Answering 911, p.13
Answering 911, page 13
“What kind of car?”
“A blue Nissan.”
“What direction did he go?”
“I don’t know! Just send someone!”
“Hang on, I’ll get someone going. Don’t hang up.”
“He’s already gone! Just send someone over here.”
“Did he have keys in the car?”
“Um. What?”
Real car thefts are actually pretty rare. I smell a rat.
I ask again, “When did this happen?”
“Ten minutes ago,” she tells me.
“Why did you wait so long to call?”
The squads get rolling right away, but I keep her on the line to get her name and phone number. Or at least, I try.
“What do you need that for?” she blurts out when I ask for her last name.
She is like a lot of people who want the police to just blindly go red-lights-and-sirens into a situation they know nothing about, on faith that the caller is telling the truth. I told you it was stolen! Just go out and get it back for me!
Then I say, “The cops are checking the area for your car. Now, were your keys inside when it was taken? How did they steal it, do you think?”
So, the cops are driving around her house with sirens blasting and she can hear them now, looking for this alleged stolen vehicle, and at last she says, “Well, my husband has a key.”
“Did your husband take the car?”
“Well, maybe. We’re getting a divorce and he wants the car.”
Duh. By this time, she’s crying. Either she is lying to me and she knows it, or her sense of denial is so strong that she is refusing to admit the truth even to herself. Either way, we’ve been misled. Whether it was premeditated or not, she hadn’t so much called us with a crime to report, but with an agenda to fulfill. She is losing her car, and she wants us to get it back.
A good 911 call-taker can smell an agenda a mile away and let the officers know before they arrive. Some of the people I work with are absolute masters at this because they’ve heard all the bullshit lies anyone could imagine.
In fact, not only did the husband take the car, but he had a legal right to. Just that day, a family court judge had ruled that the car, among other things, belonged to her ex.
Even after all that, our caller probably hung up feeling like the police didn’t give a shit about her. If you asked her today, she would tell you that the police don’t care.
What can we do? Not send her a Christmas card?
* * *
People break the law hundreds of times in a hundred little ways every day and don’t get caught. That drives some folks just crazy because they think police don’t care. Not true. They do care. They just don’t always do exactly what you think they should in order to solve crimes.
It’s hard for me to get as outraged about crime as the average person does. I see it so often now. Some callers seem to sense my apathy and make it their personal mission to make me as outraged as they are.
That’s usually the guy who wants to tell me the entire history of his life as it pertains to his neighbors, the high price of gas, and crime prevention in general. He’s the official or unofficial leader of his neighborhood watch group, which he believes gives him the right to call 911 every other day for every minor code infraction.
This person will most likely chew on my ear for as long as it takes to get something out of me. This person doesn’t just want justice, he wants validation. Sometimes I have that to give. Sometimes it feels like too much to ask. Maybe that’s what burnout is. When you’ve run out, entirely.
On a good day, I can listen with empathy, dispatch the call, and go on with my life. On a bad day, all I can think is, You’re right sir! It’s absolutely intolerable that your neighbor’s dog is barking. Hold on while I divert our squads from this medical they’re headed to so we can catch Spot in the act!
When that starts to happen, I know my tank is running low. I need something to fill it back up. Something positive.
This one fills my tank for a couple of weeks:
A woman named Janet comes to the station looking for help finding her adult daughter, Jacinda. Jacinda was supposed to have flown in to the Minneapolis airport from out of state and was several hours late. Janet is deaf and doesn’t know what to do to find her daughter.
One of the officers on duty knows American Sign Language, so for several minutes, I get to watch their conversation, her quick, anxious movements contrasting with his calm, reassuring ones. After Janet left, he does some checking and finds Jacinda, who is just fine and on her way to her mother’s house.
Using a teletype machine—a phone with a keyboard—I get to tell Janet the good news. As we “talk,” our keystrokes are recorded and printed on a ticker tape, just like a receipt.
“Your daughter is at work and she says she will come to the house at about 11:30. ga.” I tap out on my keyboard. “ga” means “go ahead.” It means that I’m done typing, and she can respond.
“Oh, thank you so much. I would not have been able to sleep tonight.”
“You’re very welcome.” I finish. “We’re glad to help.”
