Shards

by Allison Moore

  As for me, I now belonged to the brotherhood. And I was finally doing something with my life.

  3

  There are different kinds of cops—investigators, who find facts, analyze, and problem-solve; detectives, who put together puzzles and solve mysteries; and basic cops, the guys who only wear the badge in order to kick people’s asses. I was definitely an investigator. Fresh out of recruit school, I was itching to get into the community and find out what was going on.

  I was also terrified. I was a cop. My responsibilities loomed large.

  Luckily, I was going to spend four months riding around with field training officers before I had to go it alone. My first FTO, Agent Kane, reined me in. Kane was a tiny Asian man, soft-spoken, and a very talented officer. He taught me how to do everything by the book and how to be disciplined in learning about the law and managing my time.

  “Alli,” Kane said, “we’re shorthanded on cops in Maui, so your time management is number one. You’re not going to get home until midnight unless you learn to take care of your paperwork and evidence between traffic stops and calls.”

  Kane wasn’t very confrontational, and I found myself getting into fights with beat partners while he wasn’t watching over me. He did teach me how to sit and observe instead of getting myself into trouble every time I went on a case.

  My second FTO, Al Torres, couldn’t have been more different from Kane. He had a reputation for not exactly doing things by the book.

  The first night I was out with Al, we spotted a teenaged kid riding his bike. We could tell by looking at him that he was a stoner, and we slowed down and drove beside him, watching him weave from side to side while he looked up at the sky. Al laughed and lit the kid up. The poor kid stopped, dropping his bike.

  “What, man?” he asked. “I’m just trying to get home on my bike.”

  “Been smoking weed?” Al asked. “Been dealing?”

  We could smell the weed on him, but the kid said, “Come on, man, don’t take me in. I got nothing.”

  The kid had a pipe sticking out of the pocket of his pants, so Al said, “I’m seizing your pants!”

  “You can’t do that!” the kid said. He turned to me. “Can he do that?”

  I nodded. “He can do that,” I said, though I was pretty sure he couldn’t.

  “Pants!” Al said, holding out his hand, and the kid struggled to get his pants off without falling down. He handed them to Al and had to ride the bike home in his underwear. Later that night, his parents came to the station and filed a complaint.

  A week later, Kevin and I were both riding with Al when we got a call from a store in the mall that a lady had stolen some jewelry. When we got there, the store detective was talking to her, and we could tell she was methed out. She was so thin she looked anorexic. She was barely wearing any clothes, just this little flowered dress and no underwear. When Kevin and I cuffed her, she went crazy, flopping around on the floor like a dying fish and trying to get out of her cuffs. Her little dress was riding up and you could see everything—it was a real mess. She fought us like crazy. Meth makes you strong, or at least makes you think you’re strong. Al watched with amusement as we struggled with her. Finally, he took his giant boot and stepped on the woman’s head.

  He turned to me and let out a big laugh. “See, Moore,” he said, “when you step on the freak’s head, the freak stops moving.”

  For four months, I rode along with my field training officers, learning how to be a cop. After that, my sergeant put me in the Fishbowl while I awaited my first assignment. The Fishbowl, the receiving desk for Wailuku patrol, is where prisoners are booked and processed; most rookies spend a lot of time there. Instead of killing time watching TV with the receiving desk sergeant, I was studying the offender-based transactions, or OBTs—cop-talk for the arrest record. I wanted to find out who the major players and arrestees were on Maui during that time.

  In the Fishbowl, I observed how different cops and receiving desk officers treated their detainees. I also learned how to build a rapport with the arrestees and the patrol officers. When I would take the detainees to their cells, I heard a lot of complaints about their treatment by arresting officers. I learned what officers were dicks and what officers were respected. There is a quote by Frank Barron—“Never take a person’s dignity, it’s worth everything to them and nothing to you.” I felt everyone should be treated with respect, even those that broke the law. That is what I began to learn in the Fishbowl, and that lesson was hammered home to me when I hit the road again.

