Mentally handicapped parking?

So this morning, a couple of us are in a local 7-11 for coffee. Besides us, there are a couple of cars each from two other departments. in fact, the parking lot on the side of the building is almost all police cars, as are the spots out by the curb, in front of the building but out along the street. The only spots open are the slots directly in front of the store, which we typically leave for the regular customers who might actually want to run in, buy stuff and leave.

So we're all sitting around, drinking coffee and talking about the night's business, when I happen to glance up and see that there's a vehicle parked in the handicapped spot out in front of the store. A quick look around shows me no one who appears handicapped, just a bunch of hispanic laborers (note to self: start inviting ICE guys to these coffees) and a large guy buying a pair of hot dogs at 5AM. (Ugh!) I wander outside and notice that in addition to having an expired inspection sticker from the neighboring state, the Cadillac SUV in the handicapped spot bears no placard or special DMV tags. I sigh, wander over to my cruiser, get my ticket book out, and start to write. This sort of thing is one of my serious pet peeves, for reasons that people who know me understand all too well.

A moment later, hot dog guy comes out and sees me scratching him the ticket. Of course he begs for a break, claiming that he didn't know, despite the big blue and white sign right above the parking lot just above eye level. Unfortunately for him, it's me writing the cite, and I don't cut slack on handicapped violators. I point out that there were and still are several other vacant slots that are not handicapped and which are still closer to the door than my car, and then I point out all of the police cars in the lot and ask him what he was thinking. Hell, doing this blatantly in front of us all is almost as disrespectful to us as it is to the actual disabled people who need those spots. He shrugs and laughs and says "Yeah, ok...you got me," in a manner that suggests that he still doesn't take it that seriously. But his good nature changed when he looked at the fine amount line: "Two hundred and fifty dollars?! Come on, man! That ain't right!"

No, parking in the one space reserved for the disabled isn't right, and doing it with six police cars in the parking lot is just ignorant. Hope he enjoyed the hot dogs. I figure they cost him $125.00 each. Dumbass.

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.

How urban legends get started

There was this kid I arrested a few months ago. He was a 17 year old who was dealing dope and I was helping one of our detectives pick him up because a confidential informant said that he was carrying a large quantity of drugs and a pistol.

We saw him walking down the street so we passed him in our unmarked car and cut him off. He turned to bolt and I banged a quick J-turn, chased him back down the street and cut him off again, pulling right up onto the sidewalk and nearly flattening him. This time he gave up and we put the Habeus Grabus on him. Then we searched him and although he didn't have the gun he was supposed to have, he at least had distribution quantity of both weed and crack in his pockets.

Of course he wanted to know how we knew he had the stuff and since we didn't want to reveal that we'd been tipped by an informant, I told him: "Dude, didn't you hear? The city's got these new weed detectors up on the light poles now. You walked right past one." Him not being very bright, he asked how they worked. I said "You know how dogs can smell weed a long ways away? Well now they have machines that can do that too, and the city bought a bunch and put them all over the place. They detect weed and take your picture and send it right to us."

And a minute later when his auntie and a batch of his cousins came running up to see why we were locking him up this time, the kid yells out to the whole block: "They said I walked by one of the new weed-finding machines! It's up on a light pole somewhere. Watch out for them poles!"

With any luck, there will now be a whole bunch of dope boys looking up at the utility poles for a bit, at least until this knucklehead realizes that one of his own pals dropped a dime on him and squelches the rumor.

Ah, Eugene, Eugene, Eugene, Eugene...

So one day, I'm just tooling along through the neighborhoods when I see this white Ford Escort with a messed up left front fender pass me going the other way. The driver gives me that "Oh-shit-it's-the-police" look as we pass, so I know instantly that he's guilty of something even though I have no idea what it is. I bang a U-turn to begin following him with the hope that I can find a lawful reason to stop him, but he makes it easy for me by punching the gas and trying to jack-rabbit away.

