Bonus addition to an article

Bonus Addition to my Cracked Article

Surprisingly, the good people at cracked.com were nice enough to pay me for some of my sillier stories. Swell folks they are. A comment in the comments section (the seedy underbelly of any website) inspired me to write this bonus entry:

Holding your light and gun to look like a badass:

In movies you typically see:



And even more surprisingly you'll see them walking around, oblivious to the gun next to their face. Apparently the movie cop is unaware that adrenaline can and likely will cause them to jerk the trigger accidentally before they have a moment to get sights on anything. So now you're left with one functioning eye and ear. I can sort of understand why they do this. Tight camera shots of the hero(ine) are good, and adding a gun to that illustrates that this is a badass hero(ine), but it leads to terrible practices.

So how do they actually do things? Well, if you're old school, you adopt what is known as modified Harries technique:


Credit to

There are other techniques, example of which you'll see in the photo credit link.

If you're not, there are companies like surefire and streamlight that will gladly take your money to mount a light under your gun.

I can hear you asking: But do I hold this light up to my head? No (unless you're practicing the neck index, which always seemed like putting a target on your neck in the dark) you hold it either out from your body, as in the photo above, or very close in if you practice things like Center Axis Relock.

When actual police search buildings (and this isn't hostage or SWAT type searches, just your normal open building) they search at the low ready position. Both eyes open, gun in hand ready to move to sights position. This allows for a quick transition to firing stance, and keeps the barrel pointed into the unknown, which is where any threats are likely to come from.

Edit: Based on the pictures I forgot to say "Keep your damned fingers off the trigger"

I can't believe I need to write this down

There has been a long, proud, historical tradition of reasonable men being forced to actually write down the most painfully obvious shit for the benefit of those who really should have been weeded out by Darwinian selection for the sake of the species. Things like: "Don't attempt to stop chain with your genitals". If you need me to clarify, perhaps what kind of chain (chainsaw, bicycle, Nicolas Cage as The Ghost Rider) then you are the problem we're talking about. I cannot think of any single chain, moving or stationary, that I want to impede using my genitals. Having said that, I'm sure there's a porn website for it.

With that in mind, I really need to stress that jail is not the time, nor the place to be meeting members of the opposite sex. And yet, I find myself increasingly having to separate inmates, not because they're fighting, but because they have come to think of jail as some kind of dating site. Lulu love shack I guess (Bonus points if you can guess where I've been working based on that name). If you go to jail for something minor, it is not a safe assumption that everybody there is in for something minor. That woman you might be chatting up in the intake line might be here for some tickets she didn't pay, or maybe she just gutted her now ex-boyfriend in the bathtub. I really shouldn't have to explain that. It really should be obvious based on the context of where you are; namely, in jail.

So, if this article was informative and you learned not to stop the chain with your genitals, or pick up opposite digits in jail, then please don't ever breed. Ever.

Reasons to Walk Your Own Penis Across the Road

I'll be honest, I've got nothing. I met a man who was literally walking his penis across the street, before he assaulted a random person in said street. When I say he was walking his penis, I mean he was walking with his fly down, and his penis in his right hand as he crossed the street. My partner and myself were only able to come up with a couple theories before he started punching folks and we had to arrest him.

He was giving his penis a pep talk, telling it to keep its head up.
His penis is a frightened child and needs to hold someone's hand while crossing a street.
His penis functions as a dowsing rod to find liquor/drugs.

Alas, we'll probably never know why he was walking his penis across the street.

The Holiest of Spirits

In the Bible, it is written that Jesus would seek out the sick, the possessed, the infirm, the lame, and the blind and cure them of their ailments. In the Bible it is also written that "blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called Sons of God" (Matt 5:9). So, by the transitive property we establish that Jesus could lay hands upon the people and cure them of what ails them because he is the Son of God; therefore I (and any other officer) may do the same, as we are the peacekeepers and so the Sons of God.

