Month: March 2016

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The Decoy Story

This post from Ron Ray, retired LAPD

Ok, here goes—

It was the late seventies. I was working Hollywood morning watch. My partner had just finished writing a ticket at the intersection of Santa Monica and Western. We were in a parking lot across the street from a local dive bar and since it was close to closing time we decided to sit and wait and snag a DUI driver leaving the bar.

We did not have to wait long and saw our future arrest come staggering out of the bar and start walking to his car parked at the curb. As he walked to his car we noticed that he was placing his hands on other vehicles for support as he walked. He gets in a late fifties Cadillac, starts the engine, cranks the wheel, and punches the accelerator. The car makes a sharp U-turn from the curb, tires are screeching with rubber burning and it goes blasting east on Santa Monica to the entrance to the Hollywood Freeway.

The guy has a lead on us and my partner does some driving to catch up. We are south bound on the freeway about three miles or so before we get the guy stopped and pulled over on an off ramp. We get him out of the car and one thing is readily apparent.

He is old. His driver’s license says he is 89.

One other thing becomes apparent. He is not under the influence. No booze on his breath, no nystagmus in his eyes, and his speech was clear and distinct. We asked him if he had been drinking and he said he had not had a drink in fifty years. We asked him what the hell was he doing in a bar then. He replied that he lived in an apartment down the street from the bar and went there because he was lonely and he could talk to people. We asked what the hell was up with his driving.

He replied, “I was sitting there in the bar when someone come in and says that there is a black and white parked across the street. Someone else asks, ‘Hey, Pops you want to earn some money?’”

“They pass the hat, everybody kicks in a few bucks—I think twenty to twenty-five. They say, ‘Take this money and go take the cops on a wild goose chase’……so I did.”

We kick the old guy loose. I am laughing, my partner is fuming. We race back to the bar and of course find it locked up tight.

All the cars gone, not a soul around.

 

 

 

 

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Ramblings by Hal

Ramblings, Code 7 with Women

By Hal Collier, Retired LAPD

Here’s when things really changed. Around 1974/75, women were introduced to patrol. Now, I like women. My wife and daughter are women. Some of my favorite partners were women and I worked with a few women as captains and lieutenants. All great cops and people. My only complaint was that they showed their mother instincts when it came to code 7. They didn’t think that a juice dripping hamburger was all that healthy. Pink’s at 1 A.M. was out of the question and a Tommy burger was ok—but only once in a while.

 

What’s happening to my LAPD?

One more thing about eating with women. They usually took a doggie bag from the restaurant. Then we spent an hour driving around Hollywood looking for stray dogs or cats to give the food to. Once my partner spotted a kitten with a potato chip bag stuck on its head. There were two of LAPD’s finest chasing a kitten around the street trying to get the bag off of its head. Thank goodness this was before everyone had video cameras.

Now, when working Morning Watch (11:00 P.M. to 7 A.M.), your choices were pretty slim for fine dining on the hood of your police car. At that hour most of your food choices catered to the bar crowds. That’s when I started brown bagging. Once I brought in a big pot of my wife’s homemade chili. I shared it with my partner who said she enjoyed it but didn’t ask for seconds. The next night she made Matzo Ball soup. I declined seconds. We also ate in the police station break room, not fine dining! Before I knew it I was eating salads at Sizzler and potato skins were a no no! I was also taught to dip my fork in the salad dressing instead of pouring the dressing on my salad. Less calories. The change was probably for the better but every once in a while I feel the strong urge to eat something bad for me on the hood of my car.

 

The following stories all happened to me on code 7.

My first story didn’t have an interruption but had a real impact on my career! It was August 21, 1975, and I was dining at the Copper Penny at Sunset and Hudson. As preferred, I was sitting in a booth seat with a window view of my parked police car. Keep in mind this is when we only had radios in the car and if something big happened you didn’t know until you got back into the car.

After dining I get in my lowest bid official police cruiser and start the engine. The radio is abuzz with chatter. I detect an urgency in the dispatcher’s voice as she is directing units to block intersections.

The SLA (Symbionese Liberation Army-a domestic terrorist group) placed a pipe bomb under the police car of John Hall and James Bryan at the IHOP at Sunset and Orange, only six blocks from where I was eating.

See—another reason why I hated IHOP. I suppose it could have been under my car except I was seated where I could watch it. The bomb failed to detonate due to a stroke of luck. Both officers would have been killed instantly as well as quite a few diners.

For the next thirty years, I got down on one knee and looked under my police car for bombs. True story.

Next typical code 7 interruptions.

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Tim Dees Answers:

Why do detectives have to be cops first?

T Dees downloadTim Dees, retired cop and criminal justice professor, Reno Police Department, and Reno Municipal Court, is considered a “Top Writer” in the field of Law Enforcement, Police Procedures, and Criminal Justice. He’s been read in Time, Newsweek and many more professional magazines as well as on Quora.

This post was taken (with Tim’s permission) from Quora, an online Q & A forum on many subjects. Tim is a Quora “Most Viewed Writer” in Interacting with Police.

 

First, detectives are cops. They simply have a different assignment than the uniformed guys in patrol.

