Hero To Zero 2nd edition Page 10

  Surprisingly, Cope eventually experienced a change of heart regarding his assailant in the shooting. At the time of the shooting, he very much had an us-and-them mentality. This is very common among cops. Basically it means that we, the cops, are different from them, the criminals. Cope came to realize what any veteran cop already knows: we are all in this together. People make really bad decisions on a particular day and for a particular reason, and may never make those same decisions again. This doesn’t make them bad people, but it does mean, in this context, that they broke the law. Cope got that. He came to feel it in a way he could never have understood before.

  He too had broken the law by making a really bad decision regarding the benefit association’s treasury. He empathized with the gang member he had shot, and actually started to petition the state parole board to release the young man. This did not make Cope popular with his former peers, or with the cops in the area. Cope didn’t care. He had a different perception now of what it meant to be a part of the solution.

  I WAS AT THE TAIL end of my career when I ran into Lieutenant Ethan. He was an intense, brooding guy who rarely had anything to say to anyone. Occasionally he would stop and talk to me about the assignment I was on and ask how things were going. Not that he really cared, but it was his job to ask.

  Lieutenant Ethan had two very real passions. One was his immaculate black Lexus; the other was handguns. Especially high-end hand guns. If you wanted to see his brooding, moody side disappear, all you had to do was mention either the Lexus or his favorite handgun, the Kimber .45 caliber semi-auto. Lieutenant Ethan would light up, smiling, and begin to tell you his latest account of shooting on the range. Almost every weekend he took the Kimber out to do just that. He loved the gun like a K-9 handler loves his dog: they were inseparable. The only times I saw him happy and smiling were when he was talking about either the gun or the car; the rest of the time, he was surly.

  Lieutenant Ethan was the supervisor of two completely different units. One was the incredibly undermanned detective unit, and the other the Community-Oriented Policing (COPS) unit. I was in the COPS unit. He was tasked with overseeing our events, and would provide feedback to the administration on what we had accomplished and future directions in which we would be headed.

  The COPS unit was very dynamic and had a lot of public visibility. We did not make arrests or crunch crime in the usual manner; instead, we were proactive, and tried to find problems before they occurred and then squash them. This made our efforts hard to substantiate to the brass. It also made us very unpopular with the rest of the cops. We were warm and fuzzy with the public, while they had to battle every night. Our job was to improve the public perception of the department and of the efforts made to keep the peace, while a patrol officer’s job was to step into the battle that is the streets and hold the line against criminals. So, two very different perspectives on the same community.

  Being in charge of detectives can be challenging, to say the least. For the most part, they are extremely strong and driven personalities, and hate anyone to tell them what to do. They already know what to do, and yet still require oversight.

  Detectives also have the really unenviable job of investigating other cops. If a cop crossed the line in our department, a detective would be assigned to investigate the situation and then provide feedback to Lieutenant Ethan and the rest of the administration as to what had occurred and what the department’s liability was in the incident.

  Cops are constantly being investigated for reports of abuse or misconduct that have not taken place. However occasionally, as you have seen in this book, there are some reports that come in that are so outrageous, they seem impossible. Detectives are tasked with investigating all of them, and sometimes they find that not only are the outrageous things possible, but they actually happened. Here is one example:

  Michelle Romero was an outstanding K-9 handler. She had dreamed of being a K-9 handler ever since she had watched her father train police dogs as a child. Being a cop ran in the family, and she was a natural fit for the job. She had no illusions about the requirements of the job—the long hours spent training and caring for the dog, the late-night call-outs to assist with search warrants and building searches after someone had broken into a business. She had finally reached her dream of being a dual-purpose K-9 handler, and applied herself to the demands of the position with a determination that had not been matched by her peers.

  She felt that she had a lot to live up to. Her dad was sort of a living legend in the local K-9 community, and she wanted to prove herself more than a match for the old man. Being a dual-purpose handler meant that she and her dog were certified in narcotics detection and apprehension of escaped criminals. This required a talented handler and an even more exceptional K-9. Both the handler and the dog are certified as a team. They must be able to work together as one unit.

  Michelle and her K-9 were an incredible team, and they won awards nationwide. They were nationally recognized and certified. Michelle and her K-9 brought home trophy after trophy from police dog competitions, and more important, they never lost a case in court. The team also had the state’s largest narcotics bust on record. The drugs had been located during a traffic stop Michelle had conducted after becoming nationally certified in drug interdiction techniques.

  Michelle’s father couldn’t have been more proud of his daughter. She had truly surpassed his accomplishments as a K-9 officer, and in a short time. He felt it was a case of her taking his lessons and running with them. She was certainly a rising star in the K-9 handlers’ world.

  Michelle was a K-9 handler 24/7. She was obsessed with the job, and even started a Facebook page to promote the position and raise awareness for struggling K-9 programs in other departments. The page had several thousand followers.

  One day she decided to make up a kick ass K-9 logo and have it printed up on t-shirts and sweatshirts. She offered them to a select few Facebook page followers as a thank-you for following and supporting the K-9 handlers in their area and nationwide.

