To Serve and to Protect: June 2006

I’m sure everyone has heard this saying before. A police officer’s basic duty is to serve and to protect. And what a noble sounding creed that is, at least until you realize who it is that they are really protecting and what interests are being served at times. Like much in my story, this particular event involves a fair amount of speculation, but it is my belief that here a FWPD officer purposely falsified a police report in order to benefit one of their confidential informants. So not only does FWPD refuse to give me a report over an incident that occurred on my own property, but now it appears that they’re printing out lies as well!

I had just laid down to go to sleep one evening when I heard a loud noise outside. I peeked out the window to see that a man had clipped my car with his truck as he turned the corner. I couldn’t see his face well enough to make an accurate identification. All I could see was that he was a black male, and he appeared to be the only occupant of the vehicle. I quickly threw on my jeans and ran out the front door, just in time to watch the guy drive away. I did not get the plate number, just a basic description of the vehicle.

Although I didn’t expect the perpetrator to be found, I still had to call FWPD out to get a report for my insurance. When the officer arrived, I described the vehicle as being a dark colored (black or blue?) utility vehicle (Suburban?). I’m not great at identifying vehicle models, and it was pretty dark out, so I gave the best account I could. The officer decided to drive the area for a few minutes to look for the vehicle. As I was standing out front waiting for the officer to return, Patrick came over to speak with me.

He told me that he had seen what happened and he thought he knew who did it. He described the vehicle as a Green Yukon, and even told me where the guy lived only a few blocks from my house. Patrick went on to say that this guy is a snitch for the cops. When the police officer returned a few minutes later I gave him the updated information about the driver, sans the claim of being a snitch. The officer stated that he would go ahead and fill out the report first, then go back to look where I had been told the guy lived at.

As the officer was filling out the report, a vehicle passed through the intersection a block away from my house. This looked like the vehicle that had hit my car, and it was heading in the direction of where Patrick had said he lived at, so I alerted the officer to this. He immediately put down his paperwork to pursue this vehicle. When I say pursue here, I am referring to a high speed chase with emergency lights on, and I think this fact is important to the story.

About ten minutes later, the green Yukon came pulling up to my house, followed by the patrol car, which was itself followed by an unmarked police vehicle. At this point, there were two occupants in the Yukon. A female was driving, and a male was in the passenger seat. The female got out of the truck and came towards me, yelling and with arms flailing about. She kept saying “Can you say for certain that I was the driver of the vehicle which allegedly hit your car, Sir?” At the same time, the guy was in my face saying “Look, I wasn’t driving. I’ve got too much trouble already, and I don’t need this.” Their obnoxious behavior was getting close to assault as I tried to step away from them several times.

After the third time that the lady got in my face, with no response from the police officers who were standing right there, I walked over to the Yukon. I pointed to the smashed front fender which had paint from my car smeared across it. I told her “This truck hit my car. Whoever owns this truck is responsible for paying for the damages. I’ll leave it to you two and the police to determine who was driving at the time.” At this point, one of the officers looked at me and asked me to settle down. - What a fucking asshole! It’s okay for this lady to scream at me and come an inch from slapping me in the face. But when I calmly speak up to straighten her out on the matter, the cop tells me to shut up. Like I said, there really are some cops that are pricks, and this was one of them.

I picked up a copy of the report a few days later and noticed something interesting about it. According to the report, the officer searched the neighborhood and found the vehicle parked at a nearby house. That is odd, because it’s a damn lie! The car couldn’t have been parked, because the officer was in pursuit of it. Yet there was no mention of this pursuit at all in the report. There was something else which was even more odd. The passenger in Yukon wasn’t even mentioned. I think this was especially odd because I had described the driver as being a male before they even brought the truck back around. You’d think that since he was probably the one actually driving at the time, that the police would have at least mentioned his name in the report. But according to their report, it’s almost as if he didn’t even exist. And I think I know why that is.

Of course, Patrick’s statement was the first indication that this guy was a police C.I., but I think the police corroborated this as well. First of all, the fact that it took ten minutes to chase this truck down and bring it back here, when it was only a block away, was a bit odd. Then there was the addition of the unmarked police car that came back with them. The officer in this car was most likely a vice & narcotics detective, who of course are the ones that liaison with the C.I.’s. I think what happened was that when this guy’s name came over the police radio, the vice cop heard it and decided he’d better go and cover for his snitch. I think the long delay in bringing this car back around was because the vice cop had to explain to the other cop what was going on and to instruct him on what kind of lie to tell me.

