Sunday, February 08, 2004
The Po-lice
This issue is a little old, but I thought worth talking about. A couple weeks ago I showed up on the scene of a police shootout. A 16-year-old kid stole his parents' car at gunpoint and led police on a high speed chase through Baton Rouge. As the police approached his car to arrest him he shot three of them (they all have since recovered). Meanwhile, the cops surrounding this guy unloaded on him with their 9mms and left him paralyzed with a tube down his throat.
I got there a couple minutes after the shit went down and it was nuts. There were about 60 cop cars there, all of which had been tearing down streets and highways en route to the scene. While on the scene people who were on the road during the pursuit came up to me pissed off at the cops. So I wrote it down. There was a crowd of about 50 people and everyone I talked to was mad so it went into the article. This was compounded by the cops' public information officer telling me "I'm not telling you anything" to start her briefing on what went down. Consequently we had little on the cops but many citizen complaints in the article.
The cops had a shit fit. I got 16 e-mails on that one fucking article, 14 negative. Someone actually wrote "remember 9/11." I even got called out on local radio. Then I wrote the follow and mentioned that the cops kept speeding down the streets with lights and sirens blaring several minutes after they had announced over the police radios that the situation was under control and the suspect in custody. Now they tend not to return my phone calls.
Fortunately my bosses defended me and actually loved my coverage. Though it's made covering cops a pain in the ass for me, it's opened up a lot of questions about pursuit policy, how to approach a vehicle with an armed felon, etc.
Just wanted to clue you in to a story from my life that doesn't involve booze.
Having said that, the other night I was in a bar with a fellow reporter and we sat down at a table with our pints of Guiness only to discover two full, mixed drinks on the table. We thought little of them, figuring their owners would soon be by to collect them. Ten minutes and a pint of Guiness later, the drinks were still there. We looked at each other, nodded, each grabbed one and downed them. We are terrible people, yes, but the rufi really helped me get to sleep.
I got there a couple minutes after the shit went down and it was nuts. There were about 60 cop cars there, all of which had been tearing down streets and highways en route to the scene. While on the scene people who were on the road during the pursuit came up to me pissed off at the cops. So I wrote it down. There was a crowd of about 50 people and everyone I talked to was mad so it went into the article. This was compounded by the cops' public information officer telling me "I'm not telling you anything" to start her briefing on what went down. Consequently we had little on the cops but many citizen complaints in the article.
The cops had a shit fit. I got 16 e-mails on that one fucking article, 14 negative. Someone actually wrote "remember 9/11." I even got called out on local radio. Then I wrote the follow and mentioned that the cops kept speeding down the streets with lights and sirens blaring several minutes after they had announced over the police radios that the situation was under control and the suspect in custody. Now they tend not to return my phone calls.
Fortunately my bosses defended me and actually loved my coverage. Though it's made covering cops a pain in the ass for me, it's opened up a lot of questions about pursuit policy, how to approach a vehicle with an armed felon, etc.
Just wanted to clue you in to a story from my life that doesn't involve booze.
Having said that, the other night I was in a bar with a fellow reporter and we sat down at a table with our pints of Guiness only to discover two full, mixed drinks on the table. We thought little of them, figuring their owners would soon be by to collect them. Ten minutes and a pint of Guiness later, the drinks were still there. We looked at each other, nodded, each grabbed one and downed them. We are terrible people, yes, but the rufi really helped me get to sleep.