  My life at this time revolved around work. I would get up at four a.m. to go to the fitness center, and then report to the Fishbowl for an eight-to-twelve-hour shift, studying arrest records and reading reports on Report Warrior, the template we used to record information about our cases. After that, it was back to the gym before going home to sleep for a few hours. I was in the best shape of my life, but my life had been funneled down to work and the gym. No hobbies. No beach. No social life. All my friendships from Lulu’s had faded quickly once I became a cop, and my long-distance relationship with Dalton wasn’t going so well.

  I loved my life, but I was lonely.

  Around this time, I ran into Officer Davis, the Hawaiian officer I had first seen in Plans and Training. He came into the Fishbowl with an arrestee, and I felt that connection again.

  It turns out he did too.

  He said, “You made it through the academy, huh?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Congratulations. And I hear you’ll be joining us in Bravo Watch.”

  Even I hadn’t heard this yet.

  “It will be great to have you,” he said. “You look like you’ve been hitting the gym.”

  I turned red with embarrassment. “Thanks, Officer Davis,” I said. I was planning to visit Dalton in Miami soon and had become obsessed with wowing him with my body.

  “If we’re going to be working together you have to call me by my first name,” Officer Davis said.

  “Okay, Charles,” I said.

  “Nah, my close friends call me by my Hawaiian name. Keawe.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Say it,” he said, teasing me. “Ke-a-we.”

  “Okay,” I said again. “Keawe.” I knew he was flirting with me. I also knew he was married.

  I had a few days off between leaving the Fishbowl and starting my first assignment, and I used them to visit Dalton in Miami. Seeing him when I got off the plane felt wonderful, but within minutes I could tell something wasn’t right. He was gentlemanly, but he felt distant and cool, and I didn’t fit in with any of his friends, who couldn’t get past the idea that I was a cop. They were all deciding between getting law degrees or MBAs. On the last night of my visit, we went bowling, and his sister said to me, “You seem nice so I just thought I should tell you. He’s cheating on you.”

  That was the end of our long-distance romance.

  • • •

  Back in Maui, my first assignment after the Fishbowl was Happy Valley. These are the largest projects on Maui and are mostly full of local Hawaiians, with a mix of Filipinos and a few white families. All poverty, all drugs. Ice—as methamphetamine is called in Hawaii—is an enormous problem in Maui, and Happy Valley is where the ice epidemic is hitting the hardest.

  I was scared shitless working in Happy Valley. In MPD, you’re solo—no one has partners—and if you’re white, you stand out. Even more so if you’re blond and a girl. I was a target for a lot of people because I was new, and they wanted to test me and see how far I would go.

  Gangs from all over the island meet to fight in Happy Valley. If the Happy Valley Boys are going to beef with the Kihei Boys, or the Lahaina Boys are going to beef with the Wailuku Boys, they’re going to do it in Happy Valley. When the cops are called, there’s always the chance you’ll be the first car there, so you have to react. You’re not going to sit in a patrol car and wait for backup while potentially someone’s getting hit in the head with a bat.


  On my first felony traffic stop in Happy Valley, I was working Wailuku beat 10. An undercover officer called in and said, “Hey guys, I see this stolen car headed down Main Street.”

  I was so excited. I’d never done a felony traffic stop before, and I was just a minute away. When I got there I was alone. I identified the stolen car and lit it up. When the car pulled over, I got out of my patrol car and pointed my firearm at the car. A guy got out of the passenger side, pulling out these two giant pit bulls behind him.

  “I’m letting them go,” he said. “You watch it.” The pit bulls snarled, straining at their leashes.

  I started to shake, thinking I might have to shoot the guy, and if I did, he would let go of the dogs. I wasn’t sure I could shoot both of them before they got to me. Meanwhile, the female on the driver’s side was trying to toss her dope, the radio was blasting for me to update, and my firearm hand was shaking. I was behind the driver’s side door and could hear the sirens, but at this point I was still solo.

  “Put those dogs back in the car,” a deep, confident voice ordered.

  That voice was mine. I don’t have that normal command presence that men or butch women have, but I do have this calm man voice that comes over me when I’m really nervous. I used that voice, and it startled the guy. I told him again to put the dogs away, and lo and behold, he did. I closed in on him, and when my beat partners finally showed up, we found a bunch of dope in the car and made the arrests.

