Day trip to hell

by Jack Radey

“ACAB.” You can see it painted on walls around town. Everyone knows that, right? All Cops Are Bastards. Selected for their authoritarian personalities, contemptuous of anyone not a cop or in a suit, prone to casual violence, mostly racist and sexist, right? You know, they’re all like that.

Well, I’d been studying the Eugene Police Department pretty intensively for over 10 years, and already knew what prejudice is – prejudging, if members of a group act “that way,” we know they “all do.” Of course individuals in any group differ a lot. We don’t let people say, “All Blacks are like that, all women are like that, all kids, Jews, Latinos, gays, foreigners, etc. are all like that.”

But when it comes to cops, some people in society automatically genuflect at the sight of a uniform, and others spit on the ground. They’re all heroes (“The thin blue line protecting us from those people”) or they’re all monsters (“We’ve seen ‘em in Ferguson, Minneapolis, New York, Portland, so of course they’re like that in Eugene, they’re cops!”). Take your pick.

I have my own experiences with police. I’ve been beaten, tear-gassed, chased, and arrested back in the day—and more than once. I’ve seen cops go off on elderly demented people with no provocation, and I’ve looked at the muzzle of a revolver in the shaking hands of an officer in a situation where a car full of young people doing nothing at all were attacked by an officer. (This was either in the San Francisco Bay area or in New York City.)

I’ve also been head of the NAACP’s Legal Redress Committee here in Eugene, which gave me a perspective on the EPD, and while I know of more than a few cases of serious misconduct on the force here, I have also seen a lot that suggests the EPD is a very different department than most. I wanted to learn more.

When I took the EPD’s Citizen Academy, a 40-hour set of classes describing all the different parts of the department and what they do, it became immediately obvious. The EPD is about 350 different people.

The cheerful ghouls of forensic evidence. The uptight folks who maintain custody of evidence. The thinkers in plain clothes – the detectives. The boys who like to ride motorcycles, except when it rains sideways. The people who intervene in street crises and talk suicides down. There was one who struck me as a borderline psychopath, exactly the guy you want to go through the door first at Uvalde, and he’ll do it, too, but is possibly a hazard on the streets.

All kinds of men and women. ACAD – All Cops Are Different.

To learn more, I signed up for the “ride-along” program. If you’re interested, contact the EPD and ask for Jeff Blondé. If you have no felony convictions, you’ll probably get a ride.

I dragged myself out of bed to be at the police HQ at 0630 hours. (I’m too old for this stuff…)

Eventually Officer George (I’ll call him, it is not his name) stepped into the lobby, grinned, and called my name. Yo. I get my credential to wear and we head out. Officer George is a big guy, short haircut, a 22-year veteran policeman. So how did you get into this line of work?

It turns out after high school George went to Alaska to trap and collar bears and wolves. Wanted to be a biologist, until he found the biologists sat in offices and wrote grants, while the seasonal workers had all the fun. He needed full-time work.

Went to Seattle. Too urban. What to do? An old girlfriend in Eugene suggested, “Come on down, check it out.” She introduced him to Eugene hippydom, and he lived in a tent and sold plasma for a while, while exploring possibilities. He volunteered to work with kids, thought he might become a teacher, but was repelled by the standardized testing and paperwork emphasis.

Eventually, he decided to become a police officer.

Well, that was not what I’d been expecting.

Officer George is a patrolman, assigned to the west side of town. He works four 10-hour shifts, Monday through Thursday.

Patrol is the most obvious police function, cruisers riding around town, looking for problems but mostly answering calls. The calls appear on the touch screen that hangs over where your coffee holder would be.

He would scan through the list, reading it aloud softly. “No, that one doesn’t look interesting… stolen property recovery, what is it? A cell phone? No thank you.”

I asked, “Do you choose the calls you answer or are you sent?” “Both.” Some calls are assigned, when he is driving around and has not been ordered to respond to a call, he can pick from the waiting calls whatever is most urgent, closest, and/or most interesting.

While he explained this, we were “cruising” along the “road” the railroad has put alongside the tracks in West Eugene. I think we were mostly looking for bodies, and people in trouble. I remarked it was a bad place to be if we got an urgent call, the gravel “road” reduced speed to a bouncy 5 mph.

Then one came in, domestic.

Cops are reasonably leery of domestic disputes. They’re often indoors, and very emotional, and unpredictable. People are angry and revved up and it can get very dicey, suddenly, and at close quarters.

