View from the cop: Crime & punishment
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AJC.com > Metro > View from the cop > Archives > 2008 > April > 28
Monday, April 28, 2008
Things you see (and don’t want to see) at midnight
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Nothing good happens after midnight—unless you’re working a beat car.
Then it’s prime-time.
Welcome to the morning watch.
The hours of 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift requires that you get less sleep on average than the other shifts. Court time cut directly into your sleep time and everyday daytime noises such as grass getting cut, dogs barking and in some neighborhoods, random gunfire, keep waking you up. If you can get by on 4-5 hours of sleep then this is the place for you.
Granted, I worked this shift many years ago back when the top grossing movie was “The Empire Strikes Back” and best music artist of the year was Christopher Cross proving that at least we had good taste in movies.
Things would start up right about the time you cleared roll call. The calls from the bars would start rolling in and on Friday and Saturday nights the regulars would kick it up in the clubs or at home after they closed.
One night I was working a beat in the Johns Creek area and looking forward to a slow night since all the action seemed to be going on south of my beat. As the night went on it stayed quiet until about 3 a.m. when I got a call to meet a woman who told the 911 operator that she found what she thought was a rape victim.
The beat car next to me also responded and we found the caller parked in the parking lot of a building up in what is now in the John’s Creek area. The woman said she was driving along the road and saw another woman lying on the side of the road.
She said the woman looked drunk or drugged up but thought that she had been raped and beat up. While the other officer spoke with her, I went to the car to check the condition of the victim. As I approached the car on the passenger’s side, I shined my flashlight and found the victim lying in such a position that her right leg was extended out of the front seat passenger’s window and her left leg was sticking out the passenger side rear window, your basic east-west and a full view of everything in between. I took one look and immediately recognized who this was. We’ll call him Lana. (Yes, him.)
Other than a cut on his head Lana looked O.K. Right about then the driver of the car walked over.
I tried to figure out some clever way to explain who this was but I couldn’t think of a thing so I just said “look” and let the flashlight do the rest. The young woman, having obviously adequate eyesight, gasped and pointed to the difference between her and him, all bunched up in cheap and now torn pantyhose.
Lana was a regular customer who had a fondness of dressing up in pantyhose and sexy outfits and going out for some fun. He had some rather impressive augmentation work done and in all fairness, in a dimly lit room or cab of a truck, Lana represented the other gender quite well.
Unfortunately Lana had a fondness of Quaalude that skewed his common sense in the area of what was and was not a good idea. On this night, Lana had gotten all dressed up and then picked up at a truck stop near Atlanta.
The date probably went well until somewhere around I-85 and, oddly enough, Beaver Ruin Road where the happy couple pulled over for some fun. The truck driver discovered what we call “The Fruit-Basket Surprise” and unfortunately for Lana, didn’t take it too well. Lana was left beat up by a now long-gone good old boy having some serious homophobic issues—a story I’m sure he took or will take to his grave. We thanked the young woman, now very confused, for her help and she was on her way, probably to therapy.
Although Lana didn’t do his / her thing every night there was always something to keep things lively and I miss some of that. I don’t miss the lack of sleep or the court but anyone coming into this profession should spend the first couple of years working nights
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