Arrest-Proof Yourself (13 page)

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All this is equipment used to arrest people or weapons captured from serious bad guys in big operations of which the force is justifiably proud. This is not criticism. Cops are all about arresting people, that’s all.

When I was a cop, I didn’t just like arresting people, I loved it! My favorite activity, and the only thing I’ve ever considered as good as sex, was breaking down doors. Here’s the scenario: You sneak up on a drug house in the dead of night with your partners. In front of you is a steel door studded with locks and barred from the inside. Behind it are bad guys.

Silently two or more cops swing a gigantic iron ram. One, two, three, then whammo! The locks explode, and fragments ping off the floor and walls. The door slams down. People scream. Bad guys reach for weapons, stuff narcotics into toilets, and dive out windows. It’s like turning on the lights and watching cockroaches run. Best of all, there are so many guys to arrest! When I was a cop I even stopped smoking. Was this because of health concerns? Heck no! I stopped because cigarettes made me short of breath. I stopped so I could run faster and catch more bad guys.

Police work is not like any other work. Can you name another job in which you are expected to engage in physical combat with people who are trying to kill you? Some of those bad guys are huge, experienced brawlers. Some are psychotics who have superhuman strength from high adrenaline levels caused by brain disease. When psychos flying on adrenaline get extra juice from methamphetamines and angel dust, they can be nearly impossible to stop. My training instructor shot 14 rounds into a maniac he was fighting, and the guy still kept coming.

FLUSHING RABBITS

Cops crave variety and excitement. They never have one shift like another. On slow days they can make their own excitement because they can always find someone to arrest. I call the technique “flushing rabbits.” When I was a cop, there were days when even Miami seemed dull. No Jamaican posses were machine-gunning competitors. No Colombian peasants were stubbing out their cigarettes on drums of diethyl ether and vaporizing drug labs in a whoosh of fire. No calls, nothing happening.

My solution was to start pulling over cars that were the same make and model as the number one most stolen car of that year. I’d get behind the car, spin the lights, then give the siren a tap, just a single
honk
. If the car was being driven by a citizen, he’d pull over. I’d pass him and wave him off. I’d do this a few times, then suddenly, the next driver would be a car thief. Instead of pulling over, he’d floor the gas. He’d be off like a shot with me in hot pursuit, siren wailing and lights blazing. My partner would radio in the pursuit and call for backup with that emotion-free, calm voice that is absolutely required to maintain cop cool. (Cops are fanatics about maintaining their cool. It carries over into their prose. Cops can make an account of the most grisly murder sound like a linoleum brochure.)

While you’re in pursuit, dispatchers clear the entire network by shutting up every other cop in the city while you call in locations. Nowadays, they’ll spin up helicopters. During a pursuit police cruisers are racing ahead of you, behind you, and on every side. A minute earlier you were bored. Now you’re leading a cop circus down the highway at 100 miles an hour. Usually the suspect burns out the brakes or crashes. Then there’s a foot chase, maybe a fight, then an arrest. Every day cops engage in the primordial male activities—hunting, fighting, and protecting the tribe. They experience thrills that have been honed by a million years of evolution. When a shift gets slow, they just flush a rabbit. Want to be a cop? It’s a kick-ass way to make a living.

THE POWER

Cops are backed by courts, jails, judges, and the entire apparatus of the state. They can stop, arrest, search, attack, and even kill. It’s The Power. It’s The Juice. It’s intoxicating, and nobody else has it. Police officers have to train not to let it go to their heads. When the cops show up, the music stops, the party’s over, and everybody snaps to attention. It’s
la poli
, the po-leece, the fuzz, the heat, the man with the badge and the gun.

In any medium to large city, cops are backed up not only by other officers, but by helicopters, boats, tear gas, explosives, snipers, dogs, SWAT teams, even armored personnel carriers with artillery and high-caliber machine guns. If things get tense, the governor can call out the National Guard, which can muster infantry, cavalry, and armor equipped with mood adjusters like mortars and wire-guided missiles. Yikes!

The funny thing is that the guys who most often get snotty and sass the cops are generally clueless petty offenders. The real bad guys, the stone evil types who hurt people and steal things for a living, give it up when The Man shows. They know who has The Power.

Ever get the
cop stare
? This is a slow, hard, minute examination that gets you filed for future reference. You can almost see the blanks being filled in: hair color, eye color, height, weight, race, distinguishing marks. Cops aren’t embarrassed at all to give you the once-over in a public place, even when they’re off duty. If you interest or annoy them, you get the stare. This also establishes the pecking order, with the cop, not you, at the top of the food chain. Ever met a waitress who didn’t know who’s a cop and who’s not?

Police are dangerous. They are heavily armed, and unlike any other group in society outside the military, they are trained to fight, maim, and kill. Police officers are better educated and trained than ever, but accidents happen. Anyone who challenges cops, runs from them, hits them, grabs their equipment, or even
appears
to reach for a weapon is risking injury or death. Cops train for hundreds of hours in order to be able to disable or kill people quickly, instinctively, without thinking. When they blow you away, it’s not personal, not even emotional. It’s just business—cold as ice.