He looked at the screen, punched a few buttons, and it displayed a map showing where his backup was. “About five minutes behind us. Lets go see what is happening.” A neighbor had reported a loud fight. This could be ugly.

When we arrived, the neighbor met us, reported a cry of pain from the woman, and the sound of someone falling down stairs. Oh s—. George figures he can’t wait for the backup. Better see what’s happening.

There are two kids in the van in the driveway, and here comes the wife out the door. No sign of injuries, good, then a kid gets out of the van, goes to mom, and they start to go back in.

“No, please don’t go in there…” George’s hand moves towards his holster.

No, he’s not going into a kill-crazy state. He’s anxious as hell, but calm. It is policy that if officers go into a building where trouble is possible, they do so gun out. Because if there is trouble inside, it will be at very close range, and there won’t be time to draw.

He does not draw, however, and fortunately the guy comes out the door. First thing he says is, “Put the cuffs on me, man.”

George later told me if a suspect asks to be cuffed, he ALWAYS obliges. “He may know something I don’t.”

By now backup has arrived, a regular cop and a “baby cop” – a rookie in training. They take the guy (let’s call him Johnny) aside and sit him down to tell them his story.

He is near tears. He can’t hold a job, his mind keeps messing with him, he would never hit his wife, they do fight all the time but it’s just yelling, he can’t control his mind, he has all these fears of things out to get him, he’s been to hospital and gotten no help, all he wants is to get well and be able to take care of his kids.

The officers let him talk, steer him back to the subject when he gets off on a rant, and gently urge him to take it easy, he’ll be all right.

I go over to where George is questioning the wife on the porch. When she sees me, she gets a jacket and shoes for her man and asks me to take them to him where he’s sitting, handcuffed, in the rain. All I see on her face is compassion.

No, she wasn’t hit, no, no one fell down the stairs, probably the sound of the kids running down them. No, she doesn’t want to press charges.

The whole picture is consistent. I walk back to Johnny. The baby cop asks him, “Do you want to go to the hospital? We can give you a ride.” He does, they do.

I’m thinking, “Good luck, Johnny, I know people who have been seriously suicidal who the hospital didn’t want to admit.” But it turns out, there is a way to get admitted: Don’t walk in. Get delivered to the back, in a police cruiser. The car that took him called George to let him know Johnny had been admitted. “Maybe a positive result on that one,” said George as we drove there to recover his handcuffs.

Next call is about trouble in a squat. While I was told I would follow wherever George went, on this one he asked me to wait in the car. OK. Several other officers arrived, got into the building, came out. “No one home, floor is ankle deep in feces and syringes, we’ve been here before…”

Then the radio made a sound. “Aha, a hot one. What is it?” It was a silent alarm at a bank. “About a 50-50 shot on this, half the time it’s because some teller reaching for a drawer hit the button by mistake.”

He heads there, notes there are a half a dozen cars en route… and it is reported to be nothing.

George is usually alone in his cruiser, unless he is assigned as training officer for a rookie, or some special situation. He is driving through traffic, monitoring a radio that quietly chatters at him, listening for it to call his number, sometimes scanning the sidewalk for trouble, or people who the police are searching for.

He also monitors the touch screen, and occasionally pulls out his cell to talk to some other agency, officer, or once in a while his wife.

I ask him about driving distracted, and he says his wife says he drives like that all the time. His wife, by the way, is a community service officer, and his son is a baby cop for the EPD. “The family that patrols together…”

Then the call comes in about Alice (that’s not her name). George knows Alice well. He has arrested her before. The call is from a local office where there is a worker who has tried to help Alice before. But today Alice has been in the office, half falling out of her clothes, screaming and making it impossible for the office to function.

When we get there Alice is in cuffs (another car got there first), but it is decided that George will handle her. She has three outstanding warrants, so she is jail-bound. In the back of the cruiser, she alternates coherently answering George’s questions with screaming: We’re killing her, taking her to be killed, tearing her arms off, erasing her.

George constantly patiently tries to reassure her, no, we’re not killing you, we’re not taking you to be killed, it’s going to be OK.

She says she used drugs two days ago, “Some guy in a tent shot me up with some black stuff…” and rattles off the names of every drug she can think of. More screaming. She does remember the name and number of her counselor at Laurel Hill though, and gives it to George.

