Officer Rambo: Alternates

I hope everyone found the Officer Rambo jokes funny in the post about Officer Krista last week.  I had made a few extra joke pictures that were possibilities for the post, that wound up going unused.  I figured I’d just go ahead and put them up since I found them funny, hopefully you folks will, too.  There’s only two, but I enjoyed them.

The first one was going to be in response to the line, “You think she and the wife would be up for a threesome?”

 

The second one was going to be the after-signature comment, referencing the final punchline about Krista being drunk:

~RCS

Officer Krista Did What?

In my ‘day job’ I have to deal with the city police on a semi-regular basis. One particular night when I had to call the police the call was responded to by two officers. One was a regular we deal with; I like to call him Officer Rambo. He’s always got this wild-eyed look to him and can’t stand still.

One time I called to report a guy smoking a crack pipe in the street in front of my workplace and the guy drove away before they got there. Officer Rambo remarked, “Dude! You gotta call sooner, do you have any idea how fun it is to bash out a window with a baton and drag a cracked-out hippy out of a car window?”

Officer Rambo, the later years.

But the other officer was an athletic brunette. She was cute, charming, and very helpful with the case. We’ll call her Officer Krista, because that was her name. Probably…I’m kind of bad with names and this happened over a year ago.

So anyway, Rambo and Krista show up and take statements from my partner and I. At the end of the whole issue I offered them a cup of coffee or such. They politely declined. Rambo reminded me that there is justice to be done or some crazy shit, I’m sure.

That was when Krista tore a sheet out of her pocket notebook, wrote her name and cell number on it and said, “Here’s my number. It’s my cell, so if you need anything, even if I’m not on-duty, go ahead and give me a call.”

Now, that’s what I call polite! I was telling my new partner about the story and about how helpful of a police officer she was. He shrugged, “Yeah, all the city officers have business cards with their name, badge number, and office numbers on them.”

That’s right, they do! But she wrote her personal cell number down, with her name, and no badge number…and, uhh…no office number…

OH MY GOD!!

 

That works, too.

She was hitting on me! Wasn’t she? Wasn’t she, Rambo?!

It was a moot point, I was already married, but still. A cute girl with a nice job was hitting on me! Do you know what that means?  It means the city cops must be drinking on the job, is what it means.

~RCS

Pulled Over And Not Tested?

So last night the wife and I were driving home from getting some shopping done and we decided to hit one of our favorite spots to eat: Applebee’s.  She had chicken and shrimp and I had a 9 oz steak and we shared a dessert.  Including tip, and drinks, it was under $40; not a bad set, especially since we had some leftovers for breakfast today.

But let’s go back to those drinks I had mentioned.  She had the Mango Lemonade and I had a cup of tea.  Neither of which is boozy.  So skip ahead a few minutes to when we’re driving home and I see flashy-lights behind me.

Uhh, not that kind of flashy lights.

Yeah, something a little more like that.

So I pulled into the next parking space and proceeded to make an ass out of myself to a kindly police officer.  Being in the industry I work in and the industries I work alongside, I generally have pretty congenial pull-overs; I know the proper protocols, I know the questions, I know the responses…I know when to reach for things and when to sit still with my hands on the steering wheel knowing that I’m also a paranoid psychopath that often has a small armory in my vehicle.

So question 1 that I failed at, when he saw my concealed carry permit:

 

“Do you have a firearm with you?”

 

 

 

 

“No, sir, not on me.”

 

 

 

“Do you have any other weapons in the vehicle?”

 

 

 

 

“…I, uhh, I…don’t think so?”

 

 

 

 

“Well look, you either have a firearm or you don’t, and it’s kind of important to me what the answer to that is.”

 

 

Now the issue here is…we had considered wearing our costumes to Applebee’s.  And as I mentioned in an earlier post, our costumes were that of samurai.  Complete with killer-quality blade swords.  We had debated wearing the costumes with the wooden practice swords, but we had decided to just slum it and dress down.  I was wearing a gray hoodie over top of one of my DickJutsu shirts (which I can shamelessly remind you that you can purchase here).  So finally the correct response…

 

 

“No, sir, no weapons on me at this moment.”

 

 

 

Then he explained that he had been following me for a few blocks and that I had swerved past the fog lines on the road.  I can certainly believe it, the lines on that particular road need repainted and it was raining, so I couldn’t even argue since I couldn’t see the fog lines, myself; good on him that he still could.