After I disconnect, I take the printout of our conversation and keep it at my console for the evening.
We’re glad to help.
* * *
Some people call 911 and immediately apologize for calling. “I’m sorry to call on this line, but my wife’s having a stroke.”
Then there’s the guy who calls 911 because he wants directions to the local movie theater.
If you need police, you can call 911. Analyze whether it was truly emergent later when you’re alive and safe. People ask about various hotlines that are set up to handle emergencies, like 211 for family emergencies or *77 if you’re being pulled over by someone who is impersonating police. My advice to them is always just to call 911. Don’t call your mom, don’t call Onstar, and for God’s sake don’t call your friend who’s a cop in another city ten miles away. If you need police, call 911.
I’ve never seen anyone get in trouble for using 911 on something that’s less than emergent. If your emergency really isn’t, the worst thing we’ll do is put you on hold until we can get to you. And if you’re calling for directions to the movie theater, you could be on hold for a very, very long time.
* * *
Some of the people I work with get hooked on emergency worker-type tv shows, like Third Watch and ER. ER had me for a while. Dr. Mark Green was my favorite character until everything bad in the world started happening to him. He found out he had brain cancer. His new wife, a surgeon, was sued for malpractice. His toddler daughter wound up in the er after ingesting some ecstasy that she fished out of his other daughter’s backpack. His good-looking doctor and nurse colleagues are also in constant crisis, one family member after another getting wheeled into the er.
It got to be too much. People who write these shows seem to think that it’s not dramatic enough for emergency workers to witness other people’s tragedies every day. The tragedy has to happen to them.
Well, I’m here to tell you, it is enough. It’s plenty.
The Parenting Option
On a sunny day in June, I adopt my darling stepdaughter. It is official. She is now free to do to me all the awful things that I did to my own mother. I pray that she won’t, but in this job, I witness a whole range of the awful things that children do as children. Conversely, I see all the awful things that parents do as parents, and I am sometimes amazed.
My husband reassures me with the reasoning that just the fact that I worry so much about being a good mother makes me a good mother. Hmm. Not much incentive to stop worrying, though.
“911?”
“Hi, this is Jean Markus. I live at . . .”
“19114 Deercrest?”
“How did you know?”
“It’s on my screen, but I recognize your voice, Jean.”
“Okay, well, what I want is for a cop car and an ambulance to come and take my kids because my boyfriend says he’s going to work in the morning and I threw my back out and if he goes to work, there won’t be anybody taking care of them.”
“Your boyfriend Travis?”
“Yeah.”
“Let me get this straight. You want us to baby-sit your kids?”
“Well, when parents can’t take care of their kids, don’t they go into foster care or something?”
“Yes, but not for a day while your boyfriend goes to work. Foster care is long term. Do you want us to take your girls for a long time?”
“Well, I can’t take care of them. I threw my back out and I don’t have a job. But can they come home by the end of the week?”
“No, Jean. That’s not how it would be.”
“Oh.” Crying. Sobbing.
“Jean?”
“If you don’t take them I don’t know what’s going to happen!”
That’s my cue to get someone over there. I put the call into the system, then Marsha keys the mike for the main channel.
“2464?”
“2464.”
“For 2464 and a backup squad, head over to 19114 Deercrest. Thirty-one-year-old female says she’s not well and wants us to take care of her children tomorrow. Unknown what the real issue is tonight . . . possibly a dispute with the boyfriend.”
“’64 copies. I know the house.”
“’64, do you want an ambulance started?”
“Negative. I’ll advise.”
“Thank you, 23:32.”
Anyone whose address or voice we know by heart we call a “frequent flyer.” Frequent flyers are people who are always in crisis. Frequent flyers are the houses where someday, something big is going to happen. Maybe a murder or a suicide, or the house burns down. And when it happens, the police say, well, this was a problem house. And then the reporters and the neighbors say, why didn’t you do anything to stop it?
Or maybe nothing big happens at all. Maybe all that happens is that some poor child has a very sad and unfortunate upbringing by a mother who was too mentally ill to give her what she needed. I don’t know which is worse.
* * *
The drug of choice for kids nowadays is a little white drug called methamphetamine or crystal meth. The longer I am at this job, the more I am struck by how close it is to me, my house, my now almost-teenaged daughter and the school she goes to.
