I Just Shake My Head

The same thing that happened on the old TV show 'Cops' is starting to happen on A & E's 'Live PD'...only on a whole different scale.

It's getting to the point that I don't know if I can continue watching.

Back in the day, when 'Cops' first came on, it was mainly Miami PD officers. Not that it was a bad thing, but it was the same people all the time. The one officer, whose name I don't recall, was a real 'pretty boy'; by that I mean that his combed-back hair was always perfectly coiffed and he made sure to wear his gold....not the badge, but the necklace, rings and bracelet. This guy looked as if he came straight from central casting with the lite version of the Mr. T starter kit.

As the show expanded to other agencies I noticed another anomaly, something that non-TV cops didn't do: whenever a group of officers would finish a call, after the arrests had been made and the bad dudes/dudettes went to jail, those involved would stand in a semicircle and tell each other what a great job they did. Every call, no matter how run-of-the-mill, every show.

I used to laugh at the TV when those officers would do that.

There's a line that Clint Eastwood's 'Gunny Highway' used in 'Heartbreak Ridge' that would fit what I almost expected them to do after the show, but I want this blog to remain family-friendly.

Those of you that have seen the movie can probably imagine what I'd print, though.

That brings us to Live PD.

Great show but, on most episodes, there's one or two officers being shadowed that are definitely camera-aware...and they make sure to act and dress the part.

By 'dress' I mean that they're sure to have their uniform shirtsleeves tailored in order to display bulging biceps covered with tattoos...as long as they have the guns for it. Skin tight and ending just at the bottom of the deltoids, they seem to constantly have their thumbs on the gunbelt, arms bent and flexed.

That's not a knock on tats or fitness by any means, it's the 'hey, look at my arms and be deeply impressed' way they carry themselves when the camera is pointed in their direction.

If they thought they could get away with it, I'm sure some would be completely sleeveless.

Here's the kicker: I've seen coppers that looked like they were in chess club in high school that were great police officers and I've seen muscle-bound hulks wearing a badge that did just the minimum they could to get by on the street. All show and no go.

I don't care how much you bench press. I do care if you have the verbal acumen to talk a person out of committing suicide.

Endeth the rant.

Brothers I Otherwise Wouldn't Have Met

You work in a profession for thirty, forty years and you're bound to make some good friends. In a factory, on a construction crew, running a retail store, you'll meet people who can become like a second family.

Nowhere is that more evident than the military, in a fire house or, in my case, a police department.

Putting your life on the line, often repeatedly, with co-workers builds pretty strong bonds. Shared experiences, risks and profound events in the intimate confines of a police cruiser during an eight-hour tour produces connections that can't be found in an office building. They just can't.

I've met some real characters in law enforcement, guys and gals who, under different circumstances, I would never have crossed paths with. Some of them became extended family, people I call my brothers and sisters, who I love dearly and would do anything for, knowing that particular gate swings both ways.

A few of these fellow officers no doubt would have made it in the world of comedy.

Ted Brinley immediately comes to mind. Ted and I worked together at Ontario PD in 1983 and part of '84, he coming to OPD after several years at the Richland County Sheriff's Office. Ted had the innate ability to make anyone laugh just by facial expressions alone; throw in the razor-sharp wit and his disdain for those in command, well...I'll just say that you never knew what he would say next, but you could be sure it would be funny.

Working afternoon shift together, Ted told me that the other half of the double he lived in on Creston Rd in Ontario was open; I rented it and, for the year that it lasted, we did much carousing after our shifts. Then came the day I was hired at Mansfield PD in 1984 and moved into the city.

Ted died a few days after crashing his motorcycle in the summer of 1985. I was honored to be one of his pallbearers at the funeral.

At Mansfield it was Jan Wendling, master of pranks and scaring the ever-living solid waste right out of you. The youngest of four brothers to serve at MPD, Jan was known for using a rubber, hairy gorilla mask to scare those unsuspecting souls who were his prey. It is rumored that he once hid in the back seat of a cruiser, raising his ape-head just as the copper driving turned to look behind him as he backed out of a space in the police compound, causing that officer to side-swipe a pole. As I said, that is rumored to have happened.

One hot summer night found he and I laying on the floor of a motel room, using an overturned table as cover as Jan tried to talk an armed, mentally-unstable woman out of the bathroom. The special response team (SWAT) waited all night outside the room, then-Captain Messer deciding to have Jan continue to talk to the gal instead of sending in a negotiator, as my squad sergeant had built somewhat of a rapport with her. I lay beside Jan, armed with a 12-gauge shotgun should the woman decide to come out shooting.