Now question number two that I failed miserably at:

 

 

“Where are you folks coming from?”

 

 

 

 

“Applebee’s, just had some dinner.”

 

 

 

“Have any drinks, there?”

 

 

 

 

“No sir, I didn’t.”

 

 

 

Now this failure comes from the fact that my wife was considering trying one of their Halloween seasonal alcoholic drinks.  We talked about her getting it, but she opted not to, because she is a pushover when it comes to booze and she decided she still had things to do and that the drink would put her on her ass for the rest of the night.  So I corrected my mistake…

 

 

“Sorry, neither of us had anything.”

 

 

 

Off to a good start!  Regardless, he took my ID, registration, and insurance information and went back to his squad car.  I did violate proper procedures a bit when I rolled my window back up and turned it to accessories to run the heater for a bit, but it was pretty chilly at ten-pm last night.  When he returned I shut it back off and rolled the window down (in that order, because my van is friggin’ awesome and lets me run the door locks and windows for a few minutes after it’s turned off).

During the time he was away, the wife and I had a conversation of our own.

 

 

“Do you think he’s going to give you a sobriety test?”

 

 

 

 

“…?”

 

 

 

 

“What?”

 

 

 

 

“He might!”

 

 

 

 

“Woah, what?  Why are you getting so excited?”

 

 

 

 

“I’ve never been given a sobriety test before!”

 

 

 

Needless to say, I think the cop lied to me.  He came back, returned my stuff and said…

 

 

“Okay, I’ve informed you of the reason for your pull-over.  Do you have any questions?”

 

 

 

And a question that I actually answered correctly…so one out of three ain’t bad, right?

 

 

“No, Sir; thank you.”

 

 

 

The cop walked away, jumped into his car, and pulled away.  Now like I said earlier, I know the procedures…cops don’t just pull away after a pull-over.  I think he either got a call in and figured I was a small-fry or a hard take (since, I was completely sober) or else he was actually pulling me over for a different reason, that somebody had committed a crime in a vehicle like mine but we didn’t match the suspect’s descriptions or such.  Or he might have just had to poop and was on his way back to the station in a hurry.  Who knows?

Anyway, driving home the wife and I had another conversation on the matter and this series of dialogue came up…

 

“Why did you get so excited about being given a sobriety test?”

 

 

 

 

“Because it’s a test that I can ace!”

 

 

 

 

“You are…so retarded.  You don’t want to get sobriety tested!”

 

 

 

 

“Yes, yes I do.  It’s a test I know that I can pass!  I have studied for this test for my entire life!”

 

 

 

“How…how do you study for a sobriety test?”

 

 

 

 

“By not getting drunk.”

 

 

 

 

“I…never mind.”

Argument Won!  1 point for Male!  New score…Male 3, Female 5,768!

 

So remember folks, just like W.C. Fields said…

~RCS

Drive safe, now, Folks!

Shorty Shorts #7

Got a pretty good cop story for you folks today. I was driving to work and there’s some construction in front of the building. A cop was standing at the beginning of the construction zone, waving at everyone to slow down. Now the speed zone there is 35 mph, but most people do 50 or more through there, so the cop is not just a good idea, he’s probably wholly necessary.
But I was coming around the bend in my van and saw the construction zone, so I slowed down to well…6 miles per hour. Because said officer kept glaring at me and waving his arms madly and mouthing the words – well he was actually yelling at the top of his lungs, but in the van with the radio on and the windows up it was just mouthing words to me – signaling me to slow down more.
At 6 mph, just in front of him, he leaps in front of my vehicle, drops his arms madly and screams, “Slow the fuck down!!”
My van, as big as it is, has almost no weight to it. To give you an idea, I’m not that big of a guy and I needed a jump-start some time ago (old battery…aaaand I left my headlights on all day), but I was nosed right up to the garage wall and couldn’t get to the hood latch to open it up and hook my jumper box up to the battery.
I put it in neutral, stretched out for the big grunt, and gently pressed my shoulder into the van, urging it lazily backward. I moved it twelve feet before I realized that I only needed twelve inches.
So, take my van’s lack of weight into account and then add in the fact that it has a powerful V6 engine roaring in there and it’s not hard to believe that 10 mph is my idle speed.
So yeah…I was idling through the construction zone, with my brakes applied, and the cop leapt in front of me.
Amused by his antics, I gently inform him (with my windows still up, mind you, so to him I was just mouthing words), “Y’know Chief, if I go any slower, I’m gonna have to put it in neutral and push.”
He glared at me the whole time it took to pass him (because now I was doing two miles per hour, so it took a while). He glared at me so intently that the car behind me, which almost rear-ended me when the cop jumped in front of me, almost hit the cop in the back of the knees.

