Let’s Get It On! (10 page)

The third type were big game hunters. These officers didn’t hunt rabbits, which couldn’t hurt them back; they hunted lions. They answered the hardest calls, went looking for bad guys, and put them away. That’s what I wanted to do.

My training officer, Leonard Mora, and the others on the morning watch were the hunters. It wasn’t a free-for-all, however. They taught me the balance between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. That the law is an immense power, but it’s there to protect people, not to crush them. That it’s all about dispensing the law in a rational way, with care and compassion. Under Mora’s lead, I found my place within the LAPD and my strengths were utilized.

As an officer, the more situations you get involved in, the more likely you’ll encounter a suspect trying to get away or fight. The less you do, the less chance use of force will be needed. It’s just basic math and odds. Every time you use what the department considers force, you have to file a report. If you file three in a month or six over a six-month period, the department can counsel you about use of force and even take you off the street if they feel there is a pattern.

In any profession, some people are more suited to certain tasks than others. I quickly gained a reputation for being willing to roll up my sleeves and get a little dirty. More often than not, I’d be called when others were having trouble controlling the situation. On a public street where a naked, sweaty guy on PCP was swinging a steel pipe, Tasering usually didn’t work well, and we never wanted to use deadly force. A sergeant would just have to point and tell me to take the man into custody.

I wanted to put bad guys in jail and didn’t mind dropping a few on their heads in the process if I had to. I was getting plenty of on-the-job training for my future profession as a mixed martial arts referee. Lateral drops and other wrestling takedowns worked well. I did as I was told, and it made me a viable part of the force.

If there was a job for a tunnel rat—a smaller guy who wasn’t particularly physical—I wasn’t the guy to send. But a few guys and I were the first ones sent to the front lines. We were also the first to reach the quota for use of force reports. I didn’t mind, though, because I finally felt like I belonged and was accomplishing something positive.

I stayed on morning watch with Mora and the others for about six months. They requested to keep me there, which was a good fit for me. I admired Mora so much that when he left the department two years later, I traded in my badge number for his to keep his presence on the street in some small way.

About nine months into probation, on September 28, 1986, I made my next contribution to the world: my son Ron, named after my dad, of course. While I was carefully inspecting Ron’s ten fingers and ten toes, his tiny hand grabbed my little finger. It’s difficult to explain the love I felt in that moment. This little person had just come into my life, but I would have died for him. If a four-year-old had come up and tried to hurt him, I’d have punched the kid in the mouth. That’s the kind of love you have for your child when he’s born. He was the cutest, most perfect thing I’d ever seen.

I think all guys want their first child to be a boy, even if they won’t admit it. They want to play catch and put them in Little League and take them to karate or wrestling class. They want that boy to protect his sister, who will be born next. I wanted the experience of teaching my two-year-old son to take a football stance and come at me so I could toughen him up, just as my dad had done with me.

I made it through my one-year probation unfazed and graduated to a full-fledged officer, or P2, then moved to night watch. Everything was going fine for the next few months, until I ran into an issue with a new captain who’d transferred into Southwest. We all called him Nick the Knife because of his awful reputation for stabbing everyone in the back. I thought he wasn’t good at his job, and Southwest went downhill fast because of it.

My partner was accused of mishandling a suspect when we’d been called to a disturbance at a party. The suspect complained that she’d kicked him. Our supervisors both came to us separately, and we told them the truth: yes, we’d stopped the suspect outside the party and searched him, but other than that, nobody had laid a hand on him.

Nick the Knife called me into his office. “If you need to change your story now, you won’t get in trouble,” he said. He obviously didn’t believe us.

I knew he didn’t like my partner. She was a tough cop. Nick didn’t like the fact that she didn’t say nice things about him, so if I altered my story it would clear a path so he could punish her.

Nick tried a variety of ways to persuade me to squeal on my partner for something she hadn’t actually done. He even brought up my dad. “Just because Ron was who he was doesn’t mean you owe it to others to cover up for them.”

He also tried to get something out of me by telling me about an experience he’d once had. “This drunk spat on me,” he said, “and I went to hit him. My partner stopped me and said, ‘We don’t do that.’ He handcuffed him, and you know what? My partner was right, and I was wrong.”

I didn’t know whether I was angrier with being pressured to lie or being forced to listen to his stupid story. “If someone spat on me,” I said, “and I went to do something and my partner tried to stop me, the first thing I’d do is beat the piss out of the person who spat on me. Then I’d beat the piss out of my partner for trying to stop me.” I ripped my badge off and threw it at him. “I don’t want your fucking job. You guys are a bunch of candy asses.”

As I walked out the door, I realized I’d screwed up in a major way. My temper had gotten the best of me. I had more people than just me to think about. I had a wife and son relying on me.