I’m still somewhat puzzled by my own addiction, and I find that I am absolutely riveted by the phenomenon of hundreds and thousands of teenagers getting hooked on a drug that is so destructive.
The cops call them meth-heads. I begin to learn them by name. They are kids in their late teens and early twenties who live in a constant state of searching. They slowly walk away from everything of value in their lives until all that’s left is the drug and the desperate pursuit of more. They age five times faster than normal, but stop maturing. They grow literal holes in their brains. They slowly stop feeling emotionally and become sociopaths. Their hearts weaken. They scratch themselves raw.
When they call for help, which is rare, I know them immediately. They often don’t hear me. They ramble on and on and tell me nothing of use. They lie about what they need from me. I want to tell them things that I know, but I don’t. It’s not my role.
When one of them dies, some cops act like they don’t feel sorry. I don’t say out loud that I feel sorry, either. One less, someone might say. Even though we know for every one fewer, there are likely two more coming.
When I see their booking photos with their raw skin and their thousand-mile stares, I think: Thank God I got sober when I did.
One night, an older couple comes to the twenty-four-hour window of our dispatch center. While walking through the parking lot of the local motel, they found a small baggy with white crystals. Jody, who is in school to be a cop, recognizes it right away as crystal meth.
I’ve never seen it, so I cautiously lean over the baggy as she examines it. She pokes at it with her French manicure and explains to me that she knows it’s meth because of the crystal texture of it, and that if it was cocaine, it would be smooth, more powdery, and matted.
I don’t tell her that I could pick out cocaine in a lineup any day of the week and twice on Sunday. I am careful who I share that with. I stare at the tiny baggy in awe. This is the latest thing that kills kids. I wonder what it will be ten years from now. I wonder if I will still be sitting in this seat to witness it.
The next day, another crystal meth baggy comes in. This time, the deliverer is the mother of a fifteen-year-old girl. She has discovered a tiny plastic ziplock in her daughter’s backpack. It’s almost empty except for the salty white crystals in its corners.
“I want to have this tested,” she tells me, smiling, embarrassed. “You know, in case it’s pot or something.” She slowly pushes it through the opening at the bottom of the security window that divides us.
I look up at her. She is dressed smartly. She wears a burgundy leather blazer that is so new I can smell it through the small opening in the bullet-proof glass. Her hair is styled, streaked and layered like that of a news anchor’s. She knows that whatever this bag held, it wasn’t pot. But maybe pot is the only thing she can wrap her head around just yet.
“I’ll see if one of our detectives is available.”
“Okay, thanks!”
A.J., a police detective in general investigations, has come in on a weekend day to finish up some paperwork. He takes the baggy from mom, and I can tell from the disgusted look on his face that it’s probably the real deal. Now he’s going to have to stay half an hour longer and write another report.
Damn kids and their meth.
Mom chats with A.J. in the lobby for a few minutes, then turns to go. I smile and wave to her, as though this is a downtown boutique and we’ve just sold her a lovely pair of boots to go with her new blazer. She smiles back at me as though her daughter has never used meth. And everything’s going to be okay.
The Note
“911?”
“My husband’s missing. He went out for a walk this morning and he’s still not back.”
“Does he usually take long walks?”
“Yeah, but not this long. He’s got diabetes. He’s got a lot of problems. Health problems.”
It’s only been a couple of hours, but it’s not for me to decide when a man’s been missing too long (or not long enough), so I put a call into the system and assure Mrs. Reese she’ll be contacted soon.
I label the call as an “attempt to locate” (atl) and not as a “missing person” call because it’s not taking place under what we would normally think of as suspicious circumstances. Husbands disappear from their wives all the time, and vice versa. Mostly, by choice.
2660 must be thinking the same as I am because instead of driving out to the house, he opts to call Mrs. Reese and take the information by phone. A little while later, a general message goes out to the console of each officer and dispatcher. “Attempt to locate John Reese: 58-year-old white male, 5-foot-10, 175 pounds, gray hair, blue eyes. Last seen wearing jeans and a flannel shirt and on foot northbound from 3200 block of Terrace Hills. Unknown destination.”
