Riding Along with the Cops

By aredien © 1991 Washington, is the nation’s crime capital, the media likes to say. The streets in Southeast are often compared to killing fields and in Northwest, drug dealers, transvestites and prostitutes share sidewalks with the homeless and drug addicts, they say. Eager to see for myself what life is like for the Metropolitan Police Department, I recently participated in two night ride-alongs. One took me through the streets of Southeast’s seventh district, and the other one to the third district in Northwest. Ironically the officers I was riding with in Northwest responded to many more calls than did the officers with whom I rode in Southeast. Not half an hour passed without some action: arrest, robbery, assaults. It is true, however, that when the radio dispatcher in Southeast came on the air, it was for major incidents. I arrived at the Southeast station at 8:30 p.m. expecting that on a Friday night this was a good time to start. I was wrong, an officer told me. "You missed all the actions," he said, telling me that a man had just been shot to death, "He was laying on the sidewalk, bleeding like a pig." The latest Police Department’s statistical crime report, which covers the months of January 1991 through August 1991, clearly shows that crimes in Southeast are more violent than in Northwest. In the seventh district, 97 homicides were committed during that period, while in the third district 31 homicides occurred. However, the total number of thefts was 3,089 in this district, while it was 1,217 in the seventh. Although police interventions were few that night in Southeast, they were often massive. For an arrest of a man accused of carrying a gun, at least five police cars and a helicopter was dispatched to the scene. I was also pretty impressed by the work of an undercover jump-squad, who kicked open an apartment door to rescue a woman allegedly being abused by her husband. The undercover officers wore jump boots, military pants and sweatshirts. They carried their guns on their backs, underneath sweatshirts. They looked strong; they were not the kind of people you would want to run into on your way home late at night. When we arrived on the scene to back up the jump-squad, I noticed that those officers were extremely professional. Before putting handcuffs on the husband, they asked his wife to take the children away to avoid humiliating the father. They also made sure that the woman knew the legal procedure to see her husband, and they gave them both time to speak to each other before taking him away. I stayed in Southeast with the police from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. in which time we answered two calls for domestic violence and made one arrest on charges of possession of an unregistered gun. We actually spent most of our time at Burger King filing out event reports. The third district, in Northwest, covers an area from Harvard Street to L Street, and Connecticut Avenue to 4th Street. After a 45-minute wait in the station, I was finally assigned to Officer Adrien Lancaster who was driving scout car number 98 that Friday night. For the last two years, Lancaster has been working nights and he enjoys it. "Sometimes I can’t wait to come to work; I love my job," he said. He loves his beat too, and after a couple of hours riding in the neighborhood with him, you understand that he knows everybody there. Lancaster knows the prostitutes, the transvestites, the hustlers, the addicts, the cashiers at Seven Eleven; everybody. In Southeast the police’s relationship with the community was limited. The car would slowly pass in the streets, sometime stopping to disperse a group at a street corner, but rarely would the police talk to the people. Here in Northwest Lancaster stopped and chatted for a while with a man standing at the door of an apartment building. I soon realized that the man was a drug dealer. "He gives us a lot of respect," Lancaster later said, "Some just sell in the street and don’t care when we stop in front of them." The man, Lancaster told me, is a police informer. After dispersing a 2 a.m. traffic-jam of cars stopping to pick-up prostitutes, Lancaster pointed one out to me. "This one does it to get money for her drug habit; she is on crack," he said. He was interrupted by a radio-call, "A woman was heard screaming," said the dispatcher. Lancaster switched on his lights and sirens, and stepped on the pedal. He picked up the microphone to answer the call. The car was going at 60 MPH, through red lights, into the lanes of oncoming traffic, and up one-way streets in the wrong direction, "I hope my driving doesn’t bother you," he said. I assured him that I, too, enjoyed it, and he admitted that fast driving for him was the recompense for a job which at times is a bit dull. We arrived on the scene at the same time as three other police cars. Neighbors pointed to the window of the apartment where screams had been heard. With their guns in hand, Lancaster and two other officers ran up the stairs and knocked on the apartment’s door, only to be told that the police were not needed, and that the woman had screamed to call someone in the street. "Yea, she was acting stupid," Lancaster said. When applying for a ride-along with the police, one has to sign a release form stating that the rider won’t sue the government in the event that something happens. I knew I was exposing myself to violent scenes and that I might see a lot of blood. I thought I was ready for it. At 1:45, a call came on the radio. It was for us. A man was hurt, in front of the Seven Eleven. While Lancaster was speeding to the scene, I was trying to prepare myself for the worst. I was nervous. The first thing I remember seeing was a man walking aimlessly in the street. He wore a white T-shirt, which was now red from the blood running from his head to his legs. His entire face was covered with blood, and he was screaming furiously. He tried to tell Lancaster the story: his brother in law attacked him, he said, and took his son away from him. We looked for the brother in law, who lived closed by, and stopped him while he was getting in his car, to go to the hospital, he said. In the fight he broke an arm twisted it backward and cut his upper lip. Once back in the car, Lancaster told me that blood never bothered him. "I have seen so much of it before," he said, adding that when you are born in Southeast, you are exposed to it frequently. Although working at night for two years might seem hard to the majority of people, Lancaster said he is perfectly happy working this shift. He always wanted to be a police officer, "As soon as I turned 21, I was in the academy." His parents are quite proud of him, he said. In Southeast, after the chase and the arrest of the man who carried a gun, an officer made a remark that reflected the general attitude of most officers I met. He turned toward his partner and said, "You know Fonda, I love this job sometimes." --30--