Arrest-Proof Yourself (15 page)

Cops have to respond to calls, so to score more points, above the level available from calls, they hunt. This means searching for people to arrest by stopping cars and questioning people on the street. This approach seems haphazard, but it works. The reason is that most serious crimes are solved not by dogged detective work, but by street policing by a cop who stops someone suspicious and says, “Hey you, come over here! Got some ID?” That’s right. Merely by
pulling over cars and stopping people on the street
, police catch an astounding number of bad guys.

Tim McVeigh, who blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, evaded one of the largest manhunts in history only to be arrested by a Kansas state trooper who noticed that his getaway vehicle had an expired tag. Eric Robert Rudolph, the accused abortion clinic serial bomber, vanished into the Nantahala National Forest and evaded federal, state, and local law enforcement for years. He was nabbed by a rookie cop who arrested him at a convenience store. The cop didn’t recognize Rudolph, one of the most wanted killers in America. He simply arrested him because he was dumpster diving for a snack.

Take my old buddy Wayne Williams, the mass murderer. I’d like to say that his arrest was due to the FBI’s massive investigation and the nightly stakeouts other agents and I mounted for hours on end, but it wasn’t, not directly. Little Wayne got busted because, after dumping a dead body off a bridge, he made an illegal U-turn! Once again, a routine traffic violation ended a major crime spree.

If the basic patrol activities are responding to calls, pulling over cars, and stopping people on the street, how are they accomplished? Police make foot, bicycle, and horseback patrols, but most of them, most of the time,
drive around in cars
.

Here’s the lesson: if cops make most of their arrests by driving around in cars, what you need to do to become less arrestable is to be
less visible to car patrols
. Remember Uncle Dale’s Golden Rule #1:

IF COPS CAN
’
T SEE YOU, THEY CAN
’
T ARREST YOU.

This also seems obvious, but it’s the key to everything. Here’s an example. My coauthor was in line to pay some traffic fines in Miami when he saw this Cuban kid with an enormous sheaf of traffic tickets. “
¿Qué tal todo esto?
” he says. Turns out the guy has $3,500 worth of tickets!

This Cuban kid had taken a trip to L.A., where he became wild about Chicano lowriders. These are cars with the springs and shocks removed so they roll only inches above the ground. To make a lowrider you saw off the roof to make the car a convertible, juice the stereo to 500-plus watts, and bolt on enough tweeters and sub-woofers to turn the Rockies into rubble. Finish with a neon paint job, preferably with flames licking up the sides. Some guys even install hydraulic lifts so the car will “dance.” Thus equipped, you cruise the boulevards at slow speed and get chicks. Ah, youth!

So this Cuban kid returns home and spends months customizing one of Miami’s first lowriders. When the day arrives for his first cruise, he roars out of the garage and,
bang
, he’s busted before he goes a mile. He comes home and tries it again. More tickets. And again, ditto. Being a knucklehead, he keeps trying, and gets more tickets. Inevitably he gets short tempered with the cops, who naturally arrest him.

Here’s an important point. The kid thought the cops were racist and were picking on him because he’s
Cuban
. In Miami, where most cops are Cuban, this is nonsense. He got busted because he was easy to bust. (In Miami and Miami Beach, cops are famous for proving that Miami
ain’t L.A
. They have an astounding record of arresting movie stars, celebrities, and professional athletes from the Left Coast. They hate lowriders.) Not only was the car in violation of multiple statutes, it was
visible
, not to mention
ugly
! It gave cops the opportunity to write multiple tickets on a single stop and rack up lots of points,
bing, bing, bing
. To score the same number of tickets at any other time, the cops would have had to stop dozens of solid citizens.

One reason clueless people are arrested disproportionately is that they’re more visible to police driving around in cars. They’re
available
for arrest. This visibility is based on the “urban outdoorsman” lifestyle. I’ll discuss this in an upcoming chapter.

Here’s just one example from a guy I interviewed in jail the other day. He and his buddies were driving along and toking some organic hand-raised marijuana, the type with enough THC to topple an elephant with a single sniff. Suddenly, everyone gets the munchies, the insane food craving caused by extra-fine dope. They roll through the drive-through of a barbecue joint, load up on baby back ribs, then suddenly decide they need extra sauce. The driver runs into the restaurant, grabs one bottle of the extra spicy mustard and another of the tomato habanero blend, then butts into the cashier line right in front of a cop! This, of course, violates one of the Cop Commandments:

THOU SHALT NOT ANNOY COPS DURING MEALTIMES.

The officer is enjoying his digestion, picking his teeth, and getting ready to fire up a stogie when this twerp reeking of dope inserts himself under official police nostrils. Naturally the cop busts the guy, searches the car, finds the weed, arrests the passengers, and impounds the car. He scores three felony arrests, a drug seizure, and a handful of traffic citations. That’s a cop’s idea of dessert. The moral? Don’t make yourself
available
for arrest. Also, it’s a good idea to
hide
while breaking laws.

