If ever there was a specific phrase that I truly hated during my career at the SFPD, (and elsewhere) it was this question being asked by a self-important nimrod at the other end of my ticket book. Forget the 1)...

If you’ve ever seen the movie, “West Side Story,” the glamorized and sanitized tale about gangs in a New York City barrio, you’d be unpleasantly surprised at what really goes on with teenagers in the real world, especially in my...

As the Jefferson Starship would later proclaim: “We Built this City on Rock and Roll.” In our Thin Blue Line world, it was more accurate to say it was “Sex, and Drugs, AND Rock and Roll” that made San Francisco...

In my considered opinion, the local newspaper was valuable to line the litter box of my girlfriends’ cat, maybe to wrap fish n’ chips from the Edenborough Castle Pub, or to be mulched up to fertilize my transplanted Birch trees....

If you are lucky enough to actually live in your city while working as a police officer, there are “good-news, bad news” angles that a lot of people aren’t aware of. Good News: You will almost never get a traffic...

Sometimes technology helps you and is your friend. ... The other 94% of the time, it causes rising blood pressure, organizational frustration, and in this case, an expensive repair invoice. The Tarravel Police District in San Francesco is a nice...

Everyone got to arrest Michael at least once. I explain: Mission Station was a Field Training Officer base primarily because of our diversity and the eternal intensity of criminal activity. We had a little bit (A LOT!) of just about...

“The first thing we do is kill all the lawyers!”                   - William Shakespeare's,  Henry VI, Part 2, Act IV, Scene 2 My late father was a hard charging real estate broker, and...

There’s an old Law Enforcement maxim about having to physically fight a suspect: “When you get down in the mud to fight a pig, you get dirty, and the hog enjoys it.” In this story, all the cops enjoyed it....

A lot of management policies stress the importance of keeping your workforce “engaged.” In law enforcement that means keeping the troops busy, even if you have to make up work for them. Otherwise, the grunts will start getting restless, invent...