Reflections on a Police Ride Along

Reflections on a Police Ride Along
Thursday, August 28, 2008.

Along with about 20 other Kirkwood area ministers, I have joined the chaplain program sponsored by the Kirkwood Police Department. I have a pocket badge, and an ID. I understand we are going to get jackets later on.

As part of the program, the ministers go on ride-a-longs. I understand I was the 2nd one to do so. Below is an account of how the day went. Enjoy!

Thursday morning, 6:45 am, roll call. A half dozen police sitting around. The lieutenant recaps a little of what is going on. There is some light joking.

I am assigned to two different officers for different parts of the 8 hour shift that runs from 7 am to 3 pm.

One officer mainly drives me around and shows me where our US Senator, Claire MaCaskill's compound is in Kirkwood, plus the homes of a few TV announcers. He has also been investigating the theft of a parishioners purse during a Room At The Inn night at Eliot. He has been living in Kirkwood and serving on our police force for 38 ½ years. He has seen it all. I don’t really want to know what ‘it’ is, actually.

We get a call from the dispatcher. A woman is complaining about difficulty breathing. When we arrive, there is an ambulance and a fire truck. We enter the woman’s home. Inside there are about 7 people. The old woman is complaining about difficulty breathing, but she seems fine to me. She is not getting along with her equally aged husband. A neighbor is in the room. He agrees to hang out with the husband until another relative shows up. One of the men in the room confides to me that he thinks the old woman is fed up with caring for her husband and just needs a couple days away at Missouri Baptist. It is really hard to be old and feeble yourself and have to take care of a crotchety spouse at the same time.

When I inquire as to why so many emergency responders are here in this woman’s house, this is how it is explained to me. The woman called, 911, so an ambulance came. When an ambulance comes, usually a fire truck comes, too, because they don’t know how many people they will actually need. When the fire truck comes, the police now come, too. Why? Because not that long ago, a man in Maplewood set fire to his truck, and when the firemen came to put out the fire, he shot and killed the fireman. So, now the police go on fire calls too.

Otherwise we drive around the high school a few times making sure the high schoolers are getting to school. We turn on the radar gun a few times riding around town– it checks car speeds while we are moving and it checks ahead and behind our police car.

We give out a couple of parking tickets to outrageously and dangerously parked cars. We pull over an old guy in a pickup truck, which is heavily laden with old pallets. Apparently, he drives around town, picks up the pallets from loading docks, and then goes and sells them somewhere. That’s not the problem. It’s that he has no tail lights or brake light. So, the officer tells him that she could have the truck towed, since it is illegal to drive, but she will just give him a ticket and tell him to get the lights fixed.

When the officer calls the car’s license plate in, they can tell us what kind of car it is supposed to be, the address it is registered to, and the date of its registration sticker.

At one point, the air conditioning breaks down. It is about 90 degrees out. The police officers wear tight fitting ballistic vests, along with tee shirts and their uniform. It gets them pretty hot. So the a/c is pretty important. And they often keep their driver’s side window down to hear better for better situational awareness. So, we take the car into the depot, and they test it, fix something, send us back out. Later in the day, it happens again, so we get a ‘new’ car. These cars are not in the best of shape. They are running pretty much constantly– 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There are always 5 of them out on the streets of Kirkwood. The officers patrol in zones, so they cover a lot of the same ground.

The dispatcher comes on line to tell us a woman has called 911 several times. All they can hear is her telling someone to stop what they are doing and the woman is saying to this person they should go into a mental institution. And the woman hangs up. Several times. They can target a cell phone to a certain range, but not pinpoint. We drive over to where the call was to have originated. We drive around slowly, looking around, listening. The cell phone call could have come from inside a house. The woman is not answering her cell phone now. Who knows? We don’t find anything. We drive on. Later on, they get through to the woman. It was just an argument about something. Nothing serious.

I remind the officer about lunch. This is about one o’clock. Two hours to go on the shift. We go to Subway, sit down to eat. I get three bites in, and we get a call on the radio. A truck has crashed into a tree on North Taylor street. That is in our zone. Just like on TV, we quickly stash our lunch in the plastic bags, and jog out to the patrol car.

I’m wondering if it is going to be a grisly scene. If there will be an opportunity to offer pastoral care or a prayer to a stranger. I’m a chaplain after all. The adrenaline begins to pump a little bit.

We hop in, maneuver over to Taylor, and with our light on and siren whooping, we quickly get in behind a fire truck and an ambulance. They got the call too. We are going about 40 miles an hour up Taylor toward Manchester. We are zooming through stop signs, people are pulled over for us. First in line is the fire truck, then the ambulance, and then us, the police car. And I’m riding shot gun. Whooee!

When we get there, we don’t see anything. Some guys mowing lawns tell us there was a panel truck that crashed into a tree over there– they point– and the truck took off again. We look around and can see where the truck hit the tree. There are small bits of truck and a huge gouge. We drive around the block but the panel truck is long gone. Finally, the fire truck and ambulance head back to their station.

We drive and talk a bit more. We get a call about a suspicious character on North Taylor street: an African American youth with a red Mohawk haircut. Well, he shouldn’t be hard to spot. And we spot him. He seems like an ordinary youth. But he is black. With a red Mohawk, and he is seated on a curb scratching his leg. The officer asks if he is hurt or anything. He says, no, he is just scratching his leg. She waves and we drive off. She happens to know who he is, and that the youth is out on bond for some offense, and she knows he isn’t wanted for anything.

So the gist of it is that a neighbor sees a black youth with a red Mohawk haircut walking down the street, and that automatically makes him a suspicious character, and it is good to call the police in on such situations, right? Because North Taylor doesn’t have black people, and black people– especially youth, and especially a youth with a red Mohawk– how much more suspicious can you get? But this is profiling, it is racist. And the police get calls like this all the time. Calls about the neighbors leaves blowing on to your yard. Calls about rescuing a lost cat, dog.

We end our day by driving to a few houses in Kirkwood and handing out packs of 20 flyers to neighborhood block captains. The flyers are about a Take Back the Night event coming up later next month. It is community policing. I think next time, I’ll do a half shift, because 8 hours is pretty grueling. And I’ll go later in the day. They tell me more is going on then. The bad guys don’t get up early in the morning. Most shoplifting and other crime happens after 2 pm.

Well, you can learn a lot about how people view the police by riding with them in their cars. Some people smile and wave, others look suspiciously at the officers, as if the police are already guilty of something. But the ones I met are caring people with a tough job to do.