The tally sheet scoring system encourages cops to give out traffic tickets instead of warnings. It motivates them to make arrests rather than resolve problems by conciliation and warnings. Years ago cops might have taken an errant child home to Mama or delivered a drunk to a spouse. Not anymore. Humane alternatives do not score points. Worse, from the cop’s point of view, they take up valuable time that could be used to
hunt and arrest more people
. The point system turns arrests into a game rather than a human encounter. It transforms people into points.

The scoring system motivates cops to make arrests rather than issue a notice to appear (NOA). An NOA is a citation that requires you to appear in court. Once there, you can be convicted and sentenced to jail by the judge, but there is one crucial difference:
you are not arrested prior to appearing in court
. Thus if the judge dismisses the case, seals the records, or withholds adjudication (as he or she generally will on a first offense), you do
not
have an arrest record. Your picture and fingerprints are not on file, and you will not be summarily consigned, without your knowledge, to the electronic plantation. This is not an academic point. Police in most states have wide discretion as to whether they make an arrest or issue an NOA for a misdemeanor (at least in Florida, an NOA may not be issued for a felony). A notice, however, scores zero points.

By contrast, federal law enforcement officers’ job performances are evaluated not only on the number of arrests, but also on the number and quality of the resulting convictions. This directs them to arrest more serious criminals, and to accumulate more evidence before making an arrest. Generally the concurrence of an assistant U.S. attorney is required prior to effecting an arrest. Municipal police, unfortunately, are generally rated only on arrest numbers. What happens later is irrelevant to the cops. The result is that police are strongly motivated to make an arrest rather than give someone the benefit of a doubt. They tend to “cuff and stuff,” which means they make an arrest, dump the detainee in jail, and let a judge and prosecutor sort things out. Even when charges are dismissed, cops get credit for the arrest.

FRUIT PATROLS AND JOHN BUSTS

The rage to make large numbers of arrests affects not only car patrolling, but also undercover operations that might otherwise be devoted to investigating serious crimes. “Fruit patrols” are undercover operations that result in the arrest of gay men for soliciting a sex act or exhibiting lewd and lascivious conduct in public. For a fruit patrol, you get a young, in-shape, male officer in a tight T-shirt to cruise public restrooms. When he gets an offer, he busts the guy.

John busts are similar operations in which female officers impersonate prostitutes. When someone stops and asks, “How much?” he gets arrested. Who are these offenders? They’re not bad guys who hurt people, steal things, and sell illegal things. They’re schlubs who are too stupid or too ugly to get sex without paying for it. Cops working these units rack up lots of arrests of petty offenders.

PROACTIVE POLICING

The hottest trend in police work is proactive policing. When you cut through the rhetoric, this means making arrests for any and all violations no matter how small. The more people cops arrest, the more likely they are to catch serious bad guys. Proactive policing is a modern version, using computers, radio, and digital communications, of what cops used to call “the big heat.”

Think of police patrolling as a large net that’s dragged through the city hour after hour. Now and then a huge bad guy gets caught and is dragged flopping to jail. It follows that the faster you trawl, and the finer the mesh of the net, the more bad guys you catch.

There’s one little problem, however, that is never officially discussed when police chiefs and mayors proudly announce reductions in crime. For every real bad guy trawled up, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of
other people
get arrested. No one ever mentions these petty offenders and innocent people who get shoved through the criminal justice sausage grinder and dumped onto the electronic plantation in industrial quantities.

If cops are sharks cruising the streets, you are a silvery little fish in danger of getting gobbled up. Little fish, however, are not without defenses. They can hide under rocks or vanish into the shimmering myriads of schooling fish. The arrest-proofing techniques in the second and third parts of this book will show you how to avoid blue-suited sharks and the jaws of justice.

ODE TO DOPE

Marijuana is a cop’s friend. “What?” you say. Let me repeat: any sensible cop loves marijuana. As the little ditty goes,

Nothing could be finer
Than marijuana in the liner
Of your
Pickup
Truck!

Dope makes scoring points on the cop pinball machine absurdly easy. Stop a car with a six-pack of beer—no points. Beer’s legal. Stop one with a bag of reefer—
bing, bong
—points on the board. Cops know weed makes people careless, so stoned detainees are likely to have other contraband stashed in their cars—more points.

Being confused and limp as wet noodles, potheads are easier to handle than drunks, who are belligerent and want to fight. Marijuana is so great that, when I was a cop, at every dope bust I used to break out in song for sheer joy. As we rolled off to jail I’d put my wasted prisoners on the loudspeaker and lead them in singing:

Heigh ho, heigh ho!
It’s off to jail you go.
Under lock and key, never to be free
Heigh ho, heigh ho!

Heigh ho, heigh ho!
It’s off to court you go
Under lock and key to be found guilty
Heigh ho, heigh ho!

Heigh ho, heigh ho!
It’s off to the chair you go
Under lock and strap to get the zap
Heigh ho, heigh ho!

This is cop humor; it’s especially hilarious around 2:00 A.M. in a cruiser packed with happy dopers who don’t even realize they’ve been arrested.