be tricky enough without having someone else standing on the sidelines telling them not to do it or otherwise butting in.
Predictably, she failed. Big time. And she got locked up, so we had a happy ending to the tale.

And as she was being searched and put into the car, her boyfriend returned. As expected, he saw her being placed under arrest and started to front up, showing her that he was her alpha male. But once I pulled him aside, explained the situation to him, and asked him if he wanted to go with her for interfering, he looked over to see if she could see us, and when he realized that she could not, he shrugged and told us that he’d come get her later when we released her. He walked off, and I then explained to the rookie how much easier these things tend to work when you get the guy out of eye-and ear-shot of the girl. All-in-all, it was a good learning opportunity for both of them and hopefully they take a few things away from it.

Realistically, my guy had already ruled out DUI in his own mind despite it being a single-vehicle crash early on a Saturday morning just a short distance away from the bar area. He was so caught up trying to be all “Officer Friendly” to this poor girl that he was even buying her tale of woe about how the crash happened despite the skid marks which clearly showed that she’d fish-tailed from road shoulder to road shoulder twice before hitting the steel pole hard enough dent it severely while destroying the front of her car. Yet when asked her speed, she’d just batted her eyes and said “no more than 10-15 mph…”

But she was pretty, and he’s way too naïve and trusting at this stage in his career, so he'd disregarded all the clues that didn't confoem to her story and she almost got away with it.

Kids, coats and drunk drivers.

So the other night I'm out, and I stop to back up another officer who has a suspected drunk driver. He puts the guy through field sobriety tests and he fails miserably. He checks him with the portable breath tester and gets a reading back of 0.27. Whoa! Legal limit is 0.08--this guy is over three times that. He gets locked up and we impound his car.

Complicating things, of course, is the presence of his baby momma in the car as a passenger, along with their child--a two year old named Dayquan who is not in a car seat. There is no car seat in the car. Dayquan was just loose in the back seat without even a seatbelt.

This is added to the driver's DWI, and it becomes an aggravating factor for charging and sentencing. If convicted, he's going to do time.

Mama just shrugged when we asked where the car seat was. She knew that he was supposed to be in one, but it was in another car and she admitted that she just didn't feel like taking it out of that one and putting it in this one.

But the funny part came when Dayquan decided to get out of their car and walk around. His mama actually scolded him for getting out without his coat. "Dayquan! You put your coat on right now. Mama doesn't want you getting sick."

So going out without a coat in 60-degree weather is bad, but riding around unrestrained in a car driven by a drunk is ok. Got it.

I made sure that a copy of the report was sent to Child Protective Services, with a recommendation for home visits and other follow-ups.

And the money comment of the night:

So in the middle of our snow emergency, I ask the guy I just stopped for an asinine traffic violation why he's driving.

He points to his passenger and says "Because he's drunker than I am."

Some people just make my job way too easy.

And for what it's worth--everyone that I saw out tooling around last night with a three-foot high mound of snow atop their vehicle got a ticket for it. That's dangerous to you and other drivers and common sense would suggest that if you must drive, you take a minute to remove it. Or to paraphrase Chris Rock: "Clean that shit off!"

Sometimes lightning really does strike twice

A couple of years back, I tagged this gal for DWI one night. Smoking hot and a recent Russian immigrant. Turned out that she was one of those mail-order wives and some sap had paid big bucks to bring her here to America. Then he enlisted and went to fight overseas while she lived with his parents, cashing his checks, driving his car (and getting it impounded) and hanging out at the clubs until closing time...good wife, eh? I locked her up and her in-laws or husband or whoever ponied up for a lawyer who got her a plea deal, so the case never went to actual trial. I'd forgotten all about her until one night almost a year later when I found a car parked in a dark park a bit after midnight. I went up and interrupted a couple who were about to get busy, and when I did, I noticed the smell of alcoholic beverages. I also saw that the engine was running. Good enough. I pulled the two of them out and discovered that is was my little Russian friend from a year prior, still smoking hot and apparently unfaithful as ever. The car was her husband's but the guy she was with...not him. He's still overseas and this is just some casual hook-up.
Now I have to ask myself about the odds of this. My agency's coverage area is huge, spanning several smaller municpalities. A year ago, I'd tagged her near the northen end of it, and here, just by chance, I'd caught her again about forty miles south of there. With literally hundreds of thousands of people in our area, it boggles the mind to figure the odds of this happening.

