Sory I'm late honey...I accidently locked my keys in the car!

I was driving home early this morning at a little past midnight when I saw something that caught my interest. The police had pulled over a vehicle a couple blocks away from my house, which in itself is not really that unusual. However, what first caught my attention about this scene was that there were three officers and only one patrol car. There were no other police cars in the area. Usually there are one or two officers to a car, but I have rarely ever seen three in one car. Anyway, as odd as that fact might be, it was not really at the heart of the story here, just something of interest to take note of.

I parked for ten minutes and watched as the driver of the car was handcuffed and taken by two of the officers back to their patrol car. The third officer then began searching the car, including the trunk. At one point he appeared to be dumping the contents of the ashtray on the ground, then went back inside the car. I know he turned the ignition key, as I heard the engine squeal, but I’m not sure if it actually started.

After a few minutes, this officer joined the others and all three stood there with the handcuffed man and talked a bit. The officers then let the man walk back towards his car, and they all three got in their car and drove away. I watched as this man stumbled around in the dark beside his car for a few minutes, and became more curious as to exactly what was going on. I decided to pull up behind him and ask if everything was okay.

His initial reaction was a bit startling. If I am standing out on a dark street in a high crime area of town, and another car pulls up on me, I am going to do one of two things. Either I am going to walk towards that vehicle (most likely with my hand on my gun) or I am going to walk away from it. Instead, what this man did was to just stand there, with his head hung low, and not move an inch. He remained this way for at least thirty seconds and I finally realized he probably thought I was another police officer. He was simply afraid to move or even to look up at me.

I called to him, asking if he was okay, and he then approached my vehicle. I asked why the police had stopped him and he said he had been talking with a girl. I said “You mean there was a girl in your car?” He responded “No, she was walking and I stopped to talk to her.” He then told me that the officers had locked his keys inside the car. I was seriously considering offering him a ride, just because I didn’t think it was safe for him to be walking this neighborhood in the middle of the night. The look of concern must have shown on my face because he then said “I’ll be okay, thanks.” He then began walking home.

Now that you know the story, there’s a couple things to consider here. First of all, this incident supports my belief that most patrol officers really would rather simply stop a problem from occurring, rather than to arrest someone. This guy looked a little inebriated, and if he’s going to be driving through this neighborhood in the middle of the night and calling out to strangers who are walking around then he probably shouldn’t be behind the wheel. I think what happened was that these officers assessed the situation and determined that this guy hadn’t caused any real harm, but that he had the potential to do so. Basically, they disabled his vehicle for the night, and let him go on his way.

What is troubling about this, however, is the potential for something to go wrong. As I have said before, I see a lot of police activity here that never even gets reported on FWPD’s daily activity report. It seems that to allow a situation where an officer can detain and handcuff a person, while leaving no record of the event, is an invitation for abuse to occur. Now it might be that some internal documentation is actually done in such cases, but of course there is no way of knowing this.

In the past two years, I have directly led police to discover illegal drugs here three times that I know of. The first two times were in December 2006, so there is no on-line record for comparison. But in March of 2007, I called FWPD to report drug activity here. A short while later, there was scanner traffic that appeared to be related to my call. Then, several patrol cars swooped down on the place and the officers grabbed one of the guys as he was running. They found several rocks of crack cocaine on the ground where he and his friends had been standing, so they handcuffed him and sat him down on a neighbors steps. As two of the officers were arguing with the suspect and his mother, Officer Jefferson (a member of the FWPD Command Staff) arrived to negotiate the situation.

No arrests were made that day, but a report actually does appear to have been filed on this activity.

http://www.fwpd.org/daily/display/20080326.html
08F042877 14:08:57 99 NARCOTICS 25XX WARSAW ST & SUTTENFIELD ST E

If anyone is able to get their hands on that report, it should state that four or five rocks of crack were found on the ground that afternoon. I really doubt if this report would be released publicly, but if it was, it might be interesting to check and see if they handle drug busts here in the same style as Indy (officers skimming off the top.)

Anyway, I’ll have to wait until Monday afternoon to check and see if the traffic stop I witnessed a couple hours ago even appears on their activity report. It seems doubtful since the guy obviously hadn’t yet done enough to warrant being arrested, but then the officers went ahead and purposely locked him out of his car. Which makes one wonder - what if it had been a pretty young woman who was stopped alone (by three men with guns) on that dark and desolate street, or what if the officers had found a large amount of drugs and cash in the car? If they can do nice things off the record, then couldn’t they just as easily do bad things?

I certainly can appreciate that allowing police officers a certain amount of discretion can often be helpful to both the people they stop as well as the communities they serve. But if this discretion is so wide as to allow them to simply act without any record being made, then there is simply no way such a system can fail to eventually corrupt some officers, if it hasn’t already.

So remember to check the FWPD activity report after it is released on Monday afternoon and look for something similar to this posted there.

http://www.fwpd.org/daily/display/20081213.html
08F190xxx 00:10:00 30 TRAFFIC STOP 4XX CREIGHTON AVE E & WARSAW ST

Actually, now that I think about it, this was early enough in the morning that it might have been initiated at the end of the previous night. Regardless, the rest of the details are unchanged so it shouldn't be difficult to spot.

If you don’t find it, then it’s just one more example of the police acting off-record. If you do find it, then at least my predicting it before it was published will perhaps add more credibility to my reporting here.