Dude--you've got a Ford Escort and I've got a Crown Vic Police Interceptor. Come on...

I hit the lights and siren and of course he refuses to stop. I put the pursuit out on my radio, but no sooner do I get the words out than he skids to a stop in front of an apartment building and bails out. I slide to a stop and go out after him, but he gets to the building door ahead of me and runs inside. I'm slowed down a bit by my need to quick-peek the doorway and subsequent corners, and he gets up the stairs and into one of the apartments on the third floor before I can make it up there. I have no idea which unit he's in, and of course I can't expect any of his friends and neighbors to rat him out. OK, fine. But I still have his car downstairs. I go back down, and when my back-up arrives, I toss the car to find the name of the owner and discover a bag of weed in the center console. Turns out that the car is unregistered and the tags are expired and belong on another car. (Big shock in this neighborhood...) At least I got the guy's dope, and I'll impound the car, which means that someone is going to have to pony up some cash and ownership documents to get it back from the tow yard or forfeit the car altogether. Other than the fender and the typically filthy interior, it's not really a bad car.

So as I wait on the impound tow truck, knucklehead starts yelling at me out the window, taunting me for being slow. He quits laughing when I yell back that I'm taking his car.
A few minutes pass, and then a woman walks out of the building and tells me that the car's driver is her baby's daddy and that all of her tax documents are in the car and she needs those to get her tax refund. She wants to get them out. I tell her that I'm not letting her or anyone else take anything out of the car, but that if he wants to come down and surrender himself, I'll leave the car here instead of impounding it.
"Oh, he not gonna do that," she replies.
"Tough break," I say. "That's the only way I let this car or anything in it go."
She goes back inside. A minute later, he starts cussing me out of the window. Unfortunately I can't tell which window. Oh well. I take another look in the car and sure enough, there's an envelope inside with filled-out income tax forms and documents. At least I know who she is and her apartment number now. But I still don't know his name and I won't be able to get a warrant for her apartment with what I've got, especially since all the charges at this point are traffic violations.
I wait some more. Then a large woman walks up to me and tells me that the Escort is her son's car. She says that he's not a bad boy and that he's actually trying to do right and provide for his babies (I note the plural) and that he has a job that he was just coming back from. She says that he really needs the car and that he was just scared because his driver's license "might" be suspended (I'd be surprised if it wasn't) and she begs me to just leave him and the car be. I ask her what his name is and where he's at, and of course she says that she can't tell me that. I tell her to have a nice day and to let him know that he can get the car back from the impound yard if he shows up there with a valid registration and the towing and storage fees. I also wish like hell that this city would require a valid driver's license before releasing an impounded car like so many other cities do, but they don't and the hood rats all know it which is why many of these cars go through cycles of being impounded by the police and redeemed by the same owners who don't have drivers' licenses and probably never will. Once they get a few hundred dollars in fines, it's really not cost-effective to pay them as the fine for driving without a license here is minimal and can be paid at the police station without even having to show up in court.

Big Mama steps away and goes to sit on the stoop, where she is joined by other people--friends, relatives, or whoever--all of whom take to pleading with me over and over to just let him and the car go. Meanwhile he's still sporadically cursing me out the window, so I tell his mother that the more he does that, the less charitable I feel towards him. So she stands up, walks out to the sidewalk, looks up at the building, and hollers: "Eugene! You stop that right now! You making it worse!"
Eugene yells back. "Dammit Mama, you just told him my name!"
I have to laugh. Real rocket scientists, this bunch.
I call up to Eugene and tell him to just come down and take the arrest like a man and quit putting all of these women to so much trouble. He curses me again and tells me not to be putting his business out in front of everybody. I respond by shouting back and asking him what he's going to do about it. Come down here, maybe?
He curses again but says nothing more until the tow truck arrives. At this time, nearly a dozen people are standing there with Big Mama and Baby's Mama, imploring me not to take the car. Kind of touching, all of this concern for a knucklehead, but not nearly touching enough. The car goes away and we all clear.