About forty-five minutes later, Mrs. Reese calls again.
“I want to talk to the officer who called me before, but I want him to come over here.” she says. She is crying.
“Okay, did your husband get back home?”
“No,” she says. “But I think I know where he is. I found a note.”
Well, there you go, I figure. He left a note. Considerate.
I put another call into the system, but it takes five or ten minutes before the officer gets to it. He had to take another call. But before we get the chance to dispatch it to him, Mrs. Reese is back on the line.
“When is the officer going to come?”
“As soon as he’s done with the call he’s on,” I say somewhat defensively. I’m not his keeper, right?
“Well, it’s really important,” she says.
“Okay, I’ll let him know.” Geez, impatient.
Thanks to Mr. Reese’s note, officers were able to find him in a park about two miles from his house. He brought a gun with him on his walk and shot himself in the woods, just as his note said he would.
On Wannabes
I “meet” a lot of wannabe cops, self-appointed security guards, and real-life security guards, and none of them get a whole lot of love from me, I’m sorry to say. It’s mostly because they try too hard to make me like them. But I only like cops and civilians. Anyone who thinks there is something in between is suspicious. I figure, why would anyone want to do a cop’s job if he’s not a cop? Because he thinks it’s fun?
A wannabe cop is usually a white male in his twenties or thirties working somewhere as a security guard (sometimes real, sometimes self-appointed), and he is usually less concerned with helping the truly needy or sick than he is with righting all the wrongs of the world, like being too rich, driving too nice a car, and having too pretty a girlfriend in the passenger seat.
Wannabe cops often ride around town in old Crown Victorias they bought at police auctions, equipped with scanners and light bars that are legal to own, but not to operate, and they almost always make it some or all the way through cop school, but don’t get hired by any agencies for reasons that nobody can quite put a finger on.
These are the ones who call us as they’re burning Mach 10 down the highway, one hand on the wheel, one hand on the phone, screaming out license plates and asking for a “black and white” on westbound Highway X at the Y exit.
“911?”
“Okay, write down this plate. Kilo Charlie Bravo, five, six, five. Got that?”
“Roger Wilko. What’s your emergency, sir?”
“A blue Nissan.”
“What direction did he go?”
“I don’t know! Just send someone!”
“Hang on, I’ll get someone going. Don’t hang up.”
“He’s already gone! Just send someone over here.”
“Did he have keys in the car?”
“Um. What?”
Real car thefts are actually pretty rare. I smell a rat.
I ask again, “When did this happen?”
“Ten minutes ago,” she tells me.
“Why did you wait so long to call?”
The squads get rolling right away, but I keep her on the line to get her name and phone number. Or at least, I try.
“What do you need that for?” she blurts out when I ask for her last name.
She is like a lot of people who want the police to just blindly go red-lights-and-sirens into a situation they know nothing about, on faith that the caller is telling the truth. I told you it was stolen! Just go out and get it back for me!
Then I say, “The cops are checking the area for your car. Now, were your keys inside when it was taken? How did they steal it, do you think?”
So, the cops are driving around her house with sirens blasting and she can hear them now, looking for this alleged stolen vehicle, and at last she says, “Well, my husband has a key.”
“Did your husband take the car?”
“Well, maybe. We’re getting a divorce and he wants the car.”
Duh. By this time, she’s crying. Either she is lying to me and she knows it, or her sense of denial is so strong that she is refusing to admit the truth even to herself. Either way, we’ve been misled. Whether it was premeditated or not, she hadn’t so much called us with a crime to report, but with an agenda to fulfill. She is losing her car, and she wants us to get it back.
A good 911 call-taker can smell an agenda a mile away and let the officers know before they arrive. Some of the people I work with are absolute masters at this because they’ve heard all the bullshit lies anyone could imagine.
In fact, not only did the husband take the car, but he had a legal right to. Just that day, a family court judge had ruled that the car, among other things, belonged to her ex.
Even after all that, our caller probably hung up feeling like the police didn’t give a shit about her. If you asked her today, she would tell you that the police don’t care.
What can we do? Not send her a Christmas card?
* * *
People break the law hundreds of times in a hundred little ways every day and don’t get caught. That drives some folks just crazy because they think police don’t care. Not true. They do care. They just don’t always do exactly what you think they should in order to solve crimes.
