I’ve learned a lot in the last month on evening watch.  Mostly how to handle problems without so much report writing.  And a lot of social skills on interacting with my fellow officers.  Believe it or not, that’s the hardest thing to learn.  Cops are a strange breed.  It really takes some getting used to.  Very abrasive personalities.  But the last few weeks took a good turn.  Earned some respect from some of the guys on my shift.  Did some things that impressed them (I was told through the grapevine) and made a few good cut down jokes that earned me some respect (yes insulting each other gets you further than trying to be nice, if you’re creative and funny).

    So now about the picture to the left.  I get a call last Thursday night.  It’s a "insane person" signal.  The radio traffic went something like this (I am changing our codes into ?? since I don’t need our dept codes publicized)  …

"526 signal ??"
"526"
"526 signal ?? - ### Somewhere Road - Complainant states that a fish came through her wall and is attacking her leg"
"*extreme laughter* 526"
"526 Be advised that there is a lockbox on the door, check your ?? for the code.  The complainant is an elderly woman and cannot get to the door.  Be advised she does have a ?? (code for gun) in the residence"
"10-4"

    So I head on over to the call.  I approach the door and see the lockbox.  I start entering the combination and hear a woman screaming for help inside.  I tell my FTO

"This oughta be good, I’m gonna turn my mic on for this so be warned."

    We enter the residence and see an old woman laying on a hospital style bed.  She’s halfway off the bed reaching between it and the couch.  My first thought is gun.  But I don’t want to draw down on the poor old lady.  She already thinks a fish is attacking her. I don’t want to give her a heart attack and kill her.

    I check between the bed and couch, and it’s just the phone.  Still off the hook from calling 911.  She’s telling me to please help her, that there’s a fish on her leg.  I assure her that there is not a fish on her leg.  She continues on that the fish is there.  I tell her that the walls are cynderblock and there’s not a body of water within miles of her residence.  She still swears a fish came through the wall and is there.

    She has me check under her bed for the fish, and search the room.  I humor her and do it.  I keep telling her that it would be impossible for a fish to come through concrete and into her living room.  And if it did, it would have drown by now anyways.  All the while my FTO is hiding behind the front door from her sight, and making this big open/close mouth fish face at me, trying to make me crack up.

    To make a long story short, I spent 30+ minutes trying to convince this woman that there was no fish.  Finally she told me I was "such a handsome young officer" which gave me some ground to say "Then how about this.  I give you my personal word that there is no fish here and won’t ever be".  This shut her up long enough for me to get out of there.

    When I got back in my car, it took me almost a full minute of giggles to close the call on the radio.  Everytime I’d get ready to key up I’d bust out laughing.  I finally got out …

"526 Code ?? - CT warned the fish" [CT = criminal tresspass]

    Needless to say the dispatchers cracked up on that one.  It was definitely my most interesting call yet.  And I have it all recorded.  Once this tape runs out and I bring it home, I’ll try to digitize it and post it.

    The first thing is an announcement.  I have been switched to evening watch as of tomorrow.  I have about two or three weeks left on FTO because they want me on evening watch, so they want me to do a few weeks FTO on that watch so I am familiar with how things go.  Big difference there.  Day watch was like the easy setting, morning watch would be medium, and evening watch is hard.  I’m told a lot of the guys on evening watch don’t get along too.  So this could be a real buzz killer.  Guess I’ll find out this week.

    I finally got my own car too.  I spent all day Friday getting it equipped the way I want, getting it all ready, etc.  It’s an old piece of shit.  But not the worst in the fleet.  It was the Sgt.’s old car so it has a few bells and whistles that other’s don’t have.

    And last but not least, if you are wondering about the pictures in this post (yes I blanked out the words and numbers on my car).  I had my first "power lines down" call the other day.  And sure as shit, there were down power lines.  I had to block off the road while the crew came to fix it.  A tree had fallen on someone’s house.  No storm or anything.  It was actually a nice day.  It fell down, almost hitting the people outside.  But it landed on the powerlines, ripping it from the pole on both ends.

    We were just finishing up on a report of a man sucking gas out of people’s cars in a shopping center parking lot.  We were parked side by side discussing the incident with our Lt.  A call came in for a suspicious vehicle with someone holding a camera filming the bank tellers at Bank of America.  We asked the dispatcher to confirm if they were filming the tellers (and how that was possible) or filming the ATM machine etc.   The dispatcher responded that the caller only stated "It’s a white van with blue lettering and they are filming the outside of the bank".

