Over the course of the 10 years he has been a police officer, countless people (usually teenage boys) have approached him and asked if he “gets to shoot his gun alot,” “gets to beat up on people,” and “has ever gotten knifed or shot at.” Although he has found himself in dangerous situations on rare occasion, his answer to these questions, fortunately, is no. Therefore, it goes without saying that questions such as these underscore the misperception many people have regarding what it is typically like to be a cop. Television shows such as “Cops” do nothing but fuel these misonceptions.
If the questioners persist, my husband will usually point to his mouth and say, “this is the weapon I use the most often.” He will then take a pen out of his breast pocket, point to it, and say “and this is the weapon I use almost as often.” In other words, his job consists mainly of talking to different people and writing reports. While this may not seem particularly exciting on its face, my husband has come home with some interesting stories – none involving violence, by the way, nothing exciting enough for “Cops,” but interesting nonetheless. The bulk of his more entertaining (albeit disturbing) stories involve dealing with people who are self-destructive and/or generally stupid.
One of his first really interesting stories involves a man I will refer to as Mr. Jones. My husband was assigned to watch over Mr. Jones, who had been arrested an hour ago by another officer, and was waiting in the station’s waiting area for his paperwork to be processed. After some time had passed, Mr. Jones became agitated, muttering obscenities and racist remarks to other people in room, and made himself generally obnoxious.
He then began yelling at my husband: “Hey! What’m I being arrested for?” Nobody told my husband what Mr. Jones had done, so he simply said with a straight face, “sir, I believe you’ve been arrested for aggravated mopery,” to which our intrepid Mr. Jones repled, “what the hell’s that? No way.” My husband then removed a book containing the Ohio Revised Code off a nearby bookshelf, making a show of opening it to a specific page, and said, “yes, aggravated mopery. It’s right here. And based on what I’m looking at, aggravated mopery is a fourth degree misdemeanor. However, because of what you’ve done, you’re going to be charged with a third degree misdemeanor.”
At that point, Mr. Jones let forth a barrage of expletives: “THAT’S BULLSH**!! I’VE BEEN ARRESTED FIFTEEN TIMES AND I’VE NEVER HEARD OF NO F***ING MOPERY!!” Other people awaiting processing (aka the peanut gallery) started paying attention and adding their two cents, including one guy who kept exclaiming, “shut the f*** up, man. You just shut the f*** up. You’re an a**hole. You f***in’ deserve it.” My husband, of course, just sat quietly at his desk trying his darndest to keep a straight face.
I have to admit the above story is funnier told in person. When my husband told me this story, his imitation of Mr. Jones’ voice was hysterical.
The second story is more sad than funny. My husband was working at the hospital one night when a distressed and disoriented woman wandered into the emergency room waiting area. He and a nurse walked over to her to try to find out what was wrong with her. Because she was marginally intelligible, it took them a while to figure out she was a frequent patient and had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, among other things. After conversing with her a little more, they learned she hadn’t been taking her medications. When they asked her why, she replied that she decided to smoke some crack instead. When they asked her to elaborate, she said “I kept on hearing voices, so I smoked some crack to make them stop. But they wouldn’t stop. So I smoked even more crack. But it didn’t matter, cuz no matter how much crack I smoked, the voices wouldn’t go away.”
The third story is funny, but also sad – and gross. One night, toward the end of his evening shift, my husband found a man blue in the face and crumpled up in front of the campus student union. When his efforts to revive the man failed, he radioed the EMT, who was able to revive the man enough to take him to the emergency room. My husband went to the emergency room with the EMT and the near-comatose man, and obtained the information he needed to make as accurate of a report he could. This information included the results of a blood test taken to see if he had anything unusual in his system, which he did: phentynol.
The next day, my husband went to the hospital to follow up a theft report involving the theft of drugs. The person making the theft report was a woman staying at the hospital to recover from surgery. When he questioned her, she revealed that her phentynol patch had been taken off her arm, hence the theft report. My husband asked her if there had been anyone else in the room with her over the past day or two, and she said, yes, my son was in here. He then asked her his name. When she gave him her son’s name, he recognized it – it was the name of the man he had found in front of the student union the previous night.
He asked the woman if she knew her son’s whereabouts, and she said no. Her eyes grew wide, and she groaned, “what – don’t tell me my son’s in trouble again!” He told her that he believed it might have been her son he found passed out in front of the student union – could she describe what he looks like? She did, and sure enough, her description matched the guy he found.
Upon returning to the station to write a report, my husband began asking around to see if anyone had taken a follow up report on the guy he took to the hospital the previous night. Someone had, and my husband shared his newfound information with his colleague. In a nutshell, it turned out this guy actually was the one who had stolen the phentynol patch off his mother’s arm – and it also explained why he had been sprawled out in front of the student union building. He had OD’d: after taking his mother’s phentynol patch, he stuck it in his mouth and ate it.
Perhaps these stories are not quite as exciting as the stuff you’ll see on “Cops.” On the other hand, they ought to give you a more realistic picture of what law enforcement officers do over the course of a typical workday.
