When I hired on as a cop, oh-so-long-ago, the guys that I worked with were always happy when they caught a DUI. With all the other duties they had, and how small the town was, they just didn't get that many. They would congratulate each other when they found out the other had made a DUI arrest such as at shift change. When I started working there, we only had one officer on duty at a time. I can't explain why there was so much emphasis on DUIs. Part of it was the emerging zero tolerance of DUIs, I'm sure. Part of it was the rarity. Even though I tried, it took me 9 months on the job before I ever made a DUI arrest and boy was that one a good learning experience. Part of it was that it showed you were out there trying to make something happen. It was a small town and it was possible to work all night and have absolutely nothing happen.
Besides the sergeant, there were only two other officers besides me. Both of them quit about a year after I started. One moved to a different department in another state where he could get better pay. Hell, you could probably work for WalMart and get better pay than we were getting back then. The other became a school teacher because police work is so hard on marriages and family life. He was a great cop and really taught me a lot about the right attitude on the job. I never kept in touch with Jorge or PacMan but I sure hope everything worked out well for them.
Even though they left, the emphasis on DUI arrests stayed with me my entire career. I tried to pass it on to officers that came streaming through our department. We trained a lot of officers for other departments. Our city was too small for the adrenaline junkies and the pay too low for just about everyone else. Officers could get their foot in the door by working for us so we had a lot of people come through.
My efforts on DUI arrests paid off in that there were a couple of years when I made more DUI arrests than the rest of the officers put together, even when the department had grown by 50%. That said, I have to say that even I found the summer of 2003 to be a weird fluke.
I'd come in on Friday night to replace Slider and he'd say, "Do you want me to just leave the door open when I leave so the DUI can walk in here and give himself up?"
It was funny because it was so close to the truth. I'll recount some of them over the next few days.
Recent Comments