It’s hard for me to get as outraged about crime as the average person does. I see it so often now. Some callers seem to sense my apathy and make it their personal mission to make me as outraged as they are.
That’s usually the guy who wants to tell me the entire history of his life as it pertains to his neighbors, the high price of gas, and crime prevention in general. He’s the official or unofficial leader of his neighborhood watch group, which he believes gives him the right to call 911 every other day for every minor code infraction.
This person will most likely chew on my ear for as long as it takes to get something out of me. This person doesn’t just want justice, he wants validation. Sometimes I have that to give. Sometimes it feels like too much to ask. Maybe that’s what burnout is. When you’ve run out, entirely.
On a good day, I can listen with empathy, dispatch the call, and go on with my life. On a bad day, all I can think is, You’re right sir! It’s absolutely intolerable that your neighbor’s dog is barking. Hold on while I divert our squads from this medical they’re headed to so we can catch Spot in the act!
When that starts to happen, I know my tank is running low. I need something to fill it back up. Something positive.
This one fills my tank for a couple of weeks:
A woman named Janet comes to the station looking for help finding her adult daughter, Jacinda. Jacinda was supposed to have flown in to the Minneapolis airport from out of state and was several hours late. Janet is deaf and doesn’t know what to do to find her daughter.
One of the officers on duty knows American Sign Language, so for several minutes, I get to watch their conversation, her quick, anxious movements contrasting with his calm, reassuring ones. After Janet left, he does some checking and finds Jacinda, who is just fine and on her way to her mother’s house.
Using a teletype machine—a phone with a keyboard—I get to tell Janet the good news. As we “talk,” our keystrokes are recorded and printed on a ticker tape, just like a receipt.
“Your daughter is at work and she says she will come to the house at about 11:30. ga.” I tap out on my keyboard. “ga” means “go ahead.” It means that I’m done typing, and she can respond.
“Oh, thank you so much. I would not have been able to sleep tonight.”
“You’re very welcome.” I finish. “We’re glad to help.”
After I disconnect, I take the printout of our conversation and keep it at my console for the evening.
We’re glad to help.
* * *
Some people call 911 and immediately apologize for calling. “I’m sorry to call on this line, but my wife’s having a stroke.”
Then there’s the guy who calls 911 because he wants directions to the local movie theater.
If you need police, you can call 911. Analyze whether it was truly emergent later when you’re alive and safe. People ask about various hotlines that are set up to handle emergencies, like 211 for family emergencies or *77 if you’re being pulled over by someone who is impersonating police. My advice to them is always just to call 911. Don’t call your mom, don’t call Onstar, and for God’s sake don’t call your friend who’s a cop in another city ten miles away. If you need police, call 911.
I’ve never seen anyone get in trouble for using 911 on something that’s less than emergent. If your emergency really isn’t, the worst thing we’ll do is put you on hold until we can get to you. And if you’re calling for directions to the movie theater, you could be on hold for a very, very long time.
* * *
Some of the people I work with get hooked on emergency worker-type tv shows, like Third Watch and ER. ER had me for a while. Dr. Mark Green was my favorite character until everything bad in the world started happening to him. He found out he had brain cancer. His new wife, a surgeon, was sued for malpractice. His toddler daughter wound up in the er after ingesting some ecstasy that she fished out of his other daughter’s backpack. His good-looking doctor and nurse colleagues are also in constant crisis, one family member after another getting wheeled into the er.
It got to be too much. People who write these shows seem to think that it’s not dramatic enough for emergency workers to witness other people’s tragedies every day. The tragedy has to happen to them.
Well, I’m here to tell you, it is enough. It’s plenty.
The Parenting Option
On a sunny day in June, I adopt my darling stepdaughter. It is official. She is now free to do to me all the awful things that I did to my own mother. I pray that she won’t, but in this job, I witness a whole range of the awful things that children do as children. Conversely, I see all the awful things that parents do as parents, and I am sometimes amazed.
My husband reassures me with the reasoning that just the fact that I worry so much about being a good mother makes me a good mother. Hmm. Not much incentive to stop worrying, though.
“911?”
“Hi, this is Jean Markus. I live at . . .”