It was a very long night but, in the end, she surrendered peacefully. She'd been wanted on a felony warrant out of Franklin county for stalking a doctor and breaking into his house.

Those 'shared experiences' I mentioned? That was one of them; Jan's been one of my best friends ever since. Not that he hadn't been before, but that night cemented it.

I was maybe 20 yards away from Gary Foster the night someone took six shots at him in the middle of Bowman Street near Harker. Keith Coleman and I once turned a car stop into a search warrant at the driver's home that saw the recovery of a sawed-off shotgun, pistol and crack cocaine. Bob Powers stopped a stolen car out of Columbus one night on Walnut Street, whereupon all 4 occupants took off running; the guy I chased and caught (with the aid of a citizen) had been wearing a 9mm handgun in a shoulder holster. Big Chuck Norris and I, on one of the absolute coldest nights I ever worked, spotted a guy who ended up being responsible for a string of 18 business burglaries in the Lexington Avenue/Trimble Rd area. I was with Joe Petrycki, who's now MPD's assistant chief of police, when we crawled into a furiously-burning apartment building in search of the elderly, ground-floor occupant; luckily, she'd been at a doctor's appointment when the fire broke out.

We suffered some smoke inhalation and took a pretty good chewing out from the fire guys when they showed up a few minutes after we came out of the building. I have great respect for the job firefighters do, especially after that incident.

I call every one of those men my brothers, guys I wouldn't have had the opportunity to know had I decided to stay in the grocery business in 1979.

...and law enforcement was a hell of a lot more exciting, too.

The Dirty Cop

There's few things in life more intolerable to me than a dirty cop.

Bad drivers, rude, profane people and obnoxious, undisciplined teens? No problem. Egomaniacs, the socially-elite who parade their imagined superiority to the world? Piece of cake. Crooked cops are a whole different story.

I've had the displeasure of wearing the same uniform as a few who chose to run afoul of the law; four ended up in prison. There's another out there, a guy who is older than me and retired on disability when I was still a young copper, that eventually went to prison for trafficking cocaine. He's been out for awhile now, back in the area and no doubt back in the drug business.

He also murdered his wife. That's only my opinion, as her death was ruled a suicide, but I have strong reason to believe she didn't willingly put a gun to her head. That's all I'll say about that one.

Back in the mid-90s I was working in a ten-county anti-drug task force. It had been my goal for several years to work in the unit; you wore your hair however you wanted, grew a beard and dressed like...well, not scumbags, but not far off, either. We ran CIs, 'cooperating individuals' who, most times, would make a few buys from drug dealers for us, who would later be indicted by a grand jury, thus putting them in the court system. There's many variables to the chain of events described but, by and large, that's how we operated. Sometimes the unit executed search warrants on dope houses in the middle of the night, usually with the assistance of the county-wide special operations team...the black-garbed, automatic weapons-armed door-kickers commonly referred to by the public as SWAT.

It was the best position I would hold during my 30-plus years as a police officer.

On occasion we'd work other types of crimes, too, such as prostitution, white-collar, gambling and liquor offenses. It was a weeks-long joint venture with the state liquor cops that introduced me to my first dirty law enforcement officer.

The operation was called a '61-B' because that was the section of state liquor administrative code used to cite establishments into hearings before the liquor board. Sending several agents to the area, nearly every bar in the county was checked over several nights. My partner, who commanded our four-man afternoon shift unit, a man I called my 'rabbi' because he'd taught me so much about how to be a policeman, and I were assigned a female agent. I'll call her Janet.

Janet was short, bespectacled and rotundish, a gal who let you know immediately that she knew her job and, probably, yours too. To me she seemed a little arrogant...but she knew liquor law.

Her job was to enter an establishment and mingle, chat up the bar staff and watch for liquor violations. Our only means of communicating with her was one-way; she wore a body wire, or transmitter, that permitted us to monitor her conversations, though we had to be positioned within a couple hundred yards or so. We'd worked out a code phrase that would indicate trouble and needed intervention on our part prior to Janet entering a dive on the west end of the county on the night in question. We anticipated her spending an hour or two inside and then moving on to the next location.

That's not what happened.

