Adventures with Dr. Lady Cutie Troublemaker

The rest of the ride along. I won’t be organized about it. I’m too pissed about the election.

The scariest part of the evening came after we went to the house where the “violent mental consumer” was supposed to be. I was expecting someone screaming throwing things. We pulled up after meeting briefly around the corner (I wrote about that before). There were 6 police officers (and me) in 4 cars. The house looked dark. I was very nervous. In the car, I asked if I should come in with her. She said that was the only way I could see a CIT call. I was scared, but I decided to do it (a real act of bravery for me). I got out of the car and suddenly became very aware of my chest and back being exposed (police officers wear bulletproof vests). We walked up to the dark house. I positioned myself between two officers, not wanting to be the last person to walk up, nor the first person. They always go to CIT calls with backup, so this was typical. The officers had flashlights aimed at the door and their hands on their weapons. They knocked loudly on the front door. A 28 year-old African-American woman (I’ll call her Miss X) answered the door. She had clearly been sleeping, not at all what I was expecting. The lead CIT officer was in charge of the call.

This woman was talking a lot about details of her life and her day. She was coherent, but she wasn’t giving us enough background for us to understand what she was saying. The officer asked many organizing questions. It’s hard to explain, but basically here’s what we finally gleaned from talking to her and from making a few calls to the hospital emergency room. Miss X lives with her mother, her mother’s common law husband, and another woman who moved in recently. Miss X clearly didn’t like this new woman who had moved in. The mother of Miss X is not healthy and has to take several types of medication. Her daughter is the one who gives her medication. She doesn’t like anyone else to do that. Well, Miss X is also on medication. TennCare (Tennessee’s version of Medicare) will only prescribe medication for 30 days at a time, but sometimes the appointments they make are further apart than 30 days. Turns out this woman had run out of her meds about two weeks ago. On the day of the night we were there, she had overdosed her mother, and her mother ended up in the emergency room.

What was interesting about this call was how the lead officer spoke to this woman. He kept her thoughts organized by asking simple questions. And when he arrested her, it was so casual that I didn’t even know that was what had happened. He asked, “Sweetheart, you got some shoes you can put on?” And when she panicked saying she couldn’t possibly leave the house because there weren’t keys and she couldn’t get back in, he told her he’d call her mother and get more keys and take care of everything. They cuffed her, and she went into our car.

We drove her south to the triage assessment center at the big hospital downtown, not before missing our exit and ending up in Arkansas. The triage assessment center was a grim and horrible place. It was cramped and dirty and small. There was a woman there playing with her Treo and debating through the glass with one of the patients in a way I found appalling. I’d get her fired if I could. It was not a pretty place, and I hate that people who are psychotic, scared, out of their heads have to go some place like that.

After that lovely experience, we still hadn’t eaten. It was 11pm. We got to the Rendezvous at 11:05pm, and a cop watching the door let us in anyway. They didn’t want to feed us until the old guy working there saw that she was a cop. His son is also a cop and works in her precinct. We asked for anything they wanted to give us. We each got a full rack of ribs plus sides. They didn’t charge us either. We tipped though.

We drove through some pretty scary neighborhoods to get to a Police substation in a really sketchy part of town. A friend of hers was there after her shift. She’d been hanging out in the substation with an on-duty, plainclothes officer who she likes. The male officer left, then we ate our ribs and the two of them talked about this boy who’d been there. It was like high school or something very bizarre. After that, my officer gave me a ride home.

I learned a lot about police culture. I’m so glad I did it, but I don’t think I’ll be doing it again. It was a hard thing to do. It isn’t in my blood. I’m so glad I saw a CIT call and that it wasn’t a dangerous situation (even though going in, it TOTALLY felt dangerous). I’m even gladder I didn’t see horrible violence or anything too inerasable. What a relief. More training this Friday, but luckily, the ride-along is now behind me, and I survived.

Two more election-related posts below. Don’t forget to read those, too.

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I feel like this.

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Let’s psychoanalyze the election for shits and giggles. My Dad sent me this e-mail this morning:

This election was lost on religious grounds:

* abortion is bad
* marriage is only for heterosexuals
* stem cell research is evil because it’s messing with sex and babies or something like that

When it’s all said and done, all three have to do with sex. All three “foundational” issues have to do with not messing with sexual things.

Actually, the last election was probably lost on similar grounds:

* Gore was with Clinton
* Clinton was sexual
* ergo, no Gore

So what’s foundational about religion has to do with sex, and now what has become foundational in politics has to do with sex…

Amazing!

Sex is bad, but aggression is good.

Amazing!

I responded:

Republicans are closet pervs.

He responded:

You got it!

Freud, for all of his failings, had his finger on the pulse of the human psyche. It’s a great pleasure for an aging, balding, psychoanalyst to have a daughter who immediately got the point of the missive.

It’s easier to rationalize aggressive, power-driven motives than sexual ones….

