Tuesday night I got to do my first ride-along with my buddy Eric who is a Durham police officer.

I was only planning on staying for a couple of hours, but ended up hanging out for almost the entire shift, and it was a pretty slow evening. Those of you from out of state may have seen Durham in the news last week as the scene of three cross burnings.

I met Eric at a sub-station, and immediately noticed that he’d gain weight. It was actually from a kevlar vest, although the cheesy mustache he added since I last saw him made him look like a member of the Village People. (grin)

It started out, and I am not making this up, with us spending about 20 minutes trying to get the Windows 2000 based computer in the patrol car to run. Wait, I did skip the step about signing the release form that said the City of Durham was not liable for anything that happened (to me) that evening.

Durham is divided into five districts, 1-4 and “central” which is 5. Each district has anywhere from 10-15 officers on patrol, except for central which is smaller. Eric is in district two and usually rides as car 212. The first number indicates the district, 2, the “1” indicates “inside” versus a “2” which would indicate the perimeter, or “outside”, and the final “2” is just a number. Thus car 229 would be district 2, perimeter, car 9. 210 and 220 represent the squads corporals, and 200 is the sergeant.

Each officer works 14 12-hour shifts per month, some during the day and some at night, with time off in between. The basic job is to drive around a beat and respond to calls as needed. While all the cars are only staffed by a single officer (except when training a rookie) on almost any call another cop will show up and offer assistance.

There is also a sense of pride about responding to all calls within one’s district without outside assistance. There were a couple of calls in District 1 that we responded to, and you could tell that it reflected poorly on District 1 that they couldn’t keep up.

We drove around and fought with the PC until we got it working (three reboots later). The main application includes a dispatch module (i.e. the calls an officer in responsible for), a messaging system (a la e-mail) and a way of looking up registration plates (note I didn’t refer to them as license plates), driver’s licenses, gun ownership, etc. Other apps let you look up outstanding warrants, etc.

The first real call of the night was an assault. A woman claims she was beaten real bad, and so a number of car responded as well as an EMS team. When we got there, the woman was probably in her late 40’s to early 50’s and had been punched in the face (she was swollen and bleeding slightly). She reported that the man who assaulted her was named “Rooster” and she had lived with him on and off for a year and a half. She didn’t know his real name.

The description she gave was of a black male wearing a black T-shirt walking with another black male wearing a white T-shirt.

Kinda narrows it done, huh?

So I’m wandering around while they talk to the lady, and I see a black man wearing a black T-shirt walk into a house along with another black man in a white T-shirt. When I tell this to Eric, I get a well deserved “don’t wander off like that” and he and some other officers went to investigate. Turns out it wasn’t him (Rooster is bald – woulda helped if she’d mentioned that earlier).

We get back in the car and start patrolling again. We did get an “officer needs assistance” call from District 4 which resulted in lights, siren and a nice 75 in a 35 mph zone, but they had enough cars respond that we were dropped before we got there.

There were a couple of funny calls. One lady called in and reported “my baby’s daddy stole my car and sold it”. Eric called her and it turns out that “stolen” was too harsh a word and that she really just wanted someone to make the man help her pay for insurance.

Another call came over the radio “Careless and reckless driving on a moped … if that’s even possible.” We went to the area where it was reported and couldn’t hear a moped.

It was a slow night, and I guess the best call was about a van that hit the concrete barriers in the median of the interstate. The van was a GMC work vehicle and it hit the barriers so hard that it ripped the left front wheel off, punctured the right rear and the wheel took chunks of concrete out as it rolled down the road.

The van was stolen from Georgia, and another patrol car (from another district) reported a man walking down the highway not too far away. Why he didn’t stop and investigate, I’ll never know, but when we got there he was gone.

The saddest call was the last one of the night. A woman delivering papers had a headlight out and was driving with her high beams on. Her license had been revoked, she was using a plate from another car (the plate for the car she was in was expired) and she had no insurance.

The fact that she was working spoke in her favor, but you can’t let someone to continue to drive around without insurance. She got a couple of citations.

The cops in Eric’s squad were nice guys, although very rude at times when not dealing with a person in an official capacity (grin). They seemed really concerned with getting drugs and guns off the streets, and I watched a number of times when cars and people were searched just because something seemed a bit off (and there was always a solid reason, such as an expired plate or the person was trespassing on business property).

Just before I left, I got to see the “Wall of Shame” where pictures of previous raids were up on a bulletin board. Some people just ain’t so smart. If you happen to have a large amount of drugs and a large number of illegal weapons in your house, don’t answer “yes” when the office asks you if he can look around.

I’m sure the paperwork can add tedium to the job (next time I’ll take a book so that I won’t just be sitting there when Eric has to write up a report) but to me the 12 hours flew by, and it was a slow night.

Next time, I wanna runs some more red lights.