    I doubt I need to say anymore about this story :)  Needless to say we laughed our asses off.

    The question I keep hearing is "So how do you like it?".  I hear it from family, friends, co-workers, and even supervisors.  And my answer is always the same … "I freaking love it!".  I seriously cannot believe I get paid for this.  And paid well for it.  I am having a blast.  Even the most boring moments are fun to me.  The times when my FTO says "Hey man, sorry.  I know this is the boring part" I am thinking "Are you nuts?  I love it!". 

    The job is incredible.  I encourage anyone who is pursuing a law enforcement career to stick to it.  Three years it took me to get here.  Many thoughts of giving up and quitting.  And be sure you really try hard to get the department you want.  Many of the ones I interviewed with, I had secret thoughts of not staying forever.  But this one is incredible, and I plan on retiring here.  Everyone I have met, from the 80 year old maintenance guy, to the detectives, to the fellow patrolmen, to the brass, to the chief himself …. everyone has been incredibly cool.  I seriously have not had a negative thought about anyone or anything we’ve done.  I enjoy my job so much that I actually get sad on my days off or when my day is over.  Granted the getting up at 4:30am I don’t look forward to.  But once I get in my patrol car, I never want to go home.

    If you’re wondering about the sign.  We do a lot of mexican raids.  You know the spots where all the illegals hang out in the morning looking for day labor.  Well we have a lot of fun harrassing them.  The other day we played the cops theme song "Bad Boys" across the PA system as we rolled up in there.  It was hilarious.

    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!

    I also understand now why on my ride-alongs in the past, my friend kept his car so freezing cold.  This uniform is hot as can be.    So it’s official now.  Gun in holster, radio tuned in, and all sweated … err suited … up.

I am very nervous.  This will definitely be a diffucult next few months.  I know I can do it though, and do it well.

This coming Monday I head in to pcik up my uniform and equipment.  Then I start hitting the streets with my FTO.  I will make another post next week once I get my uniform and have my picture taken for my ID card etc.

    Today I had my psych test for "Littleville".  I had to be on the other side of Atlanta at 8:30am this morning.  I left at 5:50am and made it on time.  I figured that drive must be part of my test.  The first part of the test was handwritten.  We had to complete very open ended sentences that seemed almost like a ’set up’ to make you say something bad about yourself.  You know, something like "I really loose my temper when …." and you have to complete it.

    After that we took some computer administered tests.  There were four total and I know most of them had 300 to 400 questions.  We also had to re-fill out all our information from our applications.  Everything we’ve filled out a hundred times already.  No big deal though, I’m sure they’re just looking for consistency.

The computer tests were the usual "Somewhat agree" etc. questions.  Except the one test that was problem solving and puzzles.  And it was insane.  Math, puzzles, patterns, etc.  I did pretty well I thought.  Nothing really stumped me to the point that I was ‘guessing’.  And we were not expected to finish all 60 questions in 12 minutes.  But I got to #54 before time ran out.  It was quite a challenge and I enjoyed it.

After all that we had to go one at a time to see the psychologist.  She would go over our answers on the psych exams and ask us to elaborate.  I was brutally honest, which led to a lot of questioning or clarifications in the interview.  I started getting worried when I realized just how many of my answers threw up ‘flags’.  But as I elaborated on them, I think she realized that I was just being completely honest.  For example I answered yes to "Have you ever threatened another person with physical harm".  Now to them, they are thinking assault.  To me, I thought "Well if I am being completely honest here, then yes, I threaten to spank my daughter, and it didn’t say Except disciplining your children".  So once I elaborated on the questions she realized I was just being so honest, that it actually seemed worse than it was.  Another example "Have you ever broken a law and not been discovered".  Of course I answered yes, seeing as everyone breaks the speed limit at least a little bit all the time.

But the day ended better than it started.  I left there just as nervous as I had arrived.  Had I screwed up?  Was my dream department about to disqualify me?  The lady I deal with at the department told me the Major would let me know his answer either today or most likely tomorrow.

I contacted Hellotown and let them know exactly what was going on.  They said they appreciated my honesty and understood why I’d pick Littleville over a smaller department.  They asked that I just let them know what Littleville says, as they’d like to hire me, but don’t want to be left empty.  I promised I would have them an answer by tomorrow.

Within minutes though, the Major called me from Littleville.  He asked if I could be in tomorrow morning for some firing range time, iron out some details, and then have the mayor swear me in!

I DID IT!!!!!!!!!!!