I’m starting to get the feeling that this guy just really didn’t want this assignment today.

~RCS

Friendly Neighborhood Dispatcher

Here’s a funny work story (or two) for you folks.  Given my occupation I enjoy watching funny police dispatcher videos and audio clips, because I know exactly what they have to deal with.  So first I’ll tell you a funny story a recent semi-retired officer told me when we were working together.  You see, my partner (and boss) had too many hours and we have a new no-overtime rule, so he had to take an extra day off.  Well, his replacement was a no-call/no-show, so we brought a guy out of retirement to cover the shift to prevent overtime.  Trouble with starting the week on a Friday is come Wednesday there’s only three people who haven’t already worked a full 40 this week (names have been changed to keep me from getting fired): My Lieutenant, Tim, and myself.

The Lt. was off, like I said, because he’d replaced the day-shift switchboard woman on last Friday.  Thursday is the day that payroll has to submitted to the payroll department, so he can’t take that day off.  So he had to take Wednesday off.

Tim wouldn’t pick up his phone, because the last time this happened it was a Thursday 11:30-7:30 overnight shift when we had a no-call/no-show.  Tim got in at 12:30…so they said that’s no longer a Thursday shift, it’s now a Friday shift since it’s after midnight.  So he got seven hours on the following week, just so they wouldn’t have to pay overtime that week.  Then they took a day from him to prevent him from getting overtime the following week.  That means he came in, on his day off, to work 7 hours…and they took 8 hours from him.  So they docked him an hour’s pay the next week for doing them a favor.  He no longer picks up the phone on his days off when the caller I.D. says the Captain is calling him.  I don’t blame him.

Then there is myself…I’m already working and we have a two-officer per shift policy.  One officer has to run the desk and switchboard and play dispatcher; the other officer goes on patrol.

So that leaves 5 other officers on the roster, so we’ve got three alternates.  One of the alternates was the no-show, and the other two are nightshift-only.  That’s what you get when you try replacing full-time officers with part-timers: One doesn’t show up to work (3^rd shift in a week’s time she didn’t show up for), one takes classes in the afternoon so he can get a real job some day, and the other one has kids she has to watch in the afternoon and can’t get a babysitter until her husband (who works second shift like me) gets home.

So they brought a semi-retired officer from another region out to work with me, after a Captain came out to play dispatcher to make sure I could go on patrol an hour and a half later.

Now, I told you that story to tell you this story…

The old retired guy was telling me a story from ‘back in the day’ when police dispatchers were being changed from other police officers working switchboard to a civilian-run organization (which eventually became a little bit better with specially trained dispatchers in the County 911 system).

His story went like this…

Police officer walks into the local 7-11 kind of shop because they offer free donuts and coffee to police.  He gets a cup of coffee and the Krispy Kreme guy shows up and puts a fresh batch of donuts out.

A few moments later the cop, with a fresh donut, watched the Krispy Kreme truck pull out of the lot.  He took a bit out of his donut and said ‘Hi’ to the Krispy Kreme guy as he walked passed.

Take a moment, if you need to.

The cop ran out of the shop and jumped on his radio requesting dispatch to, “Put out an APB [All-Points Bulletin] on a stolen Krispy Kreme delivery truck.”

The response on the radio from the civilian dispatcher was, he shit me not, “Can you describe the truck?”

“Yeah, it’s a box truck with pictures of donuts and the words Krispy Kreme painted on the side about fifty times, you slack-jawed, fuckin’ idiot!  By the time you get the APB out there, it’ll be across county lines!”

That being said, dispatchers do get a lot of crap.  Here’s a good example of that.

My partner and I (different office, not the Lt. or the retired guy with me) were sitting at the desk about to switch roles.  She fielded a call asking for a woman named Angela.  We looked her up to see if she was an employee in the building, maybe an engineer or an accountant or something that we didn’t know personally.  Not in the computer roster.

I offered to look at our paper roster, which is strangely better updated lately.  She informed him we’d look at our paper back roster.  Then she got a weird facial expression and set the phone down.