Thanks..

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The Littlest Officer

So how was the ride-along, Abby?

I got to the North Precinct a little before 5pm. At the beginning of the shift is role call. There is a literal role call in a room with school desks. All the officers are chatting and laughing and telling stories. The lieutenant and another guy (a sergeant?) came in and did a literal role call like in a school room. After that, he made a few announcements, then there was a prayer for safety or all the officers on that shift.

Next, there was a presentation about gangs in Memphis. This wasn’t general. It was really specific. The guy who did the presentation knew a LOT about gangs in Memphis. He told us about the origins of each gang and showed us pictures of what each gang member’s symbols were, how to tell one from the other. He showed us mug shots of the leaders of the local gangs and told us where they lived (“Leader X lives in such and such apartments at such and such intersection with his mother.”) What was really interesting was how he knew what each gang considered a “dis.” I don’t remember the specific words, but if you were in doubt about a certain person, you could accuse them of being a “Lilly Mae” or whatever. If they got really riled up, you’d know you had the right gang.

After dismissal, all of the officers wandered around checking out shotguns and cars (they aren’t in the same car every time). The car keys were on hooks on the wall like at a valet. We went out to the parking lot, talking to others as we went. I was with a African-American female officer. She was 41 and really pretty, with full makeup, and on the short side. She and I spend a really long time setting up the car, getting things out of her car, getting all the right paperwork together, putting Skin So Soft all over us to protect ourselves from mosquitos, then she loaded the shotgun and put it in the locked holder inside the car. The car was really dirty, and she had wet wipes that she had us use to clean it up. It wasn’t as tricked out inside as I would have thought. The windows weren’t bullet-proof, and when you got in and out of the car, the doors didn’t lock in any special way. There was a radio but no special computer on board, no GPS devises, nothing like that.

We rode with the windows down so we could hear outside the car more easily. She drove without a seatbelt because she said that it was too hard to get out quickly on a moment’s notice. In the car, the car radio was on, the police radio was on, her individual radio was on, and her phone kept ringing (it had this funny Jamaican steel drum song on it… she’d been to Jamaica a few weeks ago on vacation). It went off all night. Sometimes it was her son, sometimes it was her boyfriend, sometimes friends, sometimes other police officers.

The officers were all very social with one another. Because I was with one of only two women from the precinct on the shift, and because she was so pretty, lots of officers liked talking to her. There was low-level flirting going on all night. That was kind of funny to me. We were supposed to meet several other officers on duty for dinner, but that never happened. We were too busy to get there. Instead of dinner at 7pm, we got dinner at 11pm!

The first call we got was to a “hit and run with no injuries.” When we got there, it was a little different than we’d first thought. A woman in a small car hit the side of an 18-wheeler. It seems either one or the other of them had run the red light, but it was unclear exactly who was at fault. The 18-wheeler had not noticed that he’d been hit because he had a full load and didn’t feel the impact because it was so far at the back of his loaded trailer. A car waved him down a block or two down the road to tell him what had happened, so he pulled over and walked back to the scene. When we got there, his wife and child had met him there. The woman in the car said she was injured. We called an ambulance. No one reported clearly what had happened. Both parties were concerned about being blamed. Both parties got a citation and were going to have to fight it out in traffic court. The woman in the car had a license that had been expired for 6 years and no insurance. We had to go to the emergency room and give her the citation for everything which sucked. The officer I was with was really angry at the woman because she felt the woman had lied to her. It was stressful being there in the emergency room giving this woman the ticket when she really did seem to be injured. I mean, she hit a semi with the front of her car, and the front end was all smashed up. I’m sure she’s going to have back issues as a result.

The other call we went on (there were only two since both took so long) was supposed to be a CIT (Crisis Intervention Team) call. We were told that there was a “violent mental consumer” at a certain address. They don’t call people perpetrators. They call them consumers, which I found bizarre. “Mental patients” or “mental consumers” require that a CIT-trained officer be there, and they usually show up with three cars. We ended up at this call with 6 officers and me. Before we went to the house, we all met in a nearby parking lot. I so wanted to take a picture of this (goofy me). The cars were all pulled up, some facing one way, some facing another. The windows were all lined up, and everyone’s windows were open, so all the officers could talk to each other and figure out how to approach this situation. There was one other CIT-trained officer there besides the one I was riding with. My officer said she was there “for training purposes” (i.e., for me) and was pissed when they expected her to be the lead car because she didn’t have much information about the situation. The other CIT officer kept saying, “I’m not really here,” which didn’t make sense to me or to my officer. So the point is that it wasn’t the most clear call, and no one knew that much. My officer was really annoyed about that. I’ll write more later on. This is plenty to sink your teeth into for now.

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I’m on my way out the door for the ride-along. I’ll be with a female CIT-trained cop out of the North Memphis precinct who’s supposed to be excellent. Fingers crossed that there isn’t too much action. Yikes!

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