Rabbi and I were parked at a closed landscaping business probably a hundred fifty yards from a place I'll refer to as The Hollow. We listened as Janet went inside and seated herself at the bar, ordering a drink that she'd nurse while doing her job. It wouldn't do to have an undercover agent become inebriated, you know.

Janet struck up a conversation with a male who obviously had taken the seat beside her. She stuck to her cover story, which I'm unable to recall now, while the male proceeded to inform her that he was an off-duty sheriff's deputy from a few counties away, originally from the community where The Hollow was located, and that he liked to come 'home' on his time off so he could party in a place where no one would know his profession.

Then things got very interesting.

Stephen, the deputy, asked Janet, the undercover state liquor agent, if she'd be interested in throwing in if he bought a quarter-pound of marijuana. Janet, God bless her, agreed, but said she'd have to go to an ATM to get some cash. She told Stephen she'd be back as soon as she could and left the bar, driving straight to where we were parked.

As soon as we'd heard the events unfolding, even before Janet left the bar, the inside of our car became a flurry of activity. Rabbi immediately got on the cell phone (it might even have been one of the ancient 'bag' phones that were all the rage in the very early days of wireless communication) and instructed the other half of our crew, Larry and Duane, to sign out some SIU (Special Investigative Unit, which we also were) cash and bring it to our location after photocopying the bills.

How they did all that in under 25 minutes, driving from our downtown office to the west end of the county, is still a mystery to this day.

Carrying our cash, Janet returned to the bar. Our plan was, after the deal was made, to take down Stephen when he left the bar; Larry and Duane were going to stop the dope delivery guy after he left the immediate area, arrest him and recover our photocopied buy money.

Janet went back inside the bar; Stephen suggested they wait in his car in the parking lot for the delivery guy to show up. A few minutes later the pair were in the crooked cop's car, chatting while awaiting their dope. At one point, Stephen was heard to say something along the lines of, 'have you ever seen one of these?' Our girl asked him what it was and, I'll never forget this, the mope says, "It's a nine-millimeter with a laser sight."

Now we've got him armed during a drug transaction, which enhances the crime.

Shortly thereafter the dope arrives; our mope gets out of the car and, with half of the money used to buy the quarter-pound belonging to us, makes the transaction. Delivery guy leaves, followed by Larry and Duane (at that time, De-Wayne, as I called him, bore a striking resemblance to actor Tom Berenger). Rabbi and I heard Stephen divide the grass with Janet; they said their goodbyes and she got out of his car.

The impending felon left the lot and drove a half-mile west to another bar, one which no longer exists today. Rabbi and I waited outside in the lot for the other half of our team to arrive, they having had a marked cruiser from the local department take custody of the drug dealer they'd stopped. Once they arrived the four of us walked inside; our man was sitting mid-bar, drinking. Rabbi, an imposing figure, stepped beside the soon-to-be ex-deputy and told him he was under arrest for trafficking in drugs. Without a word, Stephen stood up, put his hands behind his back and was handcuffed.

I can tell you this now: never, for the rest of my career, did I take more pleasure in slamming a cell door closed than I did that night.

We towed Stephen's car, got a search warrant and recovered his half of the marijuana along with the laser-sighted 9mm handgun. Janet had the other half of the dope and it all was logged into evidence. Our bills were recovered from the dealer during the book-in process, pretty much nailing his coffin shut. We spent the rest of the night completing our paperwork...and notifying the Sheriff for whom Stephen worked of his deputy's arrest.

The next morning, that same Sheriff drove to our jail and fired the mope we'd locked up, still in his cell.

 I love a story with a happy ending.

Earliest Memories Include Getting The Cops Called On Me

Dwight D. Eisenhower was the 34th President of the United States when I came into this world in November of 1956, a cloudy, cold Tuesday afternoon in Portsmouth along the banks of the Ohio River.

I spent a couple of days in what was then called an 'incubator' because I was a little small.

The earliest memory I have is of falling off a swing set in our yard and cracking my head on its metal frame. Pretty traumatic stuff for a three-year-old. Dad scooped me up and took me in the house. Now that I think about it, that blow to the head might explain much.

A significant memory is the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the days that followed. His death was announced over the public address system at Raemelton school that afternoon; my teacher, Miss Lindbeck, cried, as did a lot of the staff. During the time his body lay in state in the Capitol rotunda and JFK's funeral, cartoons were preempted during television coverage. I couldn't watch Huckleberry Hound, Top Cat or Deputy Dawg. Black days for a kindergartener who didn't understand the magnitude of a presidential assassination.