I have my scheduled days off, and when I get back to work early the next week, I check with the tow yard, and sure enough, Eugene or someone on his behalf showed up and redeemed the car. It cost them about $400.00 but they got it back. Of course I still have no last name for Eugene, but I know where he's staying, what he drives, and more than likely, what time he gets home from whatever job he has. So I go back out there a little before the time that I saw him last week and I and a back-up officer just sit in a parking lot near where I first saw him driving and we wait.

Sure enough, there goes that same white Escort with the messed-up front fender, and the same knucklehead is driving. He sees us right about the time that we're shifting our cruisers into "Drive" and he takes off again. We go after him, and it's clear that he's going to try the same trick. He races right back to the same apartment building and skids to a stop in front of it, just like he did the last time, but I'm closer now, and when he throws open his door to bail out, it just hits my bumper as I slide to a stop next to him, leaving him with no way to get out of the left side of his car. He jumps across and tries to go out the passenger side but we're on him and this time, Eugene gets grabbed and taken off to jail.

And for good measure, I impound his car again.

I charge him with everything that I can hang on him for today's dumb stunt--Operating Without a License, Operating Without Insurance, Unregistered Auto, Fleeing to Elude (at this time, only a misdemeanor in that city) etc., and I get warrants for him for the same charges based on the preceding week and serve those on him too before we let him go. I also hang a Possession of MJ charge on him, but as expected, the city attorney ash-canned that one since I didn't take it off him and because the car that I found it in wasn't registered to him. Eugene spent the night in jail and was released the next day pending his court appearance.

OK, now I felt like we were at least even, but we have a thing here for making sure that the community understands that it's not a good idea for individuals to try to punk us. Come Saturday afternoon, I head back over to that area and sit and wait again. Like clockwork, there goes Eugene in that Escort again. Since I already know that his license is suspended, I go after him. This time he stops his car on the left side of the street so I can't block his door, and he bails out again. So I run my cruiser up over the curb and use it to cut him off from the building's door, and I jump out and tackle him. Once more, Eugene's off to jail, and his car's off to impound. And this time, since he's already got an open case and is out on supervised release, his getting re-arrested on new charges means that he has to sit in jail until his public defender can get a pre-trial release hearing for him, and that usually takes a few weeks. Plus I impounded his car yet again.

A month or so passed, and I'd not thought about Eugene much, but then one afternoon I happened to be driving through that neighborhood again and coming up the road towards me was that White Escort again...and Eugene was driving it!

I stopped, waiting for him to pass so I could U-turn on him and chase him back to his building again, but this time Eugene just pulled over to the curb, parked his car, and stuck his hands out the window.
"I'm tired of this, Officer Krupke," he said, "I ain't even gonna run no more!"

I was so proud of Eugene for learning his lesson that this time when I arrested him again, I didn't even impound his car.

Eventually all of the charges that I'd laid on Eugene from these four encounters got him probation, a heap of community service, a year in jail--suspended of course--and a promise from the judge that if he got arrested again, he'd do the whole year. I gave myself two weeks to nail him again and make that come true, but Eugene either moved away or sold the Escort because I never saw him or that little white Ford again. But at least he was good for four arrests in my stat book and hopefully served as an object lesson to his neighbors. Moral of the story: If you're going to run from the police, don't just try to run home, and once the police have your number and know that you're suspended, it's probably not a good idea to keep driving the same distinctive car down the same roads at the same time every day.

Of Hummers and gals not too bright...

So one night I’m driving south down the highway, minding my own business, when I see a vehicle traveling northbound on the other side of the median at a pretty good clip. I hit my radar and confirm that the vehicle is traveling thirty-three miles over the posted limit.

Normally I don’t bother jumping the median for something like this since it’s almost a given that I’ll lose sight of the vehicle, making a positive identification problematic, but in this case, it’s a bright yellow, full-sized Hummer with a radio station logo on the side, so that won’t be a problem here. I hit the grass and bang a u-turn and go after the Hummer.

