If you want to make good money, for regular hours, don’t become a cop!
If you want to have a life, when you’re not working, don’t become a cop!
If you want to wear snazzy outfits and drive fast cars (except on TV), don’t become a cop.
If you want to drink strong coffee and eat very fresh doughnuts, well, maybe…
After “only” 8 years of police work (which included 6 years as a concrete pounding beat-cop), the much-ballyhooed promotional schedule for my big city police force escaped the bureaucratic horror show of our Federal Consent Decree committee.
Keeping with City tradition, it was published very late on a Friday evening, after all the responsible parties had escaped to their ritzy suburban Golf Club bars and turned off their departmental cell phones.
By 3 am Saturday morning, there were over 1650 completed 10-page paper applications clogging up the HR mailboxes for the advertised 110 promotional positions.
Note: My Department had an authorized strength of 1776 members at all ranks.
Do the math.
Yes, It HAD been a long time since the politicians on the Police Commission admitted that they needed more Inspectors and Sergeants.
When the Official Scope and Position Requirements got published soon afterwards, it was a safe bet that District Station computer paper and ink supplies lasted maybe 43 minutes city-wide.
Vacations got cancelled, study groups took over living rooms, and cop bars started selling more espresso coffee than beer.
Fast Forward 60 days. After 11,341 Number 9 lead pencils were worn to nubs over the course of six 10-hour-long days of civil service and multiple-choice exam hell, we were finished.
Some people more than others.
Thanks to my previous 6 years of draft-dodging college experience, taking tests such as these almost weekly, I scored in the top 50 on both exams.
Not because I actually knew anything, mind you, but more like that I knew how to take multiple-guess exams.
While I was waiting for the Exam Gods to decide on who to smile on, my partner Marc and I went about our usual drinking coffee and writing useless reports duties.
Until one day-shift afternoon.
We were stopped at the red light, facing northbound on Valencia Street at the 17th Street intersection. Senior Partner Marc saw it first, but the impact of a high-speed head-on day-drinker drunk that tore through the crowded intersection into the front of Patrol Unit Number 148 was felt by both of us at the same time.
He was doing at least 50 in a big frame, older Chevy.
The steering wheel did an attempted shish-ka-bob imitation to Marc, but Kevlar and a semi-working airbag prevented that. (That, and in that he was a big fan of off-duty pizza, cheap beer, and had a Buddha-statue-like physique as a result)
148’s right side dashboard came down hard on my legs like a closing overhead garage door, and broke both of my kneecaps.
This was Jose’s 4th DUI, I was told later, right after they cut us both out of the car using hydraulic pry tools and saws.
While I still had a large-bore IV tube in my left arm, the Police Union Rep from my station came by and, while smiling carefully, told me I had made both promotional lists. Then, as he backed away slightly, he continued saying that because of today’s injuries, the Department wanted to “retire “me with a 50% disability pay rating.
It was a good thing that the nurses had disarmed me before putting me into that recovery room.
Several closed-door conversations with differing volume levels and official participants took place shortly after that.
Promising, threatening, and Accommodating are terms I came to become more familiar with that afternoon.
An AMA (Against Medical Advice) hospital form was printed with my name on it and quickly signed, with the understanding that I’d not sue the City for not “retiring” me at that time, but that I’d be allowed to promote as planned.
I signed it in triplicate and hobbled off to my ride home as fast as I could move with that many pain killers on board, and who knows how many yards of wide athletic tape from sutures to ankles.
Sergeant was a then a “field position” so I became a “Suit” (Inspector).
Of the various Detective Details (units) that my Department had, I managed to intern in several of them during the next 11 months. Some assignments went better than others.
Homicide: The self-styled “Princes of the City” were all fashion plates and ate and drank like the elite top-of-the-heap investigators that they were.
It took 20 years as a detective to get here (with most of these guys having more than 40 years of service), and yes, movies like the Steve McQueen film “Bullet” were made about them. There was also a hand-signed, autographed poster from the “The Streets of San Francisco” TV show, featuring actor Karl Malden and a then-young Michael Douglas, framed just inside their cloistered office.
As a “Newbie,” my assignments there were mundane: Drive senior Inspectors Hither and Yon, guard the cars and their backs in the more dicey neighborhoods, and in one memorable moment, look for a long-ago-reported victim of a mass shooting in a multi-story public housing project at 0200 hrs one noisy Friday.
I found him in a rather unique manner.
Standing in an early morning Karl the Fog moment, with my rain hat fortunately tightly over my head, under the edge of a building in the Alemany Projects, I felt what I thought were raindrops falling on my head. Looking at my feet, I found out that raindrops weren’t white, wriggly, and motile. It was raining maggots from the long-dead victim who was in an overhead attic, onto exactly where I had chosen to stand on the post.
Hot showers are wonderful, as are public laundromats.
When I healed more, I transitioned back to being in a field supervising uniformed presence as a street Sergeant.
Given my previous departmental tenure, I felt much more comfortable in this job. Of course, things change. I discovered the extent of the issue by revisiting those same projects, this time as a backup unit for crowd control situations. The city had unfortunately decided to evict some very vocal squatters after dark on a hot weekend evening, and my 20 cops here were dealing with over 500 angry residents.
My “command post” was a beat-up, elderly Crown Victoria radio car, and to manage the situation properly, I was forced to park my car much closer to the action than I would have if I were just online with my squad.
Fortunately, I had most of my gear with me when a gasoline bomb (Molotov Cocktail) hit the car’s roof just forward of the light bar and changed the supervisory dynamic.
BBQ is a favorite food of mine, but not when it suddenly involves my car.
20 cops quickly became 60, and the Fire guys seemed to actually enjoy hosing down my car just before the gas tank went up.
I began to look at when the Lieutenant’s promotional test would be scheduled.
10-7