So I hooked her for DWI again after she failed the field sobriety tests and exhibited enough other signs of intoxication for me to take her even though I hadn't actually seen her driving the car. (mere possession and control of the car is enough for the arrest here, and here being in the car with the engine running works.)

Her shack-up actually had the nerve to ask me how he was suppoosed to get home as I was hooking her up. No concern for her or curiosity about her charges--just interested in how he was supposed to get home.

I pointed out that he had feet and suggested that he use them. Then I took her back to out jail.

And on the way back, it finally dawned on her that we'd met before. She hadn't recognized me at first, and I didn't say anything. But half way back, the light came on and she told me that she knew. "Small world, eh?" I replied.

She was silent for a few minutes, and then she leaned towards the divider and told me off:
"You know, last time you arrested me, that was total bullshit. I was hardly drunk at all."

I didn't say anything; I never respond when prisoners start to ramble. Sometimes they say really cool spontaneous (and admissible) stuff if allowed to just talk.

"Yeah, I'll admit that you got me good this time. I'm fucked up. But last time I was hardly drunk at all and that was wrong."

I had to shake my head to be sure I'd just heard that. "What did you say?"
Thinking quickly, I grabbed my radio mike, keyed it, and held it up near the divider.

"I said that the last time you got me, I was hardly drunk at all. This time's solid because I'm fucked up, but last time I was hardly drunk at all and you shouldn't have arrested me."

Then she saw the microphone I was holding up.

"Oh, fuck you!" she screamed.

"Dispatch, please mark the tape and have a copy ready for pick-up prior to EOT," I said.

That confession was a nice addition to the little Tsarina's case jacket...and because I'd done nothing to solicit it, it was perfectly admissible. She wound up getting five days for this second DWI and the husband's car was impounded yet again.

I have to wonder if her husband has mailed her back to Moscow yet, or if she's still here, driving around in his car and waiting for our next encounter.

Law Students...

So one evening, I’m out driving along with one of our new assistant prosecutors in my car because they have to do ride-alongs with us to get a feel for what we do and how the cases actually get to their office.

Of course since I have a ride-along, I can’t find a damned thing to get into. I never can when I have a rider who needs to actually see something. It’s a curse, really.

But then I stop the car being rather stupidly driven. It’s speeding and it seems to be having a bit of trouble staying in it’s lane. I point out to my passenger the number of times that the car crosses the right shoulder fog line and/or the center line ( three times and twice in less than a mile, respectively) and then I light it up. The pulls over onto the next highway exit ramp, but instead of stopping immediately, it goes to the top of the ramp, then turns onto the connecting street and pulls to the curb.

I approach the driver and sole occupant and see that she’s a young blonde woman in her late twenties. I also immediately detect the odor of alcoholic beverages and observe that her eyes are red and that her pupils are dilated, all signs of alcohol use.

I introduce myself and explain that I’ve stopped her due to her speed. She’s smiling and cooperative, and in response to my “casual” follow-up questions, she says that she’s coming from a dinner put on by her law school and that she’s on her way to her boyfriend’s house.

Law school. Great. Experience has shown that there are few people as reliably stupid and/or aggravating as a law student. They think that they know it all, and most of what they “know” is, of course, wrong.

I congratulate her on being a law student, then when she smiles and thanks me, I ask her how much she had to drink tonight. “Oh, I just had a glass of wine,” she says.

Now based upon my observations and experience, I know that she’s had way more than one glass of wine. I ask her to step out of her car for a moment so that I can talk to her up on the sidewalk, and she does. I notice that she’s a bit unsteady on her feet, and I get another strong scent of booze as she gets out of the car, still all smiling and cooperative. Once up on the sidewalk, I ask her to submit to the field-sobriety tests. I really don’t need her to at this point, since between her driving behavior, my initial observations and her admission that she’d been drinking, I’ve already got enough probable cause to take her in. But more is always better.

And now the fun begins. Little miss law student has just figured out that she might be in trouble. The smile disappears from her face, replaced by a panicked look.

“Uhhhhh….You’re not allowed to ask me that,” she says.

