My first day was interesting to say the least.  Within three hours into my law enforcement career, I already had to draw my weapon.  And to top it off, the bust that my FTO and I made, was 6 o’clock news worthy.  I recorded the story but haven’t digitized it yet, but I will at a future date.  Here’s what happened (note: I obviously have to leave out some details).

    There have been a large number of homes burglarized in my city over the last month.  No suspects.  We get a call about a burglary in progress.  We race over there.  The first unit arrived from one direction.  As he arrived, the burglars fled out the back window (without him seeing them).  As my FTO and I round the corner from the other direction to back him up, we saw two kids fitting the description running away from the location.  We stopped them.  They swore they were just playing in the yard, heard a loud noise from that house a few doors up (the burglarized one) and got scared and ran.  They were quite young, and my FTO believed them.  We told them we’d drive them home, and put them in our car.  But first we had to go help clear the house.  Long story short (this is where the gun comes out) we clear the house.  The burglars had escaped and the search was on.  Units everywhere. 

    We take the two kids to their houses (next street over).  We have a chat with their parents, and let them know we may be back for some more questions later.  I take down their information and we leave.  As we are searching the area, I keep pestering my FTO that the kids are full of shit.  I have a kid that loves to lie, and sucks at it.  And just something inside me is saying that these kids are completely full of it.  My FTO states that he thinks they were telling the truth.  I keep on that I think they are lieing.  Meanwhile the K-9 unit gets a trail from the house.  But it goes cold at a wooden fence around another house.  My FTO realizes that the house the trail went cold it, just so happens to be directly across the street from the house we dropped one of the kids off at.  He tells me that my hunch may just be right after all, and we head back to talk to that kid.

    Another long story short.  With a little "We already caught your two buddies and they already told us you helped them break into that house" trick, the kid broke into tears and spilled all the beans.  He was one of the burglars that had been breaking into a string of houses over the last month.  The other kid with him was one of them too (we immediately had a unit pick him back up).  And the kid across the street (where the K-9 lost the trail at the fence) was the mastermind.   We detained this kid, and ran across the street and snagged the third burglar.  And under his bed, we found a lot of the missing items.

    Turned over to an investigator.  And it was a match.  These were the kids that had burglarized over a half dozen houses in the last month.  Enough items to fill half our squad room with evidence.  They went to jail.   The local news media came to our department (of course the detective we turned it over to gets the credit for it, but who cares, all that matters is we got em) and reports on the huge bust.  And my FTO tells me "Way to trust your gut man, you were right all along".

It was an interesting first day.  And I loved it!