By Steve Pomper
There’s so much negative stuff out there for cops, but most of us are nevertheless happy warriors. So, the adage, laughter is the best medicine, applies. Here are three stories that may tickle your funny bone.
The first two stories are from my career, which I’ve written about in two of my books. The first story isn’t as funny for what happened as for the sincerity with which the suspect made his request. He looked at me as if there were a possibility I was going to do as he asked.
So, sometime back in the mid-90s to early 2000s, we were making a lot of drug arrests in a specific high crime/narcotics area. We cops got to know the players well, and they got to know us.
The hardcore gangbangers who dealt we took most seriously because they were likely to be armed and aggressive. But there were also low-level user/dealers we referred to as “clucks” because they resembled chickens ambling frenetically up and down the block, heads bobbing, plying their trade.
This one guy we got to know well was pleasant enough—you know, for a cluck. I can’t tell you the number of times my partner, other officers, and I had arrested him. But it was the old story: each time, he’d be out of jail before we finished the paperwork. Yeah, that’s a real thing. Let’s call him Gene.
We were working in a high-narcotics area, monitoring it discreetly. We observed Gene in front of an apartment building until he’d made a few transactions, which was the protocol at the time. Then we swooped on in.
We arrested him without incident in the foyer of the apartment building entrance. Cooperative as usual, we handcuffed him and put him in the backseat of our car. While chatting with other cops involved in the operation, I noticed Gene knocking on the window and flailing to get my attention.
I walked over to the car, lowered the driver’s side backseat window, and asked Gene, “What do you want.” He looked up at me with the sincerest expression I’d ever see—on a cluck. And with his trademark stutter, Gene glanced right and left and then looked me in the eye and said, “Can’t you just let me go.”
This was a new one, even for Gene. I asked, “What do you think?”
Then he got even more serious, stared into my eyes intently, and added, “You guys arrest me all the time. You know you’ll get me again, so just let me go this time.”
Did he think we gave out punch cards and he got to go free every tenth arrest. If you’re wondering, we didn’t let him go. And yes, we did arrest him a few days later. We didn’t let him go that time either—apparently, it was the judge’s job to let him go.
This next story I wrote about in Chapter 22, Road Rage—Grrrr! of my book, Is There a Problem, Officer? (The Lyons Press, 2007). The book was intended to teach drivers how to not talk themselves into tickets. Unfortunately, this woman didn’t have the benefit of my book before acting in a way that utterly guaranteed she’d get a ticket.
On our way to get coffee, a driver chooses then to make a dangerous maneuver. I was driving, and before I finished asking my partner, “Did you see that?” he was already flipping on the overheads. She’d whipped out of a gas station parking lot, failing to yield to oncoming traffic, nearly causing a collision. Her tabs were two months expired, to boot.
In my book I’d written, “Her eyes were intense; she seemed to be making one eye larger than the other, with one brow arched high into her forehead and the other dipped in a sinister swoop.”
She repeated the facial expression in the opposite direction, having turned to face my partner, peering in at her passenger window. I asked for her license, proof of insurance, and registration. She said, “You don’t need to see anything from me.” I calmly explained to her error. Like Gene in the story above, the woman asked me to just let her go and to “stop ruining her day.”
I told her even if I wanted to let her go, without her license, I had no idea who I’d be releasing. She repeated she wanted us to let her go, only now she was “becoming unhinged, shaking, and grabbing her steering wheel like she was trying to snap it off its column….”
Finally, she calmed and began to cooperate and handed me her license. But as she did, she emitted a low, prolonged, guttural growl and said, “Just get it over with—now.”
I went to my patrol car, wrote her a ticket, and returned to her car. She signed the citation, and I asked if she had any questions. She said she didn’t, again reminding me that I’d ruined her day.
Then, with the intensity she’d displayed earlier, she looked up at me with what I took as an “evil eye.” In the book, I wrote she “pointed two crooked fingers at me,’ and said, ‘I hex you. I hex you. I hex you… I’ve put a hex on you, and I hope it ruins your whole day.’ Then she put her car in gear and drove off in a uncustomarily controlled huff.”
Remarkably, she was the second person during my career who’d hexed me.
And now, on to the news item that prompted this humorfest. According to FOX News, recently, police in Oregon (Portland, of course) stopped a stolen vehicle occupied by a man and woman. They discovered drugs and other illegal and suspicious items in the vehicle. They recovered some evidence you’d expect during a drug bust and one item that was, well, unexpected.
The cops recovered the usual druggie items like a scale, cash, and a handgun. But one item stood out for its audacity. The officers also recovered a zippered bag, and printed on it in bold black letters was “Definitely not a bag full of Drugs.”
However, Portlandia’s version of Bonnie and Clyde did not fool Portland’s Finest. The cops looked inside and found that it was Definitely a bag full of Drugs.
There’s a motto that for years conveyed the Rose City’s charm in a nutshell: “Keep Portland Weird.” But, tragically, over the past decade, BLM and Antifa thugs have tarnished Portland’s quirky “weird” vibe with their incessant property destruction and violence.
I have a suggestion for a new motto: Make Portland Weird Again.
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