by Rosa Brooks
Finally, Sergeant Fremont strides in. He stands directly in front of my table, so close I could reach out and tickle his tummy. I focus my eyes on my notebook.
Fremont has a strong, morose baritone. “All right, attention to roll call, today is Saturday, October thirtieth, this is the evening tour of duty.” He reads out the day’s code word, names the watch commander and the check-off sergeant, then starts listing assignments.
“Perez and Smith, you’re gonna be operating under call sign 7011, utilizing vehicle 7026, take the breach kit.”
Perez and Smith each give a desultory acknowledgment. “Sarge.”
“Dorry and Fiske, you’re 7012, utilizing vehicle 7022, you guys got the M4 patrol rifle.”
“Sir.”
“Warner and Phelps, you’re 7021, in vehicle 7213, special attention to Woodlands; we had three shootings there in the last few days, so look sharp.”
“You got it, Sarge.”
“Murphy and . . . Brooks, you’re 7022.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Take vehicle 7214, and take the dog pole.”
Dog pole? I scribble this down in my notebook, where I’m trying to list everyone’s names and call signs.
When Fremont finishes running through the assignments, he goes on to roll call training.
“Okay, roll call training for the day, be advised, 18 DCMR 2405.1(g) prohibits stopping, standing, and parking in bike lanes. Accordingly, members are prohibited from stopping, standing, or parking department vehicles in bike lanes when conducting routine business. In accordance with GO-SPT-301.01 (Vehicle Operation and Maintenance), sworn members may only park or idle in a bike lane in emergency cases, and vehicles must be parked in accordance with traffic regulations as soon as possible. Any questions?”
No one has any questions.
“All right, fall in.”
We all stand, and I follow everyone to the side of the room. Fremont gives us a cursory glance.
“Okay. Fall out. Be safe.”
Murphy’s already disappearing around the corner. Trying to catch up, I push through the scrum of officers standing by the door. One of them, a thirtysomething white guy with dark hair much longer than regulation length, winks at me.
“So, the new reserve officer’s kind of hot,” he announces to some of the other men.
For a millisecond, I’m brought up short. Is this flirtation? Mockery? Hazing? Some kind of test?
But his tone isn’t hostile, and it doesn’t seem like a good moment to offer an explication of the laws relating to appropriate workplace conduct. The truth is, I’m grateful that my gender can even be discerned through my bulky uniform. Pathetic.
I wink back. “It’s the armored vest, right? Admit it. No man can resist a woman in a ballistic vest.”
He laughs. I feel another humiliating surge of gratitude.
I push past and catch up with Murphy, who has somehow acquired both a set of car keys and the dog pole. This instrument is a long aluminum pole with a loop of cable at the end, like a noose. In theory, the loop can be used to snare and temporarily immobilize vicious dogs, while the pole keeps the officer safely distant from sharp teeth and dog drool. Resources are scarce at 7D, so there’s apparently only one dog pole for several hundred officers, and on each shift, one vehicle is assigned to drive around with it.
“Carrying this is completely stupid,” Murphy mutters as we head out to the parking lot in search of vehicle 7214.
“How come?”
“Because what kind of dog is going to stick its head into one of these things? None, that’s what kind of dog. And, what, like we’re going to just happen to have this thing handy when a pit bull shows up and lunges at us?”
Murphy shoves the dog pole into vehicle 7214’s trunk, where it remains for the rest of the shift.
Your Tax Dollars at Work
Assault with a Dangerous Weapon (bottle): Subject states Defendant . . . attempted to take his steak and cheese sub at which point Subject refused and the sandwich fell to the ground. Defendant became enraged and struck Subject in the head with a bottle causing minor injury, a ambulance was notified however Subject refused treatment. Defendant was placed under arrest. . . .
—MPD Joint Strategic and Tactical Analysis Command Center, Daily Report
Then, just like that, I was officially working my first patrol shift.
I offered to drive, per academy instructions, but Murphy declined. “Before we leave, I’m gonna give you the grand tour of the station, and then the whole rest of the district,” he promised as he slammed the trunk on the dog pole. “Then after the tour, you can take the wheel and I’m gonna watch a movie, then take a nice long nap. Ha ha, kidding . . . not.”
The Seventh District police station was even more down at heel than the academy. It was smaller than most of the other six district stations, and more decrepit. The women’s locker room, where I had already spent an unhappy hour, was dank and humid. Neither of the two toilet stall doors latched properly, and the toilets didn’t flush unless you held your foot down on the handle for a full five seconds. Unpropitiously, a sign posted near the toilets warned against smearing feces on the wall.
I mentioned this to Murphy. “Is the men’s locker room any better?” I asked.
He gave a derisive snort. “This is 7D.”
In the report-writing room, several of the ten or so computers were broken, and one of the two printers was out of order. The copy machine was always jammed or out of paper, Murphy said, and the computer keyboards had seen so much hard use that the letters had worn off most of the keys, making report writing a challenge for those who, like me, never learned to touch-type.