  The logo was really sweet, and I even ordered a couple of sweatshirts myself. I sent the money and waited. Nothing happened. I never received the shirts. I sent a message to Michelle and asked WTF had happened to my shirts. She said that she’d had problems with the printing company, but that the issues were resolved and my shirts were on their way.

  A month passed, and still I had no shirts. I guess I wasn’t the only one who was waiting: Lieutenant Ethan and his detectives had gotten wind of the problem from someone who had complained, and began an investigation.

  Michelle was found to have taken in several hundred dollars in orders from around the country for the kick-ass logo she had produced and advertised on her Facebook K-9 page. Not one shirt had been printed, however, and they charged her with theft.

  Michelle was an extremely gifted K-9 handler who went down in flames over a few hundred bucks. She went from hero to zero in an incredibly dumb fashion. I have to admit I am still disappointed. The shirts I never received looked awesome.

  The detectives moved on to the next case, and quietly complained among themselves about Lieutenant Ethan.

  Ethan was a very quiet guy, and apparently had a difficult time managing the detective unit. It was severely understaffed, and was always being criticized for being unable to keep up with the increasing demands placed on its investigators.

  Apparently the detectives were less than happy with Lieutenant Ethan and his management style. He could really be a prick if he needed to be, and he drove them hard for results. To be honest, they hated him.

  We in the COPS unit, on the other hand, loved him. He took care of us better than any supervisor did, before or after. I talked to Lieutenant Ethan about the K-9 handler case, and he shook his head. He was amazed at how stupid Michelle had been, and criticized her for her actions. He proclaimed loudly that it was the single stupidest thing he had witnessed a cop do in his tenure as the lieutenant of the detective division.

 
I thought about that. I had seen numerous cops go down in flames over the years and, in hindsight, they all seemed incredibly dumb. I knew that anyone was capable of anything given the right set of circumstances…even cops.

  I mentioned this to Lieutenant Ethan, and he loudly proclaimed, “Not this cop! I ain’t going down on some stupid shit like this. I did not drag my ass up the food chain to go down on some stupid shit like this.”

  I didn’t see Lieutenant Ethan for several more weeks, as we were incredibly busy. Then one day I saw him coming out of work. He was preoccupied and acted edgy. I thought that maybe his high-maintenance girlfriend was getting the best of him. I called out, “Hey, Lieutenant, how’s it going?” He waved, but made no comment. He got into his sweet black Lexus and left.

  Over the next six weeks, Lieutenant Ethan was investigated for two different incidents. The first was an accusation that he had claimed time on his time card that he had not worked. That was found to be unfounded, and Lieutenant Ethan, who had been placed on administrative leave, came back to work for a couple of weeks on the night shift.

  Pending the second investigation, he had been removed from his position as the lieutenant in charge of detectives, and honestly, he looked relieved. Or at least I assumed that look was one of relief—at no longer being burdened with responsibility for managing all the investigations.

  But it was not that burden he had been worried about. A few weeks passed, and Lieutenant Ethan was again on administrative leave, this time on suspicion of theft. He was accused of stealing a very expensive handgun from an evidence locker. The gun was missing, and all the evidence pointed to him.

  Guess what? Yep. Mr. “I’m-not-gonna-go-down-on-some-stupid-shit-like-that” went down on that very stupid shit.

  Ethan was charged, and pleaded guilty to the theft of a handgun. He was in charge of the entire detective unit, and had investigated many thefts over the years. He knew the consequences of stealing a handgun, and he did it anyway.

  Now he was a convicted felon, which meant he could never again legally own a handgun.

  THE COMPLEX MIX OF TALENTS it takes to be a good cop is very hard to define. I have heard many blue-collar descriptions. “Sheep dogs protecting the flock from the wolves” seems to be the most popular at the moment. I have always liked what a veteran cop told me when I first started. He said, “You have to have been there to know how to get there.” By this he meant that the best cops were problem children who grew up and went straight, but remembered where they had come from and had compassion for those they dealt with.

  Anyone is capable of anything, given the right set of circumstances. That is a fact any cop realizes the first time he or she arrests the homecoming queen for possession of methamphetamines or, in my case, sees the sister of his best friend from high school arrested and convicted for burning her handicapped foster child alive for the insurance money. For cops, life is about reality checks. Lots of reality checks.

  Anyway, police departments have long struggled with how to identify the intangibles that separate the good cops from the bad. Personally, I don’t think it can be done. The original method used was to conduct a background check of the potential police officer. The idea was to send a seasoned investigator out to speak with the neighbors of a potential cop, check into his or her background, dig a little bit, contact some friends and some enemies to give the detective a feeling for what kind of person the rookie might be.

  Seasoned detectives are rarely used for this task. In our department, wannabe detectives like Mike Preston got the job. Real detectives were much too busy to investigate a potential new hire, so right from the get-go the process was flawed. An idiot was sent out to sift through some new hire’s personal life and determine if he or she had what it took to work the streets.