Think law enforcement officers aren’t dangerous? This is an FBI SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) team. I’m on the bottom row, second from right, holding a CAR-16. This was a fully automatic assault rifle, with a barrel modified by FBI armorers to shoot tight groups in the 75- to 200-yard range common for urban sniping. We spent hours becoming proficient at making the CNS disconnect shot. This is a round fired through a suspect’s upper lip. It severs the brain stem and disconnects the central nervous system. The suspect drops immediately, so he cannot fire his weapon or attack other officers or hostages.

In some ways cops are similar to a gang. They have better haircuts than the Hell’s Outlaws and use deodorant, but they’re still a gang in one characteristic all gangs share: you can’t challenge just one member; you always have to deal with the entire gang. With cops, you take on one, you take on all. Even cops who hate each other will stand shoulder to shoulder against outsiders. Cops are always the biggest gang in town, with the most guys, the most guns, and the most money. They show their blue colors with pride, 24/7, every day of the year. Challenging them is insanity. Cops never,
ever
, lose on the street. Whenever challenged, they call up reinforcements until they win.

Later in this book I’m going to advise you to do some things that will really bug you. I’m going to tell you
never
to challenge cops,
never
to try to score verbal points with them, and
always
to be submissive and polite to them—even if this makes you crazy. Worse, you should do these things even if the cops are obnoxious and even racist. The only way to win with cops is to stay free and out of their clutches. So take a deep breath, have a cooling beverage, and read more about cops.

THE BOYS’ CLUB FOR MEN

One of the joys of being a professional athlete is that you don’t have to stop playing childhood games when you grow up. You even get paid for what you used to do free. Same with the cops. They get to play cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, and hide-and-seek in the grownup world. To be a law enforcement officer is to join a super-exclusive boys’ club.

You get the best toys. Cops have all sorts of high-powered rifles, pistols, and ammunition that are illegal for anyone but law enforcement officers to possess. When I was in the FBI, we used to tool around town in government cars with trunks stuffed with high explosives, rifles, shotguns, pistols, and communication and surveillance gear I still can’t talk about—and that was just to go to lunch! Heck, one of my FBI partners, who shall forever remain nameless, had his car, which contained an extra-large arsenal, stolen while he was noshing at a lunch joint. Did he freak out? Worry about getting fired? Heck no! He just commandeered another car (mine) and rolled down to the baddest part of town. He spread the word that his car needed to be returned
at once
. It was, too, with a wash and a wax. The real bad guys know who’s boss.

SOVEREIGN IMMUNITY

While on duty, cops have another advantage you don’t know about. They are generally immune from lawsuits. “Hey!” you remonstrate. “What about Rodney King, the guy the cops beat up in L.A.? Didn’t he sue the police and win millions?” That’s right, he did—in L.A., but that’s the Left Coast, where tort lawyers are kings.

State and municipal employees generally have sovereign immunity from lawsuits. This means that you can sue the police department, or the city, but not the individual police officer as long as he or she is determined to have been operating within the scope of employment—which is legalese for saying that, as long as cops don’t get too far out of line, you can’t sue them personally. If you win in a lawsuit against the department or against the city, a cop may get disciplined, fired, or even indicted, but he’s probably not going to be writing any checks to you. Most states have strict limits on what you can win in punitive “pain and suffering” damages when you sue the government. If Rodney King had sued in Florida, he would have won lost wages (i.e., zero) and a maximum of $100,000 in damages, which is about what tort attorneys spend on espresso and Danish during a big case.

Sovereign immunity is an amazing power. In law enforcement this makes sense. How could cops work if they had to think “Am I going to get sued?” every time they tackled some whacked-out perp with a gun? Cops don’t worry about getting sued—ever. This is astonishing in a society where everyone else is paralyzed by lawsuit fears. Civilians, which in practice means people with insurance, money, and property, can get sued for spilling hot coffee or dropping a banana peel. Fart in an elevator and you can get sued for olfactory pain and suffering. So next time you get stopped by the cops, don’t yell, “I’m gonna sue you!” After they quit laughing, they’re likely to charge you with stupidity in the first degree.

THE GLORY

Being a police officer is exciting, and not just from the thrill of the hunt. Cops see life and death in the raw. Babies are born in the back of squad cars all the time. When someone gets shot, cops are the first responders and may have to close off an artery and save a life that would otherwise have been lost. They see life at its extremes. During domestic disturbance calls, police intervene between men and women devoured by love and hate, who may be crying, “I love you” even as they pull the trigger or plunge a knife into their beloved. As women wail over dead children and mates, cops are often by their side.

There’s much death. Cops hold people and look into their eyes as they bleed out and get cold. They hear the screams of people dying in agony in burning vehicles. They hold epileptics as they shiver in grand mal seizures and their brains fry with electrical discharges. Civilians only infrequently experience life this way. They often know only the gray version of events in the newspapers or the flickering imitation on TV. Cops have a front-row seat, comped by the taxpayers, to life at its most intense.

Media are no substitute for the real thing. Crime reportage is a pale shadow of what it once was. In the 1930s and ’40s, police photographers like Weegee photographed murders for the front page. Readers saw gangsters’ bodies riddled with bullets in the barber chair or on the restaurant floor. Nowadays, tragedy is masked from view. Crime-scene tape prohibits entry. No photographers and note takers allowed—except cops.