The public came in the front door, and waited in an odorous antechamber to gain the attention of one of the station clerks. We officers came in through the rear parking lot and the station’s back door, which led to a small landing containing a vandalized, gutted ATM. It looked like someone had taken an ax and a hammer to it, then doused it with gasoline and set it on fire. Down a few stairs, in the basement, were the roll call room, the report writing room, and the locker rooms. The sergeants had their own room, which connected both to the report writing room and the roll call room. At the end of the hall were a weight room and some vending machines.
Upstairs somewhere there was a room called the “lunchroom,” but Murphy explained that since no one ever had time to sit and eat, it was always empty. The administrative offices were also upstairs, along with the detectives’ area and offices for the lieutenants, captains, and the 7D commander.
Upstairs there was also an alcove containing the district Property Book, the archaic, Dickensian object into which all “found property” and evidence had to be entered, by hand and in black ink, with corrections in red ink. The book was enormous, nearly the size of those dictionaries libraries sometimes display on stands, and as battered as the ATM on the landing; it looked like someone had spilled coffee on it and then left it out in the rain for a few weeks before returning it to the station.
The property room itself was in the basement, and even more archaic: like a medieval cabinet of curiosities, it housed scores of moldering Property Books from years past, along with all the items the Seventh District was holding or storing: wallets and cell phones, teddy bears, family photos, wigs, hats, machetes, knives, handguns, Air Jordans, umbrellas, suitcases, textbooks, mops, pillows, jewelry, televisions, bicycles, spent shell casings, crack vials—it was all there somewhere, much of it tucked away in cupboards and ancient storage containers that could only be opened with enormous, heavy metal keys that also looked like they’d been borrowed from a medieval dungeon.
Murphy led me back to Vehicle 7214, and our tour of 7D began.
“That’s the big chair. Yeah, it’s a giant sculpture of a chair. I don’t know why it’s there. That convenience store there, it keeps getting robbed; I’ve b
een in there, like, ten times in the last few days. Those guys on the left side corner, they’re okay. They don’t give me any shit usually. That park, though, the kids who hang out in it, they’re bad news. They’re always up to something. That’s what I hate about this PSA, too many fucking juveniles.”
He scowled out the window at some teenagers.
“I can handle the older guys, they’re pretty straight with me, but the juveniles are another story, and if you arrest them it’s, like, two hours of extra pain-in-the-ass paperwork and process because they’re juveniles. I hate arresting juveniles; it’s too much hassle. That’s why I liked my last PSA better. Not as many juveniles. . . . Okay, right here, this is where that guy got stabbed last night, you can still see the bloodstain on the pavement, over there, see?”
The Seventh District was divided into eight “police service areas.” We were assigned to PSA 702, and we were the second car assigned to that sector; thus our call sign, 7022. Two other officers were assigned to the first sector car in PSA 702, with the call sign 7021. That meant, Murphy explained, that when calls came in, the dispatcher first assigned them to call sign 7021; if 7021 was busy, calls came next to us, call sign 7022, then to 7023, 7024 and so on. “Except there is no 7023 or 7024,” Murphy said. “A lot of guys are on leave, so it’s just 7021 and us.” If our PSA was quiet and we got bored, he added, we could respond to calls in other PSAs as well, and if things got really busy, the dispatchers would start ignoring PSA assignments and send any available 7D car to calls.
I was lucky it wasn’t summer, he said. In the summer, when crime tended to spike because the long hot days kept people out on the streets, the department always launched the Summer Crime Initiative, which involved assigning officers to static posts in high-crime areas. “It sucks. You’re not allowed to leave your SCI area unless the sergeant gives permission, and you’re stuck in the same block or two for ten hours.”
By 16:30, the radio started to squawk a bit more. I still had trouble understanding much of what came over it. “You’ll get the hang of it,” Murphy assured me, “but it takes a while. Anyway, this fuckin’ dispatcher’s totally ghetto, I can’t understand a fuckin’ thing she’s saying half the time. I don’t know where they get these people.”
I’d been listening to my police radio whenever I had some downtime, trying to develop what they call “radio ear,” and it was true that some dispatchers were harder to understand than others. The best dispatchers spoke slowly and crisply, articulating every word. “Seven-oh-two-one, please respond to the burglary at three-eight-two-one Martin Luther King Ave., apartment number two; repeat, seven-oh-two-one, respond to the burglary at three-eight-two-one Martin Luther King Ave., apartment number two, do you copy?” The worst dispatchers rushed and swallowed half their words, and all you could hear was an indistinct blur of barely intelligible sounds. “—two-one, respond eight-two—King—two—copy?” Usually, assignments also came in over the car’s mobile data terminal, but Murphy complained that the MDTs tended to stop working at crucial moments.
Just then the radio crackled, and we heard the steady beep signifying a priority transmission. A garbled, panicky young voice came over the air. “10-33, 10-33! Corner of Southern and South Cap, I’m”—there was some unintelligible crackling and panting—“need additional units!”
Murphy already had his foot on the gas and we were flying down the street, lights flashing and sirens blaring.