I catch up and stop it about a mile up the highway. It’s being driven by a young black girl who denies speeding. I tell her that I got her on radar and there’s no doubt at all, and then she asks: “Well how do you know it was this Hummer?”

Yeah. Because there are so many bright yellow Hummers with radio station logos on the side driving around.

Then she asks for a break, telling me that she’s “Hottie Melinda”, a DJ with the radio station whose logo decorates the side of the vehicle. She says that she’ll get in trouble with the station and not be allowed to drive the Hummer if she gets a ticket in it.

My heart bleeds. Really it does. In fact my eyes are so teary back in my cruiser that I almost have trouble writing out the Speeding and Reckless Driving citations that I’m giving her. Of course when she gets them, she gets upset and tells me that because of me, she won’t be allowed to drive the Hummer any more. And then she starts crying, and the tears are running down her cheeks like water from a faucet.

Whatever. I explain her options and point out her mandatory court date and send her on her way. Hopefully she’ll show up on the assigned date and just plead out to the usual deal that the prosecutors offer to anyone with a decent driving record—pay the speeding fine and the Reckless gets dropped. Almost everyone takes that deal because the Reckless is a heavy hit, with the fine and points involved, to say nothing of the hike in insurance rates.

A few weeks later though, I get the subpoena. Hottie Melinda wants her trial on the matter.

Now maybe some people think that they have a good chance of beating a ticket just because the officer may not show up. Well here, we get in trouble if we miss court, and my attendance record is flawless. Besides, if we ever need to miss a day and we let the Prosecutor’s Office know even a few days in advance, they’ll just get continuances on all of our cases. The defendants will show up, get all happy when they find out that we’re not going to be in court that day, and then get served with a new court date instead of the dismissal that they thought they’d get.

However it seems that in this case, my defendant really wanted her trial, because she had what she thought was a winning argument:

“Your Honor, I don’t think I was speeding at all. I think that the officer just stopped me because I was in a Hummer.”

This piqued the judge’s curiosity. “So why would the officer stop you just for driving a Hummer?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “Maybe because he’s jealous.”

The judge looked at me. I so tried not to roll my eyes, but I know that he saw me. How could you not?

The judge asked her another question. “The officer has already testified as to his determination of your speed. What do you have to say about that, if anything?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “But I know that I wasn’t speeding. Oh—and Your Honor, I just want to let you know that I’m not just some kid…I’m Hottie Melinda!”

Ah yes…the old “I’m sure that I wasn’t speeding” claim, followed by the fabled “do you know who I am?” ploy. That almost always sways judges, right?

But alas, it didn’t seem to persuade this one. He replied by outlining my allegation, including my testimony regarding my radar reading, and asked if he should not credit my testimony because she thought that she wasn’t speeding and because she worked for a radio station.

Apparently she could read the writing on the wall, because she began to cry again. And I was impressed; this ability to just turn on the waterworks on cue like that is something not every girl can do.

“I know I wasn’t speeding,” she said again between the sobs. “I don’t speed, because the radio station won’t let me drive the Hummer if I do, so I wasn’t speeding! He just stopped me because I’m a young girl driving a nice shiny Hummer…and because I’m black!”

All right! There it was! I knew that one was coming sooner or later and I’d have been disappointed if that tired old ploy hadn’t been trotted out in this case. And now it was the judge who was rolling his eyes. He’s heard that one before, too…about a thousand times. And he knows me well enough to know that I don’t care about race, sex or any other criteria—I hammer every violator equally.

So he finds Hottie Melinda guilty of Speeding and Reckless Driving, and he suspends her license for ninety days because she’s got a few previous violations on her record, including a prior Reckless three years previous. Of course now she’s sobbing and hyperventilating, so the judge asks her if she’s going to require medical help from the court nurse. It was actually an honest question asked with legitimate concern, but she was angry now and snapped back at the judge.
“I don’t want nothing from this G-ddamned Cracker court! Just wait until my listeners hear about this bullshit!”