I was immediately suspended for forty days with no pay and had to hand in my badge. My case was sent to a board of rights, a committee that would decide if I got to keep my job. Three captains listened to my testimony, and I ended up getting ten days of unpaid suspension for blowing my lid.

Next I was supposed to report to Hollywood Division to work the Prostitution Enforcement Detail (PED), a special assignment. However, when Bob Taylor, captain of Hollywood Division, found out I was coming off a ten-day slap on the wrist, he sent me back out on patrol. I will forever thank Bob for making this decision because it taught me some invaluable lessons.

On my first day on patrol in Hollywood, my new partner and I pulled over a car after observing it swerving in traffic. The driver, a fifty-year-old black man, danced through his sobriety test, and it was my inclination to let him go. But my partner wanted to take him in and have him screened by a drug recognition expert (DRE) at the station because he really thought the guy was on something illegal. Personally, I believed my partner was intoxicated on his own authority.

It’s true that a police officer can stop anybody for virtually anything. I tried to do so for the reasons I’d been taught, such as for drivers running stoplights or exceeding the speed limit. But I wasn’t the guy to write tickets if I believed I was staring into the eyes of a good person who’d made a mistake. He’d lose money or his car insurance would go up, and that didn’t seem fair to me. I’d say, “Slow down” or “Watch the stop signs,” and let the person off with the warning.

When you take someone into custody, it’s even worse. You’re having his car towed and impounded. I didn’t do that to someone for just anything.

But demonstrating letter of the law versus spirit of the law at its best, my partner insisted we take this man in. At the station, though the man passed all drug tests and the expert couldn’t determine if he was really on anything more than a prescription drug, my partner still pushed to book him.

“If you’re going to book him,” I said, “keep my name off the report.”

It was another sobering day for me. I hadn’t gotten into this line of work to screw with people. I wanted to go after the bad guys, and this guy wasn’t one of them. I drove home that night disenchanted and disappointed, thinking it might be time to get another job.

My second day in Hollywood couldn’t have gone more differently. I was assigned to work with a great officer named Jimmy Barlow, a six-feet-two, 140-pound black guy we all called J-Bone.

While we were driving about midnight, we noticed two guys cruising along with their lights off, a definite red flag. We were in the process of pulling them over when the car took off. We went into pursuit. After about a minute into the high-speed chase, the car suddenly screeched to the side of the road and one man jumped out with something in his hands.

On impulse, I jumped out and started chasing him as he hopped over a nearby fence, tossed something underneath another car, and scaled a second fence. I didn’t know the neighborhood at all and it was pitch black, but I could track him because of the two blinking red lights on the backs of his sneakers. Note to would-be criminals: functionality always outweighs fashion.

Meanwhile, Jimmy was in pursuit of the driver, who’d peeled out.

Behind a run-down apartment building, I caught up to my suspect, cuffed him, and dragged him back to where he’d tossed his package. By now, a few other police units had arrived on the scene.

When I opened the parcel, I found about eleven pounds of fifty-dollar rocks of cocaine worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Miles away, I’d learn, the other suspect crashed his car into a tree, and Jimmy apprehended him. The car was full of guns.

I’d made my first serious bust in Hollywood Division, and it couldn’t have gone any better if it’d been written for
Law & Order.

This is what I’m talking about,
I thought. It was quite a bit of loot for a young police officer to find during his first arrest in a new division, and I felt really good about it. I didn’t even mind filling out all the paperwork, which included the traffic accident, a foot pursuit, and use of force.

My morning watch sergeant, Chuck Wampler, wanted to write me up for a commendation. It was the first time I interacted with this hardworking second-generation officer. He had a lazy eye and didn’t look at anything directly, but he was one of the straightest shooters you could ever meet. I would work with Sgt. Wampler throughout my career, and I loved him.

Though Sgt. Wampler was impressed with my work, the lieutenant pointed out how I’d failed to follow procedure. I’d called dispatch to tell them I was in foot pursuit, but I hadn’t told them where I was, so they couldn’t send backup. The truth was that I didn’t know the Hollywood streets well enough yet to report my position.

The bigger problem to them, though, was that I’d separated from my partner. I hadn’t even realized Jimmy left me until I was running up the alleyway and heard on my belt radio about his vehicle pursuit.

The lieutenant had to settle for giving Jimmy and me a stern talking to, though, because the department couldn’t ignore what we’d hauled in.

Jimmy joked with me after that first day together. “I can’t take too many more days like this.”

I laughed, feeling a little more secure about the people I’d taken up company with, and I drove home that night smiling.

This is what happens when your partner is a part-time photographer.

Three generations of McCarthy men