“19114 Deercrest?”
“How did you know?”
“It’s on my screen, but I recognize your voice, Jean.”
“Okay, well, what I want is for a cop car and an ambulance to come and take my kids because my boyfriend says he’s going to work in the morning and I threw my back out and if he goes to work, there won’t be anybody taking care of them.”
“Your boyfriend Travis?”
“Yeah.”
“Let me get this straight. You want us to baby-sit your kids?”
“Well, when parents can’t take care of their kids, don’t they go into foster care or something?”
“Yes, but not for a day while your boyfriend goes to work. Foster care is long term. Do you want us to take your girls for a long time?”
“Well, I can’t take care of them. I threw my back out and I don’t have a job. But can they come home by the end of the week?”
“No, Jean. That’s not how it would be.”
“Oh.” Crying. Sobbing.
“Jean?”
“If you don’t take them I don’t know what’s going to happen!”
That’s my cue to get someone over there. I put the call into the system, then Marsha keys the mike for the main channel.
“2464?”
“2464.”
“For 2464 and a backup squad, head over to 19114 Deercrest. Thirty-one-year-old female says she’s not well and wants us to take care of her children tomorrow. Unknown what the real issue is tonight . . . possibly a dispute with the boyfriend.”
“’64 copies. I know the house.”
“’64, do you want an ambulance started?”
“Negative. I’ll advise.”
“Thank you, 23:32.”
Anyone whose address or voice we know by heart we call a “frequent flyer.” Frequent flyers are people who are always in crisis. Frequent flyers are the houses where someday, something big is going to happen. Maybe a murder or a suicide, or the house burns down. And when it happens, the police say, well, this was a problem house. And then the reporters and the neighbors say, why didn’t you do anything to stop it?
Or maybe nothing big happens at all. Maybe all that happens is that some poor child has a very sad and unfortunate upbringing by a mother who was too mentally ill to give her what she needed. I don’t know which is worse.
* * *
The drug of choice for kids nowadays is a little white drug called methamphetamine or crystal meth. The longer I am at this job, the more I am struck by how close it is to me, my house, my now almost-teenaged daughter and the school she goes to.
I’m still somewhat puzzled by my own addiction, and I find that I am absolutely riveted by the phenomenon of hundreds and thousands of teenagers getting hooked on a drug that is so destructive.
The cops call them meth-heads. I begin to learn them by name. They are kids in their late teens and early twenties who live in a constant state of searching. They slowly walk away from everything of value in their lives until all that’s left is the drug and the desperate pursuit of more. They age five times faster than normal, but stop maturing. They grow literal holes in their brains. They slowly stop feeling emotionally and become sociopaths. Their hearts weaken. They scratch themselves raw.
When they call for help, which is rare, I know them immediately. They often don’t hear me. They ramble on and on and tell me nothing of use. They lie about what they need from me. I want to tell them things that I know, but I don’t. It’s not my role.
When one of them dies, some cops act like they don’t feel sorry. I don’t say out loud that I feel sorry, either. One less, someone might say. Even though we know for every one fewer, there are likely two more coming.
When I see their booking photos with their raw skin and their thousand-mile stares, I think: Thank God I got sober when I did.
One night, an older couple comes to the twenty-four-hour window of our dispatch center. While walking through the parking lot of the local motel, they found a small baggy with white crystals. Jody, who is in school to be a cop, recognizes it right away as crystal meth.
I’ve never seen it, so I cautiously lean over the baggy as she examines it. She pokes at it with her French manicure and explains to me that she knows it’s meth because of the crystal texture of it, and that if it was cocaine, it would be smooth, more powdery, and matted.
I don’t tell her that I could pick out cocaine in a lineup any day of the week and twice on Sunday. I am careful who I share that with. I stare at the tiny baggy in awe. This is the latest thing that kills kids. I wonder what it will be ten years from now. I wonder if I will still be sitting in this seat to witness it.
The next day, another crystal meth baggy comes in. This time, the deliverer is the mother of a fifteen-year-old girl. She has discovered a tiny plastic ziplock in her daughter’s backpack. It’s almost empty except for the salty white crystals in its corners.