OK, I’m curious now. I ask her why not. This should be good. My attorney rider seems a bit amused too.

“Well you haven’t explained all of the possible consequences of my taking the test and my refusing to take the test,” she says. People have to understand their rights and this is an important decision that can really affect me.”

I tell her that she’s correct in that it’s an important decision, and then I tell her that there’s no obligation on my part to explain a lot of things. It’s really a “yes or no” question and it’s her choice either way. “Besides”, I add. “You’re a law student. You’re obviously bright enough to understand this.”

“Yes, I know that I am,” she replies. “However, the standard here is what a layperson would understand, and you can’t use my extra education against me. I’m entitled to the same consideration as a layperson, and this is way too important a decision for a layperson to understand. So you need to explain everything to me.”

“Well that’s not going to happen, I tell her. The simple question is whether you’re going to take the test and demonstrate that you’re safe to drive, or whether I’m going to just take you in for a breath test and a mandatory blood test if you refuse that.”

“But I have a right to know!” she exclaimed.

“Yes you do,” I told her. “But that’s your responsibility. You could have learned all of this stuff any time that you wanted to. You apparently chose not to. So think of this as a test that you didn’t study for.”

So she changed her tack. Now she wanted to go at my authority.

“You can’t arrest me for anything,” she said. “You’re from the highway, and we’re not on the highway any more.”

I told her that I hated to disappoint her, but I had the same jurisdiction up here as I do down on the highway; there’s no difference.

“But the jurisdiction rule still applies to evidence,” she proclaimed. “You saw me driving down there on the highway, and if I crossed the lines there, it doesn’t matter because I’m off the highway now and this isn’t the highway…it’s not the same.”

OK, she gets props for originality if nothing else. I see my rider snickering so I introduce him. “I’m sorry, but this is Tom Xxxxxx. He’s one of our new prosecutors here in District Court. And that makes him a real lawyer. What do you think, Tom? You ever hear anything like this when you were in law school?”

Tom said that he didn’t, so I asked her one more time if she wanted to try the field-sobriety tests and convince me that she really wasn’t under the influence. “Last chance…” I told her as I unsnapped my cuff case.

“OK, ok…” she said. “I’ll do it. I don’t have to, but I just want to show you that I’m not drunk.”

So saying, she took the tests. And she failed resoundingly. Click, click. The cuffs went on and I put her in the back of my cruiser. I walked up to her car to secure it.

“Hey!” she began yelling. “Hey, ASSHOLE!”

I stopped to look at her, my attention caught by this latest change in her demeanor.

“You can’t look in my car! You don’t have consent! Touch my car and I’m suing!”

I walked back to her. “I guess you haven’t had the class on ‘search incident to arrest’ yet, eh?”

“The black bag on my seat is personal property and separate from the car! You can’t look in there!”

I just turned to Tom. “Feel free to explain,” I told him as I walked back up. By the time that he presumably told her that anything in the car was fair game, I’d already looked in the bag and observed it’s contents. Not illegal—just amusing. I imagined that her boyfriend was going to be disappointed tonight.

After I finished my inventory search, I went back and asked her if she wanted me to leave the bag of sex toys in the car or take them back and log them in as personal property at the station.

So I took her back to the station and began explaining the breath test procedure to her, but she interrupted and told me that she had a right to an attorney and that she wouldn’t take it until she was allowed to find an attorney and have him present. Fine. I bundled her back up and just took her to the hospital for a blood draw, listening to her caterwaul all the way about how I was violating her rights and I was going to be sued and fired and how she was going to win everything that I’ve ever owned…

It’s times like this that I’m grateful that cruisers come with stereos.


Flash forward two months to court. She walks in all professionally attired, the perfect picture of poise. She’s refused any plea offers, probably because her a blood-alcohol content was in excess of 0.15, guaranteeing her a minimum five days in jail following conviction. The case was presented and she was, of course, found guilty, with the judge suppressing a smile more than once as her antics and claims were retold in court. Finally, she was asked if she had anything that she wanted to say.

“Well your Honor…I just wanted to say that I have always admired this court and you personally and I hope that you can find it in your heart to show some mercy here, as my goal ever since beginning law school was to become a clerk in this very court.”