I checked the roster and Angela wasn’t there.  I informed her of the ‘no go’ and she smacked the phone down and hung it up.  Here’s what she said happened…

“When I told him I’d check the roster…he said, ‘take your time…Bitch!’”

We laughed about the rude man and a moment later the phone rang again.  She picked it up and handed it to me and I politely greeted the caller.  The voice on the phone, I can only describe, as a Jamaican using an Arabic accent.  He asked for Angela, again, and I double-checked my roster.  I informed him that I didn’t have her name in my roster, but if he knew what department she worked in, I could transfer him to someone in that department.  His response was less than…gentle:

“Fuck you mutha fucka, I don’t know what department she’s in, just transfer me to her.”

“I can’t transfer you, if I don’t know who she is or where she’s at.”

“Fuck you, mutha fucka, and transfer me to her, now!”

“Sir, we’re not an answering service…”

I gentle explained to him what we did and then got this great response…

“Don’t lie to me, fuck you mutha fucka, lemme speak to yo manager.”

I sat the phone down and hit the ‘hold’ button, shrugged and smiled at my partner, “He’ll eventually give up, our hold music isn’t that good.”

He stayed on the line for about two minutes before hanging up and he didn’t call again.  Problem solved.

~RCS

Corrupt Local Yokals

Just a bit of news, my fiancé was recently in a car accident.  She’s okay, the car isn’t, and it’s going to cost me a fortune.  Why?  Because my future father-in-law manages a mechanic shop, with towing services.  I can get discounted, or free, towing.  As such I didn’t pay the extra $27 a month for the towing/rental package from my car insurance.

But when the accident happened, my fiancé drove the car away from the accident site.  The responding police officer then deemed the vehicle was not drivable and ordered a tow.  He forced my fiancé to get towed by the local towing company (who has a very lucrative contract with 5 of the local police forces) to their impound/service lot.

When her brother was caught trespassing (he was riding his dirt bike in a place he shouldn’t have been) the cops impounded his bike and it cost $160 to ‘tow’ the dirt bike to the impound lot.  They also charged $60 a night for storage.

That was a dirt bike; imagine what towing and storing a car is going to cost me!  And he didn’t even tow it to my garage to get fixed!

I live on the border of four different police precincts.  We’ve got a corrupt force who won’t enforce drug laws but brutally punishes sound ordinance offenders (a guy refused to turn down his music…so they tazed him), a force that has a 45 minutes response time (over an hour if the local corner store just put out fresh coffee), a force with four vehicles and only two officers on duty at any time (one squad car, two unmarked cars, and one K-9 unit SUV), and then one that relegates a lot of its patrol duties to a private security company (I know because I work for the company).

All four of these precincts have contracts with this towing and impound company.  If you have an accident within a 25-mile radius of my home…I know where your car’s going to be.

 

To go further into stories of corrupt police forces…my boss was telling me a story the other day.  He said that he was sitting in his living room watching T.V. and noticed a pair of cars pull up in front of his house.

A handful of guys got out of the vehicles, dressed in all-black with sunglasses on, and walked into his yard, approaching his house.

They walked up to his door…and hard kick ripped it right off the hinges.  My boss leapt to his feet and jumped behind the couch, he’s trained in Kempo Karate, and prepared to square off with the five or so guys that just charged into his home.

“Are you Robert?” asked the guy in the lead.

My boss shook his head and said, “No.”

“Do you know where Robert is?”

Again, “No.”

“Is Mary here?”

At this point my boss called his mother down from her room upstairs, as she was living with him at the time, and told her, “Ma, I think they’re looking for Robby.”

Only now did the badges come out and the men explained that they had a warrant for my boss’ brother-in-law and since this was my boss’ mother-in-law’s listed residence, they thought maybe he was there as well.

After forcing my boss to prove his identity and searching the house (without a search warrant) they said they were convinced that Robert wasn’t there and they began to depart.

That’s when my boss posed a question to them, “Hey!  What about my door?  You kicked it in, remember?”

The lead detective looked at my boss, looked at the door, then shrugged, “That’s your homeowner’s insurance.”

There are a lot of good cops out there…it’s a shame it seems like the asshole cops are the ones who get hired, though.

~RCS

My boss had a $500 deductible on his insurance, so he just bought two dead bolts and put a steel piano hinge on the door.  Good luck ripping that bitch off the hinges.