We lived, back then, at 766 Lexington Avenue; at the time, Lex was a two-lane road and we had these big pine trees out in front of our house. They were the perfect cover for an incident that resulted in the first...and only...criminal contact I had with police.

I was five years old and had the police come to my house because my neighbor, Jerry Harper, and I had been throwing clods of dirt at cars as they drove by from behind the pines. Jerry was a couple of years older and easily convinced me that 'bombing' cars was a good idea. When I saw the cruiser pull into the drive I ran into the house and hid behind Mom's skirt as she worked in the kitchen, she not understanding why I was so scared...until the cops came to the door. That policeman, when he stepped into our living room, seemed 8-feet-tall and scared the ever-living crap out of me when he leaned over and, an inch from my face, said I'd go to jail if I ever threw anything at cars again.

Looking back, this is all pretty funny stuff now; you see, Jerry's Dad was a Captain on the Mansfield Police Auxiliary, yet Jerry spent a lot of time being in trouble. The policeman who came to the house had the sole aim of instilling fear...mission accomplished. I can recall several instances during my time wearing a badge of doing that very thing to a youngster, aside from telling them they'd be incarcerated. The point was to get them to behave, not make them afraid of police.

I was so scared by that brush with the law that, hours later, Mom asked where the harmonica that our elderly neighbor, Mrs. Fleming, had given me was.

"It's outside." I wasn't about to go near the door.

"Well, you better go outside and get it, honey. It's supposed to rain tonight and it'll get rusty."

The thought of going outside was horrifying. I told Mom I didn't want to.

"Well why not?"

"Because that policeman will get me and take me to jail!"

The End Is Not Always The End

There's an old saying that says, 'in each life some rain must fall' and I've found that to be very true.

Know what else is also true? After the rain falls, something new may sprout.

That may be what is about to happen...or maybe not.

I closed my social media account, which also triggered the closure of a page I ran, called 'A Veteran's Story'. While I won't bore you with details of why I'm leaving social media, the shut-down of the page where the veterans' stories I've written were posted stings. A lot.

Those stories were printed in Monday's local newspaper, something I'd been writing weekly for the past 27 months. I loved the job, the opportunity to honor veterans who served in this nation's military from the beginning of World War II through the end of Vietnam. It was an honor to sit with a different vet every week, hear his story and then tell it to the public.Theirs is history that's not taught in high school classrooms anymore.

In short, I ended my relationship with the local newspaper. It was done because, after weighing the time and effort expended each week against financial compensation, I was making less than a fry cook. Though the local editor endorsed a new rate proposal, budget constraints implemented by the paper's parent company compelled the editor to reject my offer.

Since announcing on social media that I wouldn't be continuing the veterans' stories, two friends floated suggestions on how the articles could possibly continue. I am humbled, to say the least, to have had them reach out, but the bottom line will be financial compensation.

Print media has taken a huge hit for over a decade, as more readers choose to get their news from the internet rather than traditional newspapers; this explains the parent company's directive to cut expenses. In the end, it always comes down to money

But I'll still be here, in this space.

Learning To Talk A Second Time

Baby gibberish, cooing, squeals and blowing slobber bubbles evolves into trying to mimic words. Soon they start stringing together two or 3 words. That's followed by complete sentences and, before you know it, intelligent conversations through the pubesency period on into adulthood.

For most of society that's it; they've reached the pinnacle of speech, of communicating orally with another person, never understanding there's something beyond.

Cops know this...or at least most do. There's always a select few who believe they already know everything there is to know about communicating with those they are sworn to protect and serve. Sadly, there are those wearing a badge who believe their word is law,  a law not reinforced by actual law; the 'because I said so' complex which, they believe, demands immediate obedience.

The most useful skill a copper can develop is that of communication, the conveyance of ideas and meaning, followed closely by the ability to listen and comprehend.

Knowledge of the law, physical fitness for the job and proficiency with a sidearm are important, too, but they're all superseded by verbal acumen when dealing with the public.

The realization of this, for me, occurred when I was still on coach/pupil (it's called 'field training' now) and paired up with probably the best police officer I ever saw with this skill, Sgt. Bob Poth. 'Pappy' or 'Slim', as he was also known, could talk to anyone, from bank president to skid-row wino. It was this skill that would produce scores of folks who trusted him, even those who spent their lives on the wrong side of the law.