Wow. We all looked to the judge to see how that line was going to play.

“Well I don’t think that’s going to happen,” he told her. “but nothing will prevent you from submitting a resume once you finish your five days in jail and year of probation.”

Ouch!

So there I am one night, just minding my own business...

Not bothering anyone. Nope. It was about 4AM, the night was dead, and I'd just finished my reports and was on the way to the local Stop n' Rob to get a cup of coffee.

I was rolling down a highway, about to get off at the exit where the coffee was, when I saw headlights in my rearview. They were way back and had just been visible for a second when they'd crested a hill. I almost let it go, but since it was so slow out tonight, I pulled to the shoulder just before the ramp and doused me lights, figuring I'd at least check this guy's speed on my rear radar as he came past. If he was really speeding, I'd peg him. If not, at least one more guy would see that we actually ARE out here at night. So I waited that few seconds...

My radar unit screamed and nearly jumped off of the dashboard. 112 mph. Holy Shit! I turned my lights back on as the car rocketed past me and had just put my hand on the gear shift when he slid into the curve just past the exit ramp--a curve that was the reason for the speed limit in this area being posted at 50mph. And sure enough--going into the curve, he lost it. He skidded and slammed into the left side Jersey wall, hitting it hard enough to bounce off and spin completely across the two-lane highway to impact the wall on the right side. The car--a full-size Mercury Marquis--disintegrated before my eyes, car parts large and small flying everywhere.

I got on the radio and called out that I'd just witnessed a crash and that Rescue and additional police units were going to be needed, then I rolled up to the wreckage, expecting to find a dead moron or two.

A teenager got out of what was left of the car. He was a bit woozy, but actually appeared uninjured. "Inconceivable!" as Fezzini would have said.

I sat him down and had just started talking to him when everyone else started to show up. I smelled booze on him and when I asked him if he'd been drinking, he admitted it. He also did not have a driver's license. He was 18 and had never had one. The car was his sister's. Great. So much for getting off in two hours like I was supposed to.

Now I wanted to pop the little turd for DUI, but he quickly figured out the score and even though he'd told me several times that he wasn't hurt. he began asking to go to the hospital once I told him that he was going to be taken back to the station for a Breathalyzer. And of course as bad as the crash was, I couldn't deny him. So I let Rescue package his dopey ass up and he was probably thinking that he was getting over, not realizing that I'd be following him down there with a blood draw kit.

But first I had to deal with the questions from my peers.

"Dude--what were you chasing him for?"

Of course I hadn't been chasing him, but no one wanted to accept the fact that I'd just been parked on the shoulder when this goofball came by and coincidentally destroyed himself right in front of me. Cops being cops, everyone was jumping to the conclusion that I'd been chasing this kid without putting the pursuit out over the radio and only called in the wreck to cover my ass. I must have been asked at least once by every other cop who showed up. "What were you chasing him for? You know they're going to hammer you for chasing off the radio..."

I really can't blame them. I'd have had trouble believing my claim too. I mean, what are the odds?

Even my sergeant pulled me aside and told me that there were liable to be some questions later about my role in this, and that I might want to call up the shift union steward.

I finally exploded. "Look, dammit! I was NOT chasing this kid! I was really just sitting over there minding my own business! Hell--go to the hospital and ASK HIM! And do it before I get there so there won't be any question about him being coached! In fact, Sarge, I insist that you go ask him and get a statement from him right now."
My sergeant, being a good guy who takes care of his people, said that he would go over and do that just to make sure that nothing bad came down from the Monday morning quarterbacks at headquarters. I'd hoped that he would. I quickly grabbed a blood kit from my duty bag. "Oh--and while you're over there, would you be so kind as to get a blood draw for me?" I could play the game too. That just saved me about an hour and a half that I would have blown over at the hospital. Besides, I still had to document all of this carnage and I had some questions for the actual owner of the car.

The sister came to the station to talk to me just as I was finishing the crash diagram. And she was incredibly cooperative, admitting freely that she'd let her brother borrow her car and that she'd known that he did not have a license. She even said that she'd known that he was going to a party and figured that he'd be drinking. And all of those statements went into my report. I also cited her for allowing an unlicensed driver to use her car, and I found out later that based upon my report and the citation--which she paid (basically admitting to the charge)--the insurance company denied the claim on the car. It was only two years old. She also got a bill for damage to the Jersey walls, and that's never cheap.