If you don’t happen to drive an ambulance, fire truck, or police car, you may never have noticed that a high percentage of drivers don’t pull to the right and stop when they hear sirens. Maybe they’re deaf, or confused, or panicked, or maybe they just choose not to. Either way, Murphy was constantly swerving onto the wrong side of the road to avoid vehicles that were directly in our path. We were on narrow residential streets, going eighty.
I closed my eyes. “God,” I thought, “I would really, really hate to die in a car crash on my first night on patrol. If I’m going to get killed in the line of duty, please let me be shot while protecting schoolchildren from an active shooter, not die in a fiery car crash caused by a colleague’s overzealous driving.” Discreetly, I checked that my seat belt was securely fastened. Murphy wasn’t even wearing his, but I decided it wasn’t my place to tell him to buckle up. Around us, other patrol cars were also screaming by.
We all converged at the corner of Southern and South Capitol streets. By the time we arrived, there were seven or eight patrol cars there already, slewed out across the road. I had no idea what the emergency was; although there was more crackling and panting on the radio beneath the wail of the sirens, none of it was intelligible to me. Murphy slammed on the brakes, and we both leapt out and raced toward the crowd of people milling around at the corner.
At least fifteen officers were already standing in a loose circle. In the center of the circle, surrounded, stood a middle-aged black man with his hands up in the air. He was dressed conservatively, in khakis and a sweater, and behind his glasses and his trim salt-and-pepper beard, he looked bemused as he surveyed the crowd of blue uniforms around him.
He shrugged wryly, keeping his hands up in the air. “My tax dollars at work.”
But already, some of the officers were starting to leave and head back to their cars. There was a lot of muttering and disgusted head shaking.
“What just happened?” I asked Murphy, following him back to our car.
“Aw, that was total bullshit. That fucking guy, Chalin, the guy who called the 10-33, this is the third time he’s done that in a week. He totally overreacts. He did a traffic stop and the driver got out and walked toward him instead of just staying in his seat, and Chalin fucking panicked, thought he was being ambushed or something. Fucking idiot. The guy wasn’t doing anything; he just didn’t know he was supposed to stay in the car. Chalin freaked. People are gonna stop showing up when he calls if he keeps pulling this shit.”
I was glad the traffic stop had ended peacefully. A panicky young officer and a subject unexpectedly getting out of the car were common ingredients in too many police shootings. At the same time, I felt a twinge of disappointment as Murphy and I drove away. It was my first 10-33, and after so many practice runs at the academy, I couldn’t help wishing for a genuine emergency.
By now the radio was chattering almost constantly, calls starting to come in all over 7D. Suddenly, we were busy. After a few hours responding to disorderly conduct and family disturbance calls, we were sent to check out a case of possible child abuse. An anonymous caller had told the 911 operator that she thought a child was being beaten or hurt in an apartment in her building; she had heard angry shouts and thumps, followed by what sounded like a child screaming in pain.
When we arrived at the address the caller had given, another officer was already in the hallway, and everything was quiet. A television or radio was playing in one of the apartments off the long hallway, but there was no sound coming from apartment 3C, where the caller had said she’d heard a child’s screams. The officer already on the scene, a young black guy in the uniform of a mountain bike patrol officer, said he had already knocked on the door, but no one had answered. Murphy knocked again.
This time, we could hear a muffled noise behind the door. It sounded like a child’s laughter.
“Police!” shouted the mountain bike officer. “Open the door!”
Behind the door, we heard a child’s voice, raised questioningly, followed by a woman’s voice.
“Ma’am?” called Murphy. “MPD. Could you open the door, please?”
The sounds came closer. Then, a woman’s voice, suspicious: “What do you want?”
“Ma’am, it’s the police. Could you please open the door?”
There was a brief silence, broken by the child’s voice.
“Police? Mama, is they the police?”
Then the woman’s voice again: “I’m not opening this door. What do you want
?”
The mountain bike officer was getting impatient. “Ma’am, you have to let us in. We have a report of an abused child in there. We need to come in and make sure that child is safe and unhurt.”
“That’s ridiculous.” The voice on the other side of the door was angry now. “There’s no abused child in here. My son is perfectly fine. What kind of busybody told you there was? You just believe every single lie people tell you, and go around accusing people of child abuse?”
We looked at one another.
“Ma’am,” I tried, “we’re not accusing you of anything. But if we get a report that a child might be in danger, we have to check it out. We can’t just ignore it.”
Silence.
I tried again. “If your child was with a babysitter or something and we got a call saying that he was in danger, wouldn’t you want us to go make sure he was okay?”
“You got a warrant?” she demanded. “If you don’t have a warrant, you’re not getting into my home.”
“No, ma’am. But we really would like to just make sure everything’s okay. If you would just open the door so we can see that your child is all right, we’ll get out of your hair.”
“You don’t need to come in. You can tell from right out there that my son is alive and well. He was fussing earlier because he’s overtired, that’s all, and some busybody with a grudge calls you people to come shout through my door! I want you to leave right now.”
“This is bullshit,” the mountain bike officer hissed to Murphy and me. “We gotta get in there. We got no idea what she did to that kid. He could be hurt bad for all we know. Or she could have another kid lying dead in there. You got a battering ram in your car? We gotta get that door open!”