And quicker than you could say “contempt of court”, Hottie Melinda, was on her way back to the holding cells with the Bailiff. Some people just don’t know when to quit digging, and the defendant was obviously one of them.

She was apparently a bit more contrite when she was brought before the judge the following day though because I heard that he let her go.

Fools in da' hood

Ah, Copwatch and Indymedia… Never before have I seen such a bunch of pathetic losers venting their impotent rage at the police. I’ve just read on the Bitches in Blue blog about how the local hemorrhoids have been harassing the Chicago Police Department and claiming—without merit—that the police in that city are and always have been power-crazed bullies.

I have to admit that we have those simpletons here in our area too. Mostly they just make harmless noise and I still laugh when I recall the last time that I had anything to do with their antics.

This encounter stemmed from their outrage over the fact that our agency was responding to an increase in violent drug-related crime in a particular public housing complex by engaging in a practice known as “jump-outs”. In a jump-out, officers roll around in a van all inconspicuous until they see what looks like a group of drug dealers or other assorted thugs. The van pulls up, the officers jump out, and everyone in the group gets detained, run for warrants, and at least frisked if not searched. Typically this results in a warrant hit or two and the recovery of some quantity of drugs and/or a weapon is almost guaranteed. You see, jump-out squads don’t just hit up any group of people—or even any group of black males. They know what the signs of drug dealing and gang affiliation are, and they target the ones who fit those criteria. The goal is the interdiction of bad people, not just harassing groups of teens or young adults.

I wasn’t part of the actual jump-out squad, but I was assigned to loiter in the area as rapid-response back-up when needed. If the thugs broke and ran, or someone began to fight, I was right around the corner.

Well we’d been doing this for a few weeks, and we’d wrapped up a number of bad guys. We’d also snared about a dozen guns and a fair bit of narcotics. In fact, it was going so well that the local newspaper got hold of it and did a story on it. And this brought the kook brigade out in force.

Now when you’re policing a minority-majority city (one where the population is predominately black) and there is no outrage from the usual suspect who claim to speak for the black community—the local Al Sharpton/Jesse Jackson wanna-be types in addition to the NAACP—you’re probably on pretty safe ground. And none of these folks were complaining, because they knew that we were surgically removing from the community the very scumbags who were preying on the decent people and making life hard for the elderly and the single moms who just wanted to get through the day without becoming crime victims. But then the angry white kids showed up.

And these are the fools who run websites like Copwatch and the various Indymedia sites. Self-proclaimed “anarchists”, most are really spoiled suburbanite kids whose parents either don’t know how to raise them to be decent, responsible young adults or they just don’t care. Within a day or two, these little nit-wits are posting all sorts of smack talk on the internet, sending letters to the editor at the newspaper, and posting Xerox-copy fliers around the project telling people to rise up and resist the oppressive police.

Yeah, I know… there’s just no curing stupid.

Well that alone wasn’t really very noteworthy, because everyone knows that there aren’t more than a couple dozen of these little turds in the group, and none of them actually live in our city but only commute in to try to rile things up and then go home to mommy’s and daddy’s basement in one of the more trendy suburbs to watch MTV and play video games in lieu of actually working a job or going to school. But in this case, the kids decided to take it a step further and one day they just appeared in the projects with video cameras, looking for our units or any other signs of police activity, and then dipping in from the sidewalk, telling anyone that we were dealing with that they didn’t have to answer our questions or consent to searches. They basically succeeded in getting us to suspend operations for the day because the unit supervisor didn’t want to give them any publicity by letting them gin up some incident to put on Youtube, so in that regard, they actually accomplished something.

However, a couple of hours after we’d pulled out, some of these little cretins actually walked into our station, looking a bit beaten and battered. It seems that after we’d left, some of those “fine, upstanding people” who live in the projects jumped them and took all of their money and their video cameras—the very cameras that they’d been using to harass US—and roughed them up a bit, either because they didn’t immediately comply or because they displayed some of their trademark “We’re superior to you” attitudes. (I’m betting on the latter.) Now—incredibly—they want to make a police report and they want US to roll back up into the neighborhood in force and recover their stuff for them.