  I couldn’t believe it—my first big awesome case. I was a cop.

  I felt strong. Untouchable. Badass.

  Until the next week.

  One of my beat partners got into a high-speed pursuit on Honoapiilani Highway, and I joined in the pursuit. Abruptly, the guy we were pursuing turned his truck off the highway and onto a dirt road headed for the Maui Block. The Maui Block is an area of wilderness above Wailuku where most criminals hide out because it’s treacherous and hard for us to navigate.

  I was considered a pretty aggressive driver throughout recruit school and was keeping pace with the pursuit. The next thing I knew, I was looking at water. The nose of my patrol car was pointed down and I had to brace myself against the steering wheel to keep from falling into the windshield.

  I was in some sort of Maui Block swamp, stuck in my car because of the angle—not to mention the water all around me. Thankfully the water was not very deep—it barely covered the engine block. I was going to radio in my predicament as soon as I felt the chase was over, but before I could do that, I saw some lights behind me and heard a bunch of laughter. My beat partners approached my car as I rolled down the window.

  “Need some help, Alli?” one of them asked, and I thought the others were going to die laughing. I was on the verge of tears.

  “Don’t worry, honey. We’ll get you out of there,” one of the guys said condescendingly. Turns out they had caught the man we were chasing, and they made him use his own truck to tow me out of the ditch. For that they let him go. One of the guys took pictures, and they had lots of laughs, but they were decent about it. They never told any of the brass. It was the most embarrassing thing I had gotten myself into, but after a day or two I found it as funny as they did. Keawe kidded me about it in the station, and I was able to laugh with him. I guess it took badass me down a peg.

  • • •

  In Happy Valley, I earned the reputation of being a good cop. I wasn’t arrest-happy like some of the others. If a guy was driving drunk and I knew he didn’t have the money to bail himself out or pay the court for the DUI fine, I would make his wife come pick him up. When people living in that kind of poverty don’t pay a traffic ticket because they can’t spare seventy bucks, they get picked up and sent to jail. Then they can’t work, and their families fall even further into poverty. I tried to keep that from happening.

  We didn’t have quotas when it came to writing traffic violations, but there was an unspoken (but sometimes spoken) requirement from our sergeants to issue traffic tickets regularly. In attempts to produce drug arrests stemming from traffic stops, I pulled people over all the time and learned all the traffic violations and even county codes, but I rarely, rarely wrote traffic tickets. I was often scolded by my sergeants for not issuing more traffic violations, but I felt that traffic citations were the wrong way to enforce the law. When people drove recklessly, I pulled them over, warned them, and enlightened them on how to drive. Why issue a hundred-dollar ticket to people in an economy where we all knew they probably wouldn’t be able to pay?

  Cops could be so insensitive when it came to issuing tickets. They just couldn’t see the big picture. Often an officer would issue a standard hundred-dollar citation to someone who couldn’t afford car insurance. If the woman is making minimum wage and has to choose between paying her traffic ticket or feeding her family, she won’t pay the ticket. Then a warrant is issued for an arrest, and she is visited by a rookie patrolman at her home during dinner and arrested for contempt of court for failure to pay a traffic ticket. Of course, the asshole rookie cop doesn’t take the time to figure out where her children could go while he takes her in because he’s on a deadline and needs to get his arrest report done, so CPS is called and the children are removed from the home. The woman didn’t have the money to pay the ticket, so why would she have the money to now bail herself out of jail? She’s kept in county lockup until her arraignment, misses work—no call, no show—so she’s fired. When she finally makes it to her arraignment, the judge scolds her, orders her to pay the court, and releases her. At that point, her children are in the custody of CPS and she no longer has a job, so CPS won’t release the children to her. She can’t find a new job because she has recently been arrested, and her life is officially effed up because of one traffic ticket.

  That is not the reason I became a cop.

  However, the second a guy hit or even threatened to hurt another person, he was going to jail. They always knew that about me in Happy Valley.

