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Quite the busy week.
Dash | 31. March 2008 @ 04:02
This week I was trying to take it easy, lay back a bit.
Easier thought up, then accomplished.
On Friday, my partner and I decided to spend some time with the squad in the much neglected north area of the district. Since that area generally has less crime and less project housing, it’s typically not a place that we’d normally patrol.
The current figures for the weekly crime trends suggested otherwise though, as there were some robberies and some burglaries in that area which showed a steady incline.
We’d been driving around for an hour shaking a few trees but with no avail and were getting bored.
Just then one of the other Two-man units on my squad got on the air, “HES FLEEING EAST BOUND!!”
Ugh, one of my pet peeves. If you’re going to get on the Tac channel to advise of a chase :
A) Don’t scream like you’re being shot at, it isn’t that serious. Calm down and relay the information.
B) Give a direction of travel, starting address and description.
I picked up the mic, “Whats your address?”.
The Officer replied back with one that was only a few blocks away. I hit the lights and sirens and started that way.
“BAIL OUT! WE GOT A BAIL OUT!!!!”
Silence.
I accelerator wouldn’t go any further, as the peddle was touching the floorboard of my cruiser, but the bloody car just didn’t want to go today. My partner and I rolled up to the area seconds later.
It was a dead end street with a Canal on the north and east side forming a small right angle and housing on the west side. The car was a Blue Impala that stopped just before the guard rail and I saw the other Officers Cruiser stopped right behind it, both doors open.
I got on the mic, “Hey, where are you at? Description?”
All I got back was, “Black male, white shirt, blue shorts, dreads”.
I asked for their location again, but got no answer, so my partner and I secured the other Officers patrol car and waited around, in case the subject doubled back and tried to flee in his car again.
A few minutes later we saw the two Officers walking back to their car and they started telling me what happened.
He said to me, “Okay man, this is what went down. I can’t believe it. We stopped this dude in a car matching the description of an armed robbery vehicle and when we walked up to his window we saw some weed in his passenger seat. I looked nervous but we asked him to step out of the car for us. He opened the door and started to step out so my partner and I took a step back to give him some room. That’s when he slammed the door and took off, leading us on that chase. We ended up back here and he bailed. We lost him…”
So, with that being said, I helped them start the paperwork for the ‘abandoned’ vehicle.
While writing the paperwork my partner noticed a White Grand Am drive up around a ‘blind’ corner. It was occupied 4 times and when he got my attention, I saw a guy matching the description sitting in the front passenger seat.
What normally happens on these bail outs is that the subject gets away, has a friend pick them up and then comes back to the scene to pickup their car when its ‘cooled down’, if it wasn’t towed.
Well, the driver of the car spotted us, as we were only yards away, and decided he wanted to make a 3 point turn haul ass in the direction he came from. My partner and I jumped into my cruiser and took pursuit. The car made the mistake of turning onto the main avenue in prime time traffic and by the time he realized he had no space to move, my partner and I were already at the two front doors, guns drawn as it was a possible armed robbery subject. Everyone in the car put their hands up and were pulled out of the car and detained.
While we were waiting for the other Officer to come by and try to ID the front passenger, I noticed that there was an ID sitting on the passengers seat of a White Woman, which none of these four fine gentlemen were. I picked it up and asked who knew the woman in the ID to the group. One of them said it was a friend. I handed the ID to my partner, who saw the address that I saw, from a completely different part of the state. I gave him the ‘look’ and he went to our cruiser and started to do some computer work. The address had been changed in the computer recently to a local address only a district over to our west, so we had a unit go by that person house.
The unit raised us back about 20 minutes later with some surprising information. The owner of that ID had just finished calling the police because her car was broken into only 3 blocks from where we first encountered these four guys and her purse was stolen.
Among the property taken was her license, her digital camera, her Ipod charger and some collector style foreign money. Guess what each one of these four guys had on them? Yeap, each one had a single item that belonged to this woman.