“I want to have this tested,” she tells me, smiling, embarrassed. “You know, in case it’s pot or something.” She slowly pushes it through the opening at the bottom of the security window that divides us.
I look up at her. She is dressed smartly. She wears a burgundy leather blazer that is so new I can smell it through the small opening in the bullet-proof glass. Her hair is styled, streaked and layered like that of a news anchor’s. She knows that whatever this bag held, it wasn’t pot. But maybe pot is the only thing she can wrap her head around just yet.
“I’ll see if one of our detectives is available.”
“Okay, thanks!”
A.J., a police detective in general investigations, has come in on a weekend day to finish up some paperwork. He takes the baggy from mom, and I can tell from the disgusted look on his face that it’s probably the real deal. Now he’s going to have to stay half an hour longer and write another report.
Damn kids and their meth.
Mom chats with A.J. in the lobby for a few minutes, then turns to go. I smile and wave to her, as though this is a downtown boutique and we’ve just sold her a lovely pair of boots to go with her new blazer. She smiles back at me as though her daughter has never used meth. And everything’s going to be okay.
The Note
“911?”
“My husband’s missing. He went out for a walk this morning and he’s still not back.”
“Does he usually take long walks?”
“Yeah, but not this long. He’s got diabetes. He’s got a lot of problems. Health problems.”
It’s only been a couple of hours, but it’s not for me to decide when a man’s been missing too long (or not long enough), so I put a call into the system and assure Mrs. Reese she’ll be contacted soon.
I label the call as an “attempt to locate” (atl) and not as a “missing person” call because it’s not taking place under what we would normally think of as suspicious circumstances. Husbands disappear from their wives all the time, and vice versa. Mostly, by choice.
2660 must be thinking the same as I am because instead of driving out to the house, he opts to call Mrs. Reese and take the information by phone. A little while later, a general message goes out to the console of each officer and dispatcher. “Attempt to locate John Reese: 58-year-old white male, 5-foot-10, 175 pounds, gray hair, blue eyes. Last seen wearing jeans and a flannel shirt and on foot northbound from 3200 block of Terrace Hills. Unknown destination.”
About forty-five minutes later, Mrs. Reese calls again.
“I want to talk to the officer who called me before, but I want him to come over here.” she says. She is crying.
“Okay, did your husband get back home?”
“No,” she says. “But I think I know where he is. I found a note.”
Well, there you go, I figure. He left a note. Considerate.
I put another call into the system, but it takes five or ten minutes before the officer gets to it. He had to take another call. But before we get the chance to dispatch it to him, Mrs. Reese is back on the line.
“When is the officer going to come?”
“As soon as he’s done with the call he’s on,” I say somewhat defensively. I’m not his keeper, right?
“Well, it’s really important,” she says.
“Okay, I’ll let him know.” Geez, impatient.
Thanks to Mr. Reese’s note, officers were able to find him in a park about two miles from his house. He brought a gun with him on his walk and shot himself in the woods, just as his note said he would.
On Wannabes
I “meet” a lot of wannabe cops, self-appointed security guards, and real-life security guards, and none of them get a whole lot of love from me, I’m sorry to say. It’s mostly because they try too hard to make me like them. But I only like cops and civilians. Anyone who thinks there is something in between is suspicious. I figure, why would anyone want to do a cop’s job if he’s not a cop? Because he thinks it’s fun?
A wannabe cop is usually a white male in his twenties or thirties working somewhere as a security guard (sometimes real, sometimes self-appointed), and he is usually less concerned with helping the truly needy or sick than he is with righting all the wrongs of the world, like being too rich, driving too nice a car, and having too pretty a girlfriend in the passenger seat.
Wannabe cops often ride around town in old Crown Victorias they bought at police auctions, equipped with scanners and light bars that are legal to own, but not to operate, and they almost always make it some or all the way through cop school, but don’t get hired by any agencies for reasons that nobody can quite put a finger on.
These are the ones who call us as they’re burning Mach 10 down the highway, one hand on the wheel, one hand on the phone, screaming out license plates and asking for a “black and white” on westbound Highway X at the Y exit.
“911?”
“Okay, write down this plate. Kilo Charlie Bravo, five, six, five. Got that?”
“Roger Wilko. What’s your emergency, sir?”