Long story short, the kid did state that he'd been speeding long before getting to that curve, and he also stated that I was not chasing him and that he hadn't even seen me when he passed me. And his BAC turned out to be 0.21, so he got pegged for DWI, Underage Consumption, Reckless Driving in addition to Operating Without a License and Uninsured Motorist.

DISPOSITION: A plea deal where he took the DWI and OWL and got 15 days jail and no driver's license until his 21st birthday, with the judge telling him that if he got caught driving again before then, he could count on being locked up for at least thirty days.

And of course big sister was out a car that she was probably still paying on.

Pursuits can be fun

Who am I kidding? They ARE fun. However most departments frown on them these days because oftentimes people get hurt. Now if it's just the jerkwater who decides to run, that's no big deal in my personal opinion. Call it a case of the Karma fairy settling accounts. But sometimes it's one of the good guys, and that's bad. And sometimes it's an innocent, totally uninvolved citizen. And that's unacceptable.

I remember my first pursuit like it was yesterday. I'd been on my own out of training for two days and a couple of hours when I saw a beat-up, tinted-out ex-police Caprice going down the road.

Now other than cab companies, only two kinds of people buy ex-police cars: Geeky, unpopular high school kids who are still a step above the Columbine trench Coat Mafia, and thugs.

The first group are mostly harmless. It's just goofy, antisocial little white boys who think that if they buy an ex-police car, someone might think for a moment that they're police officers instead of nerds and they hope that someone might actually respect or fear them. Usually they trick these cars up with as many lights and do-dads as they can to make them look even more like police cars, often to the point of actually getting in trouble for impersonating real police when they start using those lights in traffic, but usually they land a fat girlfriend who treats them like crap and they gladly ditch the toy cop car for her.

The second group is the dope boys and assorted hood rats who think that if they get a car that was once used to arrest many of the people that they know, it'll give them some sort of "street cred" and also allow them to flee from the real police, because everyone knows that an untrained fool driving an ex-police car that hasn't been maintained for crap can out-drive any seasoned police officer in a newer car that's actually been taken care of.

Well it was one of the second sort that I saw on this day, and sure enough, as soon as I went to stop the driver for the window-tint violation, he stomped on the gas and took off. I hit the lights and gunned it, all excited because I had my very own first pursuit. Go, me! And I called it in on the radio, just like I'd been taught, clarifying that it was a pursuit for traffic, giving a description of the vehicle, our direction of travel, and road and traffic conditions. I was doing everything right, just like I'd been taught to do for months in the academy. My fellow recent graduates were no doubt listening, green with envy. This was a great game.

Then a voice came over the radio. It was the shift Lieutenant, ordering Dispatch to tell me to break it off and quit chasing.

WTF?! I was right on this guy! I practically had him, other than the fact that he wasn't stopping. Dispatch relayed the command to me. "Break it off."

And here's where I almost ended my police career in it's opening days. I pulled a trick that I'd heard other officers do, both on TV and even in Field Training:

"Repeat that, Dispatch...you're breaking up." I pretended that I couldn't hear the order to stop. Just give me a few more seconds and I know that this guy'll stop and surrender to me, or something. He'll, that car's probably chock full of guns and drugs...

But it only lasted long enough for Dispatch to repeat the command, the tone making it clear that they weren't buying it.

I immediately wised up and complied, doing it "by the book" again. I turned my lights off, and I slowed to a stop, preparing to make a U-turn and leave the area so that I wouldn't even be accidentally going in the same direction of the Caprice that was now a two blocks away and disappearing fast. I gave it one more wistful glance. I'd almost had him...

Then I saw him hit the pedestrian--an old man who was just crossing the street three blocks down. The old man flew through the air like a rag doll, his bag of groceries scattering everywhere. SHIT!!!

"Dispatch! I stopped chasing but he just hit a pedestrian! Roll EMS! Get some people over here!" This wasn't a game anymore. Now somebody was really hurt--somebody who wasn't even playing. It wasn't supposed to work like this.

