How to Steal a Rolls-Royce

I won't go into why it's a bad idea to even have a Rolls dealership anywhere near anything with the words "Section 8" anywhere within twenty miles. You shouldn't even have a bus stop nearby. Rolls' are expensive as hell for a reason. But anyway, someone made the mistake of having a dealership right here in my fair city, right next to our Sector 5. A man (Think Thug-nificent from The Boondocks) walks in, finds what he guesses to be the youngest, least experienced, possibly retarded employee he can, and asks for a test drive. I don't know what the steps are in getting hired to sell cars for RR, but they can't be very stringent. Men who are utterly unable to dress themselves are probably not going to buy a Rolls, but whatever. The employee grabs a key, gets in the Rolls and off they go. After a couple blocks, our enterprising criminal decides that he likes the car, produces his "get out of my car" stick (a 9 mm) and motions the employee out of the car.

Now, it's really not that hard to find a Rolls near Section 8 housing. I think it took us 8 minutes from when the call was placed. So we found the car, and followed it. We have a pretty strict rule about chasing, but he was doing 35 mph or so, so nobody called it a chase. Just a "cold trail" (try that with your AWC). Apparently Mr. Thug also knew that he probably wasn't going to get away with this, so instead of running, he just drove past his friends' places and honked and waved, and showed off for about 45 minutes, each time getting back on the freeway to head to his starting point and do it again. The last time though, he'd just gotten onto a surface road when we spot an old, beat up, clearly-a-hook-car, Ford Crown Vic crest the off ramp, aim his wheels at the Rolls, and come tearing down the hill to T bone that thing.

For those who don't know, a Rolls runs somewhere around 100 grand. Initially we thought it was some rival dealer, or gang member, or maybe just a pissed off ex. Negative. Both vehicles came to a stop, and Pookie surrendered, and we see this cartoon parody of a southern cop (he was a security guard) step out of his POS. Big gut, big hat, southern drawl, Wilford Brimley mustache.

"I heard y'all can't chase, so I stopped 'im for ya."

The only thing he didn't do was spit out a wad of chewing tobacco right then.

Happy Father's Day!!

This Father's Day, do something special for dad. But since I don't work for Hallmark, I won't suggest what that may be. What I can do, is tell you what not to do in the form of this cautionary tale:

Once upon a time, in a land that's far too close for comfort, there were eleven people living in a one bedroom apartment. The family decided to get a giant van/truck monstrosity on wheels and take grandpa and all the family out for father's day. Shortly thereafter, everybody who wasn't a child was completely hammered, the mark of a good father's day dinner. Well, they drive home, and can't find a parking spot in their apartment. So they find the one sign in the whole apartment that basically says: "Abandon Hope All Ye Who Park Here, For Thine Shit is Mine".


Well, it was just for a minute. Just a minute while the half dozen kids used the bathroom (1 bedroom apartment = 1 bathroom) and while the wife was looking for her purse, and while mom (who can't walk) was helped somewhere. Yeah, one minute. The tow truck was just hiding behind the sign and busted out as soon as they hit P on the gear shift. Anyway, during this one minute interlude, the family notices the car being jacked up and a security officer (actually a police officer working off duty) nearby. One of the drunk women (it's always a woman) rushes over there and physically pushes the tow truck driver down and tries to take his truck. Security ( a tiny old man born in the late 40s) restrains here. Then the rest of the family tries to step in, so the old timer does what he thinks will disperse the crowd. Maces everyone. Straight up everybody. He even maced me after the fact, because OC spray is like that curious strain of syphilis that just "mysteriously" gets around. Also, it's a total bitch. Well, one of the women doesn't take kindly to that, so she jumps on his back trying to take him to the ground and fight him for the spray. Old timer's partner, a gigantic 6' 5" wall of dude finally shows up and picks up the fighting drunk chick off his partner's back. The drunk chick's sister (hereafter DB, you can guess why) gets it in her alcohol addled mind to sneak up and knock out the great wall of dude. She punches him in the back of the head. He turned around, assessed the situation and knocked her flat out with a punch to the face. Then the fire dept showed up, bemoaned the long term effects of pepper spray, looked at DB's newly reshaped nose, and left. We took everyone who wasn't crippled or a small child to jail that night. Best Part: Grandpa's so drunk, he still can't remember why he was arrested. Have fun at your bail hearing. And happy Father's Day!

Things not to tell your arresting officer

I ain't talking to you, stupid. 
Chris Rock put out a video detailing how not to get your ass beat by the police. One of the key points was "Shut the Fuck Up". If you're not asking your arresting officer a pertinent question, or engaging in conversation regarding a point of clarification, or something else useful (try a funny joke, because hauling people to jail all day gets dreary) then you need to shut it. And if you're talking, but not to the officer, then you really need to understand that you're in jail, you're under arrest, and STFU.

I'm getting up out of here.
If you're under arrest your freedom of movement has been curtailed. This is why an officer can legally remove you from where you are to jail or interrogation or detox once you've been arrested. Your notion of "getting up out of here" can end up with you getting tackled, injured, and charged with felony escape of detention. If you mean that you're getting out of jail soon (and I hope you clarified in some way, to prevent that tackling) yes, we know. A sad fact is that generally speaking that an officer, over a 30 year career, will log more hours in jail than most of the people he arrests.

I pay your salary.
Strictly speaking this is rarely true. I have yet to arrest anyone out of the Comptroller's Office. Indeed, given where I work, it's rare that I arrest anyone paying taxes in my city. Furthermore, even if you are a taxpayer, the police don't work for you. Hell, they don't even work for the Comptroller, and that's the office actually paying the police. Police is derived from the Greek word polis meaning "city-state". The city is defined as X number of people living in a certain proximity. As the number and the people are generally in a state of flux, it's more accurate to say that the police (whose individuals are also usually in a state of flux) work for the intangible notion of a city, namely the idea that within this place and with these people, all men may live together free from the initiation of force upon them.