Television has convinced many people they know everything they need to know to be detectives. TV makes it look easy. You want to question someone, and they are both immediately available to you and willing to talk. You only work one case at a time, and if it goes to trial, the trial is later that week. If someone clams up and demands their lawyer, all you have to do is act mean and they’ll come apart in a heartbeat. Confessions are obtained in minutes.

Police work is very seldom like what you see on TV. No two calls are exactly the same, and you have to be able to apply broad legal and procedural principles to ambiguous situations, often when the immediate world is coming apart. While you think you can keep it together at these moments, I can guarantee you will have experiences where you have no idea what you are supposed to do next. Those experiences happen less often as you grow in the job, but they still come around now and again for everyone.

In order to do long, complex interviews, you first have to learn to do short ones. Those happen on traffic stops, on field interviews, when you’re talking to a domestic violence or burglary victim. You have to know about search and seizure, which is a field that changes constantly. When can you stop someone? When can you search them? Is there a difference between a search for weapons and a search for evidence of a crime (hint: yes, there is). If you have a search warrant for someone’s house, can you also search their garage?

You also have to learn about people very different from you. You have to be aware of the body language of native Asians and Hispanics, which can be very different from that of Americans. You have to know your community at a level people who live there all their lives never get into.

These things are all learned while you’re a patrol cop. Some people learn faster than others. Hardly anyone gets it before they’ve been doing it five years. A few people circumvent the usual career path and get promoted before that, but they nearly always become substandard cops, people who could have been much better in their jobs if they were left on a vine a little longer.

Policing is something almost no one understands until they have done it. There is no way to acquire the necessary experience in a classroom or from a book. You have to live it.

Dees at Quora

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Ramblings by Hal

Ramblings, Code-seven, part 2

By Hal Collier, Retired LAPD

In 1984, I promoted to Senior Lead Officer which meant I had to work day watch or nights. I hated nights because I never saw my wife and kids. My dog even started barking at me when I came home. I left for work before by wife and kids got home from school and when I got home sometime after midnight everyone was sleep. There were times I was tempted to eat a box of Thin Mint cookies with a beer on the hood of my car in front of my house.
Now that’s fine dining!
Day watch had everything open and the choices were endless if you beat the lunch crowds. You see we were timed for our code-seven.  Patrol officers were given twenty-three minutes to eat! That’s right—23 whole minutes. I figured that some command officer came to that number by timing himself in the police administration cafeteria. That’s fine if you’re seated right away and your waitress takes your order in thirty-five seconds and your food is delivered right away. Hell, on a busy night it could take twenty-three minutes just to give your order at those popular greasy spoon eating spots. Time yourself at your next dinner and get up after twenty-three minutes. Later, someone came to their senses and changed the code-seven time to forty-five minutes. You might even have time for a second cup of coffee or go to the bathroom.

Next, women and  interrupted code-sevens!

Hal
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Too Many Lost This Year

By Thonie Hevron Too many law enforcement officers have been killed in the line of duty in 2013. One is too many but thirteen is unfathomable. And we’re only in mid-March. Patrolman David Ort…

Source: Too Many Lost This Year

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Too Many Lost This Year

By Thonie Hevron

Too many law enforcement officers have been killed in the line of duty in 2013. One is too many but thirteen is unfathomable. And we’re only in mid-March.
Patrolman David Ortiz of the El Paso, Tx Police Department End of Watch March 14, 2016Patrolman David Ortiz El Paso Police Department, Texas​​
Peace Officers Down Memorial Page offers statistic that are difficult to believe. Taken from FBI statistics drawn from every police agency in the US, they are a sobering reminder of the inherent peril in this work. Few men and women can do this job with the alertness and cognition it requires–twenty-four hours a day. Cops are never off duty. Badges and guns may be put away but a warrior mindset must always be present. It’s like a sneaker wave at the beach–nine times out of ten, it’s okay to turn your back, but the tenth wave can kill you.
The effects of a career last a lifetime–PTSD is almost a cliche but honestly, we live with it day in and day out. Every cop, every emergency worker (I know because my husband is a retired fire fighter) has ghosts that will forever haunt us. There is no laying them to rest, closure is an illusion. Turning away has been my coping mechanism–remembering the camaraderie, the sense of accomplishment when an incident went right ( I’ll never forget a hug from an officer and close friend when only he and I–in dispatch–were on duty. He had a particularly dangerous pursuit that ended safely with a solid arrest due to the fact that we both did our jobs well–that hug was a highlight of my career), acknowledging the adrenaline spurt and excitement is satisfying enough.
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Standing in the rain directing traffic around flooded streets during two El Nino events, smelling the airborn toxins as I drove up to a burning house, being nervous as hell doing CPR on an old man who fell off a ladder are memories that make me who I am. All of us have these memories and worse–I was a civilian Community Services Officer for seven years before I traded the uniform for  the climate controlled chaos of dispatch. I saw but a small slice of the life on the streets.
Those of you who wear or have worn the badge, get it. Those of you who don’t, count your blessings that there are those people out there who love this job. It can’t be done well if they don’t.
All know this could be their last day, but do it anyway.
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