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Long night? Sure seemed like it.
Last night I was riding two man with my partner in our squad car. I was actually driving and he was playing passenger but that is another story all together. Now, when you ride as a two man unit you tend to handle more calls and almost all the priority calls. This is fine and I’m used to it; I love the excitement and running lights and sirens. That being said, every call is different and every call can turn into a cluster very quickly. What is a cluster? A cluster is when you arrive at a call and it turns into something that requires multitasking, quick thinking and an assortment of ‘call outs’ for specialized units such as detectives, traffic homicide, crime scene, you name it.
A call went out over the air reference to a Baker act (mentality ill person) being extremely violent at his house and of course I took the call. The dispatcher gets back on the air asking if my unit had a taser, causing me to look at my partner to see if he had one because I sure as hell didn’t. “Nope” was the reply she got and then more units were dispatched to the same call, hopefully having tasers. Why would she ask this over the air? Because on any Baker act related call where the person is being violent, the level of danger has now risen exponentially due to the fact they’re usually on medication/narcotic and don’t respond to normal methods of subduing. Some of the hardest times I’ve had taking anyone into custody have been Baker acts.
The call was at the other end of the district so I decided to take the main street that runs through our chunk of county all the way to the call. Halfway there I pulled into an intersection and saw a Police Cruiser all mangled up. I stared at it for a second before realizing what I was actually looking at was an emergency traffic crash with serious injuries. I immediately pulled my unit over and hit my over head lights. My partner found the second vehicle and I went to the Officer’s car.
One look at the officer and I knew both parties involved were in serious condition. I got on the air and advised dispatch to have another unit handle that baker act call and to get rescue started out to this traffic crash immediately along with a sergeant and some more units to block the road. The Officer involved was standing outside of his Cruiser with this hand completely mangled and blood everywhere. I followed his blood trail to the other car and found my partner talking to the other driver, who had been sitting in the drivers seat of his car, which was now the passenger seat. Long story short, he was having a bad day.
Now I’m not by any means a Traffic homicide investigator so I wont even begin to go into who did what to cause that accident or even how it happened. I will say that after all the other units showed up to that call, including several Lieutenants and Sergeants I went back into service to handle the priority calls again and 7 hours later the accident was still being investigated.
The civilian was air lifted to the nearest hospital and the officer was treated and released on scene. I didn’t get to see the final conclusion or the accident report and of course no one ever talks about Officer involved incidents at work for whatever reasons.
To sum up, it was a very long night and it didn’t stop until the wee hours of the morning. I didn’t catch any drug dealers or get a gun off the street, which is my goal every day I am on duty but I got a Felony Battery Arrest and a ton of calls handled. There’s always tomorrow.
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