You're only here making XX amount
Officers generally know their own wage. A man incapable of figuring that out probably doesn't need to be police in the first place. Furthermore, they knew their wage before they arrested you, and indeed made the decision that the time used putting you in jail for whatever stupidity you inflicted upon your fellow man is worth the wage offered.

I know XXXX and I'll have your badge
I have yet to meet the officer who gives a flying fuck about who you know. There are trophy rooms filled with the empty shelves that contain all the fucks never given. People have told me that they know:
The Mayor
The City Manager
City Council Member XYZ
The President of the United States
The Attorney General (State or Federal was never specified)
The Chief of Police
The Sheriff
and my personal favorite: Warren Buffett.
I've never met Officer Buffett, or Chief Buffett, but apparently he'll have my badge. It's been a few years now.

Special Hell

In Hell, there are all the sinners basting in a lake of fire or some such thing.

Basically that ^
It's a freaky place. Murderers and Suicides get to hang out together. Adulterers, cheaters, swindlers, liars, and traitors all hang out in the respective places and generally things suck for everyone. For an example of this suckitude, please refer to the above painting by Heironymus Bosch.

However, even within Hell there is (or ought to be) a special place for people who suck especially hard. For people who do things like try to steal from Wal-Mart, but are too chickenshit to do it themselves, so they instead coerce their 8 year old son and 14 year old daughter to do it instead. Because, holy shit, you're shooting for the Mother of the Year trophy this time. 

Supernatural Occurrences

I'm not a believer in ghosts, the boogie man, or psychics. Really, anything supernatural. That being said, I have encountered two "psychic" episodes while out on the street.

In the first, a man calls 911 and begs for officers to come to his apartment, that he's being robbed at home and they're kicking in the door. We run out, lights and sirens, and find his door intact, no robbers anywhere, and no crime having been committed. We talk to the caller, who says that men are coming to rob him, but that he's hid his property inside his shoe and that nobody will ever find it. About an hour later we get another call, same thing, so we run back out and lo and behold, someone's kicked in the door, and stolen this man's shoe. Of course, he denies having told anyone about it, so the only other explanation as to why gunmen would only take his shoe is that he's part of a secret psychic cabal and owes them money or something.

In the second, we get a call about people fighting out in the parking lot of a gas station. So we roll out and find our people. In true moron fashion, everyone agrees "ain't nothin happen" and that they were merely having a spirited discussion. No doubt about foreign policy and domestic economic theory. We find out where these people live (of course, nobody says they live in that area) and tell them to go home, it's a bad part of town. Every single time an officer utters those words, at least one suspect (who has to absolutely have the last word) will say "Oh, I'm from (Louisiana, Mississippi, California, Arizona, etc etc), so I didn't know."

I'm going to segue for a moment. It's actually quite easy to discern if you're in a good or bad neighborhood if you apply this secret Tibetan monk technique of "looking around". Look around, if you see more than one grown adult male walking around with no shirt and no pool in sight, it's probably a bad neighborhood. If people just hang out in front of the gas station looking back and forth at 3 AM, it's a bad neighborhood. If the gas station has bulletproof partitions, it's a bad neighborhood. If you see lots of police seemingly driving in circles in the area, it's a bad neighborhood. Basically, if you encounter behavior that tells you that most of these people don't have to worry about being up in the morning to go to work, it's probably a bad neighborhood.

Back to the original topic. So this guy feeds us the lie that he's from out of town and didn't know better. Another officer tells him that if he's gonna keep acting up like this he's gonna get shot in this part of town, and he should go home, or even better, go back to (insert fake home state here). 24 hours later (not even joking) we find the dude stabbed 17 times and shot once, hiding under a car in that same intersection we found him.

So the moral of this story, just ask people for winning lotto numbers. You never know who might accidentally predict the future.

Self Defense Made Easy

So, my friend is asking about self defense and about Krav Maga and Muay Thai. I explained my own perspective on violence (which is what self defense is really about) and made this handy flowchart.

Guest Infographic

So, a "guest" infographic. More below the graphic.

Gun Facts You Need To Know | Infographics

I didn't anticipate going into anything political on this blog, so I'm not going to approach the 2nd Amendment argument from a rights standpoint (though, as a political science graduate I think I could). However, I will point out that there is an odd disconnect between administrative level and street level police with regard to civilian ownership of guns. For the most part, administrators will tout the need for fewer guns on the street. As I'm not an administrator I can only guess as to their intents or reasons for this. Perhaps they need to, as any rank above LT (or Captain for those of you who still have that rank) are basically political appointees, ingratiate themselves with the Mayor's office, City Council and/or City Manager's office. Maybe they see it as a liability risk. Maybe they just like power and prefer to have private citizens helpless and awaiting police intervention (an attitude that will likely get you killed btw). At the street level, though, we recognize that there aren't nearly enough police on shift on any given night to intervene in time to actually resolve a deadly situation before it's over. We've been relegated, through cuts in personnel and through policy/procedure changes, to report takers. Thus, in a deadly confrontation, the first responder is the citizen and his life is in his own hands. While some citizens may have a physical advantage over an assailant, or maybe the assailant is a complete coward who flees at the first sign of resistance, this may not always hold true. For a smaller person, a female, or elderly, or otherwise disabled citizen, a firearm is the most effective means of protection available provided they train themselves and practice accordingly. And besides, since patrol officers are relegated to report taking anyway, it's better we take a report on the dead rapist hanging out of your window rather than trying to piece together who raped you after they got away.