I once watched Slim and Sgt Jack Butler confront a man who was a hardened criminal, who had at one time bitten off part of a police officer's ear; this thug was at the top of a staircase, armed with a butcher knife, drunk and enraged, as they stood at the bottom of the steps, pistols (we still had revolvers back then) pointed at him as the thug threatened to kill them.

Slim talked the man into putting the knife down and coming down the steps to be handcuffed. I was amazed. I was sure I would witness a line-of-duty shooting, only five weeks into the job.

That was an important lesson.

Years before that, while working at a smaller department, a seasoned officer allegedly told a drunk driver he'd arrested to follow through on the driver's threat to commit suicide once he got home due to the DWI arrest.

And the arrestee did just that.

Words matter. Their meaning also matters. I wish those select few coppers I mentioned earlier understood this because, eventually, they'll stain the profession.

And maybe even indirectly cause a death.

Sully versus Bosco

Back in the early 2000s NBC had a fictional series called 'Third Watch'; it followed the lives of characters who were NYPD, FDNY and NYC paramedics, and it was a great show. My favorite was Officer John Sullivan, a grizzed, overweight, cynical veteran nearing retirement because he reminded me of...myself.

'Sully' would often clash with a young go-getter who loved running hot at a thousand miles per hour with his hair on fire, who believed the answer to every issue or problem was either an arrest or citation. Bosco was a policeman who reminded me of the youngsters getting into the job as I neared retirement.

I was Bosco way back in 1979. Even two years before that, when I was sworn in as an auxiliary patrolman at Ontario PD.

Every Friday and Saturday night as an auxiliary, without fail, I was at the old police department on Park Avenue West, which is now the city's senior citizen center. Back then, when Ontario was just a village, the administrative offices were in the front half of the building and the police department was in the back. General Motors, the Richland Mall, Service Merchandise, Zayre's, Tractor Supply and a handful of restaurants were the biggest reasons anyone stopped and spent time in the village.

Chief Bob Krauss, Captain Denny Reid, Lieutenant  Cal Miller, Tim McClaran, Keith Miller, Rex Knee, Ted Brinley and Dick Hamrick are all gone from us now, as is Paul Jones, who was also on the auxiliary. I worked with Dave Pugh, Ron Dille, Mike Burchett, Ron Miller, Lou Bemiller, Allen Au and Rod Smith in those days, too. Including the chief, we had thirteen officers. If memory serves, the auxiliary corps at one time had eighteen members.

Looking back, I can imagine that some of those men would, at times, become a little perturbed as I rode with them, for a couple of reasons: I wanted to write traffic tickets, make car stops and arrest people; plus, as I learned later in my career, when you're used to operating on your own in a cruiser, a rider can be a pain in the butt. Sometimes it was easy to feel the disdain the 'regulars' had for us.

As I progressed in my years on the job a lot of my attitude toward it changed. The boldest change was the realization that an arrest or citation isn't always the best answer. "We're out here to solve problems", Sully had once said to Bosco in one episode; the younger officer, of course had the opposite view of law enforcement. At the end of that episode, the veteran was proven right.

In the latter years of my three-plus decades on the job I can recount many instances of younger coppers having that same opposite view, seeing me as an over-the-hill dinosaur who was coasting toward the end of the line. The advent of in-car computer terminals only made things worse, as some youngsters wanted solely to operate through them. Officer safety was out the window by doing that, as far I as I was concerned, because if you weren't continually staring at the MDT screen you'd never know when another officer had cleared a call or car stop. Mobile Data Terminals have made for lazy policemen.

And solving problems? Giving someone a break on a minor infraction or traffic ticket paid off countless times, as folks tended to remember what you'd once done for them. One young guy couldn't understand why people would call me or stop in to see me out of the blue with information; I told him it was because they knew they owed me because they'd been let off the hook in the past. I'd treated them as human beings, not criminals; you build a rapport with people, not make them enemies. You don't go out and see how many tickets you can write during the shift, you go out, interact with the public and show them that you're human, too....and lose the arrogant attitude. You are NOT automatically better than someone else just because you're wearing a badge.

I'm just glad that some of the veteran officers I once worked with as a young man took the time to show me how to be a police officer.

Law enforcement needs more of those kind now.

                                                               Sully and Bosco