At the jail, it is either roll call or shift change, at which point all other jail activities cease, including intake of prisoners, so we and several other cops cool our heels while Alice continues to alternately scream and babble. George gets her a shirt so she can cover herself.

During one rant, he tells her that’s crazy. Later he tells me, “Sometimes you have to tell them they’re crazy. They know that, you know?” Yeah, I know. I have a relative in that condition.

The nurse at the jail knows Alice, she’s been there before. The woman is difficult to deal with, but no one—not the other waiting cops, not the jail staff, not George—say an unkind word towards her nor express anything but sympathy, and sorrow, at her condition.

Later, after she’s been booked in, George gets on his phone and does his best to coordinate with her caregivers, offering whatever help he can give in trying to get her the care she needs.

“Why did we take her to the jail then?” Well, there is the matter of the three outstanding warrants, and while the office she disrupted does not want to press charges, they don’t want her in the office any more.

But there is a far more important reason to take her to jail instead of hospital. She’s used presumably meth recently. At hospital, she’ll get a urine analysis, which will come back “dirty.” And out she’ll go.

“Speed makes you crazy? So what else is new, sugar? No room at the inn for you.” The official language would be, “treated and released.”

But at the jail, while they’ll UA her and help her with her detox, they’ll also provide counseling and meds, and try to work with other agencies to see what can be done for her.

George had asked her where she’d been happiest, could she remember a happier time. She’d been in hospital on a hold, and then to a halfway house that all concerned agreed was a s—show. She said she’d been happiest in the state mental hospital.

George and her counselor had concurring opinions – her problem is mostly being mentally ill, that the drugs make it worse but they are a product of her being too crazy to keep a housing situation together, and that leads to the streets, where there is an enormous amount of meth and fentanyl, and next thing she’s getting raped and beaten and robbed and high and round we go again.

And everyone involved—cops, social workers, nurses, mental health workers—all said the same thing: The system is broken. I suspect they say that about 20 times a day on the average.

Society has no place for the mentally ill unless they are “a threat to themselves or others.” But it must be an immediate threat to get care.

If you don’t have a plan for your suicide, or signs of a serious recent attempt, if you haven’t attempted to murder someone, not just, say, trashed their house and yelled at them, well, sorry, Charlie.

There are thousands of people mentally disturbed out there and here in the richest country in the world, there are 11 locked beds in this county, so take a number… Gee, your number is 837, please be seated and calm and wait for your number to be called.

CAHOOTS, the police, and the sheriffs are left to pick up the pieces, but, because we can’t actually tax the wealthy, there is nowhere to put those pieces. The mental health system we have is literally crazy.

Dealing with this every day could work-harden your soul in self-protection, because otherwise you could emotionally “bleed out.” I could see no sign that this had happened to Officer George. He gave a damn about these people.

When I had signed up for the ride, I’d been informed I’d be riding with Sergeant George so-and-so. I asked him, “Why no stripes? I was told you were a sergeant?”

He said he had taken a voluntary demotion, so he could stay a patrolman. “As for as my voluntary demotion… after 15 years as a patrol officer I thought there might be a natural progression to a detective or a supervisor role.

“I thought that as a sergeant, I could impart my philosophy of policing to officers and serve as a support for them to keep them focused on all the great aspects of policing without getting sucked into the emotional drains, internally and externally, that this job can expose officers to.

“After a year as a sergeant I realized that it did not feed my soul and I truly missed working with citizens in all respects. I enjoy talking with folks on their tough day, hearing their stories as suspects, victims and citizens, and seeing if I could do more. Or just maybe be an ear to listen to them and be empathetic.

“I felt that I could better serve the department, the community, and most importantly myself, as a patrol officer. “

Note: He took a pay cut in order to work with the public. Besides the smiles of the people he has dealt with who know him, there is no way the department can recognize and reward the contribution of those who prefer to stay working the streets, rather than working their way up the ranks. (Maybe in the future?)

Two points came home to me from my day’s experience:

• Our mental health care system is a disgrace, and will require massive infusions of money to offer the care needed by the increasing numbers of people in crisis.

• Among those who deal with people in crisis—including our police force—are some outstanding human beings.

I strongly urge my fellow residents of Eugene to get a closer look at both. The people yelling ACAB, and the people calling for the police to be used to drive the homeless out of town, need to quiet down and learn something.

Jack Radey is a volunteer member of the Eugene Police Commission.