  4

  MPD covered three islands in Maui—Maui, Molokai, and Lanai—and it was the policy of the department to send rookies out to one of the smaller islands for patrol. After Happy Valley, the sergeant sent me to Lanai for a one-year assignment.

  I wasn’t thrilled about it. Lanai was a tiny little island, forty-five minutes by ferry from Maui, a backwater town with mostly dirt roads and not a single stoplight. It was a small community—three thousand people, predominantly Filipino, predominantly Catholic. I had no idea what I would do there.

  My only consolation was that I was going to have a dog to take with me, a 180-pound gentle mastiff named Mo. My soon-to-be beat partner on Lanai, Walker, had agreed to take Mo from one of his church members. Mo’s owner, a woman, had recently died, and her husband couldn’t stand to keep Mo around because he was too much of a reminder of his wife. A dog breeder himself, Walker knew that Mo would do best with a female and asked me if I would take her. Without thinking, I said yes, though my landlord in Kihei freaked out until he saw how mellow and friendly Mo was. I had never had any dealings with mastiffs before and had no idea a dog could be so sensitive and loving. Mo became an important part of my life almost immediately.

  My sergeants threw a going-away party for me before I left for Lanai, a huge barbecue at Sergeant Alvarez’s house in Lahaina. Everyone came—my fellow recruits and all of my beat partners from Bravo Watch. I rarely drank alcohol, but I drank a couple of cans of Heineken that night—the chosen beer of most MPD officers.

  Of course Keawe was there. With Dalton out of the picture, I had been fighting my attraction to him. Once we started working together, it was hard for either of us to deny that something was brewing between us, but Keawe was a married man.

  I wore a long-sleeved gauzy shirt, and several times that night I caught Keawe watching me. At one point he came up and whispered in my ear, “Nice outfit, but it covers up too much of you.” I found this very flattering, and that bothered me. Part of me was actually relieved that I was leaving because I was worrie
d about what might happen between us if I stuck around.

  I put off my departure until the last possible moment and had to leave straight from the party to catch the last ferry of the night to Lanai.

  When it was time for me to go, Keawe walked me to my car, where Mo was quietly sleeping in the backseat. As I opened the door, Keawe said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do without you, Alli.” To my horror, he leaned in to kiss me. I quickly turned my head so he ended up kissing my cheek.

  “Hey,” I said. “What are you doing?”

  “You know what I’m doing,” he said.

  “I also know that you have a wife,” I said angrily.

  I got into my car and slammed the door. As I drove away, I tried to brush off his behavior. He had been drinking and was being a dog, the way a lot of cops are dogs. But in the end, I was so pissed at him for threatening our friendship that once I got to Lanai I stopped taking his calls.

  On Lanai, Mo became a station dog. He wasn’t eating very well—Walker thought he was in mourning for his old owner—so I wanted to keep him with me all the time. I didn’t even ask my sergeant—I just brought him into work one day and everyone loved him. He started sleeping in the report-writing room and riding in my patrol car. He got the reputation for being a police dog, but he was never deputized. I found Mo to be a great tool for proactive police work. If I made a traffic stop, all he had to do was peek his head out the back window and the driver would cooperate. He rode on the ferry with me back and forth, and when people saw him coming, they just assumed he was a drug dog. There were always a few backpacks with dope in them left behind when Mo and I were on the ferry.

  Although I wasn’t thrilled about being in Lanai, it was there that I developed my real passion for being a cop. At first I thought it was a lazy town with nothing for me to do but surveillance on cockfights and dogfights. Before long, I recognized how many drugs there were on Lanai, coming and going. Ice had captured the community. It takes two hours to get from Maui to Lanai on a Jet Ski, less than an hour on the ferry, and there is no security whatsoever. Dealers were sending coolers with packets of ice on the ferry with grandmothers who looked like innocent picnickers. Often our informants would tell us that a shipment was coming over, but we could do nothing because the ferry was technically US Coast Guard jurisdiction. An informant’s tip didn’t give us probable cause to hold people on the ferry and stop them from entering Lanai before the Coast Guard got there. I was sure we had missed several opportunities to nail dealers this way.