I’ve read a few police reports, and there is definitely something strange about this one. Compare what was reported here to a line from another report which stated “For officer safety, I removed a Glock model 17 handgun from Mr. Marx’s front waistband while I checked his gun permit.” Now that’s some damn good writing. Here he not only mentioned that I had a gun, but also what model it was, where I carried it, and that I had a permit. And he did it all in one smooth sentence.

Then there’s that other fuckheaded cop from the night of the accident. He just happened to forget to mention the fact that he had to pursue the vehicle and he accidentally left out the name of the person who most likely caused the accident. But other than that, he got it right. So either he was purposely falsifying that report, or he just has poor writing skills. It’s interesting to think that the information that I gave to the officer should have been enough to at least suspect that guy of being the driver, and that probably would have been enough to give him a breathalyzer test, but since he wasn’t (officially) there, then this wasn’t necessary. I guess being an FWPD snitch does have it’s advantages. I just wonder what some of these cops get in return.

There was something else noteworthy about this night. I got into a conversation with Officer Byrnes, who was driving the unmarked car. We were talking about all the commotion that goes on in this neighborhood and I mentioned the incident where Thomas had recently done a mock drive-by-shooting against me. Officer Byrnes asked if I had called FWPD to report this and I said that I hadn’t because I didn’t think there was anything they’d be able to do about it. None of the people who witnessed it would have spoken on my behalf, so it would just be hearsay. But according to Officer Byrnes, this was irrelevant.

He chastised me because by failing to report this “It’s as if it never occurred.” According to Officer Byrnes, the police want to hear from people like me about what is going on here. And by failing to report this information, I am part of the problem. Never mind the fact that so many officers before him had basically told me to shut up and quit bothering them. Never mind the fact that I had offered, in writing and to a member of FWPD Command Staff, to allow FWPD to place cameras on my property and even to station officers inside my home for surveillance and received absolutely no response to this offer. According to Officer Byrnes, I am the problem.

Before I go to the next stage in this story, let’s just summarize what my experience with FWPD so far has shown me. If you don’t live here, but come over to sell crack on the corner, that is okay. But if you’re a law-abiding home owner and resident here, it is okay for the police to accost you for simply coming to or going from your home. And when they detain you for such an offense, it is likely that they will imply that you are somehow to blame for the activities here.

Most of the officers that you happen to meet on the street will tell you that they have a lot of limits on what they can do here. But they recommend that you call one of their supervisors who are all willing to listen and help tackle this problem in a serious manner. Yet when you call those high ranking officers they either give you a line of bull-shit, fail to return your calls, or simply refer you to another officer who also doesn’t give a damn. When a juvenile drug dealer hides a gun in your front yard, they won’t release the report. And when one of their C.I.’s smashes into your car, they issue a falsified report to protect him.

By this point, I had become convinced that there are many FWPD officers who are just as corrupt as the criminals that I am paying them to protect me from. It appears to me that they have sanctioned this neighborhood as an area to sell drugs and the only actions they take are designed to give the appearance that they are fighting this problem. And I have no illusion that most of these officers see me as nothing more than a pain in the ass, because I refuse to play their game.

So what happens when these corrupt cops finally determine that I’m a serious problem for them? It would not be difficult to set up a person in a neighborhood like this. It would be pretty easy to get one of their guys to drop a few rocks through my open truck window, and any of the law-abiding residents who might happen to see this are too afraid of the dealers and distrustful of the cops to say anything. At this point, I began to document things in my journal in a more detailed manner. I also decided that I would be less hesitant to call FWPD. It wasn’t that I expected them to really do anything about it, it was just another way to document things.

If I ever found myself in court because someone had tossed drugs into my truck, or because I had gotten drawn into a gun fight with one of the drug dealers in front of my house, I needed evidence to show what was going on here. I needed to document the fact that armed drug dealers were trying to take over my property, and that I was resisting them. This strategy culminated in my writing a letter to FWPD Chief Rusty York in early October 2006, which itself led to my home being fire-bombed shortly afterwards.