Fast-forward a lifetime as I pulled up and did what I could to render aid and keep the growing crowd back. I was deep in the 'hood--the only cop or white guy for a long ways--and everyone knew and liked this guy. Not good. Several of the crowd tried to rally the rest to attack me, but I was able to exert enough command presence to convince them that my goal was to help this guy and that they needed to help me by staying back. It bought me time until the cavalry got there.

Long story short, the guy was medivac'd out, and turned out to have relatively minor injuries, despite flipping clean over the car that had hit him. Apparently as drunk as he was, he was relaxed and he bent instead of breaking. He was angry about one thing, and that was the destruction of his recently-opened 40oz. malt liquor.

But then the perjury circus started. A million witnesses surged forth to swear on their last food stamps that I'd still been in full pursuit when the man was hit, and some even claimed that I'd hit him. It always amazed me how no one could be out on the street when something goes down, but if the police is involved, hundreds of them still see "everything"--even people who arrived ten or fifteen minutes later in cars or got off the city bus. And they all want to be witnesses against the police.

Fortunately my supervisors and the investigators knew what was going on, and they managed to find one honest person of the bunch who said that he'd seen me shut my lights and siren off and pull to the curb three blocks away, well before the fleeing Caprice had hit the man. This man's honesty might well have saved my job, an act which caused his wonderful neighbors to subsequently vandalize both his house and his car. I was found to be not responsible, even though I heard a few references to my "radio trouble" as part of the counseling session that followed. But the point was driven home to me that day that chases aren't kid games like you see on TV. They're serious safety hazards to anyone around, and each has the potential to hurt or kill someone who doesn't deserve it. I still chase, but always with that incident in mind. And now I break them off myself if the risks get too heavy.

But sometimes, chase endings are pre-ordained based simply on where you're chasing. There is a section of road in my area that ends in an on-ramp to the highway, and that ramp has a fairly steep descent that conceals from view a 15-mph, nearly 90-degree curve. Any vehicle hitting that curve as any kind of speed winds up on it's roof and/or in the woods. We chase three or four cars a year into that curve and the end result is as predictable as it is inevitable. Here's one that I chased into it a while back:
The driver was a early-twenties woman from a local "better-than-you" wealthy family who'd decided that she didn't want to get a third DWI. Well needless to say, she got it anyway and went to jail for 120 days once the judge heard my testimony and saw the pictures. Sometimes there is a happy ending.

Oh--and the best part about pursuits that end in that curve? The bottom of that ramp is the state highway patrol's jurisdiction. They get to handle the crash reports and clean-up!

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.

Denver area police do the right thing--404 DUI arrests over Halloween week-end

Now this is good police work.

A Halloween drunken-driving crackdown netted 404 arrests statewide between Friday night and early Monday morning, the Colorado State Patrol said today.

Troopers and more than 50 local law-enforcement agencies participated in the crackdown.

Four people in Colorado were killed during the four-day period; two of those crashes were alcohol-related, according to troopers.

Alcohol was a factor in 40 percent of the traffic deaths in Colorado last year, accounting for 226 deaths.

Those arrested for drunken driving face jail time, the loss of their driver's license, and fines and court costs as high as $10,000.

Col. Mark Trostel, chief of the Colorado State Patrol, said arresting drunken drivers would be a top priority for the upcoming holiday season.

"If you take the risk, you will get caught," he said in a statement.

During the crackdown, the State Patrol made 104 DUI arrests; Denver police made 64; Colorado Springs police made 33; Aurora made 29; Adams County sheriff's deputies made 14; Lakewood police made 13; Grand Junction police made 10; Jefferson County sheriff's deputies arrested 10; and Rifle police made 10 arrests.

There are really few things out there on our roads more dangerous than drunk drivers. Each year, drunk drivers kill more people that we've lost in Iraq since the beginning of the war. According to the DUI Death Clock, nearly 12,000 Americans have died so far this year alone due to someone's decision to drink and drive.

I commend my brothers and sisters in the participating Denver-area agencies.

Now my next question: How many arrested DUI drivers were illegal aliens driving without licenses or insurance? Of that number, How many were held for deportation?

Since it's the Denver area that we're talking about, I'm betting that the answers are "quite a few" and "not even one". But I'd sure like to be proven wrong on that last one.