View from the cop: Crime & punishment
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AJC.com > Metro > View from the cop > Archives > 2007 > January > 24
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Stakeouts and the art of conversation
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
On TV, stakeouts are long and tedious. All three minutes of it. In reality, stakeouts are long periods of nothingness interrupted by more nothingness.
It is a way, however, to expand our knowledge and discuss topics that rarely come up during the 9-5 workday—just about anywhere else. Topics include the “existence” category. Topics of existence range from the existence of God to the theory founded in logic, mathematics and geometry that derives the universe as the unique consequence of the impossibility of a state of nothing. Normal stuff.
Stakeouts offer the time to discuss politics, sports, whether or not those UFO videos on Youtube are fake, who’s getting divorced this month and all of the office gossip including whose on the internal affairs sh—list. Other stakeout topics include spam, (not the Internet type), Desperate Housewives, Mike Vick’s water bottle, porn, Iraq, when will Oprah dump Stedman, will Lindsay Lohan be boring after rehab, porn, and the alarmingly high rate of suicide of those who have seen “Big Mama’s House 2—and porn.
Stakeouts are extremely boring. Like fishing, you spend most of the time doing nothing and showing nothing at the end of the night. Many high-level stakeouts fizzle out during the night and the priority of the arrest suffers. You start the night trying to corner a big-time drug dealer but you end up collaring a drunken transvestite who saw you and figured you needed a date. Sometime the well is full and sometime it isn’t.
The dress code for stakeouts is casual. Police goobers, who wear every piece of police equipment known to man soon suffer “equipment wedgies.” It’s no fun trying to run after someone and pull your handcuffs out the back of your shorts at the same time.
Come to think of it, police goobers rarely get to go on stakeouts. They stand out in a crowd. I had a detail once that involved mingling in the parking lot at a Grateful Dead concert at the old Omni. First of all, I was pissed off that my detail didn’t involve going inside where I could watch the show. But if you had to do an outside detail, a Dead concert was the best. The traveling troupes selling beads, tie dyes, little wooden things they claimed were trinkets but resembled pipes, and just about anything else handmade provided the best people watching you could get.
Something else they sold in the parking lot was the occasional acid. LSD was a popular high-school and college drug in the late 80’s and early 90’s. Most of it was blotter acid consisting of 100 hits on a ‘sheet.’ The hits were perforated cuts with a drop of the liquid on it. The paper was marked with a picture and the name usually corresponded with the picture. Some of you may remember Bart Simpson? That night however, I was only there to identify the guy that was supposed to meet our guy the following night up in north Fulton County. It was an easy detail. Unfortunately I didn’t count on the police goober factor.
I gave very specific instructions. Dress as far down as you have ever dressed. Body odor is okay and don’t worry about things like underwear. I made the mistake of not realizing that my partner that night came from the upper crust of fashionable Roswell where everything was color coordinated and dressing down meant wearing the old Gucci’s and the Hugo Boss Man-bag. I showed up ready to blend in and my partner showed up looking like a young Ricky Ricardo complete with a silk puffy shirt and leather vest. Three yuppies ran up and tried to order the prime rib.
So next time you watch TV and the stakeout is full of serious police-talk conversation with super macho cops—well that part is true—and after a full minute or two all the action starts, it’s baloney—unless the drunken transvestite is in there somewhere.
One more thing: For those of you going into detective work and who will soon taking part in stakeouts, don’t forget to unbuckle your seat belt when you get to where you’re going. It’s embarrassing when you can’t get out of the car when it’s time to chase the bad guy.