We are, of course, professional enough not to laugh in their faces, but I’m sure they could hear us busting up in the hallway behind our lobby area. Karma can be a real bitch at times, can’t it?

The Great Banana Caper

Did you ever have one of those times when you go a little out of your way to try to be helpful and it comes back on you? well I had one of those not too long ago. It's still referred to around my department as "The Great Banana Caper".

It all began one day when I decided to camp out in a local highway construction zone and slow traffic down a bit. As i did so, I got to talking with a couple of the construction workers and they told me that for the past couple of weeks, a woman had been driving through every morning between 7:30 and 8:00AM and throwing a banana at them. Not a banana peel, but a whole banana. And she did this every weekday.

I admit, my first thought was that this was kinda funny, and they'd thought so too, until a couple of guys had actually been hit by the flying bananas. Apparently a banana launched from a car at 40-45mph hurts when it hits you. I had to take their word for that, but being a nice guy, I promised to come back for the next few mornings and see if I couldn't catch the Unknown Fruiter.

That was my first mistake. The second was when I put a slip in identifying my special enforcement project so that I would not get a bunch of low-priority calls during that timeframe. You can bet that that one raised my sergeant's eyebrows at the next roll call.

"You want to be blocked out to catch WHAT?!"

And word spread around the station that I was on the hunt for a dangerous criminal. Support was offered by small containers of milk and recipes for banana bread left--anonymously of course--in my mailbox.

What made it worse, however, was that I couldn't actually catch this woman. For almost two weeks I failed to make the connection with her. Either she wouldn't show up, or else she'd come by and pelt the workers when I wasn't there waiting. It actually got to be pretty embarrassing, especially when my co-workers inquired daily as to when they might expect to read about the arrest of this criminal mastermind in the morning papers.

Finally I caught a break. I showed up one morning for my stake-out, which had now been dubbed "Operation Dole" by my professional peers, and the work foreman told me that she'd just come by not two minutes before. I sighed. But this time was different. This time someone had actually gotten her LICENSE NUMBER--something that hadn't happened this far into the game. I ran the tag and got the name of the owner, along with a local address within our jurisdiction.
As I figured she was probably on her way to work in the morning, I decided to go pay her a visit in the later afternoon, just prior to end of shift, and talk to her about her little game.

And later that day, I drove up to a nice townhouse and saw the vehicle in question parked under the carport. Finally I could put this one to bed.

I rang the bell and a rather attractive woman about 40 years old answered the door. I asked for my suspect, and she admitted that she was the one I was looking for. And when I told her why I was there, she laughed and freely admitted that yes, she'd been throwing bananas at the workers almost every day for the past month or so. She actually stopped at the local stop n' rob to buy one every morning along with her coffee and paper. It was a joke that she thought was quite funny, and when I asked her why she threw bananas, she said it was because construction workers reminded her of apes. Nice gal, eh? And she was a money market manager at a big firm downtown.

Well I advised her against doing it any further and I left, figuring that this was finally over. I went back and wrote up my reports, including her statements, and submitted the packet, expecting to hear no more about it. I let the road workers know that I'd talked to her and that it shouldn't happen again. I did get a round of applause at roll call the next day, but what I didn't expect was the call from the prosecutor's office a couple of days later, telling me to come in and pick up the arrest warrant. Apparently one of the workers had called over there saying that he wanted to press charges, so now I had to go pick her up for multiple charges of FELONY ASSAULT since she'd thrown objects--bananas--from a moving vehicle, which under our criminal code, was a felony regardless of what the object was. So that afternoon, I once again drove to the townhouse and rang the bell. The banana lady came back to the door, laughing and claiming that she hadn't thrown any more bananas, so if there was fresh fruit out there, it had to have come from someone else. I asked her to step outside on the stoop for a moment, and when she did, I informed her that she was under arrest and suggested that she get her ID and her credit cards and lock her door. It took her a few seconds to figure out that I was serious, and when she did, she tried to jump back inside, but I grabbed her and pulled her back out and got the cuffs on while she screamed and hollered and basically caused a scene in front of her neighbors and anyone else who might be around to watch. Now she wasn't friendly any more, and she bitched about how embarrassing this was, and how ridiculous, and told me several times that she was going to sue me for emotional distress because all her neighbors would think that she was a criminal now. And she said that she should have thrown the bananas at cops, because we were all apes, too. Again with the "ape" thing in reference to men who do real work. Now I'm thinking that someone's probably got some interesting fantasies.