With that introduction I'd like to talk about the Holy Spirit of Policing, which we call the Spirit of Slap. Every now and then we come across a man (and it's usually a man) who suffers greatly from a disease. It is a disease that paramedics and doctors find themselves ill-equipped to treat. It is a disease of the mind, yet no psychologist, nor psychiatrist, has found a treatment or cure. Only the police and corrections have determined a (temporary) cure for this disease. The disease is known by many names. Cranial-rectal insertion. Fecal encephalitis. Head-in-ass syndrome. I call it Asshattery. And, like Jesus before us, we lay hands upon these people in their time of need, to cure them of their ailment. Where Jesus was the Son of God and had the power of the Holy Spirit in Him, we turned to the Spirit of Slap. The Spirit of Slap occurs when the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost descend from Heaven to a choir of angels, and gently alight upon the shoulders of the officer in need. The Spirit of Slap grants the strength of God Himself to the backhand being delivered by the officer until his fist collides with the asshat's head, generally causing it to explode in teeth, snot, and holy light (sometimes). Having been delivered from the clutches of asshattery, the suspect is then removed to a local hospital, so that his more basic ailments can be healed as well, in addition to the side effects of laying on of hands.

I will lay hands on you, and you will be healed. Nobody said how long it would take, or what you'd look like after. Or if I need a team of surgeons to piece your face back together.

The Glossary of Political Terminology

This is somewhat off the beaten track, but I feel like perhaps it will be useful. Also, I'm no longer a police officer (though paradoxically I'm still a licensed peace officer in my state, and will remain so) so I only have my archived BS stories to share instead of meeting new and interesting people, and mocking them here.

A major part of the problem of modern politics, and life perhaps, is that people no longer remember what words mean. Words have a shocking power, to alter the very reality around us. Just as the past defines our present, it is unfortunate to find that the present can easily alter the past. The notion that 26 letters and a handful of punctuation, as Mr. Gaiman would say, can craft a tale to outlast civilizations should be downright frightening. So, remember this the next time you encounter someone who professes to have power over you.

Policeman: Root comes from greek word polis, meaning city-state. Thus, policeman literally becomes cityman, or man of the city. It's important to remember that the police are people. They don't work for you, the citizen, because they are you, and as importantly, you are them. They work for the city. And it's important to establish what a city is, lest you think that a city is no more than the bureaucracy that you're forced to deal with to build in your backyard, or to put up a fence, or pay a ticket.

City: Root from French word cite, which was a community of peoples. The city isn't the administration. It's not the mayor, or the city council, or the lands, or the population. The city is the unspoken contract between the peoples that they shall live here together in peace.

Politician: Base word politic, a Greek word for the voting body, or body of citizens, and suffix "ian" meaning belonging to or pertaining to. Thus a politician is one who belongs to the body of voters. They were basically slaves whose only job was to effectively petition for the betterment of his constituents. There was no career path, no future in such a job. You simply did your civic duty, and went back to what you did before, usually farming. It's no wonder that in the Roman days political office came through a system not unlike our own jury selection, rather than through men seeking office. If we somehow barred any who would want political power from ever having political power, I suspect virtually every government related issue would vanish in short order.

Right: A right, like the right to life, liberty, and property, is a negative right. This means that your right to life bars any from depriving you of life. Your right to your property means that none may take your property without your consent. What it is not is a positive right. A positive right would be a right to property, therefore someone must provide you with property.

As I think of more terms, I will put them here. If you would like something defined, leave it in a comment.

How to go to the mental hospital free of charge

 Heroine is a bitch. I've never done heroine, but I have met many many people who have and it strikes me as a bitch. You know, when you see someone from a distance and, even though you've never spoken to them, you can just tell (somehow, maybe it's the way they stand, or abuse oxygen, or they're that Joffrey kid from Game of Thrones) that this person is a total bitch. Maybe they have a bitch reputation. But heroine is a bitch. If, after this, you feel the need to go do heroine because you feel you can't bash something unless you've tried it, let me know how castration treats you. Combine mental illness, such as clinical depression, or schizophrenia, with heroine and you're gonna have a bad time. So, I meet this young enterprising lunatic crack whore. I don't use the term "crack whore" pejoratively, as this is actually her profession. She is standing there, telling me that the scars on her arms are from when she used to be suicidal. Due diligence being what it is, I ask if she's still suicidal. "No no, I'm cured. I don't hurt myself anymore." She then reaches into her own ear, gashes it open and starts playing with the blood. I don't mean this happened after I left. I mean, right there while talking to us, she gashed her own ear open. You can't tell me that you're not going to self harm, and then self harm in front of me and two other cops. You will end up in the hospital, and you will stay there until the voices shut the hell up for at least an hour. That's a lie. I know they'll toss her out to come back to her heroine house in a matter of hours.

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.