We called out an Auto Theft detective who responded to the scene.
Long story short, we transported them to the main station in the district and all four were charged with Burglary to a vehicle. The property was returned to the owner and we’d basically gotten lucky from the drivers ignorance of his geography. Basically, the driver of the ‘get away car’ made a ‘wrong turn’ because he was lost, crappy luck he ran into a few guys from the districts jumpout unit…
The very next day was Saturday and happened to be the last work day of our week.
My Sergeant was gone so I was the acting Sarge for the day, which meant I had to do the Payroll, squad stats, arrest logs and other misc items for the entire week. This was going to take quite a bit of time.
My partner, Arod and I went to go eat as we normally do for the shift. Then we headed back to the mini-station so I could start on the paperwork while he took some mandatory training for ‘human diversity’ that the entire department has to take.
I was 1/4 the way through the payroll, which requires a lot of concentration when I heard a road unit screaming that he had an armed robbery vehicle fleeing from his south bound on the main avenue that our mini-station was off of. He was only 15 blocks north of us, heading south.
I immediately jumped up and my partner and I were inside my car within seconds.
Just as I was making the right turn to get onto the main avenue, we saw the fleeing car heading south bound. It was driving all over the south bound lands, but there is a large median with huge support columns (5 feet thick) for the train system system that runs 40 feet above the street.
We saw the white Grand Prix, which matched the exact description of that same robbery vehicle we’d been looking for, get hit by the pursuing Officer, causing the car to fish tail. It was now only 20 or so feet north of us, on the opposite side of the street.
The car started to face east bound, hitting the curb of the median, going up and over it, striking a support column and coming off the median just feet away from where my car now was.
It was going to hit me and I threw my car over two lanes and onto the side walk. The car just missed mine as it slammed into a cement wall on the east side of the street just behind my car.
Just then I saw three guys jump out of the car and start running. My partner and I took flight on foot after the driver while the other near by Officers went after the other two. This guy ran past out car first, while we were getting out, so we were playing catch-up.
First he ran north to the corner and made a right, running half a block east. Just as we were about to tackle him, he did some super spin around move we just couldn’t react too and he started running West.
This guy hit the main avenue with us right on his tail but with the raid gear on, it isn’t so easy to run at full speed. Everything was moving around, the gun belt, the vest, you name it. My radio popped out of its holster I was running so hard.
5 blocks later we were still right behind this guy and running through a small block party. People were yelling to the guy as we were running, “Don’t let them cracka catch you! Run!!!”.
Ugh, pure ignorance.
All of the sudden I heard my partner, who is a bit chubby and a heavy smoker, pick up the pace. He actually paced me and yelled out, “Lets go Dash!”.
Here I was, running at full stride, and I got walked by my heavy partner. Oh hell no.
Long story short, the guy that ran from us hit the ground a little hard. Nothing important broke, but he did pass out a few times before rescue treated him. Walking him back to our cruiser, several blocks away was a mission and all of the other units were tied up on the scene of the crash/bailout.
Since we were so close to the mini-station my partner offered to handle all of that paperwork so I could finish more important things, like the Payroll. I finished all of the paperwork I had to do hours later, which was good because my partner also finished all of the paperwork for the guy we arrested around the same time.
So, what happened was that these guys just finished robbing a car lot with a firearm and as they were running back to the getaway vehicle, the Officer that gave them a ‘love tap’ later on, spotted them and started calling the chase. We ended up with all three guys in custody.
At the end of the shift the LT came up and told me I needed to be at the main station with my partner an hour earlier then our normal duty hours on Tuesday for some fancy commendation presentation. Apparently, we’d earned another ‘award’ for doing what we’re supposed to be doing. I have no idea what its for but like the other hundred I have, it’ll go into a file and I’ll never actually see it. Those things are really nothing but ‘thataboys’ in writing.
An eventful few days if I do say so.
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