But I brought her back in, arriving at shift change, and both shifts got a good look at the Rotten Banana, as she was now known. Sigh... Everyone else in the processing center has drug dealers and thieves, and I have a banana-tossing money manager. Freaking great. And she ran her mouth the whole time, just making it all that much more special.

Long story short, it was pled down to a misdemeanor Disorderly Person charge and she actually got twenty days community service, roughly a day for every banana that she'd thrown. So for ten week-ends, she got to don a day-go vest and go out and clean up trash with the rest of the local petty criminals. I have to wonder how many banana peels she picked up while she was out there.

As for me, I learned to just stay on the highway and mind my own business.

Sometimes it's the little things that getcha.

Littering. Just don't do it. Even if you're not wanted.

LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga.—Police said a man likely wishes he never threw trash on a highway. That's because littering wasn't the only charge filed against him. The man, 42, faces drug charges after deputies seized six pounds of methamphetamine from his vehicle.

He was arrested Friday on Interstate 85. Deputies also learned he was wanted in Louisiana for failure to appear.

The meth was valued at approximately $350,000 on the streets.

The man was charged with trafficking methampetamine, littering and other traffic violations.

———

This one reminds me of a night when I was just driving along, minding my own business, on my way back to my station to do some reports and not particularly looking for any trouble. I was in the right lane on the highway, overtaking a slower vehicle in the left lane, when suddenly a burst of sparks exploded on my grille and windshield. The passenger of that car had tossed a cigarette butt out and it had hit the nose of my cruiser. Oh no he didn't!

I braked, dropped back behind this car, and hit the red-and-blues. They stopped, and when I walked up to the car, the driver was visibly nervous. Turns out that his license was revoked. Step out the car, sir.

The driver complies, but not before exclaiming: "Damn! I'm going to jail because of you!" and reaching across the car to slug his passenger in the side of the head. By the time he turns to come out of the car, I've got my pepper spray in hand, but he's compliant with me. His passenger--a huge guy who is probably closer to 400 lbs than 300--just looks at me and says: "Honest officer, if you wasn't here, I'd be skooshing him."

"No hitting, no skooshing!" I ordered. I cuffed the driver and began the pat-down as back-up arrived. I Found a zip of crack in his watch pocket, and that just made my night. So he went for Driving While Revoked, Possession of Crack Cocaine and Simple Assault. The car belonged to his mom, and when I called her to let her know that we had it, she admitted that she knew that his license was revoked but didn't see a problem with letting him drive her car. "Well I told him that if he got caught it was gonna be on him," she said.

Actually I was going to let her either come get it or with her permission, let Mongo the passenger drive it away, but when she said that, I just told her to call the impound tow company in the morning to make arrangements to get it from them pursuant to our policy on Operating While Revoked, subsection: "knowingly allowing another to do so". She wasn't happy with that.

It was quickly wrapped up as my back-up waited on the tow and then gave Mongo a ride off the highway while I took Smacky in for booking. Oh--and he also got a $75.00 Littering citation for the cigarette that was thrown from his car in the first place.

DISPOSITION: Plea in which he got 10 days jail for DWR, 30 days for Possessing Cocaine, and the Assault was dismissed. Time to be served concurrently.