  In the 70s and 80s, the police departments used the polygraph machine to assist the “detective” in weeding out the bad cops from the good. These tests have been around since the early 1920s, and there is ample evidence that they just don’t work. I personally have known several people who have taken a polygraph and much later admitted they lied and defeated the test. They were deemed to have been telling the truth, and were amazed that they were not caught in their deception.

  The idea that any test can measure human perceptions of what is and is not a lie is severely flawed. People are just ‘way too complex, and their perceptions of what is right and what is wrong are not as solid or concrete as churches and civic leaders would have us believe.

  Police departments, however, still believe strongly in the polygraph, and a lot of them use it to screen potential new hires. Personally, I think flipping a coin would be about as accurate in predicting whether or not the new recruit will be a good cop. Heads or tails really doesn’t matter. You pick.

  Next up in the arsenal used by the administrations of police departments to weed out the “bad seed” is the psychological exam. This is my personal favorite—take a test developed by psychologists or psychiatrists attempting to measure what it is that makes a cop a good risk for a department to hire.

  Really? I could go on forever as to why I think this logic is flawed. But number one is this: What sane person straps on body armor to go to work? What sane person wears a gun, expecting to get involved in a shooting at any moment but hoping he or she won’t? What sane person wears a uniform clearly identifying him- or herself as the one person (maybe the only person) in the crowd who will fight back if you try to harm any of the other persons in that crowd? What sane person takes a job enforcing the law, when the very constitution of our country protects criminals’ rights and punishes cops for infringing upon them?

  No sane person alive would take this job. No test can measure what passion burns inside of the man or woman who desires this job—the passion to be part of the solution and not to sit idly by and wonder, “What can I do?” This freak of nature cannot be measured by a test written in a warm office with soft hands untested by the streets. Yet police departments nationwide employ the tests, afraid to call academia on its bullshit claims to know what makes people tick.

  Psychology is based on a process of self-reporting. What sociopath worth his lack of human connection is going to admit he is a bad choice? “Please don’t hire me and give me all this power, Dr. Psych; I’ll abuse it, and that just isn’t right.” Never gonna happen.

  The latest weapon was developed by the government. I’ve read that it’s used by the Israelis at the checkpoints they man in the no-man’s land between the Israeli- and Palestinian-occupied territories in the Middle East. It’s called voice stress analysis. To me it’s just another electronic version of the snake oil sold by traveling salesmen in the old west. It’s supposed to address the problem of whether or not a person is lying.

  In law-enforcement circles, it’s considered as solid a tool as the lie-detector test when it comes to locating the bad seed. However, even its developer has said in open court that it is not a lie detector, and should not be used as one.

  I was an investigator in an alleged sexual molestation case in which a woman alleged that an apartment maintenance man had sexually abused her three-year-old daughter. Voice stress analysis was used by detectives assigned to the case, and the man failed miserably. I was asked to try to get a confession from the suspect.

  He didn’t confess. He told me that he had had a relationship with the woman, and that she wanted him to pay her rent and provide upgrades to her apartment in exchange for sex. He had initially agreed to the arrangement, but later changed his mind. He said she threatened to set him up and call the cops if he failed to abide by their little agreement.

  I spoke to the detectives about the voice stress test, and they were sure he was guilty; the test said so. Something about the man’s confession of his sexual arrangement with the victim’s mother made more sense to me.

  I brought her in, and in thirty minutes she admitted she’d lied about the whole thing and was actually just mad at the maintenance man for not keeping his part of the
bargain.

  I advised the detectives about her confession and they still said, “He must have done something else we don’t know about; the test says he was lying, so he’s lying.” I shook my head and left the room. No machine can measure a person’s ability to lie.

  This is the kind of gauntlet that the police recruit has to complete to make it through the hiring process—and you’d think it would work, wouldn’t you? Surely no bad seeds could make it through this kind of process.

  Casey Davis had a goal to become a cop from the time he was a kid. He made it through the gauntlet and was hired as a police officer in a large department. He was a single guy living large. He was a cop in the city he was raised in, and was wearing the uniform, badge and gun while walking in the same neighborhoods he had walked as a child just a few short years earlier.

  He was hired at the age of twenty-three. He paid his dues on the street, and very soon was rewarded with a position making a difference in the city’s school districts, working as a school resource officer (SRO). Davis had always felt he had a special knack for working with kids, especially kids who were at risk in the inner city.

  He couldn’t wait to jump into the SRO position and start making a difference. He applied himself to the position, volunteering to participate in the department’s police explorer program (a kind of junior police officer volunteer program)and police athletic league as well. Davis felt that if he could make a difference to the kids, and help make a change for the better in where that kids ended up, then he was going to do everything he could to make sure that happened.

  Davis worked quietly at the position, teaching kids about the reality of drugs and how to make good choices. Davis made a serious attempt to win over the teachers and administrators in his schools. Previous cops assigned to the school had been older, gnarly, battle-worn veteran cops. They could be prickly and, frankly, kind of scary to the educators. Davis had replaced one of them in this assignment, and planned to make the most of his more polished and socially acceptable mannerisms.